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This year, I have been using single-word prompts or a few sentences at the most whenever I prompt ChatGPT. So, whenever a fellow educator called for like-minded souls who were keen to use AI to generate lesson plans, I enthusiastically volunteered myself so that I could gain a different kind of experience with ChatGPT.
The teacher who initiated this project called for a Zoom meeting with all the volunteer teachers. Although the meeting was held towards the end of an exhausting work day, I was glad to attend it, for listening to other teachers share about their learning points in regard to ChatGPT accelerated my understanding of this Generative AI tool.
To begin with, I didn’t expect the project owner to come up with a lesson plan prompt generator. He happened to be the Head of Department of the Info-Communications Technology division in his school, so I guess using Microsoft Excel to consolidate all the information in a cell comes as second nature to him. This is the prompt that I just needed to copy and paste after using his generator.
Some observations teachers shared during the Zoom meeting
1. ChatGPT is great for churning out activities but if teachers follow its suggested lesson plan strictly, they may find that their students take more time than is stated in the lesson plan to finish one activity. So, teachers have to first evaluate whether ChatGPT’s time allocation is a realistic expectation of their students’ abilities.
2. ChatGPT is great at learning on the spot, so if you feed it with a comprehensive source, it is able to deliver the things that you need. However, it only remembers the information you provide it within the context of one chat. So, if you were to begin another chat but want to dwell on the same topic, you will have to feed ChatGPT the same information again due to its “poor memory”.
3. Data that is indicative of events that happened up to April 2033 is fed in ChatGPT 3.5. So, don’t expect it to provide analyses of the latest trends and developments. If you need a more current response, Google Bard might be a viable alternative since it’s connected to the Internet.
4. ChatGPT does have the ability to cater to differentiated learning, but it seems better able to provide content suited to stretch high-progress students. It doesn’t seem capable to scaffold the learning of mid-progress and low-progress students.
5. I asked the group what value ChatGPT brings to the table since we can just consult more experienced colleagues about the feasibility of our lesson plan. Some teachers shared how they appreciate the fact that ChatGPT can generate multiple ideas that arise from perspectives they have never thought of before, so it is a useful tool to facilitate divergent thinking. One teacher also confided how ChatGPT helps her to organise the various ideas that are running through her head. Their insights humbled me and convinced me of the need to engage AI as a teaching assistant so that it can surface teachers’ blind spots and close these gaps in their cognitive processes.
6. For better results, it might be worth our while to type the same prompt on different AI chatbots to compare and contrast the responses derived from such tools. One participant interestingly typed the same prompt in ChatGPT and a China-based AI chatbot called ???? to see whether the results would differ significantly. Just as expected, ChatGPT is rather US-centric as it focuses on practices prevalent in the States (such as the use of interactive whiteboards). ????, on the other hand, reflects the realities of schooling in China. Interesting that different ChatGPTs might have different approaches towards teaching to account for the differences in sociocultural contexts of learning!
7. ChatGPT is good for generating generic questions that works for all case studies and scenarios. However, if you wish to get it to suggest questions that cater to the specific idiosyncratic needs of your students, you have better be a competent prompt engineer because the quality of your prompts will determine whether you get a quality lesson plan.
You can tell that I gained many insights from that Zoom meeting!
