Embracing a world increasingly using AI

Schools are cautiously embracing artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT, to help students build critical thinking capabilities.

Schools need to look at how they can use tools to shift teacher workload to the things that we know teachers do best, which is working with students.

Schools are cautiously embracing artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT, with teachers using it to help plan lessons and prepare teaching materials, and to help students build critical thinking capabilities.

Teachers are taking the view that students will enter a world which increasingly draws on AI and that AI ­literacy will be a core skill needed at university and in the workplace, and so there is no reason to try to shield them from the technology.

ChatGPT is a form of generative artificial intelligence which uses algorithms to create new content such as text by drawing on publicly available information on the internet. It can also use data it is fed by the user. This raises the possibility of cheating, and certainly ChatGPT will produce a reasonably high-standard piece of work if asked to produce an essay on one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, for instance.

But teachers say cheating isn’t a major problem.

South Australia’s Westminster school has only had to deal with six incidents of cheating with ChatGPT among its 811 students.

Like other schools, it puts students’ work through software which can accurately detect work generated by artificial intelligence. These programs generate a percentage probability that a particular piece of work was generated by artificial intelligence.

Even more effective, says the school’s director of learning Andrea Sherwood, is teachers’ knowledge of their students. “You know what they’re capable of,” she says. “You know what their writing is like. You know what their expressions are like. You know who can and who can’t.”

But the school still encourages students to use the technology.

“We are preparing students for life, so what’s the point of pretending it doesn’t exist?” she says. “It’s more about that educative process of teaching them when it’s useful, when it’s suitable and when it’s not.”

A classroom lesson might examine a ChatGPT-generated piece of work, and ask students to consider what sort of mark it might earn and to pick out the better features in the essay.

The King’s School in Sydney takes a similar approach.

“The teachers and students analyse and have a look at the characteristics of those essays right from their introduction and the types of quotes or content that AI has chosen to use and we critique that,” says Mario Ronzini, acting deputy head of academics at the school.

‘I think we need to look at how we can use tools to shift teacher workload to the things that we know teachers do best, which is working with students.’

– Michelle Dennis, head of digital at Haileybury School

Students are asked to engage in critical thinking and look at the components of a question and analyse the pros and cons of a particular response.

And in some subjects at Kings, students are assessed on their process of arriving at an answer – such as the brainstorming, planning, discussion and collaboration – rather than just the end result.

Professor George Siemens of the University of South Australia’s Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning, says schools should be rethinking how students are assessed.

“Maybe assessing student knowledge by writing isn’t necessarily the only or exclusive way to do it,” he says.

“Students should learn how to write with these technologies and they should be able to say, ‘Hey, this is the prompt I started with. This is the text it gave me. This is how I edited …’ So that we as educators are assessing the process of working with AI not just the product that’s being produced.”

Prof Siemens also sees ChatGPT’s potential to assist teachers.

“There’s a lot of outstanding opportunities to fast-track lesson plan development, to get engaged with creative thinking, different ways to present different kinds of content in the course and so on.”

Michelle Dennis, head of digital at Haileybury School in Victoria, says teachers are loading the feedback they give to students into the AI application to look for trends and to reword content for different audiences – for instance, it can translate a text for a university-level reader into something simpler for students from a non-English speaking background.

“We have a huge issue with the teacher shortage at the moment and workload is one of the main things that teachers talk about when they leave the profession,” she says.

“I think we need to look at how we can use tools to shift teacher workload to the things that we know teachers do best, which is working with students.”

And the “always-on, always-available” nature of ChatGPT makes it a powerful tool to help students, she says, using as examples as a personalised tutor to help them learn another language, or they could submit an essay and ask for feedback.