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Create complete lesson plans, resources, and report card comments.

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Automated lesson planning aligned with state standards. Creates editable and customizable lesson plans.

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AI-Powered Lesson Plan Generator | Auto Classmate

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Create a personalized and dynamic Lesson Plan for your classroom with the Auto Classmate AI-Powered Lesson Plan Generator.

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A language model that can understand and generate human-like text in response to prompts, making it capable of engaging in conversational interactions and providing information on a wide range of topics.

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ChatGPT is your AI chatbot for everyday use. Chat with the most advanced AI to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster.

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An AI assistant designed to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It can provide information, generate text, answer questions, do basic math and more to assist users.

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Talk with Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic

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AI enhanced tools for creating interactive instructional materials with the goal of sparking curiosity, discussion, and critical thinking in the classroom.

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Generate lessons with AI

Plan and deliver interactive lessons on any topic - with help from AI

I am teacher of 15 years who, until recently, has delved no more deeply into tech in the classroom, and here I am encouraging colleagues to come on in and see Curipod in action and leading CPD sessions. To top it off, I'm spending my evenings playing on my iPad to see how many new lessons I can create, and what new features have been added that week. The time saved, and the improvement in my lesson materials, is tangible.
- Read the full case study with Aileen Wallace

Curious?

Join our online workshop to find out how Curipod can work for you and your students!

Book your spot

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Join the growing movement of teachers using Curipod to make interactive lessons filled with creativity, reflection and critical thinking

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Creates differentiated Google Docs for teachers

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Use existing curriculum, or generate standards-aligned content with real, cited sources.

Choose a grade level and language, and watch Diffit create complete, differentiated resources. ✅

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Use existing curriculum, or generate standards-aligned content with real, cited sources. Choose a grade level and language, and watch Diffit create complete, differentiated resources. ✅

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All-in-one toolkit for teachers including over 50 tools that can help with different tasks including lesson plans, differentiation, communication with families, teacher jokes, writing IEPs, personalize learning, and more!

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MagicSchool.ai - AI for teachers - lesson planning and more!

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Join over a million teachers saving hours of time using the #1 AI Platform for Education, MagicSchool, to help lesson plan, differentiate, write assessments, write IEPs, communicate clearly, and more!

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Parlay is an AI-powered instructional platform that helps teachers facilitate meaningful, measurable, and inclusive class discussions.

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Parlay is an AI-powered instructional platform that helps teachers facilitate meaningful, measurable, and inclusive class discussions. Join over a million teachers and students. Start using Parlay for free in your class today.

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Toolkit designed to help education authorities, school leaders, and teachers create guidelines to help communities realize the potential benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence while mitigating the potential risks.

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TeachAI | AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit

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The AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit is designed to help education authorities, school leaders and teachers create their own thoughtful guidance to achieve potential benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence in primary and secondary K-12 education while mitigating risks.

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The CRAFTING AI prompts framework is designed to empower users in effectively utilizing ChatGPT for various writing and engagement tasks while ensuring ethical and responsible use.

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The CRAFTING AI prompts framework is designed to empower users in effectively utilizing ChatGPT for various writing and engagement tasks while ensuring ethical and responsible use. It consists of three essential parts: CRAFT, ING, and AI. Let's explore each component in detail:

CRAFT: The crafting phase focuses on providing specific details and context to enhance response quality. By framing prompts using natural language, ChatGPT better understands intentions, context, and nuances, resulting in a more conversational and human-like interaction. Additionally, specify writing style, acting roles, format requirements, and task objectives to guide ChatGPT accurately.

Craft is an acronym for: Context, Register, Acting Role, Format, Task

ING: The validation phase promotes interactive dialogue and integrates legal, security, and privacy considerations. Through fostering back-and-forth exchanges, refining inquiries, and collaborating with ChatGPT, you ensure that the generated responses align with ethical and responsible practices. By being mindful of non-disclosure agreements, data security, and privacy guidelines, your prompts maintain compliance, protect sensitive information, and establish clear goals. This approach enables you to derive meaningful insights while upholding confidentiality and achieving desired outcomes.

