Can we trust A.I. in the ELA classroom?

Including an implementation guide for full subscribers

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I recently attended a conference session on A.I. in the ELA classroom by Dr. Troy Hicks. During a turn and talk, I asked the English teacher next to me where she was regarding these technologies with her students.

"I don't trust them," she said.

"The chat bots?" I asked.

"No," she responded, "the students."

It’s not the first time I have heard a sentiment like this. I have wondered about the root of this fear.

• Is it a lack of faith and/or understanding in how students can use this technology, for example to augment their writing and thinking?

• If educators introduce A.I. into their classrooms, are they worried they would be forced to change their practices?

• If one change is releasing more control of the learning over to the students, how does that impact how teachers and leaders view themselves, their professional identities?

All of the above?

I didn't disrupt her deficit thinking, but I did note that it was great she was at the session.

To be clear, concerns around A.I. aren’t unfounded. These technology companies are being sued by newspapers for unauthorized use of their content for training their models. Their privacy policies are potentially malicious. A.I. may also contribute to cognitive decline in areas such as problem solving and creativity.

But as one educator recently expressed, “A.I. is not going away.”

In my work as a systems coach, I have seen as part of my role to introduce A.I. to clients in ways that are safe first steps and value-added. I acknowledge their concerns, look to reverse their fears around the technology, and get some quick wins in its use. If I can help the educator see the benefits of using A.I. in their ELA classrooms, I think it’s more likely they will see possibilities for their students too.

Next is a conversation I had in this context: supporting a teacher to improve their ELA curriculum with the help of A.I.

Improve 6th Grade ELA Assessments with ChatGPT

After a professional learning workshop on classroom assessment, a teacher scheduled a time to meet with me. Her goal was to find a more efficient and effective way to improve the end-of-unit assessments in her curriculum program.

“Look at how long this test is,” she demonstrated, flipping through page after page. “It took my students three class periods to get through it last year. They were exhausted.” During the workshop, she checked the readability of the assessment’s passages. They ranged from 6th to 9th grade reading levels. Combining that information with the reality that too many of her students weren’t able to read a text at a 6th grade reading level, we agreed that this assessment was measuring where they could read the test and not whether they were skilled readers.

To start, we looked at the specific standards that this unit was designed around. She located the unit/standards matrix. We found that there were only a handful of standards that were expected to be mastered per the program.

We focused on one standard to start the assessment development process. I pasted the standard into ChatGPT after entering the following prompt:

It used RAFT - Role, Audience, Format, Topic - as a framework for my prompt.

Although it wasn’t perfect - we had to revise a few statements so the verbs matched the standard in her planning doc - ChatGPT generated accurate learning intentions and success criteria.

The teacher was getting excited. “I am already starting to think about learning activities for these intentions!” We agreed that unpacking a standard is one of the most difficult tasks in curriculum and assessment work. A.I. handled it for us in a matter of seconds.

Next, we entered the following prompt into ChatGPT to generate a draft unit assessment that aligns with the standards.

“Using what was generated here, create a summative assessment that incorporates the success criteria. It can be a mixed item test, such as multiple choice and short written response/essay. Make sure the readability level of any text they have to read is at 6th grade or lower. If you can, also have the assessment resemble test items on the Forward Exam.”

Regarding the last sentence, we didn’t want to teach to the test, but we didn’t want to ignore it either or leave her students unprepared.

ChatGPT generated a relevant passage on whether students may have later school start times along with multiple related questions. After some additional improvement requests, including “add more evidence and reasoning content to the passage that supports the claim so students have more options to draw upon in the assessment,” we were satisfied with what was produced. It even included a rubric for assessing the constructed written responses.

Finally, we wanted to know what the Depth of Knowledge (DoK) levels were for each test item. (Click here for an explainer of DoK.) The questions on the Forward Exam, our state’s standardized assessment, are typically at levels of 2 and 3. Here is what it generated:

This analysis seemed to confirm that ChatGPT had aligned the assessment with the state exam as requested. When we had colleagues do a similar analysis of the test items, we came to similar conclusions about their levels of complexity.

Four Steps for Getting Started with A.I.

Trust is hard to build, with our students and in our tools with which we might use to teach them, if we aren’t sure where to start.

Here are four steps I recommend educators take to get started with using A.I. in their ELA classroom. They can work like stepping stones to developing more competence and confidence with the technology.

1. Treat A.I. like a thought partner. This is how I started using it. I would post statements such as “I am not sure where to start with…”, and list the topic on my mind. ChatGPT would generate a list of ideas, some of which I had not considered. A.I. can be a great brainstorming tool when you are struggling to know where to begin.

2. Try out different A.I. tools. ChatGPT is just one of many large language models (LLMs) out there. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, I like Claude.ai right now. It seems more honest about what it doesn’t know and more conversational than ChatGPT.

3. Outsource what you don’t like to do. What is getting in the way of you teaching and leading? Find creative ways to employ A.I. to take care of these tasks. I use it to check my writing for convention errors and general feedback. How could this example translate to the classroom? While I wouldn’t recommend uploading all your students’ essays to do the same thing, what if you taught students to utilize A.I. in this way? This would require some amount of modeling and communicating expectations.

4. For instructional work, start with assessment. My example shared here is a good entry point. Educators could utilize A.I. to co-build entire units of study, such as generating essential questions and understandings around topics and standards. I recommend uploading files that contain content you want the A.I. to focus on. In my work with the 6th grade teacher, we attached a PDF of the current ELA state standards.

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