AI in Class: Making Teachers’ Lives Easier (and Students’ Too!)

I want to start by crediting ChatGPT for the title — whose help is a perfect fit for my post today. I briefly mentioned a new resource in our discourse forum, but I wanted to expand on an interesting opportunity I was privileged to participate in this week. As my fellow Sask. teachers know, or hopefully know, one of the pillars of the Provincial Education Plan (PEP) is Student Engagement. I attended a professional development session in Saskatoon this week focused on a pilot project to specifically address the severe dip in engagement data (-20%) from Middle Years students across the province.

And it’s not just us — this engagement dips for teenagers across the globe. Among teachers, our discourse echoes deficit expressions, “kids these days” or “angsty teens”, but what if we stopped blaming the children? What might happen if we looked at flipping the narrative and designing the learning environment to meet the needs of kids in our rooms? While we don’t have a pile of money, nor supports where they are needed, simple practice changes have the potential to make a big difference in our classrooms.

So what am I selling?

 

 

Best practice in education baby! From the brains of John Hattie, John Antonetti and Michael Fullan and full of all the buzz words like deep effect size, task design and deep learning comes a resource to help teachers get the best returns for their time investment.

Data from published book 17000 Classroom Visits Can’t Be Wrong by John Antonetti and James Garver found that in any point in the learning journey:

• 93% of students can articulate what they are doing, but

ONLY

• 33% can articulate what they are learning
• 9% can articulate why they are learning it, and
• 4% can articulate what success looks like?

Furthermore,

• 87% of our lessons have students use the lowest level of Blooms taxonomy in their task

Here is more information on this research and a link to the book where these stats come from.

But, big problem — we aren’t superheroes and we are already overwhelmed with the need in our rooms. Enter AI supported planning tools!

The second component of the pilot is the feedback tool. I believe this one is a paid subscription, but would be easily duplicated with a free google form.

When we are engaging in a research supported instructional design cycle and scaffolding student learning appropraitely, our impact is greater. Do we NEED these fancy tools to do it, NO. But if we can use AI to support the planning, we can spend more time with our students and achieve a better work-life balance.

And what do the results say? (mind you– this is from Verso, so we have to consider bias and sales)

 

It looks pretty cool to me, but I’ve had a day to play with it and I recognize that time is a GIFT in education. What do you think?