ING is an acronym for: Interactive, Non-disclosure, Goal-driven

AI: The enhancement phase emphasizes staying proactive and embracing new possibilities. Adapt your approach by validating responses, making necessary adjustments, and refining prompts based on initial results. By continuously improving your prompts, you maximize the potential of AI tools and generate the best possible outcomes.

AI is an acronym for: Adapt & Improve

By adhering to the CRAFTING AI prompts framework, you can effectively utilize the capabilities of ChatGPT to improve your writing and enhance your overall engagement.

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This podcast episode and post explore how to use ChatGPT as an example maker.

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Sponsored by Listenwise and Wipebook

This post was co-written by Sarah Levine.

Editor's Note: This post takes a pragmatic approach to ChatGPT while acknowledging some of the problems that have already arisen with the tool. Other ethical issues with the tool's development have been brought to light in recent weeks that are not mentioned here. It is our belief that teachers are most effective when they are informed and empowered, so we urge you to stay mindful of these complexities when making decisions for your own practice.

You have probably already heard about or tinkered with ChatGPT (the "GPT" stands for "generative pre-trained transformer"). ChatGPT is a chatbot (or "bot") powered by artificial intelligence (AI). You can have a conversation with it, prompt it to write essays, create recipes, make medical diagnoses, mimic famous authors, and code software. Its outputs are impressively human-like. In just five days, it gained one million users, a milestone that took Facebook ten months to achieve.

ChatGPT comes with risks: Students can now copy and paste a school writing assignment into the bot's dialogue window, and the bot will spit out an essay in a couple of minutes. Also, because ChatGPT gets most of its content and genre knowledge from the web, it can generate sexist, racist, or blatantly false information, all in an authoritative tone. For example:

The prompt entered for ChatGPT:
"Can you put seven blue balls and two red balls into a tube that holds eight balls?"

Text response generated by ChatGPT:
"Yes, it is possible to put seven blue balls and two red balls into a tube that holds eight balls. The total number of balls is nine which is less than or equal to the capacity of the tube."

As literacy researchers and former high school teachers, we recognize these risks. BUT: we don't think we can avoid ChatGPT and its family of AI tools. It is not just a future vision of learning; it is already here. And we are only scratching the surface of what AI will do in the next five to ten years. So this post is about one particular way that teachers can use ChatGPT to support kids' learning: Using ChatGPT as an example machine.

ChatGPT's ability to quickly produce a lot of examples of different kinds of texts makes it uniquely suited to learning strategies like concept attainment, inductive learning, or one that we'll focus on here called contrasting cases.

Why Multiple Examples Are So Important in Learning

The basic idea behind strategies like contrasting cases or concept attainment is that one example is not enough to help people learn about a thing (like an idea or a process). People need to compare multiple, contrasting examples.

Not coincidentally, ChatGPT is built on a similar type of machine learning. For example, for a computer to recognize an image of a dog, it has to process thousands of images of dogs - but also needs to process images of "not dogs," like cats, foxes, and wolves - to accurately construct a general definition and model of dog. In other words, to know what a dog is, you also need to know what it is not.

Across disciplines, teachers use multiple contrasting examples to help students develop mental models of processes and concepts. Social studies teachers provide examples of different types of governments, English teachers provide examples of different literary interpretations, and science teachers give examples to illustrate different types of energy. Students can sequence, rank, or categorize these examples in ways that help them understand underlying concepts.

But developing these examples can take a lot of time. ChatGPT can generate any number of contrasting examples in a few minutes. Then teachers can revise and perfect those examples, and have more time to dedicate to other creative lessons.

How to Get Good Examples from ChatGPT

To use ChatGPT as an example machine, teachers first need to know how to prompt it effectively. ChatGPT will do exactly what it is prompted to do and nothing more, so it's important to give it precise instructions. Here are steps to a general approach we have been using to prompt the bot:

1. Establish criteria: Think about the elements that define a strong example of the thing you want kids to learn about (You can draw from your rubrics or final assignments to do this).

2. Prompt: Prompt ChatGPT to create an example of whatever concept, process, or phenomena you are trying to teach.

3. Review and adapt: Review the bot's output and adapt it as you see fit.

4. Prompt for contrasting cases: Prompt it to create several non-examples, incorrect examples, or ambiguous examples. These are your contrasting cases.

