ORLAND, Calif. — As a new school year begins, teachers across the country are grappling with the rise of generative artificial intelligence, recognizing the potential of ChatGPT and other AI tools to shake the foundations of education.
Steve Morgan, for one, is excited.
The Orland High School English teacher, who just started his 31st year in the classroom, has a solution for this new reality: in-class writing assignments with pencil or pen and paper.
It’s back to basics this year in OHS Room No. 2, and Mr. Morgan’s excitement comes from his belief that students will ultimately be better off as a result.
“The kids have lost a lot over the last couple of years, since the pandemic,” he explained. “They have lost basic skills, like even writing their name. I hear this down at the elementary schools, especially. They’re not used to doing this. And I think that’s a problem.”
To be sure, Morgan and his colleagues aren’t turning a blind eye to the rise of AI. With its ability to draft an essay or answer a question in seconds, ChatGPT may increase the risk of cheating. But it’s also critical for students to learn about AI and understand how it works, given its increasingly important role in the world.
Morgan has experienced the pros and cons of the technology first-hand, experimenting with ChatGPT to draft an informal quiz for his students, for example, with mixed results.
The shift to handwritten in-class essays will ensure that he’s getting a true sense for students’ work.
“I’ve got to be able to trust that it’s not ChatGPT,” he said.
‘The calculator, but for English’
Morgan credits his OHS colleagues, English teacher Patrick Guillen and history teacher Andy Johnson, for helping him better understand the implications of ChatGPT and AI for teachers and students.
Guillen, who has been teaching English for three years, led a recent training session about ChatGPT and other AI tools for teachers across the Orland Unified School District. In his own classroom, he has also shifted this year to assigning students handwritten in-class essays to get an accurate gauge of their writing abilities and progress.
However, for larger projects, he gives students the freedom to use new forms of technology as part of the learning process. For example, for an applied English project about advertising and copywriting last year, he encouraged them to take advantage of graphic design tools and artificial intelligence technologies.
“This is the calculator, but for English,” Guillen said.
He acknowledged the imperfections of the large language models that power ChatGPT and other AI tools. Ultimately, they are making predictions at a massive scale, and they’re not always accurate, although they should improve as they progress over time. For students, part of the learning process is knowing to double-check the results.
Guillen also uses ChatGPT to assist with his own teaching, reducing the amount of time it takes to create drafts of worksheets, or prompts for writing assignments, for example.
Orland Unified School District doesn’t have a formal policy on AI use in schools, said Superintendent Victor Perry. He said some type of board policy is possible in the future. However, the district wants to strike a balance, giving teachers the flexibility to adapt and use the technology in a productive way to benefit students.
“We want to make sure our kids are leaving here with the ability to be critical thinkers,” Perry said.
The nuanced approach by Orland’s educators dovetails with the findings of a recent report on the State of AI in Education by global study platform Quizlet, which found that more teachers are using AI than students (65% vs. 61%).
The study also found a correlation between student engagement and AI usage. Students who study three hours or more per night are more likely to say they have used AI technologies (72% vs. 61%), according to the report.
Last school year, districts including Seattle Public Schools blocked AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Bing on school devices, in response to cheating concerns. However, some of those schools have since reversed their policies, recognizing that many students would gain access regardless, and seeking ways to incorporate the tools into their curriculum in a constructive way, the New York Times reported Aug. 24.
Back to school, three decades later
Orland High School’s approach to artificial intelligence interested me in part because I’m an alum of the school, in rural Northern California, which has about 820 students enrolled this school year. Guillen teaches in the same classroom where I took English in high school.
Morgan, the veteran English teacher in the classroom next door, started teaching at OHS in 1994, three years after I graduated. I arranged to meet with him during a recent visit to my hometown, after a mutual friend who works at the school mentioned his approach to AI, and his excitement about returning to handwritten essays.
It was a chance to better understand the real-world realities of a subject that we’ve been covering in a series of GeekWire stories — including Bill Gates’ assertion that AI will be “as good a tutor as any human,” and the recent launch of a new “AI 101 for Teachers” online course by Code.org, Khan Academy, educational testing service ETS, and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).
Here’s more of what I learned at my old high school.
Evolution of cheating: “In the old days, back when you were in school, if you cheated, you had to get your friend’s homework, and your homework, and you had to copy it down,” Morgan said. “There’s some learning in that.”
However, with the rise of Google Classroom and other online learning tools, that manual process was replaced with copy-paste, raising the possibility that students might not even look at what they’re turning in.
While there are online tools available to teachers to detect cheating in essays, the volume of papers makes it difficult. Morgan, for example, is teaching 165 students this year across six classes.
There’s not enough time in the day to put every paper through cheating detection tools. Nor is it practical, at that scale, to check the editing history inside each document.
“You’d never get anything done,” he said.
A solution for essays: Just before I arrived in his classroom last week, Morgan had been making paper copies of a writing prompt for his Advanced Placement (AP) students for an in-class essay on Homer’s Odyssey the next day.
In the past, the students could have written their essays at home on their computers. As of last week, the second week of the school year, some students were still adjusting to the process of writing on paper again.
The shift has impacted the amount of time available for teaching in the classroom, Morgan acknowledged, describing it as a learning process. However, so far, he has been able to strike a balance, in part because he knows the curriculum well and has a sense for how to organize the time after more than 30 years of teaching.
Using ChatGPT in the classroom: As an exercise for the beginning of the school year, Morgan had his AP students re-read The Most Dangerous Game, a short story that they originally read as freshmen, to reanalyze and consider how their perspective on the piece has changed.
Without telling them what he was doing, he used ChatGPT to come up with a 10-question quiz about the story in a matter of seconds. It was just for fun, not counting toward their grades.
“I looked at the 10 questions. A couple were awful. So I threw two of them out,” he said.
Another two were questionable, but he decided to keep them, making it an eight-question quiz. After he distributed the quiz, he noticed that some students gave funny looks as they were answering the questions.
Later, as they were grading the quiz together, he revealed that ChatGPT had generated the quiz. As he recalled, the response from the students was, “No wonder! Some of those questions were really funny.”
He used the situation to drive home the point that ChatGPT, when used for writing, should be considered part of the iterative process. Writers should look critically at what AI generates, fix the problematic parts, add analysis, and so on.
With Mr. Morgan’s prep period ending, and his next class about to begin, I put myself back in the shoes of those students, and asked the obvious question: Why is it OK for teachers to use ChatGPT for quizzes, when students can’t use it for essays?
“Because,” he said, “I already know how to write.”
