Pioneers 2023/24

After another exceptional and innovative year in the education sector, the staff at Northwood have come to embody creativity, curiosity and intellect, while providing a real sense of joy for the girls they teach. Pioneers and change makers for the future, our teachers continually engage in reflective practice and educational research to ensure that our students have the best quality teaching possible. Pioneers is Northwood College’s teaching and learning magazine which showcases articles written by teachers across the school. E-News will regularly feature articles from the magazine which we hope you enjoy.

Can a robot teach my lesson?
Why AI won’t replace teachers, but will change teaching – Adam Giblin, Head of RPE

Introduction
Every generation of teachers faces its Ed-tech revolution – in the 1980s it was the calculator, at the turn of the 21st century schools saw the introduction of desktop computers, and now just over 20 years later, we have the rise of AI in education. One key difference is that while in the past technology has been dismissed as a “fad”, most of the teachers I speak to aren’t resistant to the changes AI will bring to education; most are intrigued, if a little unsure of what it will do. We haven’t yet reached any sort of integration with this new technology, the vast majority of us are still very much in the exploration stages. There are incredibly important discussions to be had on the ethics, implications for learning and impact on issues ranging from NEA work to producing work in the creative subjects, but that is not the scope of this article. Here, I aim to outline just a couple of the more interesting ways I’ve explored AI in my teaching practice this year.

What Does the Research Say?
Since its release to the general public in November 2022, ChatGPT has occupied the thoughts of Edtech leads across the country. The speed of development and improvement of AI is astounding, so much so that many organisations have put off writing policies on the technology, knowing these will be out of date within six months. The potential capabilities of AI are still unknown, but it is clear that this technology will only become more integrated into our work as teachers, both in our work with students and in how we prepare them for the world beyond school. As such, the need to become savvy on this new technology is becoming increasingly apparent. Speaking at the 2023 World Economic Forum’s Growth Summit, economist Richard Baldwin said, “AI won’t take your job. It’s somebody using AI that will take your job.” This seems to already be the case in some industries; research delivered by Sherry Coutu at Epsom College’s AI in Education: Cutting through the Noise Conference, revealed that there has been an 8,369% increase in the number of Data Scientists and Advanced Analysts in the past 3 years (Sherry Coutu CBE, 2023). The further we go on, the more advanced the AI will get. What’s more, our students – as with all things – soon will be much better at using this technology than we are, unless we are rigorous in keeping ourselves up to date with what AI is out there and how it can enhance our classrooms. Embracing technology and AI in our classroom isn’t an option, it’s a necessity. However, as our colleagues at Wimbledon High School note “For many reasons, [AI] simply cannot be a proxy for the student-teacher relationship.” (Pett and Evans, Our position on Generative Artificial Intelligence and other related technologies, Wimbledon High School, 2023). Teachers will always be the most important classroom tool a student can have. As experts in the science of learning, we have a vital role to play in ensuring that the future use of AI in our schools is academically appropriate, ethical and done to enhance the learning experience for our students. So, the robots won’t be taking our jobs, but if we are very clever, we might be able to use technology to improve how we carry out our role as teachers.

Section 2 (e.g. what you did or reflected upon)
When I took on the EdTech role this year, I hadn’t realised how much the growth of AI would impact my day to day work. I’ve spent this time  mainly trying to find ways in which AI will enhance the learning which already happens in our classrooms. I say mainly, because I’ve also played around with it for fun – such as when I asked Chat GPT to take on roles as the philosopher Plato, French Feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir and the Gospel writer St. John. We’re cultivating quite the guest list for our virtual dinner party. This playful use of the technology allows us to delve deeper into concepts than we might have through just reading a piece of text – particularly when we had to reframe questions as the responses didn’t quite match what we know about the historical figure. Or when students were asked to analyse how accurate the response was given their prior knowledge, or what this response might be revealing about the bias in the AI programme. This also demonstrated to students that using Chat GPT as a “shortcut” to knowledge, it actually requires one to do a bit of mental work with the information generated. From a teaching perspective, I have also found that far from replacing me as a teacher, the AI works best as a supplement to what we’re already doing. For example having taught my sociology students a lesson on the Development of Childhood over time, we decided to build a timeline using Padlet. As a way to get students working collaboratively and display information accessibly Padlet has been used by teachers for many years – however the new “I can’t draw” generative AI feature allowed my students to add images to the Padlet super quick. We discussed as a group the need for careful wording with the prompts used to generate images, and worked on selecting the most appropriate ones to match the text we had written. This made students think more critically about the information and discuss what they were learning in order to ensure the image was correct.

