On the Podcast: AI in the Writing Classroom, Part 3

Kelly Gallagher:

I'd love to hear a specific or two on how AI helps them develop their own voice.

Kristina Peterson:

This year I've been working with my freshmen on, we were doing personal narrative and memoir writing, and I hadn't used AI at all this year. I've only used it twice actually. And the first time was to help students, if they wanted to, I created this SchoolAI kind of bot that I trained on the rubric and the writing prompts, all the mentors that we had looked at, and the definitions of the craft moves that they were going to be graded on. And I put all of that in and the kids had until Sunday to finish, and I just said, "It's up here on my Canvas page. If you want to use it, you can." And I had about, I don't know, 35% of my students were using it. And when I went through, because the benefit of SchoolAI is I have a record of everything.

ChatGPT, you have no record. There's no way I can see how the kids used it. But with SchoolAI, I would see several students who are writing about really important moments for them or scary moments for them. And they would ask things like, how can I make my reader feel this fear? And AI would come back and say, "Well, here are four options." And the options would be from my rubric, like sentence fluency or voice or something. But then it would also pull up, here, you talked about hearing the dogs barking in the distance. You could write this instead. And then it would give her three or four lines, and then she could pick and choose. And at the end of that particular one, she really only took two lines, but it was two lines she felt really like got across that fear and that helped her kind of author that piece of writing the way she wanted.

Dennis Magliozzi:

I think sometimes people can forget that we often go to other tools to begin with. We go to a thesaurus. We go to the internet maybe and look up, we do a Wiki deep dive or something to find some language connected to what we're writing about. And AI is just another tool, another resource that we can use there. But if we're teaching our students how to use it appropriately as a writer would want to for inspiration, I think we can show them that this is a different kind of deep dive that gives us the opportunity to pull some select language, not to take all the language.

Kelly:

Well, and both of you kind of teach in a workshop approach, and so when it's not the kid's voice. You can tell when it's cut and pasted. One thing that kind of surprised me, in a good way, when I read your manuscript was this pairing of AI with poetry. Can you share some of that thinking with us?

Kristina:

I think using AI in any way that can help students become stronger writers and help them author their writing is a really powerful tool, and we have always loved our poetry unit. And students sometimes, especially freshmen and especially boys and athletes, are not excited about writing their own poetry and performing their own poetry. So having a opportunity to get more feedback on that from not just me or their writing partners, but even an AI bot, helped bridge that gap for a lot of the students.

Kelly:

How?

Kristina:

I think it's this idea that they can push back against what the AI bot says more than they can about what I would say. Teachers have this authority even if we're not trying to be authority figures. And sometimes they think that whatever I say is the golden answer. They can't disagree with me. But with AI, if AI gives them a suggestion or tells them that they need to have a rhyme scheme, they can ignore that and push back or reprompt in ways that I think they hesitate to disagree blatantly with somebody that's going to be giving them a grade.

Dennis:

I'm slightly curious about why you asked about AI being a part of the writing process with poetry specifically like it shouldn't be or couldn't be compared to writing other essays I think, or writing other pieces. What is it about poetry that makes AI off limits?

Kelly:

Well, I think because when I saw the, well, first of all, teachers are afraid of poetry and students are afraid of poetry.

Kristina:

Yes. Yes.

Kelly:

And one of the things that Penny Kittle and I wrote about in Four Essential Studies is that poetry, a full-blown poetry unit deserves its place at the table in any good ELA...

Kristina:

100%.

Kelly:

... classroom.

Kristina:

Yeah. Totally agree.

Kelly:

Not having poetry in your curriculum is not having subtraction in a math class.

Kristina:

Yes.

Kelly:

It is foundational to raising good literate kids. But I guess what I was really liking was, and I can't remember if this was actually in the poetry or somewhere else in the book, but not only using AI to give feedback for something that's already drafted, but AI as a tool to generate topics and to generate you might want to write about this. I don't know. I think it was based also on this idea that kids are very reluctant to dive into that genre.

Dennis:

Yeah. When you were asking the question about students developing their own voice, my example that I was thinking of, comes from a student I had named Lexi who was working with a poem. It was one of these moments that you love as a workshop teacher and then end up hating. I'm sitting in front of her. She asked me to read her poem. I can tell that she's very proud of it. Do I have any feedback? What kind of feedback would you like? You can tell me anything. So I bite at that and I say something about her ending and send her off to a weekend, 'cause this was on a Friday, of misery trying to figure out how to change her ending that she now feels she needs to change.

