“When ChatGPT released in November of 2022, kids learned about it from Snapchat. And what Snapchat taught them was that you take the prompt your teacher gave you, and you paste it in, and you get an essay, and then you turn that in,” Roberts said. “And that was like sending kids out to recess without any adult supervision. We don’t do that.”
Roberts, who has long maintained that teachers should be futurists, set out to show her students how to use generative AI ethically and to their advantage. She said the results have all been positive, from improved writing to increased engagement.
“My secret to engaging students is to surprise them,” she said. “The future is a really great way to engage them with curiosity, so I like to live three or four years ahead of the curve.”
A freshman and senior English teacher at Point Loma High School in San Diego, Roberts has been teaching with 1:1 laptops for her students since 2008. She’s been a Google for Education Certified Innovator since 2011, coauthored a book on classroom technology and writes a blog called “Lit and Tech.” When AI emerged, Roberts was ready to embrace it.
“I think it would be irresponsible to allow my seniors to graduate without having at least a working knowledge of it and how to use it to their advantage,” she said. “Employers want people with AI skills. That’s coming up over and over again.”
HOW AI CAN HELP
One of Roberts’ favorite ways to introduce students to the ins and outs of AI is by asking them to write an essay comparing two pieces of art from the school’s student gallery. It’s an AI-proof assignment — the chatbot has never seen this art. However, it can still help students with the essay, and Roberts shows them how.
On her classroom computer, she teaches them to phrase a prompt that will get ChatGPT to create an outline for the essay. The class reviews the resulting outline, and Roberts adds it to the assignment for reference. From there, she shows them how to ask ChatGPT for a plan to manage their writing time.
“I love this, because every time I ask an AI about time management for writing, it always breaks it into thirds: a third for research and planning, a third for writing, and a third for revision and editing,” she said. “When I tell my students they need to save time for revision and editing, they go, ‘yeah, yeah, sure, Mrs. Roberts.’ When the AI tells them they need to save time for revision and editing, suddenly it’s gospel.”
A CRITICAL EYE
With an outline and time-management plan in hand, Roberts’ students are ready to learn how to ask ChatGPT for an example. They craft a prompt for the first paragraph of an essay comparing two famous pieces of art. As the class reviews the paragraph, Roberts has an opportunity to show them how vital it is to view AI output with a critical eye.
She said students notice the paragraph is pretty good until it comes to the thesis statement, which fails to take a position about the art and starts with “in this essay,” a phrase Roberts has banned her students from using. The exercise quickly reveals they can’t count on AI to do the work for them.
After examining the paragraph together, Roberts asks the class to write their own, then requests a volunteer to let her copy and paste their work into the AI for feedback. She tells the students to read the feedback — again, with a critical eye — and decide for themselves what’s valid.
“When they get feedback from a teacher, they don’t always read it. That’s the other little secret — AI feedback gets read, partly because they’re looking for it to be wrong,” Roberts said. “I keep telling English teachers that AI may be the best tool we’ve ever had for teaching close critical reading, because it’s not reliable.”
‘FEEDBACK ANYTIME, ANYWHERE’
Roberts said she never gives her students assignments that require the use of AI but instead uses it in front of them in class as a guide. However, when a COPPA- and FERPA-compliant AI platform called MagicStudent became available through the school in spring 2024, it opened the door for students to take further advantage of the technology.
“What that did is it made the feedback anytime, anywhere. They could do their assignment, and when they were ready for feedback, they could put in what they wrote, and it knew the name of the assignment, it knew the directions for the assignment, it knew the rubric for the assignment, because I’d given it all that,” Roberts said. “And I found one of my seniors, later on when I looked, he’d done that three times. This is a kid who never would’ve asked me for feedback, certainly wouldn’t have asked me three times.”
Roberts said such formative feedback — the kind provided during the writing process — is much more valuable than the summative feedback students receive when the work is done and graded. But “there’s never enough time for a teacher to give sufficient formative feedback,” she said. With AI and students who’d been taught to read its output critically, an ample supply of formative feedback was suddenly available.
“Their general take on this was, ‘This helps, I like this, let’s do more of this, can I please have this.’ They saw the AI feedback as impartial in a way they couldn’t argue with,” Roberts said. “I saw the influence in their writing when they were getting that immediate feedback. The growth was tremendous. Their engagement was higher.”
