I have been a teacher for 27 years. When ChatGPT first came out, I was terrified; now I let my students use it to write essays.

• When teacher Kelly Gibson first read about ChatGPT, she was terrified.

• But she has since chosen to embrace AI in the classroom, allowing students to use AI tools for essays.

• She said more teachers are likely to adapt and implement AI into their teaching methods.

This as told essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Kelly Gibson, 56, a teacher from Oregon, about her personal experience using ChatGPT in her classroom. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I have been a teacher for 27 years. I currently teach English at a small rural high school in Oregon.

Two years ago I was on holiday for Thanksgiving, and a few former students contacted me out of the blue and told me about a new online tool called ChatGPT. One of them said that students could use it to cheat.

It made me nervous. I spent the next few days reading about ChatGPT and became terrified. The tool could generate an entire essay based on an assignment I would give to students.

I started to learn how to use ChatGPTand it got me thinking about how I could use it in my classroom. It had the potential to help students write while strengthening their critical thinking skills.

Instead of spending all my time catching students using AI to cheatI’ve found ways to implement it in the classroom. I think teachers will increasingly learn how to adapt to AI.

I started playing with ChatGPT and wanted to use it in the classroom

I experimented with ChatGPT during the holidays. I gave it essay prompts and saw that it could quickly generate arguments.

At the time it made fundamental mistakes. I gave it a prompt about Shakespeare’s play “Much Ado About Nothing’, and it yielded quotes from ‘As You Like It’. But I knew technology would improve. I started to despair and thought I would have to reinvent myself as a teacher.

However, when I tried planning lessons and generating worksheets with ChatGPT, I saw how useful it could be. I had fun with it and wanted to help my students use it as a tool instead of to cheat.

I considered how I could propose applications for ChatGPT that would still allow students to demonstrate their critical thinking skills. When I got back to school, I spoke to the school management and the technical specialist and asked permission to test it out ChatGPT in the classroomstarting with my 12th grade students.

Getting students to use AI as a tool has been more useful than trying to detect cheating

I started by guiding students through experiments I had done with ChatGPT. One activity involved writing an introductory paragraph. I would enter those paragraphs into the AI ​​and ask it to write an essay based on the introduction. I then asked students to edit and critique what the AI ​​was capable of compared to their writing.

That was around January 2023 and my students were disappointed with the product. They felt the arguments it made were repetitive.

Nowadays my students mainly use AI for editing. Once they complete an essay, they run it through AI editing software to clean up the sentence structure and ensure their tenses align.

I told the students that I will not check for AI in their work. I’ve tried using programs that claim that Detect AI writingbut they produce false positives and negatives. I tested something I wrote myself, and the detector told me it was 70% AI generated.

Chances are that students can get away with using more AI than I would like, but those who want to circumvent systems would have done so without AI, for example by having their big sisters at university help them write their papers.

It seems like students have embraced my message and understand that AI can only take you so far. I’ve given assignments that require them to create their own thesis and do research before using the tools, and they seem to like that combination.

I’ve seen some students feel less overwhelmed by longer writing assignments because they have a tool to help them. But I’ve seen other students use AI to their disadvantage by having it write their work and not edit it at all.

A fellow teacher allowed a number of students to use AI for an assignment without permission. I suggested she talk to each student to see if they could explain their work. Some actually learned the information and were able to explain their essays in depth, while others failed and she asked them to redo the assignment.

I take responsibility for ensuring that students really learn. One way I assess their skills is by assigning handwritten in-class essays and take-home essays where they have access to AI tools.

I suspect that AI tools will be more widely used by teachers in the future

I have never received negative feedback from a parent about my methods. At our school, some teachers try to do that use ChatGPT as a tool for students, and some don’t use it at all.

I believe that every teacher is at their best when they use classroom rules that best suit their teaching style.

As an English teacher, I believe that if I didn’t teach students how to use this new tool, it would be like earlier in my career when some teachers didn’t want students to use spell check. I also remember an outcry among teachers when SparkNotes became available online, but nowadays teachers usually don’t worry about SparkNotes anymore because we know how to teach and work around it.

I understand why some school districts previously responded by banning ChatGPT. This hit us without warning, so there is currently a lack of solid training for school districts to provide to teachers. I suspect as the years go by there will be more training, and this will just be a new tool.

It’s hard to say what AI tools will look like in a few years and whether they will stop being a tool and become a brain that hinders critical thinking.

I suspect that in the future, teachers will use AI and other tools to help students become better writers, while working hard to make them stronger thinkers and not rely on AI for their thinking process.

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