Chat GPT

February 23. 2023

Dear LREI Families,

In late December, just before winter break, a colleague, the head of another NY independent school, posted a question on our heads of school listserv asking about Chat GPT, a large language model artificial intelligence bot and its impact on schools. This was posted shortly after a slew of articles and posts about Chat GPT questioning or opining on its impact on schooling. My colleague received some interesting responses including a desire for more conversation. A few days later, channeling my middle school smart-aleck, I put my colleague’s questions into Chat GPT and out popped a reasonable essay, bland but acceptable, which I promptly posted to the listserv hoping to see if my colleagues would discern the author’s identity. Well…within a day I received two emails from peers thanking me for my thoughtful reply. When a third one came in I realized I could not wait any longer to come clean and fess up. I also was not super impressed with the writing and did not want to be given “credit” for a less than stellar response.

During the past weeks, we have been speaking a fair amount about Chat GPT and similar bots, as have educators and many, many others everywhere. There are new developments each day, improvements, changes, and a feeling of normalization of AI in our daily lives, and not behind the scenes but in our conscious choices. We have been reading and listening and, soon, will attend any number of workshops that are springing up for educators, including one organized by my colleague who asked the question in December.

We have a few tasks. We have to spend time working with students and helping them to understand the opportunities that are presented by artificial intelligence, and the challenges. We have to make distinctions between uses that are not acceptable (having it do your homework for you) and ways that are – generating ideas, creating models, sourcing practice problems and summarizing notes, for example. The same is true for adults. How can teachers use chatbots to their advantage and in which ways will it be less than they can do on their own?

Allison Isbell, high school co-principal, adds, “In the high school, we have spent time discussing the connection of academic integrity and authentic work for the learning process, and why standards of academic integrity will continue to matter as students transition out of high school. It is essential for us to help students understand this new development in AI, and to learn to use it well. We have talked about Chat GPT as a tool (imagine a calculator) to accomplish work. Sometimes you need the calculator, and sometimes you need an entirely different tool. We have imagined both possibilities and challenges, and in our conversations our goal has been, as always, to help our students think critically about what is in front of them, and how it is their work to make wise and ethical decisions about its use.”

Her colleague, Nathan Sokol-Margolis, middle school principal, added, “The doors that a tool like Chat GPT opens lead to tremendous opportunities. Having an AI that you can have a conversation with as you flesh out a new idea is invaluable. In middle school, we’ve begun to discuss how Chat GPT can be used to help students deepen their writing and thinking. When a tool is learned and used effectively, it opens new avenues for creativity. If Chat GPT can help us save time once we have mastered tasks, it means we can spend more time probing subjects and incorporating skill sets and content that we previously might not have been able to examine. In the face of this, some might fear that a school could become obsolete, but at LREI, prior to this and with this new tool, we know that what we do is not only about skills and content.”

After all, as a teacher at another NYC independent school suggested, “There is a difference between doing human things and being human.” These bots can approximate “human things” and will certainly get better at it over time. They are not, however, human. Our students need, always and primarily, to be humans, the users of the bots, directing them to do human things in support of deeper learning. They need to develop expertise in taking advantage of the technology and at being human. Thinking deeply, reflecting, and analyzing – these are habits of mind that our students practice day in and day out putting us in a good place to incorporate new technologies and opportunities as they come our way.