AI tools have rapidly entered Language Arts classrooms. The proliferation of AI tools has outpaced efforts to understand how AI’s presence might change teaching practices or the role of the teacher. ChatGPT adds to the suite of AI tools that might be encountered in an ELA classroom, along with automated essay scoring, writing evaluation and feedback. As with all emerging technologies, it is critical to understand how we relate to these technologies in order to best leverage them for student learning. How do teachers view and position AI tools in their teaching?
We evaluated one writing platform that gave students immediate, AI-generated feedback, with unlimited opportunities to use the feedback to revise and resubmit their essays for better scores. We wanted to understand better the relationship between teachers and the AI employed by the automated writing evaluation tool. To explore this relationship, we interviewed 27 middle school writing teachers nationwide and looked at their teaching materials and student work.
Our analysis identified three main approaches to using AI: as a teaching partner, as a grading assistant and as a substitute teacher.
Teachers who used AI as a teaching partner saw AI feedback as a tool to enhance their teaching and their students’ learning. Their partnership with AI gave them an “extra set of eyes” that could collect individual and group-level data to inform their instructional decisions. Their classrooms were abuzz with writing and engagement, as one described a typical class period using the platform: “There’d be class time to work 20-30 minutes on whatever they needed—mini-lessons, go in and see the feedback or make revisions, whatever. If the feedback wasn’t specific or clear enough, I helped them. I grouped them by scores and dimensions, and then I’d try to hit 2-3 areas in 30 minutes and guide them.”
Source link
Leave a Reply