5. Review and adapt: Review the outputs again and adapt them as you see fit.

Here's an example. With this one, our goal was to help students learn the underlying principles of kinetic and potential energy. We used ChatGPT to generate a range of different examples of kinetic and potential energy. Kids could sort these examples into categories and then explain their choices. In the screenshots below, the text next to the yellow icon is our prompt, and the text next to the green icon is ChatGPT's response. Following the process we introduced earlier:

Step 1 - Establish criteria: We wanted students to know that potential energy is energy that is stored, and kinetic energy is energy in motion.

Step 2 - Prompt: We asked ChatGPT to generate a list of five real-life examples of kinetic energy. (Click images for a larger view.)

Step 3 - Review and adapt: These examples looked pretty good. The fifth one - waterfall cascading down a cliff - might be a good example of both kinetic and potential energy. We could keep this one if we think our kids are ready for some ambiguity in the sorting exercise.

Step 4 - Prompt for contrasting cases: Next, we asked ChatGPT to generate examples of potential energy. These serve as our contrasting cases. (When prompting ChatGPT, you can basically talk to it as you would a person. For the most part, it remembers your previous prompts.)

Step 5 - Review and adapt: These examples also looked pretty good. We decided that we want to add one more ambiguous example that will increase the complexity of the contrasting cases. So we prompted ChatGPT:

We revised that example to simply read: "A car moving down a hill." That way, when we included it in our sorting exercise, students would have to do the work of defining the kinds of energy represented in the example.

Reviewing the outputs again, we noticed that three examples were very similar: a car moving down the highway (kinetic), a roller coaster at the top of the hill (potential), and a car moving down a hill (both). The similarities made these three examples a great illustration of contrasting cases, because students would need to come up with a nuanced rationale for why they represent different types of energy.

We could now mix up these examples on a Padlet or Google Slide, or we can print each one out on a separate piece of paper. Then students can debate with one another about each example, categorize them, and explain their choices. In their explanations, they would be constructing criteria that characterize each type of energy.

Using the example machine for different learning goals

Here are some ways to use ChatGPT to generate contrasting cases to help students understand underlying conceptual principles and build mental models. We have organized our examples based on three common learning goals: learning about processes, concepts, and arguments.

Examples to Explore Processes

Students learn about processes in many subjects. For example, they learn the steps for balancing chemical equations, solving mathematical inequalities, describing mitosis, or explaining how a bill becomes a law in the U.S. One way to help students learn the underlying logic of different processes is to generate contrasting cases of correct and incorrect sequences.

In the example below, we ask ChatGPT to provide a few contrasting cases to teach young students about the life cycle of a seed.

Step 1 - Establish criteria: First, we considered the steps we wanted students to understand.

Step 2 - Prompt: We prompted the bot to generate an accurate representation of that cycle. We also prompted the bot to write at the level of a five year-old, so we could ensure the explanation was accessible.

Step 3 - Review and adapt: We checked the bot's output to make sure it was accurate. We liked the initial result, so we kept it without revision.

Step 4 - Prompt for contrasting cases: In process learning, students need to know both what happens, and in what order. A logical activity is for students to have to move the steps from incorrect to correct order. Normally, we would re-organize the steps manually, but ChatGPT can do it faster.

We decided we also wanted a second contrasting case, so we asked ChatGPT to describe the seed's life cycle using the correct order, but leaving out steps. Now students would have to figure out what steps were missing: sprout growth and seed production. Again, this was something we would typically do ourselves, but giving the task to ChatGPT saved us some time.

Step 5 - Review and adapt: We liked these examples and decided to keep them without revision.

Just as with the activity about potential and kinetic energy, we could now present these contrasting cases to students either digitally or on paper, ask them to identify the most accurate representations, and then explain why. In doing so, students will start to develop "rules" about both the events in a seed's life and their order.

Using slight prompt modifications, teachers can change the order, accuracy, and completeness of the contrasting cases to deepen students' thinking about complex processes.

Adaptations for other subject areas:

Social studies: sequence historical events

Math: sequence steps in an approach to solving a proof

English: sequence key plot points in a novel

Examples to Explore Concepts

Teachers can also use ChatGPT to teach students to articulate principles that underlie complex concepts like authorial style, statistical variance, or separation of powers.

