ChatGPT is now unblocked for students. AI Tools have the potential to either enhance their learning and productivity, or completely bipass their critical thinking and creativity. The difference is in how they utilize these tools.

I choose to embrace AI Tools and am actively teaching my 12th grade students how to use them in an ethical, academically honest way. If you are interested in seeing my AI Tools policy, including concrete examples of appropriate use and misuse, follow this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hVQcdGpXIK1qSwMMy2pD1P5wQi5iw2534Q-QI9eD0v0/edit?usp=sharing

In my policy I address the overall purpose of AI Tools and the general philosophy that I want students to adopt regarding AI. I then give specific examples of good AI prompts that students can use in an upcoming essay, explaining why they’re ethical. I also provide specific examples of unethical or problematic essay prompts that they might be tempted to use, explaining why they must always be avoided. Finally I give other general examples of misusing AI, doing my best to cover all the bases.

When I reviewed this policy with students I made it abundantly clear that I want an open door of communication regarding the use of AI. If they have questions about using AI, I want them to ask. There is no stigma or judgement. I also made it clear that my policies are my own, and other teachers may have differing views on how to use AI (if at all). As such, I told them to always check with their instructors before using AI Tools.

Ultimately, AI is here to stay. I want my students to know how to use AI Tools effectively and ethically. Hopefully by getting ahead of it and destigmatizing AI, I will be successful in training students in how to use it appropriately.

Over the summer, Phil Miller and I attended a workshop (via Zoom) hosted by the Harvard Business School. Professor David Moss has developed what he calls “The Case Method” format for teaching US History. Essentially, the curriculum teaches history by focusing on distinct cases that illustrate different concepts. For example, one of the cases examines James Madison’s idea of a “federal negative,” a proposal at the Constitutional Convention to give the national government the power to negate any state law. The case can be used to teach students about the Constitutional Convention and the creation of our current government. It also helps students understand some of the principles behind our constitution, like federalism.

The Case Method follows a pattern for each case: give the students background reading, leading to a socratic lecture during which the teacher reviews the reading by asking questions and probing the students’ understanding. Then, the students must make a decision – should Congress have the power to negate state laws, for example.

After Phil and I completed the training, we weren’t entirely convinced the curriculum would work for our students. The readings were developed for undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard, so they are relatively complex. Several high school teachers who helped lead the workshop explained that they take the readings very slowly, spreading them out over the course of a week or two. Phil and I questioned whether this was a great use of our precious time in the classroom.

Fast forward to the start of the year…

I decided to try a paired down version of the Case Method in my AP Gov classes. I provided the students a portion of the reading that was relevant for our topic, and I gave them a double-block to get started. What surprised me was how well the students handled the reading, and how useful it was for them. I instructed them to read together in small groups and annotate each paragraph. As I circulated among the groups and asked questions, I was amazed to observe how well they understood the material. It was awesome. And they really enjoyed stepping up to the challenge of “Havard-level” reading.

The second thing that surprised me was how poorly the subsequent socratic lecture went. I was not at all worried about this portion of the curriculum, as I am a comfortable lecturer. The students really didn’t find this engaging, though. 

So, at the end of this whole experiment, I discovered that the part of the Case Method I thought would fail (the reading) in fact worked great, and the part of the curriculum I wasn’t worried about (the lecture), was kind of a bomb. Who knew?

Bottom line: it’s important to try new things in the classroom, because you just never know what will really work and what won’t. 

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The table shows the number of people who attended a Taylor Swift concert tour, (in millions of people) for selected years.

(Source: Billboard)

1. Use the regression capabilities of a graphing utility to find a linear model of the form f(t) = mt + b for the data.

2. In the model, f(t) represents the number of attendees (in millions of people) and t represents the year.

                                            f(t) = 0.189t – 378.543

2. Use a graphing utility to plot the data and graph the model. Insert a picture of the graph.

3. How does the model compare with your data – choose two years to compare? 

4. Use your model to predict how many people will attend The Eras Tour in 2023.

In French 2 each year our final unit is on Informational Writing. After working on Description and Narration for most of the year, students transfer the skills they have developed into interpreting and eventually presenting their own informational texts. 

