THE PLAN

Ok. The school year has started. It's the end of my first day of classes, and here is the plan, such as it is. 

1.) In-class notebooks. It seems so ancient now, but I do think an ongoing class journal is one of the best ways to monitor student engagement and learning. Notebooks will stay in the classroom at all times. 

The biggest challenge that this poses is how to work with students who have IEPs and who need laptop access in order to be able to express themselves in writing. I have a few students this year with dysgraphia. Our school has subscribed to the Formative platform, which will apparently provide a locked browser for writing. I will investigate and write a future post on it. 

2.) Diagnostic writing. This one is pretty standard - a handwritten piece of writing that I can use as a baseline for my student's work and understanding of their strengths and potential areas to develop as writers. Because I am not using Formative yet, I'll have students with laptop accommodations write their diagnostic pieces on a shared Google Doc, and check it using the Revision History plug in (some of my students have found ways around this, but not all.) 

3.) Triangulated assessment. This concept is already mandated by my province, and I really want to dig into it this year. If you're not familiar with this concept, it's the idea that assessment is ongoing, and final grades are produced with a consideration of summative projects, ongoing observation, and conversations that demonstrate knowledge and understanding. This is a challenging shift sometimes for students, who feel that they should only be graded on large summative pieces. I'm trying to sell it in my classroom as an ongoing opportunity to try things, to take risks, and know that if I see you struggle today then I will also see you succeed tomorrow. 

4.) Keeping an open mind to the potential for meaningful LLM use. I'll admit, I struggle with this one. In an upcoming blog post, I'll tell you about my attempts last year; one was marginally successful and one was just an utter fail. I really struggle to see how LLMs can improve learning in the Language and Literature classroom. HOWEVER... I remain open to the idea. LLMs are here to stay, and if I refuse to acknowledge them, then I'm not really educating either. 

I don't know how often I'll post; hopefully every week or two. I'll report back on my learning, my experience, and my struggles. We'll see how it goes. 

Schrödinger's Chat

 It took me a while to come up with a name for this blog. 

Schrödinger's Chat(GPT) was the best I could do; pithy and punny, perhaps pretentious. But I do think that there is something to this. 

Schrödinger's Cat is a thought experiment which, for the purposes of this metaphor and this blog, explores the idea that two things can be true at the same time. (That's a bit of a bastardization, I know, but let's just go with it for now.) 

The case has been made to me over and over again that LLMs have a helpful purpose in the classroom (sometimes by people who are in the process of developing their own LLMs, ahem.) To some degree I can see this. LLMs can construct entire lesson and unit plans in a second They can proofread your report card comments. Heck, they can write your repot card comments! 

While this is true, it does give me some pause. I've always struggled to teach from other people's lesson plans. If I don't craft and plan the lesson myself, it feels a bit like I'm wearing someone else's shoes when I'm up in front of the the class trying to teach it. And yes, I can get it to write my report card comments, but... should I? 

As for the students, I can see real benefits for the kids who have gained the required knowledge and understanding but have difficulty expressing their ideas on the page. There are all kinds of learning differences which make constructing cohesive paragraphs a much greater challenge for some students than others, even if their level of understanding is the same. 

But then... how do I distinguish which ideas are actually theirs? How can I tell that the LLM has been used for structural clarity rather than idea generation? And what do I do with the category on the rubric that DEMANDS that I assess structural clarity in students' writing? 

That's what we have in this metaphorical box: an LLM that is simultaneously helpful and a hinderance, a revolution and a devolution, the answer to all of my students' problems and the problem with all of their answers. 

All right: that's enough blathering. School started this week, so it's on to the planning. I'm going to track my real-time progress, struggles, and realities of teaching Language and Literature in a ChatGPT world. Let's go. 

Why Are We Here? Or: ChatGPT and Me

I'm a high school English teacher. It's summer vacation, and I'm sitting on my deck, reading about AI. 

AI (well, LLMs to be precise) has dominated my life for the past eighteen months. Every aspect of my career is now infused with the reality that my students have now the ability to generate a poem, an essay, or a reading reflection in seconds. 

The existence of LLMs has made me question my very purpose as an English Language and Literature teacher. The thing about being an English teacher that makes LLMs so challenging is that my subject has two prongs, and LLMs allow students to pretend that they can do both: 

1.) Students need to be able to display knowledge and understanding of the content of the course. This might look like the ability to define literary terms, to identify the tone and register of an essay, or explain why no one who actually understood the novel would ever hold a Great Gatsby-themed party, no matter how great they look in the clothes. 

2.)  Students need to be able to demonstrate that they know how to write. Maybe this will fall by the wayside now that LLMs do this work for them, but for the moment, I am required by BOTH of my mandated curricula (more on that below) to asses students for their ability to choose words, put the words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into longer pieces. 

In short: I need to know how to function as an educator in an AI world. This blog will be a record of my journey. I'll post my ideas here (note: I am not specifying that they will be GOOD ideas). I'll try to keep up with educating reporting on the subject, and generally just grapple with my purpose along the way. 

Before we begin, I had better get some stuff out of the way: my "inconvenient truths," if you will. There are a million reasons why my situation may be different than yours and, because of this, my learnings and observations may be more or less useful to you as this blog goes on. Here we go: 

1.) I am in my early 50s. While I assume the world sees me as a lithe, energetic sprite with my finger on the pulse of what is current and exciting with the youngs, you may not agree with that assessment. I am a greying teacher in the twilight of my career, trying to cope with the biggest shift in education in a generation.

2.) I try my best, but I am a slow adopter of new technology. My presence on Blogger, a site which peaked in approximately the Year of our Lord 2003, might have already given this away to my more astute readers. Look, it's my summer. If I have to spend it thinking about ChatGPT, I am not learning Substack too.

3.) I am in Canada, and therefore do not generally face political pressure about the novels or content that I teach the way that some in other jurisdictions might. I feel very grateful for this. 

4.) I deliver both the Ontario Ministry Curriculum and the International Baccalaureate Curriculum. 

5.) I teach at an independent school*. This means that the students I teach (this is not always the case, but mostly) are coming from a place of financial stability and physical safety. Every child I work with knows that they can count on regular, nutritious meals, warm clothes in the winter, and a place to sleep at night. 

6.) As of right now, I do not use ChatGPT or other LLMs to do anything related to my teaching. I'm not using it for anything I write in this blog. Maybe that will change as I learn through this blog. Maybe it will have to change. We'll see. 

So, that's where we're starting. Come with me on this journey, if you'd like to. I hope you find something here. It's going to be a mess!

Alison

*In Canada, we often use the terms "independent school" and "private school" interchangeably. They both do rely on tuition funding, but they are different. A "private school" may be a for-profit enterprise. An "independent school" is not-for-profit, is overseen by a board of governors, and any surplus money at the end of the year goes back into the school. My school is inspected and accredited by the Ontario Ministry of Education, The Canadian Association of Independent Schools, and the International Baccalaureate.