27 Years as an Educator: My Journey with ChatGPT

I've been a teacher for 27 years. When ChatGPT first came out, I was...

When high school teacher Kelly Gibson first read about ChatGPT, she was terrified. But she's since chosen to embrace AI in the classroom, allowing students to use AI tools for essays. She said more educators will likely adapt to and implement AI into their teaching methods.

Initial Apprehension

Two years ago, I was on break for Thanksgiving, and a few former students got in touch with me unexpectedly, telling me about a new online tool called ChatGPT. One of them said students would be able to use it to cheat. It made me nervous. I spent the next few days reading about ChatGPT and became terrified. The tool could generate an entire essay from a prompt I'd give to students.

Embracing AI in Education

I started learning how to use ChatGPT, and it got me thinking of how I could use it in my classroom. It had the potential to help students write while reinforcing their critical thinking skills. Instead of spending all my time trying to catch students using AI to cheat, I've found ways to implement it in the classroom. I think educators will increasingly learn how to adapt to AI.

Integration and Student Response

I experimented with ChatGPT over the holidays. I fed it essay prompts and saw it was able to generate arguments quickly. Nowadays, my students mostly use AI for editing. Once they've finished an essay, they'll run it through AI editing software to clean up sentence structure and ensure their tenses are aligned.

I've told the students I won't be checking for AI in their work. I've tried using programs that claim to detect AI writing, but they produce false positives and negatives.

Ensuring Learning and Growth

I'm taking responsibility for making sure students are really learning. One way I assess their skills is by assigning handwritten in-class essays and take-home essays where they can access AI tools.

Looking to the Future

I believe every educator is at their best when using rules for the classroom that best fit their teaching style. As an English teacher, I feel that not teaching students how to use this new tool would be like earlier days in my career when some educators didn't want students to use spellcheck.

I understand why some school districts previously responded by banning ChatGPT. This hit us without warning, so there's a lack of solid training for school districts to give to educators at this point. I'd guess that as the years go on, there'll be more training, and this will just be another tool under our belt.

Conclusion

My guess is that educators will use AI and other tools in the future to help students become better writers while working diligently to make them stronger thinkers and not dependent on AI for their thinking process.