So when she came back to me on Monday, she said, "I've been thinking about it. I do need to change this ending. There needs to be something there, but I don't know what it is." And even though I was the one who gave the comment, I didn't really have an answer for it either. So I suggested we drop that particular thing into AI and see what it came back for feedback. It gave us five different versions of what she could potentially do, and she ended up cherry picking. We read it together, the feedback, and we found lines and words that we really liked. And she ended up finding her own creative way to, what I would still argue, as her voice that just had a little bit of help from an AI bot.

Kelly:

Here's how much I love that. You may agree or disagree, but I think more than any other discourse, kids write really bad poetry. They write really bad poetry, and then they say, the brave kid comes to you and says, "How do I make it better?" And you're just looking at it like, well, I don't even know where to begin. So I like the idea of handing that over so that you're not the bad guy.

Dennis:

Yeah.

Kristina:

Yes.

Kelly:

And I'm not the bad guy. I'm trying earnestly to help the kid, but sometimes I wouldn't mind handing that off.

Kristina:

Yeah.

Dennis:

Well, that comes back to what we were talking about before as well, this idea that why does the teacher have to be the one with all of the right answers all of the time? And a lot of times our suggestions and workshops are maybe not the best suggestion for their next steps. So they need to feel that freedom to choose, pick and choose what we say. And to Kristina's point, I think they feel that freedom a little bit more with AI to pick and choose what it says, so long as we bring them to the table to start seeing that they can pick and choose.

Kristina:

Right.

Kelly:

That's interesting because when Penny Kittle and I did writing groups across schools, so you're at school A and my kids are at school B, and we would trade papers. My kids were much more likely to give honest and authentic feedback if they weren't sitting next to the person.

Dennis:

That's interesting.

Kelly:

Yeah. And so that, I think, thematically kind of rides along with what we're talking about here. So early in the book, you liken AI, the use of AI, I think you use a Department of Education quote, "It's like riding an electric bicycle." Could you explain that metaphor?

Dennis:

If you had an electric bike that could ride you from point A to point B on its own and you didn't have to do anything, then there is no work on the part of the biker. I think many people would argue that you weren't even biking anymore. So the idea that I took from that metaphor is that the electric biker still has to pedal at times. They use the power of the electric bike to go up hills or to cool off for a little while in the wind while they're going along, and they also still have to steer and they have to navigate it towards their final direction and destination. So it does really seem like a perfect metaphor for how we're looking for AI to be operating in our classroom. Let's use it to kind of push our thinking, push our writing, but don't forget that you are the one who's in control of that bike the whole time.

Kelly:

I love the metaphor, and I would like it duly noted for the record that I do pedal on my electric bike. I want you to know that.

Dennis:

Do you wait until it's run out of power or you do it along the way?

Kelly:

You know, I actually, there's four of us that ride them a lot. The other three, they're way too dependent where I actually want a little bit of a workout.

Kristina:

Yeah.

Kelly:

Right? Well, you have to work out as a rider, you're not going to. One of my concerns, of course, is that the deepest level of thinking that we do as human beings is right. And if you turn all of that decision-making over to AI, you're going to lose the ability to think deeply. And I think that's really what I liked about your book was how you wove it in ways that kids were still thinking.

Dennis:

Thank you.

Kristina:

Yeah. Thank you. I think when you ask students or you give them an assignment that is asking them to assemble an essay, they're going to more than likely farm that out to ChatGPT 'cause that's what it does shockingly well. But if you are offering them opportunities to author their writing and they want to tell that story and they want their voice, especially if they're teenagers, they're going to work hard to keep their voice and keep their point the center of that story.

Dennis:

And hopefully along the way, recognize that AI can actually help them keep that voice and push that thinking further. Right?

Kelly:

I mean, I'm not going to lie. I'm writing a book right now. I use it all the time.

Kristina:

It's really helpful.

Dennis:

How do you find you use it having just gone through the rules that we talked about? Are you in a similar camp or do you find it's a little bit different for you?

Kelly:

It's writing the entire book for me. No. I'm kidding.

Dennis:

You said that very straight faced though.

Kelly:

No. There are times when I'm writing something and I can't follow through on an idea, and I would say, give me more thinking about X. I do that myself. Right? And I actually find it way more valuable than Google.

Kristina:

Oh. Yes.

Kelly:

Way more valuable.

Kristina:

100%

Kelly:

And so again, I want to harness, we want to harness the goodness of it. One of the things I like is how you guys model the proper use of it. Right? You're not just turning on the electric bike and going.

Edie:

Thanks for tuning in today. This is just one part in a three-part series. So make sure to check out the other episodes. You can read a full transcript and learn more about Kristina and Dennis's new book 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.