ChatGPT doesn't reduce my workload...

... but it sure as hell makes me better at my job.

What is ChatGPT used for?

"In today's fast-paced world, teachers face increasing workloads that can lead to burnout and high levels of stress. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is a unique opportunity to alleviate some of these challenges. Enter ChatGPT, a powerful language model that can assist teachers with a range of tasks, from generating lesson plans and providing personalized feedback to grading assignments and answering student questions. By leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT, teachers can reduce their workload, allowing them to focus on what they do best - teaching and supporting their students. In this article, I explore how ChatGPT can be used to revolutionize the way teachers work, ultimately benefiting both teachers and students"

ChatGPT (OpenAI, n.d.) 24/03/23 Prompt: Write a 100 word introduction to a LinkedIn article about how ChatGPT can be used to reduce teacher workload

Yes, I asked ChatGPT to write an introduction to my LinkedIn article, and for all of the 10 seconds it took to ask and generate a response, it did a pretty good job! Sure, it used American spelling, it didn't quite match my voice, and it gave a rather generic answer rather than my exact strategies, but for a lot of situations, this will be good enough.

This isn't how I've been using ChatGPT however. I like to think of myself as an early adopter of technology, and as soon as I saw a great video from Tom Scott on YouTube which asked 'where are we on the curve' of technology acceleration, I knew I wanted to be riding this curve of development wherever it took me. So, as this was February 2023, at the start of our school year, I thought I'd see where ChatGPT could take me.

This hasn't reduced my workload - not at all. But, what ChatGPT has done is allowed me to rapidly complete a certain section of a task, which allows me to focus on refining, tweaking and improving my work. For the purpose of this article, I will broadly categorise my tasks into two categories

1. Student-Facing material, such as resources used in lessons, work produced and shared with students, and discussions had in class
2. Teaching back-end material, such as lesson planning, admin or parent communication tasks, or resources shared between staff.

Philosophy

I'm a self-confessed technology lover, and at times I will use technology for the sake of using technology. I find that this blue-sky research often find leads to concrete, useful, and applicable results. Yes, I was absolutely fine with my old washing machine, but when I got my new Samsung washing machine with AI Ecobubble and WiFi connection I was indulging myself. It sounded like a great new idea, so I got into it, and by playing around with its features I found useful tasks, like setting up a routine on my phone to automatically turn on a load of laundry when I leave work, meaning it will be ready to take out and hang around 10 minutes after I get home. This was my approach to ChatGPT - get into it, play around with it and worry about the applications later.

Since this 'playing around' phase I've come to find that the way I use ChatGPT has fallen into a 'making me better at my job' philosophy, rather than a 'removing work from me' philosophy. Let me explain.

A student submitted an experiment conclusion to me, asking for some feedback. The 'removing work' philosophy was obvious - copy and paste the conclusion into ChatGPT, ask for feedback, copy and paste the feedback. And, to be honest, the feedback it gives is pretty good, but this wasn't how I used it. My philosophy of 'making me better at my job' took me to take this feedback, prioritise the key points using my professional judgement, and elaborate on these myself. I didn't cut and paste anything - but what ChatGPT was able to do was rapidly scan the text, identify areas of misconceptions or lack of clarity and point me where to intervene. Rather like a doctor with an X-Ray of a broken bone, I didn't have to cut open the patient and wiggle around inside until I found the fault, I was able to go straight there and perform the surgery.

This has been my philosophy since I started integrating ChatGPT in my working day - don't use it to be lazy, use it to be better.

Teacher Back-End Material

What I have found ChatGPT particularly useful for is as a proofreader, fact-checker, text-condenser and extrapolator. This has been great in getting feedback on written documents such as emails/letters to parents or course descriptions, producing summaries of long documents either of my own or from other sources, and for grading criteria. Here are some specific examples I have used:

1. Entering an email to parents and/or staff, checking for spelling and grammar errors or awkward phrasing. I have also used this to provide feedback on my structure and re-ordered some sentences or added clarification
2. Taking a course description I have written myself, and asking for further examples of applications of material studied, rephrasing my own description to a language level appropriate for the audience
3. Entering two grading criteria (for example 'Developing' and 'Outstanding' or 'A' and 'C') and generating a set of criteria in between these levels
4. Entering a set of topics and the expected time I would spend teaching them, and generating a sequence of lesson objectives
5. Generating lists that can be tedious (for example day number vs date with specific criteria)

I must add the caveat that once these things are generated, I still edit them myself, often to add my own voice or elements that are missing. Whilst ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence it is just that - Artificial. There are still mistakes made, emotions missing or errors in understanding. However, using these has allowed me to start from a good base and improve the work, rather than starting from scratch

Student-Facing Material

This, for me, has been the most exciting area of using ChatGPT. Not only because it adds a new dimension to activities we can do in class, but because it provides opportunities for rich discussions with students. Discussions about the use of technology in our lives, discussions about evaluating sources of data, and discussions about the importance of academic honesty (the IBO have already released a statement relating to this). What I have really found advantageous with ChatGPT is modifying the tone/level of text for students, generating questions and producing alternative explanations to be discussed. By using ChatGPT to carry out these tasks, I have been able to shift my lesson planning away from resource production and focus more on pedagogical tasks. here are again some specific examples anyone could use in their classroom:

1. Taking an explanation/definition from one source and rewriting it for a different age group, including or omitting certain key terms
2. Producing three different versions of a definition (i.e. velocity) and evaluating these with students
3. Generating an introduction to a lab report (where this is not the focus, but an important part of the writeup) and critiquing/editing as a group
4. Producing a list of questions in a particular style of increasing difficulty for practice
5. Allowing students to submit sections of work to ChatGPT for feedback, allowing me to help them focus on the specific points of the feedback

This, of course, requires a level of trust and education with students. Firstly, with any resource I generate using ChatGPT I openly acknowledge with students, and open a conversation about the responsibilities we have using AI tools and the care we have to take in evaluating their outputs.This is an important responsibility we have as role models, but also a valuable educational tool. It is also important that we review the information, particularly with relation to possible bias - the AI model is an amalgamation of the data available to it - and if the human source of this data is biased, then the output is likely to be biased too.

Considerations

AI based text models aren't going away any time soon, and is likely to only play a larger part in education. As educators we have a responsibility to be aware of, and responsible in the use of, technologies available to our students. Whether you are already using ChatGPT or new to it, the following guidelines can be broadly applied to get the most out of it

1. Acknowledge, and model acknowledgement. This can be a grey area in terms of academic honesty, by modelling good practice with students we can provide them with opportunities to succeed
2. Be critical. Don't accept AI generated text as a final version - it still needs polishing, customising and checking
3. Don't be lazy. Use AI generated text to enhance what you do - not replace it. You're still the human in the room, with capabilities far beyond what these models have, so play to your strengths.
4. ChatGPT is an Excel wizard. If you want to do something specific such as calculating grades, or analysing a statistic, feed it precise information about what you want to do and follow the output instructions

This article was checked by ChatGPT using the prompt "Proof-read the following article for Linkedin, highlighting any errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar and providing feedback on any areas that could be developed further. The article is written in British English". Minor corrections were made to grammar