On the Podcast: AI in the Writing Classroom, Part 2

Exploring AI in the English Classroom: A Teacher's Guide

Kelly Gallagher:

How have you guys used AI as a benefit for pre-writing in your classrooms?

Dennis Magliozzi:

Well, when we're talking about the idea of it being there, for us as a writing partner, you have to ask yourself who's the writing partner? If it's not AI or before AI, who was it? And if it wasn't the teacher, it might've been the parent at home or it was no one at all. So when we were first faced with this onset of AI and what we were going to do with it, I think some of my first realizations about what was happening there was that it could act as a teaching partner as well. And that's not to say that we were handing over AI feedback to students and saying, "Here, deal with it." It was more about AI taking some of the pressure off of me to come up with all of the answers for a student in the moment and talking about a set of answers that was given to us specifically about that student's work.

So that to me, relieved some pressure for me to have all the answers. And it also took the pressure off of us to be the one right answer and we could talk about, have a more natural conversation about a set of possibilities, which I think is really what writing always is. As we're moving down the path of whatever it is a student happens to be writing or whether we're writing it ourselves, we have a number of decisions that we can make along the way.

Kelly:

That's really refreshing too because I think one of the concerns that I've seen out there is that AI is used in a way that takes voice away from kids that flattens their writing and kind of funnels them into a formulaic five-paragraph essay-ish. And your book was the exact opposite of that because it's built in a workshop approach.

Dennis:

We were also really heartened to see that our students would come out of this with reflections of, I don't want AI to own my voice. So there's so many things to celebrate in that the fact that our students want to have a voice, the fact that they're acknowledging the fact that AI could take their voice and that they were acting against that. Also at the same time while using AI to an extent to help develop their voice. So there are all kinds of higher-level writing things going on there for them during that process.

Kelly:

When I left the classroom, I had 185 students and in my work over the years and in my work with Penny Kittle as well, one of the points that we often make is that students don't need criticism they need coaching and they need it mid-process, not end process. They need it while the paper is unfolding. And so I thought there was some potential and some value, and I still do that instead of me trying to mid-process respond to 185 papers at a time. But in Anaheim, I took a class set and I fed the prompt and I would put one kid's essay in and I would say to ChatGPT, for example, "What advice would you give this kid to make the essay better?"

And what I found is that it did spit out a list of things, but when I hand that to a ninth-grader, it's too much. It was overwhelming to them. So I think just because it may give good advice doesn't mean without the teacher shoulder to shoulder, without the teacher in that room bouncing around. I went back and said, "Okay, give this writer one piece of advice." And that was more digestible for the ninth graders. Although I got to say there were a couple of times I did not agree with the advice.

Dennis:

I had an experience with this earlier this year. I was using Brisk AI for this particular example instead of a ChatGPT because Brisk has DPA protections and it's accepted by my school and our state and I did the same thing that you're talking about. I fed my rubric into Brisk and then Brisk lives inside the Google Doc or whatever doc you happen to be in. And then you can say go. I like the, it's called glow and grow. And it gives a ton of information. And this was during our workshop phase. So I would read the student essay myself. I would think about what I might say, I would put it through Brisk because that takes 30 seconds maybe to produce it. I would copy and paste all of what Brisk had just said into a comment on the Google Doc, and then I would edit everything that I thought was valuable or not valuable for that student.

And I was telling to Kristina when I had done this, I was coming back in and there was a moment of guilt because it didn't feel like it all came from me. I didn't write every single word, but I was saying to her, "I've given them more direct feedback I have ever given them before in all of my teaching because it didn't save me the time because it took me just as long to read them and produce back to them than it typically did but I was able to have more direct feedback to them." I thought in more spot-on ways, and I did feel that my students responded to that in a better way as well over the course of their process.

Kelly:

I mean, that's the key, right? I mean if your goal is just who gets an A and who gets a B and who gets a C, boom, we're done. But if your goal is mid-process, you're going to say something to that kid that's going to make that paper better.

Dennis:

Right.

Kristina Peterson:

Exactly.

Kelly:

I think the potential here of what you just shared, that example is really rich.

Dennis:

Yeah. One thing I would say though is that we need to keep ourselves honest as well across the board, honest as teachers because that potential for me to have just hit go and then copy and paste that's there. I respect my teaching and my students far more than that to do that to them. There's also from the student writer perspective too, they have that opportunity to just copy and paste and call it a day. We do need to step into this, lean into this, keep ourselves honest, but it can be used as a sidekick, a co-pilot, an intern, it's there. And the last thing on that, because one of the ways that I justified it for myself is teachers have been pulling from comment banks for ages. I didn't see this really in the end as any different than pulling from a comment bank. I actually saw it as better because those comments were focused specifically on that student text.

Kelly:

To each kid. I know that my favorite thing in the classroom was to read student work, and my least favorite thing was to read student work because there was too much of it. But my concern echoes yours in that if you don't read student's work, how's it going to inform your instruction? Right? You have to stay connected to the kid via you reading the writing that you can't just hand it off.