The wonderful thing about my French 2 curriculum is that I can teach about anything and the students can practice their language skills. In the description unit for example, we discuss technology then and now (they can hardly believe I survived my first 30 years without a cellphone), and trends in homes and fashion. In the narration unit,  I present stories from all over the French-speaking world, bringing awareness to people and places that we don’t usually learn about in school. Heroes working for the independence of West Africa and for the decolonisation of African history are some of the stories we learn from.

Now it all culminates in the most challenging part of the year with Informational reading and writing, practicing skills that overlap with many other classes, but in French. This year we are looking at strange and mysterious places, talking and reading about their geography, history, and cultural heritage. Students have been practicing asking questions about these places (working on grammar here only in the context of a text or a conversation), and preparing to write their own informational paragraphs.

As we do, in preparing a new unit, we plan backwards. In my case, it starts with preparing a text that students will eventually be able to read and interpret. It is a daunting task to write something intelligent and engaging that will be of interest to a group 15-16 year olds at the end of the school year. A new favorite item in my teacher’s toolbox is Chat GPT. You hear about the issues a chatbot presents with students turning in work that is not their own, but did you know a teacher can use it too? Just be sure to read your resulting text carefully to make sure the information is correct and what you really want. Sometimes you have to try a few different angles to get it just right, and then edit it yourself quite a bit. I told the Bot what I wanted and that I wanted it in simple French and voilà! A lovely shortcut to get my text prepared so that I can move on with planning the other steps in the lesson.

Have you been using this tool in your class? I would love to hear how. Let me know in the comments. 

Interested in seeing if you can interpret a computer generated/teacher edited text designed for French 2 students? Take a look and bonne chance! 

 Here’s how I used AI to detect an AI generated essay. 

I know that many of you might consider this as cheating )))… But imagine how liberating this experience might become when using AI for work in progress and delivering complex ideas. 

When rethinking the sequence for the U7Landscape: Spaces, Places, and Perspective, I asked Ai (ChatbotGPT) for a second opinion. And I ended up rewriting my Unit as I got a solid description for the Unit, a set of specific questions, and a few ideas on boosting the depth of knowledge when working on tasks. It shouldn’t substitute scope and sequence work for teachers but can support work in progress.

See…

I was specific when inserting key objectives, students’ input, and the big question for the Unit:  

much love! 

 Ingredients:

1) Motion detectors (obtain these from your friendly, neighborhood Science Department)

2) Eager students willing to run around (available in any classroom)

Have one student hold the motion detector while another student runs towards or away from them generating different position vs. time graphs. It’s important to turn the detector on!

Have the students guess their speed at different times, and then use calculus to calculate their actual speed. How good are these future or current drivers at estimating how fast they are going? 

Collaboration is fun!

 A few weeks ago my AP Gov classes wrapped up our four-week election simulation. This is a big project, with many moving parts, that takes up a good amount of class time. 

Before starting the project, Phil Miller relayed an anecdote to me that had me worried. Phil told me about a neighbor’s teenage daughter who had just wrapped up a school project, something related to economics and the mafia (?). The young woman was super excited about the project, explaining how much fun it was. When Phil asked her what she had learned from the simulation, she responded, “I don’t know.”

What concerned me was whether the election simulation would actually teach my students about how elections work and help them to achieve the learning outcomes I desired. 

Now that the simulation is done, I feel quite confident that the project achieved the desired results. I surveyed my AP Gov students at the end of the unit and asked them two questions related to the simulation. First, I asked them to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 their response to the question, “I learned a lot from the election simulation.” 65% of my students said they “strongly agreed” with the statement, while another 20% mostly agreed (4 out 5).

I then asked them to rate their response to the question, “The tasks in the election simulation were closely aligned with the content I learned from the textbook and from class.” 55% of my students said they “strongly agreed,” while another 34% mostly agreed. 

Based on the responses from students, it seems that the election simulation was a good use of class time.

One of the keys to the success, I think, was that I frequently asked students to reflect on what they were doing during the simulation. I explicitly asked the students to connect the tasks of the project with concepts we learned in class or read about in the textbook. I think this helped ground the project in the content, helping the students keep sight of why we were pretending to run presidential campaigns. 

