Welcome spring. Three years ago, I wrote this, “How are you? It is one thing to have conversations around future ready skills like adaptability, communication, perseverance, problem solving, learning to learn, creativity. It is a whole different story when the future is now and an entire public school culture makes a shift to eLearning in a week, at the same time families adapt to social distancing and parents adjust to working at home, and a stay at home order is put in place... but what stories we are writing!”
How are you now? What stories are we writing now? When I listen to colleagues, I hear below the surface a few common threads. First, it is taking our batteries longer to recharge than it did pre-pandemic. It is as if we hyperextended our capacity for change from 2020-2022 and now we need longer to make shifts in thinking or absorb new information. Second, priorities have been realigned. The balance between home and school has been reset. Building relationships with students, filling in learning gaps…and at the same time finding opportunities for students to explore their interests, and continue to apply critical thinking skills, and make room for creativity…and …and… has taken more energy than anyone really appreciates or realizes.
Learning agility refers to the ability to adapt to new situations or to see problems from different perspectives. What does this look like for educators? Educator Agility. It does not look like yoga after school. Agility is the ability to be flexible in thinking. This may actually be how to conserve energy, and thrive through the day to day changes that have become so difficult to absorb. It takes a lot of energy to try to put things back the way they were and to do things the way we did them pre -2020. It is like trying to stand in one place while the tide is pulling around you. Instead, if we have Educator Agility, we flex. If students need additional time and practice to acquire knowledge and skills. Flex. Maybe this means thinking differently about what activities are really essential vs nice to do because you have done them in the past. Be open this spring to cleaning out your “always did this” closet and make room to dig deeper into their learning. ChatGPT can help you brainstorm, provide differentiated problems, or suggest additional learning activities. If you want to focus on topic A, and students are really interested in topic B…and you don’t really know anything about it. Flex. Become a learner along with them and integrate the standards into the new activities. ChatGPT can help with this too. Ask it to provide background info for you, new vocabulary for students, inquiry questions to spark curiosity.
Generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, are an opportunity to apply Educator Agility in the world of ELA. Especially around essay writing. The conversations around cheating and plagiarism are certainly valid. Ethical use of any technology is a necessary skill that students need to know. Citing sources is also important, and because of the way generative AI algorithms function, it is not possible to cite the original source of the product it returns in response to a prompt. Students need to learn how generative AI tools work so they understand this. Learning how to communicate ideas and think critically through writing is also important. And, it is also taking hours for teachers to run student writing through ChatGPT detectors. What if instead, we flex. It is important for students to value the process and the struggle of learning. If we continue to emphasize that what we value is the final product, students will continue to find ways to get to that final product as quickly as possible so they can spend time on other things. How can we think differently about traditional essay assignments and show students that we value the learning process? Generative AI tools can be used to generate model writing that students can then work together to revise and improve upon. ChatGPT can create outlines that students can write from. ChatGPT can provide feedback questions, suggest word clarity, provide background information, or alternative points of view. It can do so much more than crank out average essays. As educators, who are modeling agility, how can we model ethical use of this new technology and teach students to use it effectively as part of the learning process as well? And, if we can move past the conversations about cheating, as Agile Educators, we can begin to explore how generative AI tools can help us be more efficient, finding that time we are looking for to build strong relationships with students, and be flexible, providing lesson ideas to meet the needs of our students.
Resources To Spark Your Thinking
A Handbook For Collaborative Writing - Univ. of Wisconsin
Group Writing - UNC
Flexible Thinking -PBS Kids