History, Politics, AI & Me

A new series of articles on AI and education by Will Van Reyk, Head of History and Politics @ North London Collegiate School

15 - A week in the life of an AI teacher

Having been experimenting with AI as a teacher for the best part of a term now, I am finding that I use it for all manner of tasks - lesson planning and research, lesson activities, and admin every single day. Indeed, I am very deliberately using it for as many things as possible in line with Professor Ethan Mollick ’s advice for people in every field to spend time working out what it can and can’t do. In order to give a sense of the range of ways I am currently using AI - and indeed continuing to experiment with it - here’s what I got up to just this past week, including some things I have discovered it can do which are quite frankly mind blowing (the ‘light bulb moments’ Byron King recently posted about and which are such a feature of working with AI), as well as some honest reflections on what didn’t work so well.

Monday:

Lesson planning - having put together a PPT and lesson for my Y13 IB class on Lenin’s consolidation of power I decided to drop the entire PPT into ChatGPT and ask for feedback (you can upload like this with the paid for version, but could copy and paste into the AI with the free one). It actually gave some really good suggestions about incorporating some diagrams and images to illustrate key points. I decided, for instance, to add some figures to the PPT illustrating economic changes between War Communism and the New Economic Policy and in fact located these using another AI tool - one of my favourites for research due to its links to sources - Perplexity.

I also used Perplexity to help plan and research for my Y12 class on race relations in modern Britain. In particular, asking it the initial prompt of ‘write me a lesson plan on this…’ led me to then find a really good website, through the source links which Perplexity (unlike ChatGPT) provides, with an article documenting the experience of someone who had come over on the Empire Windrush. I adapted one of the suggestions for the lesson itself from Perplexity and asked students as an introductory activity to consider what life was like for a recent immigrant to Britain as a starter.

Tuesday:

Lesson planning - I asked Perplexity to help plan me a lesson on women’s rights for IB Global Politics. The result was fairly mediocre, but some follow up questions allowed me to quickly locate the key documents which I already knew from existing subject knowledge I wanted to locate, for instance the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. As part of the planning I also decided that AI could feature in one of the lesson activities itself…

Lesson activity - having studied the Convention as part of the evolution of human rights topic, I asked the student in my one-to-one sixth-form Global Politics class to come up with a campaign to raise awareness of the convention. They had to design a strategy, practical ideas, and a way of evaluating their campaign (the inspiration for this activity had come from the initial lesson planning with AI and a prompt from me along the lines of, ‘provide some ideas for how to consolidate knowledge on this topic that are engaging’. After 5 mins the student shared ideas and we entered them into ChatGPT. I promoted the AI to take on the role of an expert in human rights campaigns and to give constructive feedback on the student’s ideas. This led to some really useful feedback with lots of detail, for instance in terms of methods the student could use to enhance the evaluation. Here ChatGPT really added to the lesson - as an experienced Politics teacher I was able to lead the discussion on the feedback, but using AI was akin to asking a real expert in this particular field into our lesson and definitely improved the quality of the lesson. This model also allowed the student to actually have a go at getting involved in politics, albeit through a simulation.

Wednesday:

Lesson activity - as a result of an issue with the school WiFi (ironic I know…), I hadn’t been able to get hold of all the materials I needed for my lesson. The internet was back on just in time for the lesson and this actually led me to improvise one aspect using AI and it actually worked really well - I should say here that one of the things I love about AI is that it can sometimes come to your rescue and be incorporated into a lesson with minimal planning. I am not saying this to encourage lazy teaching; my point is more that at its best it allows for highly responsive, practically on the spot use of technology to support and enhance a lesson. Let me explain…The focus of the lesson was foreign policy in the 1960s as part of AQA’s Modern Britain A-level course. Having looked at some sources and discussed Labour and the relations with the US, I decided as I hadn’t been able to get all the materials I wanted to instead consolidate using ChatGPT. I said to it that we wanted to play the role of Harold Wilson and take decisions in three scenarios about policy on Vietnam. Here is a screenshot of how this developed:

In this example I used a model which has been very effective for me in the past of putting the students into teams and each team having to decide on an option. I then gave one team a chance to input their option, asking for them to first explain their reasoning and then getting the view of the other teams. The great thing about using ChatGPT here was that it got students to work together and problem solve, all the while consolidating their knowledge too. The AI of course was so advanced that it was able to adapt the scenarios with ease depending on the choices taken.

