ChatGPT - Can it REALLY help in the classroom?

ChatGPT is a hot topic of conversation in education at the moment. For those who have not seen this in the news, ChatGPT is a language generation AI model developed by OpenAI. It can generate human-like text based on a prompt provided to it. In education, it can be used to generate educational content, answer students' questions, assist in language learning and more. With its natural language processing capabilities, ChatGPT has the potential to greatly enhance the learning experience.

That was of course ChatGPT's answer to the question "What is ChatGPT, and how can it be used in education?". You can ask it anything from "I'm an A-Level Physics student, sumarise quantum superposition for me in a way I can understand '' to "Write my Economics essay for me. Write it like a 16 year old B grade student studying the AQA syllabus so that my teacher doesn't spot it". The really exciting (or worrying) part is that these answers aren't found on the internet, they are generated each time the question is asked. No two answers will be the same. And this has prompted the usual debate about technology in work and education. As always, the key is in understanding what it can and cannot do, and helping pupils to do the same.

This week I have been using ChatGPT with a few of my classes, partly for the useful information it can give, and partly to help pupils understand the opportunities it offers, and its limitations. We have had a couple of very productive lessons feeding it past exam questions and then working together to comment on and improve the answers it gave. This was a really interesting exercise, letting them look at a "live" response, rather than one I have written, but without the embarrassment some pupils feel if it is their essay being dissected by the class. It also had the additional benefit of showing them that they need to understand quite a lot about the topic themselves before they can filter the useful answers from the less useful. By the end, both classes were writing much better introductions to their essays, and were much more able to be self-critical, seeing their writing as the examiner will.

One of the big challenges for pupils when revising, is how to keep revision active, and assess how they are doing. I have also been experimenting with using Copilot, a tool based on ChatGPT aimed at teachers, to generate multiple choice questions. It would make a huge difference to those revising for exams if they could simply copy and paste the section of the syllabus they are working on, and generate an unlimited number of questions to quickly check their understanding.

With this and other exciting possibilities, it is easy to see what all the hype is about, but as I experiment I'm reminded that this is just another example of a change that has been going on since Gutenberg first fired up his printing press in the 15th century. Information has been becoming increasingly more accessible for centuries, and with it, the benefit of simply being able to remember facts has diminished. The task of both students and teachers is not to treat our brains as walking encyclopaedia. Google will always beat us at that game. Our task is to build our base knowledge, understanding, critical faculties and transferable skills so that we can assess the information in front of us and make these tools work for us, rather than being slaves to their output. The latest ChatGPT excitement is just another reminder of the importance of the careers work we have been doing at Monkton - building transferable and soft skills through lessons and co-curricular activities, and trying to make those skills that have always been implicit, explicit to students.