More than 30 years ago I entered the profession as a sixth-grade language arts and social studies teacher at a gritty middle school in Los Angeles.
Since that time I have noticed a slow, relentless disempowering of teachers. Economics and technology as well as societal attitudes that have been in place for more than a century devalue a profession dominated by women. I’m not foolish enough to believe this is a grand conspiracy, but the lack of conspiracy does nothing to diminish the reality.
The arrival of each new technology has been heralded as the next step in the demise of the profession. I will argue here that ChatGPT and its Large-Language Model peers offer a powerful tool for empowering teachers and increasing their effectiveness and efficiency.
Every Teacher Is a Coder With ChatGPT
Virtually every professional development session I’ve seen or delivered around the world has operated under the tacit assumption that all teachers, regardless of their subject area, are literacy teachers. You communicate with your students via language. They learn primarily via oral or verbal channels.
If you’ve spent any time at all interacting with ChatGPT, Bard (Gemini), or Claude you quickly learn you communicate with these LLMs via a coding language called English. The software translates your words into code. The more clearly and concisely you write or speak your prompts, the better the output. Accordingly, who better than teachers, who must provide concise and detailed instructions all day, to interact with LLMs?
Personalizing Instruction via ChatGPT
Twenty years ago I sat down with an angry parent for a student-teacher-parent conference. He was a gruff police lieutenant convinced that the teachers in our school didn’t understand his struggling child. He looked me in the eye and said, “Prove to me that you know my son and then I’ll listen to you.”
I responded by telling him of the work his son was doing on a current history project and the single-minded focus the boy applied when completing a technology-oriented assignment that required him to learn a new skill or understanding. Deeply engrossed, the boy ignored lunch and breaks and most of his peers. The dad was satisfied.
ChatGPT has been trumpeted as the best technology we’ve ever had for personalizing instruction. Microsoft offers a personalized reading coach and the folks at the Khan Academy offer Khanmingo, which promises to provide a personalized tutor for every child on earth.
I think these tools capture only half the truth. These applications, powered by ChatGPT, are the best technical tools we’ve ever had. A student’s classroom teacher is the best affective tool we’ve ever had because we spend hours getting to know the individuals we teach. The two tools, human and AI, working in unison can deliver the personalized learning we’ve dreamed of for decades.
Don’t Curate the Experience
Here is where I earn the wrath of the ed tech companies. The curation and mediation of the generative AI curriculum design process is occurring at a breathtaking pace. Tech companies are producing slickly packaged interfaces that control the interaction between teachers and the underlying AI. This process, backed by millions in marketing money, once again disempowers teachers.
The vested interests of textbook and software publishers do not lie in a profession dominated by empowered teachers who can use the expertise of an LLM to write rigorous, relevant and personalized content and assessments and then deliver them with insider’s knowledge of each child.
Scripted curriculum, often backed by decades of research, is robust. It is thorough. It is comprehensive and detailed. However, it is designed, sold, and delivered at scale. It is not personalized no matter what the glossy brochures claim.
Districts should ignore the siren song and instead focus on creating prompt engineering prowess, easily delivered by face-to-face PD or online via fabulous programs like the class sequence ($49 per session) offered by Vanderbilt on Coursera. If we are all teachers of English and the fundamental medium of getting work out of ChatGPT is via prompts (English sentences) then the process of training teachers should present a simple and economically scalable challenge for administrators.
Recommendations to Create AI-Empowered Teachers
States, districts, and schools are beginning to implement effective rollouts of generative AI among their teachers. Based on my research I would suggest the following:
- Create AI policy for teachers and students. This policy should include revised definitions for plagiarism and paraphrasing. It should also include an updated Acceptable Use Policy. For examples, see my AI Policy Library.
- Pay the $20 per month and purchase a more robust subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini (formerly Bard) or Claude. Keep this account active on a shared computer in the teacher lounge or library.
- Create one or more superusers, possibly your school librarian or media tech, who has a paid subscription to an LLM and who receives additional training in prompt engineering. This person should also be responsible for writing a few custom GPTs (apps, basically) that meet the specialized needs of each school or district.
- Enlist your superusers to create a Prompt Library that stores all the effective prompts your teachers write. Preserve institutional knowledge specific to your teaching context. You can pattern it after the open Prompt Library I built.
Budget funds that allow every interested teacher to take one or more online asynchronous courses in prompt engineering. My recommendation is this course from Vanderbilt. Don’t reimburse teachers for the course fee until they produce a certificate of completion.
Last Best Chance to Empower Teachers
I have been deeply immersed in educational technology since 1991, when I was one of the first teachers in California to get an email account via a state-funded technology partnership with Cal State Long Beach University. A few years later I was named a Teacher Technology Leader by the Los Angeles County Office of Education.
I have seen the rise and fall of educational CDs, the invasion of tablets and Chromebooks, and the arrival and demise of countless educational software platforms (remember Edmodo?). ChatGPT and its peers are a different beast. Generative AI offers teachers the last best chance to regain control of their profession.
David Ross (@davidPBLross) is the retired CEO of the Partnership for 21st Century Learning and the former Senior Director of the Buck Institute for Education (now PBLWorks). David was an 11th grade American Studies (History and English 11) team teacher. David created curriculum design templates, exemplary projects, rubrics for critical thinking and collaboration, and project management techniques.