One of ChatGPT's coolest tricks is its ability to adopt the style of different writers or historical figures. It can also write in the style of different genres, like a cover letter, advertisement, or movie trailer. Creating contrasting cases with combinations of these outputs can make for a powerful teaching tool. In the example below, we wanted students to understand how different literary elements can contribute to authorial style, and to consider how those elements might affect their emotional responses to texts. We asked ChatGPT to produce texts in the style of different authors - all authors that were familiar to our students.

Using these contrasting cases, we could then ask students to match the review with the author, point to and name specific features of the writing that helped them identify the authors' styles, and then talk about the effects created by those different styles.

Step 1 - Establish criteria: We wanted students to understand that an author's style includes a combination of word choice, sentence structure, and attitude toward a topic. We wanted the examples to have different emotional effects.

Step 2 - Prompt: It would be easier for students to focus on style if the content of the text was similar. So we asked the bot to write about something students would be familiar with. We decided on a review of McDonald's in the style of three authors.

Step 3 - Review and adapt: In this review, ChatGPT used phrases like "dreary and tempestuous" and "wandering," which work well to represent Poe's language. The bot also did a good job creating a mood of gloom and foreboding. But we realized we wanted to emphasize Poe's punctuation (lots of exclamation points, for example). So we adapted our prompt.

Well, the bot went a little overboard with the exclamation points, so we might revise one more time.

Step 4 - Prompt for contrasting cases: Next, we wanted to generate our contrasting cases, so we asked ChatGPT to rewrite the reviews in the style of other authors that our students have read. We started with Sandra Cisneros.

Step 5 - Review and adapt: We didn't think Cisneros' characters would moralize about McDonald's, so we asked the bot to revise. We also realized that a lot of Cisneros' work is written in present tense. Making the change to present tense would give our students another element of style to consider and analyze. We prompted the bot again.

We might go for another round of revision, but we think this one is beginning to capture the style of Cisneros' narrators.

We tried for another example, this time turning to Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God for our model.

We thought some of the phrasing was a little obvious, and when we compared this example with some of Hurston's prose, we noticed that Hurston sometimes includes short, simple sentences in between longer ones. We adapted our prompt.

Now, here is another example where we prompted ChatGPT to provide some contrasting cases. This time, we used the bot in the context of a social studies unit on forms of government. In the example, ChatGPT's first response was pretty good. In this example, we will show you one way that we had to revise our initial prompts to generate more useful responses.

Step 1: Establish criteria: We wanted students to know that in a representative democracy, citizens vote in free and open elections to choose government leaders. In representative democracies, the rule of law applies equally to all citizens.

Step 2: Prompt:

Step 3: Review and adapt: In our first attempt, ChatGPT wrote a pretty accurate description. However, since we ultimately wanted students themselves to identify the types of government described in each example, we needed ChatGPT to remove the term "representative democracy." We also wanted it to add the criteria that rule of law applies to all citizens. So we had to revise our prompt.

Step 4: Prompt for contrasting cases: Next, we needed ChatGPT to generate contrasting cases. In other words, we wanted it to describe other types of governments besides representative democracy, including monarchy and communism. Importantly, because we wanted students to understand representative democracy, we also wanted a contrasting case that showed a different type of democracy. So, we prompted ChatGPT to include a description of direct democracy. Having learned our lesson in our last prompting attempt, we also prompted the bot to leave out the names of the governments themselves.

Step 5: Review and adapt: We liked these examples, but after reading them through a few times, we decided that they might be boring for kids. We decided to revise them so that each offered a specific scenario that students could connect with different forms of government.

We could print these examples on cards, give them to students, and ask them to identify the kinds of governments described in these examples. We could also go a step further and ask students to rank the descriptions based on the degree of power given to people in each example. This would require students not only to identify the characteristics of representative democracies but also understand its relationship to other forms of government. There are many variations to these types of sorting activities, and using contrasting cases will help students build rich mental models. ChatGPT magnifies our ability to use contrasting cases by creating useful examples more quickly than we could by ourselves.
Adaptations for other subject areas:

Science: "Write a description of the gaseous planets but do not use the term "gaseous." Now do the same for the ice giants and terrestrial planets."