Finally, I think the simulation was a good use of time because it filled in a lack of real world experience for the students. When I look at the elections material in AP Gov, it’s easy for me to understand the concepts, because I have many real-world examples to draw from. The students, on the other hand, were not full cognizant of past elections they lived through, and their bank of examples to draw from is much, much smaller. The simulation actually allowed them to fill up that bank with simulated examples. If I want to talk about polarization, for example, I can point to the candidates that they played in the simulation, and the students have an example that makes sense to them. 

In the end, I think it was an excellent use of our time.

Grit. Growth Mindset. Resilience. Iterative Design Process. 

We talk about these things continually, it feels, and we try and emphasize them in many classes. We want the students to dig in when presented with a challenge, and to try again when a strategy doesn’t work. 

I recently (inadvertently) got to model this entire process with my AP CS class. We were finishing up our Data unit, which has been spreadsheet-heavy. They’re learning to organize, analyze, and visualize data. Most of them claimed not to have done much with spreadsheets prior to this unit. 

I pushed them. They’re AP students, so they should expect to be challenged. They’re also a pretty sharp group all around, so I knew they could do it. They learned how tedious it can be to aggregate data from disparate sources (looking up info on colleges), how spending a bit more time up front can make your life much easier later on (setting up a spreadsheet where you can change one or two cells and force calculations through the rest of it), how to organize the data so human eyes can look at it and start to notice patterns (sort, countIF(), formatting and formulae in general), and how to visualize data so that you can present it to someone not intimately familiar with it (histograms, scatterplots with regression lines, pie charts, and pivot tables). 

They turned in good work! They did group work. They did independent work. They talked amongst their table groups and helped each other out. They asked questions and took instruction and sought out help when they needed it. 

I gave them a project (the Bean Count data), and they worked on that with minimal kvetching. 

For the unit exam, I set a practical exam, in which I gave them a mostly completed spreadsheet, asked them to complete it with some research, organize, and visualize the data. I used the standard rule of thumb of 3-4x the amount of time it takes the teacher to complete it. I did it in 25 minutes, so I figured they’d be okay, or get most of the way there. 

And then the wheels came off.

I was at my parents’ place because of a family medical issue, and I set their exam for the day I was out. I figured they’d be focused and the sub would have an easy time of it. Halfway through, I got an email from one of the students saying that everyone was really struggling. At the end of the period, they asked to be able to take it home over the weekend. I checked in with one of my stronger students, just to see if the other student was being hyperbolic. She confirmed that she had finished 2 of 6 items.I granted this request (I’d been toying with making it a take-home from the start). The next class period, I administered a survey. Here are some of the results:

I started the next class by apologizing to them and explaining that I did not intend for the exam to take them 5 hours. I owned up to the error. 

I gave an explanation of my rationale behind each aspect of the exam and how it related to assignments completed in the unit. I gave my hypotheses about where the mismatch might’ve occurred, and I asked for their feedback about what didn’t work or what was confusing. They gave me good feedback: the requirement list and the step-by-step instructions didn’t 100% agree and that was confusing; they weren’t sure what they needed to do to get full points; they didn’t know where to start. On the first point, that was intentional, as I listed intermediate steps that would get them to the product that would get them points. Being unsure about full points surprised me, because I thought my grading rubric, which I had posted a week in advance, was clear. 

Lessons learned:

• Check on hours spent on homework frequently

• Make clear the difference between instructions and what is to be submitted

• Walk through the grading rubric with them in class to ensure they understand

• Don’t confuse good work with proficiency

To be sure, it wasn’t an unmitigated disaster. Here are some other results:

1 – Strongly disagree

5 – Strongly agree

And this one is closest to my heart:

They learned things; possibly things that are more relevant than the “sexier” coding part of the class. I think I’ve given them a tool that they can use in a variety of situations 

I started the year by telling them that AP CSP is the most “applied adulting” class they’ll take in high school. Everything in the curriculum is directly related to a practical skill that most of us use daily. 

• being internet savvy

• recognizing the impact of technologies on our lives

• using spreadsheets  (how many job postings require proficiency with MS Office?)

• logical and algorithmic thought

• maybe do some code

To that, I hope I’ve also demonstrated:

• dealing with failure with grace and humility (i hope, at least!) 

• asking for and taking constructive criticism

• using that feedback to amend your design

Finally, for a bit of levity:

1 – “Everything’s fine!”

10 – “What the #%$^ even is this class?!”