AI and chatGPT are quite the hot topics right now. And as educators, many of us can be concerned for what that means for us in education. How will we know if students are learning? Will plagiarism be at an all-time high? How can we promote and motivate our students to have ownership over their work, and work hard, at that?
Personally, I’m not too concerned with this advancement in technology. As a teacher, it helps in many ways: lesson planning, announcements, and even report cards! We have so much in our minds that we want to say, but the process of organizing our thoughts into writing a plan, a report or a post can be helped with the wonderful chatGPT.
When it comes to students, the introduction of chatGPT in our lives comes with need for creativity as a teacher. The lovely prof Michael has showed us what it looks like to promote student agency over our own work. Having the creative freedom to choose how and what we want to study is the motivator for getting our work done in a way that is unique to ourselves. When students are trusted with agency and self-direction over their learning, maybe chatGPT wouldn’t be a consideration as much as it may be for some boring paper that doesn’t mean anything to anyone. The presence of chatGPT goes hand-in-hand with the new curriculum and changing times of promoting creativity and individualism within learning. Having done my own inquiry project on student-led learning, I’ve learned (and continue to learn) that interest is the biggest motivator when it comes to learning and working hard.
We don’t need any more robots – in other words, we don’t need any more students who can recite back what they’ve memorized, or compute instant facts or statistics. This is what chatGPT is for. What humans are for is the creative side, the critical thinking side, the socially, ethically and morally diverse side that only humans can bring to this world. As a teacher, how can we focus on these topics instead of facts? How can we nurture our students minds and thinking capabilities where the sky is the limit?
In this shift of time, we should not fear chatGPT, but embrace it as a benchmark of saying goodbye to the robot-minded student, and say hello to the human-student, in all of their brilliance. 🙂
“Once a student sees that he or she is capable of excellence, that student is never quite the same. There is a new self-image, a new notion of possibility. There is an appetite for excellence. After students have had a taste of excellence, they’re never quite satisfied with less; they’re always hungry” (Gosner, 2021).
Teach Up for Equity and Excellence
– reflection 6.0