Math: "Make up a math problem about rate, time, and distance, and then, using a character named Sam, describe three different ways that Sam tried to solve the problem. Have two solutions be correct, and one solution be incorrect."

Examples to Explore Arguments

One of the most important skills taught students learn in all subject areas is the ability to evaluate and construct arguments. In English class, students might write essays about whether Troy, from August Wilson's Fences, is a sympathetic character; in social studies, they might consider multiple causes and effects of World War I; in biology, they might make their case for whether a virus is a living organism. We can use ChatGPT to generate examples of arguments with contrasting structures or types of evidence, then students can evaluate each argument's effectiveness. For such a lesson design, we would use the five steps we described earlier:

1. Establish criteria for strong argument

2. Prompt

3. Review and adapt

4. Prompt for contrasting cases, including weaker or stronger evidence, or different structures

5. Review and adapt again

We could also use the bot to address a long-standing problem when it comes to teaching students to build arguments: Sometimes we ask students to write an argument about a text, but we do not give students anyone to argue with. In this case, ChatGPT can provide a contrasting case for a student to push back against.

For example, imagine that a high school class has just finished reading Fences. The teacher would like kids to consider the role of the fence as a potential symbol in Wilson's play. Instead of asking students to write an argument about the role of fences in the play, the teacher could offer students a ChatGPT-generated argument that students could respond to.

This argument in itself becomes a contrasting case for students to reflect on and respond to. They can agree with some of the interpretation, build on some parts of it, and refute other parts. In this way, their argument becomes more authentic. They might even direct their response to the bot.

We might also offer students an opposing argument about Fences:

With these two arguments in hand, we could ask students to debate the merits of each, search the text for supporting evidence, and write about perspectives beyond just these two. Doing so would help students consider multiple interpretations of complex texts and develop and refine their own arguments.

Adaptations for other subject areas:

Science: Generate summaries of competing scientific theories

Social Studies: Generate different arguments explaining cause and effects of historical events

Before ChatGPT, teachers might spend hours searching for or writing suitable examples of arguments like these. Now, we are learning how to prompt ChatGPT to generate these arguments to suit our teaching purposes.

What's Next?

There's so much more this example machine can do to help us save time and employ our creativity so that we can better serve our students. Here are a few additional prompts that create other kinds of examples:

Rewrite this paragraph at a 6th grade reading level

Use more complex vocabulary

Translate this sentence into Spanish, and then Vietnamese

With all of its possibilities in mind, a reminder: There are lots of ways that ChatGPT can create problems for teachers. The technology is still young, and it does not know when it is wrong. For instance, when we first asked ChatGPT to generate interpretations of Fences, it made up lines from the play. When we asked it to talk about the short story "Linoleum Roses," by Sandra Cisneros, it added characters that do not exist in that story, and offered unsupportable interpretations of the text. Part of our job now is to help students understand both what the tool can do and what it can't.

Want some ideas for what to DO with these examples once you have them? Three instructional strategies that would work beautifully with multiple examples like these are contrasting cases, concept attainment, and inductive learning.

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How to Use ChatGPT as an Example Machine

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To learn any concept well, students need to experience multiple examples of that concept, and ChatGPT can help you generate those examples fast.

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What Is Age-Appropriate Use of AI 4 Developmental Stages to Know About

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EdWeek article exploring when it is age-appropriate to introduce students to artificially intelligent technologies.

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Gruvy Education: Educator Prompt Library

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Gruvy Education: Educator Prompt Library

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Site includes prompts for educators to use to create questions through the use of AI.

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ISTE - Artificial Intelligence in Education

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ISTE - Artificial Intelligence in Education

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ISTE provides Educator Guides, an Ethics guide, and an entire course for educators to explore AI. Paired with a free online community, ISTE serves as a global leader in supporting schools in thoughtfully, safely, and responsibly introducing AI in ways that enhance learning and empower students and teachers.

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ISTE offers free resources and guides for educators who are interested in learning about how artificial intelligence can empower learners at every level.