Administration - our mock examination data came in on Wednesday and I decided to use ChatGPT to help analyse it. Whilst I had done some very basic experiments with spreadsheets and ChatGPT, this was pretty much new territory for me. I had done a little pre-planning in that as Head of Department I ensured that our department mark sheet was very clearly set out. I also anonymised our data by labelling each student Person 1, 2, 3 etc. I prompted ChatGPT to take on role of an expert in school data and then asked it to analyse a spreadsheet which I had uploaded. It came up with some great suggestions about the key metrics it would look at and then proceeded to pull out key headlines in terms of question data, general trends, trends by teacher, and standard deviation. I did, however, have to explain which columns contained what. As I tried to get more detailed analysis, eg asking for each student’s worst two questions, it got very confused and produced what I can only describe as made up data, what some people might call AI ‘hallucinations’. My attempts to improve my instructions didn’t seem to get anywhere. Overall, I’m not sure I saved much time using ChatGPT due to the issues I encountered. I will be totally honest though and say that as someone who is entirely non-mathematical, I did though much prefer the experience of ‘conversing’ with ChatGPT, despite the issues, than actually working with a spreadsheet.

Thursday:

Lesson planning: I already had a pretty well-planned lesson on women and the vote for Year 9 having taught it for a number of years, but I decided I wanted to make a handout to go with one of the research tasks in the lesson - students needed to make a brief biography of a suffragist and suffragette. I used ChatGPT to make the handout with just a line or so of instruction. The result was actually one of those mind blowing moments that are happening to me about once a week as the AI not only made the entire handout as I had expected but also created it as a downloadable Word document - I am sure I asked something similar a few weeks ago and it didn’t do this!

I also used AI to help created a handout for feedback and self-reflections for students after mock exams. I have many existing forms that I have made but I wanted to see what AI would come up with. I gave it a fairly general instruction, though I also specified I wanted it to include space for students to come up with some key goals and a week by week study plan - a new idea we are trying to incorporate in the department after some great INSET at school on mocks and feedback. ChatGPT produced a great document, which only needed a little editing. I also got ChatGPT to make an exemplar study plan, which again only needed a little editing.

Lesson activity: I had a Global Politics lesson again today and having used ChatGPT so effectively as an expert on campaigning, I used it for a similar activity, but this time on children’s rights rather than women’s.

Admin: I used AI to analyse A-level mock data in much the same way I had used it for GCSE earlier in the week. As a busy teacher I did not have time to experiment with ways of getting beyond the issues I experienced when delving deeper into the data earlier in the week, but it is on my to do list.

Friday:

Lesson activity: the lessons on the suffrage movement I planned earlier in the week happened today. As well as using the handout made with AI earlier in the week, I had ChatGPT on screen in class as a useful assistant - I entered in the names of the figures I want students to research and then asked ChatGPT to randomly assign to individuals in the class, ensuring each had one suffragist and one suffragette to look into.

Admin: My department meeting is on a Friday and so for the second time I used AI for my meeting minutes and it again worked brilliantly. I used Otter AI to record the minutes and then copied the transcript into ChatGPT and instructed it along the lines of ‘make these into comprehensible meeting minutes with clear action points’. I spent a couple of minutes editing the final document by hand, but this was a great time saver and I really liked the ChatGPT summaries. One important point to note is that for GDPR and general privacy I made clear at the start of the meeting no student names should be used and I got the permission of all participants to be recorded.

There is a lot of talk in the media and online about the impact of AI and also quite a bit suggesting it is all hype. I hope this blow by blow account of my week gives a sense of how AI is actually having a really tangible impact in the real world. Having used AI very deliberately as part of my practice for the past few months I am now coming to see AI as an always on, very helpful assistant. My AI assistant is saving me time, enhancing my lessons, sometimes a little frustrating, but most of all exciting. Indeed, I would really emphasise the last point. As teachers our bread and butter is getting students to learn - working with AI has once again put me in their shoes. AI has reminded me of one of the most important features of learning for adults and for children: the joy of discovering and applying new knowledge.