' A TEACHERS BEST FRIEND ' : PRECIS -CHATGPT

Cherie Shields, a high school English teacher in Oregon, told me that she had recently assigned students in one of her classes to use ChatGPT to create outlines for their essays comparing and contrasting two 19-th century short stories that touch on themes of gender and mental health :

''The Story of an Hour,'' by Kate Chopin and ''The Yellow Wallpaper,'' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Once the outlines had been generated her students put their laptops away and wrote their essays longhand.

The process, she said, had not only deepened students' understanding of the stories. It had also taught them about interacting with A.I. models and how to coax a helpful response from one.

''They have to understand, 'I need this to produce an outline about X, Y and Z,' and they have to think very carefully about it,'' Ms. Shields said.'' And if they don't get the results that they want, they can always revise it.''

Creating outlines is just one of the many ways that ChatGPT could be used in class. It could write personalized lesson plans for each student [ " explain Newton's laws of motion to a visual-spatial learner '' ] and generate ideas for classroom activities  [ '' write a script for a  ' Friends ' episode that takes place at the Constitutional Convention ''].

It could serve as an after-hours tutor  [ ''explain the Doppler effect, using language an eighth-grader could understand ''] or a debate sparring partner [ ''convince me that animal testing should be banned''] 

It could be used as a starting point for in-class exercises, or a tool for English Language learners to improve their basic writing skills. [The teaching blog Ditch That Textbook has a list of possible classroom uses for ChatGPT.]

The World Students Society thanks author Kevin Roose.