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NC Generative AI Implementation Recommendations

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NC Generative AI Implementation Recommendations

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Guide created in effort to share information and resources to help direct responsible implementation of generative AI tools and guide AI Literacy in North Carolina Public Schools. Published 1/16/24

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Created to help educators use ChatGPT in their classroom, the guide comes with prompts and explanations that clarify exactly how ChatGPT works, its limitations, and bias.

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We’re releasing a guide for teachers using ChatGPT in their classroom—including suggested prompts, an explanation of how ChatGPT works and its limitations, the efficacy of AI detectors, and bias.

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Strategies To Ensure More Accurate Responses from LLMs

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Strategies To Ensure More Accurate Responses from LLMs

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Printable Poster

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vhogg@csdspartan.org

Community School of Davidson

High School English

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jkramer@csdspartans.org

Community School of Davidson

Middle School English

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Stanford's Teaching Commons offers a series of modules as a way to learn about and positively influence the dialogue around artificial intelligence in education.

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A series of instructional web pages for instructors and teaching teams about using AI tools for teaching and learning.

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Yale's Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning provides guidance on exploring how generative AI works, suggestions about how to adapt current teaching, and a list of recommended reading.

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Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the availability of generative AI tools that produce text, image, or code has expanded to include Microsoft's BingAI, Google's Bard, and OpenAI's more powerful GPT-4. The power of these tools to answer complex questions and generate coherent text continues to improve, and they've recently been integrated into widely used software like Google Docs and Microsoft Office. This has led to questions about how students are using these tools and how faculty can respond to best support their students' learning.

In consultation with instructors and technology experts at Yale and beyond, the Poorvu Center offers guidance on exploring how Generative AI works and suggestions about how to adapt your current teaching. We also offer advice for teaching fellows and a list of recommended reading. Additional resources include examples for incorporating AI into teaching from Yale instructors and resources from Poorvu Center events on teaching in the age of AI.

Instructors: Share your thoughts and ideas with us! Send questions or examples of how you are integrating these tools in your lessons or adjusting in light of them. Email us at askpoorvucenter@yale.edu.

Understanding Generative AI

Generative AI tools respond to user-submitted text with relevant content expressed in natural language. Many of these tools remember all text that a user has entered in an ongoing conversation, and they are capable of revising their responses when prompted.

Generative AI tools operate on programs called large language models. (The technology that underlies image and coding tools is also referred to by LLM.) LLMs are programmed by being fed large bodies of text (e.g. the entire internet) and trained to predict the most relevant sequence of words in response to a prompt. As a result, they can draw on a vast database of human knowledge, and their responses reflect the biases and limitations of the material they are trained on. Put differently, generative AI produces text by calculating the probability that it will be relevant to the prompt a user has submitted. As a result, the responses produced by generative AI tools tend to reflect consensus understandings, including any biases and inaccuracies that inform those positions.

Because generative AI predicts words based on probabilities, they are not capable of original thought. They are best at responding to prompts that require less creativity, like summarizing information, solving problems whose answers are already known, or supporting one position among alternative theories or approaches. But AI tools can generate new ideas by combining existing knowledge in new ways, and users can submit follow-ups that prompt the bot to incorporate additional ideas into an existing response or to revise it for greater complexity.

The best way to learn about AI tools is to try them yourself. Signing up for an account at ChatGPT, Google Bard, or BingAI (requires Microsoft Edge browser) will allow you to explore how these programs work and help you better understand how your students might be using them. You can often learn the most about these programs by simply letting curiosity be your guide. But here are a few prompts you might use to get started:

Ask the program to write a response to one of the assignments from your class.

Prompt the tool for help with a task you're working on like writing an email or choosing the next step toward completing a project.

Choose an assignment one of your students has submitted to your class and prompt the AI tool to produce a response that is as close as possible to the student's, entering follow-up prompts as necessary to bring the text closer to the student's.

Ask the tool to teach you about a subject and then quiz you at the end.

A few words of caution
While it can be valuable to try out these tools so that you understand how they work, they do raise issues of privacy and intellectual property.

Material that you submit may then become part of the program's database-using the software also contributes to its development.

The systems have different policies and methods to let you remove your material, so be sure to look for those instructions and to review the Terms of Service.

