Christopher Fletcher

In case you haven’t heard, there is a new wave of alarm across schools and districts here in our great state.

While it thankfully doesn’t relate to some other recent crises (such as the upsetting TikTok-inspired thefts of school property or worse, the wave of false security threats called into multiple schools prompting state and federal investigations), it does however deal with pedagogy and indeed goes to the heart of what we as educators do.

I am of course referring to the awesome capabilities possessed by the latest iteration of artificial intelligence known as ChatGPT. If you haven’t talked to a teacher recently, or seen any of the panicky social media posts on this topic, let me explain: ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched last November designed to mimic human conversation.

While the initial prototype has its documented flaws, it has nonetheless already proven to be incredibly versatile, and we can expect many more versions to roll out in the near future. It is not a passing technological fad (like Pokémon Go or Fortnite); it is here to stay and has the power to transform education as we know it.

In fact, as Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at The Wharton School, recently observed, ChatGPT is “remarkably close to being a universal learning engine,” specifically due to its ability to create deliberate meaningful practice to help students achieve mastery.

As an example, he cited a prompt that he fed into this AI chatbot, asking it to simulate a detailed scenario in which he had to engage in a back-and-forth negotiation, and to then grade his responses afterward and provide him with specific feedback about what to do better using the science of negotiation. Students can use ChatGPT with similar prompts to practice everything from job interviews, to hypothetical business pitches, to simulations of historical events, and so much more.

ChatGPT can also be used to significantly reduce teacher workload and even enhance their practice. Examples include generating detailed lesson plans (especially useful for first-year teachers), providing feedback on student writing samples, summarizing and paraphrasing primary texts (and creating deeper-level questions for structured analysis of them), generating prompts for either individual or whole-class discussion and debate, creating exit tickets, using mega-prompts to design instructional strategies, creating quizzes or tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards, developing grading rubrics, and even writing everything from emails to report card comments or parent newsletters.

Teachers of any content area can also use ChatGPT for differentiating instruction, for example, by creating chapter summaries or acting as a text compactor. Band teachers can use it to compose music. Special education departments can also input information about an exceptional student’s abilities and have ChatGPT generate specific, measurable goals for the student to work toward. Language arts or English-language learner teachers can also use ChatGPT to generate sentences using a particular word, and then have students guess the meaning of the word based on the context of the sentence.

Finally, administrators can use ChatGPT to develop everything from report templates, to social media posts, to updating student and faculty handbooks, to creating permission sheets for guardians to sign for field trips or other activities.

Speaking of reducing teacher workload, most educators know how tedious researching and devising new assessment questions is, but the process can be vastly accelerated using ChatGPT. As a personal example, I love incorporating Edpuzzle (a tool that allows students to watch a video punctuated with specific questions in order to assess engagement and understanding throughout) into my lessons, and if there is a particular YouTube video I enjoy and want to use based on its relevant content and high production value (i.e. Crash Course in Economics), then I can simply copy the video transcript, prompt ChatGPT to create five multiple choice questions from the transcript, and then copy and paste those questions into Edpuzzle (or any number of other similar dynamic educational devices such as Nearpod or Kahoot!

Because of the immense potential to individualize learning, scale personalized feedback and reduce teacher and administrator workloads, schools across Maine should embrace the use of ChatGPT and other AI software.

In the process, we can further drive student excellence, hone our professional practice, deliver on intended school and district outcomes and ultimately build 21st century skills in the next generation and future of Maine’s workforce.

Christopher Fletcher teaches high school social studies at Maine Connections Academy. He lives with his wife and two rescue dogs in Lisbon Falls.