Dennis:

Let's not forget that that's the beauty of the workshop model as well, that you actually get to know your students as writers, as individuals, that you grow with them as they grow. That's not going to happen just by populating their documents with AI responses.

Kelly:

The more you get to know them as human beings, the more they're going to perform. One of the things I really liked in the book was that you had a certain set of writing rules. I think the first one was write first. Could you say more about that?

Dennis:

This was born out of our beginning to write this book. So talk about teachers learning from the practice they're trying to teach. We sat down at the beginning of this book asking ourselves what are our rules going to be for writing a book about AI. How are we going to use AI? And the first thing that we decided between each other is that we would not feed anything to AI until we wrote first. So that's really where that was born out of.

Kelly:

Why is that?

Dennis:

It seemed like first we actually learned new things as we wrote the book. There are exceptions to that rule, but for us, I think when we were writing the book, it felt like we needed to put our own thoughts on the table before we started asking what we should say.

Kristina:

We're also worried about overall reliance. I think it's easy to continually go to ChatGPT. We have written several grants for other projects and writing grants is the bane of my existence. So I will very quickly pull up ChatGPT and ask it to help write that grant because I just don't want to do it. And I didn't want over-reliance on any type of AI for myself or for my students. So that write first for me is kind of like a quick write in our notebooks. And I still feel like my composition notebook is my number one tool for my class and my students. And so if we're not doing 10 or 20 quick writes before we move into a computer, then I'm not doing my job and I felt like I needed to do that myself as well. And then when we move into struggle, second for us, that's a productive struggle.

You're struggling, but you might not know the right way to end this piece or you might want some more ideas on where to go with the book or with the poem or whatever the case might be. So taking the AI to ask for some kind of in-the-moment suggestions helps a lot. Our third one was to prompt third, and that was with us alongside with some guidance, with some ethical reminders that students shouldn't be putting in their names or their personal identifiable information and how to then analyze that prompt. What is it saying that you actually want to use?

Ideally, what are you learning so you don't have to keep going back to it time and time again, and then being transparent about where you got your information? If you used a line verbatim, that's okay. However, you need to say that in our reflective rubrics at the end, these are the lines that I took from SchoolAI or ChatGPT or whatever the case is so that they know that they have to be honest about that, especially if it is something like ChatGPT where there's no record of that. I don't have any access to that because it's on their own private feed on their phones.

Dennis:

Just to loop back to struggle second for a moment. In addition to what Kristina is saying, I think we both recognized and do feel that part of the process of writing is struggle. That part of the process of thinking there is some struggle there. If everything's just going to come with relative ease, then where is the actual growth? I don't think that I've really found that I've grown as a writer or a thinker by having everything come easily to me. So I do think that struggle is actually a component of writing, and we do want to create that environment for our students where they still experience that. And then there is that component where writing becomes communal and we're just saying, "Let's bring AI into that community, if you will." And that's where the prompt third comes in, where we are prompting it.

And question fourth is ultimately we're questioning what's being brought to us. But notice how neither one of those are really all that foreign to the writing workshop. Your teacher is going to prompt you or you're going to prompt your teacher in some way, shape, or form, and then they're going to give you information that you would have to then question, do I want this in my piece or not? It all is very close to the writing workshop, to begin with, and it just seemed like we needed that set of rules to write this book [inaudible 00:12:17]-

Kelly:

Otherwise, they start with the AI.

Kristina:

Exactly.

Kelly:

And I always that idea, and it's not my idea, it's been around a long time that you write to discover your thinking. That you don't write to spit out something you already know, you write to see where it's going to take you.

Edie:

Thanks for tuning in today. This was just one episode in a three-part series, so make sure to check out the other episodes. You can learn more about Dennis and Kristina's new book and buy their new book as well as read a full transcript at blog.heinemann.com.

Kristina Peterson has been teaching high school English since 2008. She has a master’s degree in teaching and serves the educational community as a new teacher mentor and the Secretary of the New Hampshire Council of Teachers of English. She also teaches in the University of New Hampshire’s Writers Academy and Learning Through Teaching program. She is an Ambassador to the award-winning Arts in Action program through NH's Racial Unity Team, and cofounder of Bookshelf Diversity, a statewide grant project that provides diverse books to New Hampshire classrooms. 

Dr. Dennis Magliozzi has been teaching high school English since 2008. He has an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of New Hampshire. He has supervised teachers in the UNH Learning Through Teaching (LTT) program and teaches in UNH’s Writers Academy. He is co-developer of "Arts in Action," winner of a 2023 New Hampshire Governor's Arts Education Award. He is also a co-founder of Bookshelf Diversity, a statewide grant project designed to get diverse books into the hands of New Hampshire students. 

Kelly Gallagher (@KellyGToGo) taught at Magnolia High School in Anaheim, California for 35 years. He is the coauthor, with Penny Kittle, of Four Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency, as well as the bestselling 180 Days. Kelly is also the author of several other books on adolescent literacy, most notably Readicide and Write Like This. He is the former co-director of the South Basin Writing Project at California State University, Long Beach and the former president of the Secondary Reading Group for the International Literacy Association.