If you ask students to use these tools-and over time, many of us may encourage some of this collaboration-the risks become even more complicated.

Even software platforms that don't use your content to train the product DO collect your information and often install cookies to track your other activity. While you may choose to make this bargain to try out AI tools yourself, it can be more problematic to require students to sign up for tools that will track and use their private data.

This article from the New York Times offers guidance on how to phrase prompts submitted to AI tools, and this Beebom article lists dozens of sample prompts that show the range of generative AI capabilities.

Guidance for Instructors

(1) Instructors should be direct and transparent about what tools students are permitted to use, and about the reasons for any restrictions. Yale College already requires that instructors publish policies about academic integrity, and this practice is common in many graduate and professional school courses. To ensure that your students' use of AI tools aligns with your learning goals, consider updating your academic integrity policy to clarify how students are permitted to engage with AI tools and how they should signal that it has been used. Find example statements in the next section.

As for explaining why, understanding the learning goals behind assignments helps students commit to them. The only reason to assign written work is to help students learn-either to deepen their understanding of the material or to develop the skill of writing in itself. From our long experience in reviewing the portfolios of Yale College students, we see clear evidence that over the course of four years, they progress significantly as writers.

Research shows that people learn more and retain the information longer when they write about it in their own words. If instead, students task an AI to generate texts, they won't learn as much. This is why we ask them to write their own papers, homework assignments, problem sets, and coding assignments. This impact on learning applies across all disciplines-STEM problem sets that require explanations also depend on students' generating language to learn more deeply. AI tools can also generate coding solutions, not just natural language.

(2) Controlling the use of AI writing through surveillance or detection technology is probably not feasible. Turnitin has acknowledged a reliability problem with its detection tool software and Yale has not enabled this feature in Canvas. We believe there are more fruitful ways to engage writing processes and expectations than to rely on predictions that will probably be outpaced by further AI development.

Research by the Poorvu Center shows that a minuscule number of Yale College students plagiarize in their course papers. While acknowledging that new technologies can change the landscape, we know that most students want to do their own work because they care about learning.

Tools like ChatGPT raise broader questions. We agree with this approach from Inside Higher Ed: "Go big. How do these tools allow us to achieve our intended outcomes differently and better? How can they promote equity and access? Better thinking and argumentation? ... In the past, near-term prohibitions on ... calculators, ... spellcheck, [and] search engines ... have fared poorly. They focus on in-course tactics rather than on the shifting contexts of what students need to know and how they need to learn it." While the Poorvu Center doesn't have all the answers, we can offer some general guidance and work with you to put this advice into practice.

(3) Changes in assignment design and structure can substantially reduce students' likelihood of cheating-and can also enhance their learning. Based on research about when students plagiarize (whether from published sources, commercial services, or each other), we know that students are less likely to cheat when they:

Are pursuing questions they feel connected to

Understand how the assignment will support their longer-term learning goals

Have produced preliminary work before the deadline

Have discussed their preliminary work with others

Make their writing process visible in the completed assignment

Many of the above characteristics can be integrated into authentic assessments, which are assignments that 1. have a sense of realism to them, 2. are cognitively challenging, and 3. require authentic evaluation (see this handout for more). Examples can be found at the bottom of this website. Authentic assessments also align with practices that prioritize student learning, and make it harder to collaborate with AI tools, including:

Asking students to engage primary and secondary sources, which can include:

Assignments where students place their ideas in conversation with the ideas of other scholars-either readings you give them, or sources they find themselves

Asking students to use resources that are not accessible to ChatGPT, including any resources behind a paywall or many of the amazing resources in Yale's collections.

Incorporating the most up-to-date resources and information of your field so that students are answering questions that have not yet been answered or have only begun to be answered.

Engaging with ChatGPT as a tool that exists in the world and having students critically engage with what it can produce as in these examplesfrom Yale instructors.

Using alternative ways for students to represent their knowledge beyond text (e.g., draw images, make slides, facilitate a discussion). Consider adopting collaboration tools like VoiceThread.

Addressing Generative AI on your Syllabus

The Poorvu Center recommends including on your syllabus an academic integrity statement that clarifies your course policies on academic honesty. The simplest way to state a policy on the use of ChatGPT and other AI composition software is to address it in your academic integrity statement.

