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.