Canva Magic Write is another great AI tool and great for getting students to think about the information they receive. One of the most useful tasks which my Year 11s carried out during revision was reviewing the responses the AI gave to examination style questions. As expected the AI answers were not suitable for our exams, but after some trial and error we were able to generate responses which were close to model answers for the GCSE exam. We could even make it write in the tone of a 15 year old girl from North London. To get to the correct prompt, students not only had to revise the core content they needed the AI to include, but also remind themselves of examination techniques so they could tell the programme how to structure the answer. Again, they couldn’t just chuck in an answer and memorise the AI’s response – it required them to input very specific instructions, which they could only do once they were themselves aware of the examination requirements. As we’re talking about exams, I’ll take my final paragraph to mention Edpuzzle’s Autograde/ Teacher Assist AI marking feature. Having set my Year 8s a video to watch with the usual multiple choice knowledge check questions throughout, I added a reflective open ended question at the end. Edpuzzle allowed me to put in an “ideal answer”, against which it compared the students’ answers and marked them for me. While I still went over the answers to check accuracy, I was able to glean very quickly who had really grasped the content and included key vocabulary in their answer. This is the type of time saving tools which other AI sites have also begun to promote, and while there is still a need for teachers to check answers and moderate the AI marking, it definitely sped the process up for me.

So what have I learnt?
The main take away which all of this exploration and experimentation has given me is that AI is really useful – but only when it’s used well. The AI assistants are much like enthusiastic Year 7 students – full of knowledge and keen to give you the perfect answer but in need of very specific instructions in order to actually achieve anything meaningful. In order to make sure we are using AI effectively, there are some very important reflections to be done. Earlier this year I gave a presentation on Ped-Tech, re-emphasising the need to base any decisions we make about using AI on our pedagogical values. Before using any technology, we must think about why we use particular approaches to teaching and learning and the impact we expect that to have on our learners longer term. Only then should we ask how this specific technology can help me to do this. If I am interested in using an AI tool, I must consider what message this gives to my students about what good learning is, and what knowledge is. I think the experiments I have had with AI this year have left me the most reflective I have ever been about what it means to teach well. Today I have discussed just a few examples of what is going on in the world of AI in education, and even then only examples which went successfully. I have many instances of the technology going very wrong – but this hasn’t put me off. Often it has made me laugh at how bad the outcome is, or laugh at how silly I am for having tried to use it in this way. I’ve had moments of creativity where I’ve discovered a new way to do something, and moments of salvation when AI has quickly produced a quiz for a lesson I have in oh-to-near-near future. All of it has been fun – and I think that’s part of the joy of teaching, having fun while you learn a new part of your job. So, let the fun continue!

Conclusion
I decided that in an article about the integration of AI, I should really make use of the tool in some way. So, I uploaded a copy of my article to ChatGPT and asked the AI to write a conclusion (I then had to ask it to be more concise, clearly my prompt crafting still needs work…). Here’s what it generated: “AI in education presents a significant opportunity to enhance teaching and learning, complementing rather than replacing teachers. This exploration shows AI can streamline tasks, engage students more deeply, and promote critical thinking when used thoughtfully. The key is to align AI use with pedagogical goals, ensuring it supports rather than detracts from the learning experience. Successful integration of AI involves a mix of careful planning and playful experimentation, underscoring the importance of adaptability and reflection in adopting new technologies.”