A policy that encourages transparency in how students use AI might read: Before collaborating with an AI chatbot on your work for this course, please request permission by sending me a note that describes (a) how you intend to use the tool and (b) how using it will enhance your learning. Any use of AI to complete an assignment must be acknowledged in a citation that includes the prompt you submitted to the bot, the date of access, and the URL of the program.

If you think students' learning is best supported by avoiding AI altogether, your course policy might read: Collaboration with ChatGPT or other AI composition software is not permitted in this course.

Guidance for Teaching Fellows

As a teaching fellow, raising the issue of ChatGPT with your lead instructor can open a broader conversation about the goals of your course and how ChatGPT might impact those goals. For example, it is helpful to understand the intended purpose of both low-stakes and high-stakes assessments, in addition to possible redesigns to work students are doing outside of class.

Regardless of whether you make changes to assessments, you play an important part in making the goals clear to your students. Whether you hope that their work will help them explore new ideas, familiarize themselves with important concepts, or make progress toward a bigger project, articulating those learning outcomes and the purpose of the activities that support them will help students understand why using AI would be counterproductive to their own development and progress.

These conversations with students can happen in conventional sections, but they are also worthwhile to have in office hours and review sessions. Additionally, as you give feedback to students, think about ways that you can point them back to the larger goals of the course: by showing them how they can grow through the assessment process, you indicate its value.

Poorvu Center Sessions

Teaching with AI Writers: Conversation and Workshop on May 25, 2023 provided a space for faculty to hear the various changes colleagues have made to their teaching in response to new artificial intelligence writers, as well as a hands-on opportunity to consider their own assignment design approach.

Spring Teaching Forum: Teaching in the Age of ChatGPT on May 1, 2023 hosted Derek Bruff-an educator, author, higher ed consultant, and former director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching-to briefly survey the landscape of AI text generation tools, then dive into the teaching choices they present.

Artificial Intelligence and Teaching: A Community Conversation on February 14, 2023 featured a panel of Yale faculty and students discussing the implications of AI-writing software for teaching and learning.

Incorporating AI in Teaching: Examples from Yale Instructors

Yale instructors are considering how to redesign elements of their courses to address ChatGPT and other AI platforms. Examples across the disciplines demonstrate some of the novel ways instructors are engaging their students as this technology evolves.

Recommended Reading

New articles on this fast-developing topic are appearing every day. Below is a selection of thoughtful pieces that address various elements of this tool.

The Department of Education released insights and recommendations on AI and the Future of Teaching and Learning (May 2023). Brief summary of the report is available on EdSurge.

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, shares about safety and how they train their tool as well as their guidelines for educators.

Mollick and Mollick at UPenn published seven approaches to using AI in the classroom that aim to help instructors navigate the integration of AI-assisted learning in classrooms (June 21, 2023).

The Chronicle of Higher Education outlines professors' plans to be ready in the fall for ChatGPT (June 13, 2023), provides these highlights from their virtual forum on AI and academic integrity (June 12, 2023), suggests how ChatGPT could help or hurt students with disabilities, and offers some of the ways AI may change how professors assess learning (April 5, 2023).

The Intentional Teaching podcast featured an episode, Rethinking Teaching in an Age of AI, which raises some important questions for educators to consider as they retool courses and assignments to account for AI technology.

The team at NPR's Planet Money creates an episode using Artificial Intelligence and learns ChatGPT's limitations and advantages.

The Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University and the University of South Carolina's Center for Teaching Excellence offer comprehensive AI guidance to instructors from revised learning goals and assessment to teaching strategies.

Jenny Frederick, Poorvu Center Executive Director, discusses the center's AI guidance with NBC Connecticut (February 14, 2023).

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Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the availability of generative AI tools that produce text, image, or code has expanded to include Microsoft's BingAI, Google's Bard, and OpenAI's more powerful GPT-4. The power of these tools to answer complex questions and generate coherent text continues to improve, and they've recently been integrated into widely used software like Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

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Perplexity is an alternative to traditional search engines. It has a conversational interface, contextual awareness, and personalization to learn your interests and preferences over time.