ChatGPT: A Threat to Creativity and Human Interaction or the Future of Teaching?
The emergence of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that can write anything with just a basic request, has caused quite a stir in the educational community. Although most of the discussion has focused on how students would utilize the chatbot, ChatGPT has the potential to alter the nature of teachers’ roles significantly.
Teachers have used or are considering utilizing chatbots, among other things, to plan lessons, create rubrics, provide comments to students on their assignments, reply to emails from parents, and generate recommendation letters. While some teachers are concerned about the effects of automating these processes, others claim that the technology can save them hours of labor and provide them more time for personal or social connections with their students.
Although the average teacher puts in roughly 54 hours per week, the EdWeek Research Center’s poll of teachers last year found that only under half of that time was spent educating kids. Less than a third of instructors answered that general administrative work is the task they would spend the least time on.
Braxton Thornley, a language arts instructor and instructional coach for digital teaching and learning at Bingham High School in South Jordan, Utah, noted that “teacher burnout and teacher retention are such enormous challenges in the United States.” “Much of that is caused by the high workload. If technology enables a teacher to spend three to four additional hours with their family each week, we should take advantage of that and hopefully do so.”
Thornley recently utilized the AI bot to assist him in lesson planning for a lecture on interpreting tone in textual materials. He intended to give children ten distinct paragraphs, each advocating differently that school should start later. He used to write each segment personally in the past. He requested ChatGPT to compose the paragraphs this year instead—one that was humorous and happy, another that was angry, another that was formal, and so on. He was timesaving by more than an hour. Thornley said of the chatbot, “I was utterly blown away by how much it’s capable of accomplishing.
Nevertheless, some educators are concerned that artificial intelligence would diminish some of the job’s creative and interpersonal components. “Planning lessons is enjoyable to me. I don’t want to give a chatbot control of that, “said Madi Saenz-Payne, an English/language arts and creative writing teacher at a high school in California. She said that she shares her sentiments over the use of the bot to assist in grading. “It loses its human element as a result. Making [instruction] automatically makes me feel like some fun is taken away.”
It will lessen your workload, but is teaching any less enjoyable as a result? Lessons from ChatGPT are the “recipe,” but the instructor is still the cook.
West London primary school teacher Stephen Lockyer tweeted toward the end of last month that teaching using AI would be “transformative.” He illustrated how ChatGPT developed three lectures on the formation of volcanoes. Nearly 800,000 people saw his tweet, and dozens of teachers from the US and the UK responded with tremendous interest—and some trepidation. In an interview, Lockyer said he recognized the concern but said artificial intelligence should be seen as a tool to support instructors rather than as a substitute for their own knowledge.
“You still need a chef, but your lesson plans are your recipe. To bring that dish to life, you still require a teacher, “explained he. If you have a basic concept that you can develop, flesh out, and make excellent, it will save you a ton of time.”
It’s crucial to remember that ChatGPT’s technology is not error-free. When Saenz-Payne experimented with asking the bot to create a lesson for a passage from To Kill a Mockingbird, she said she found a factual inaccuracy. Additionally, the tool only has a limited understanding of global events that occurred after 2021. Additionally, the bot, which was educated in part through human coaching, has the potential to reinforce prejudices and stereotypes.
Additionally, removing the human element of teaching by using ChatGPT for activities like lesson planning and grading Effective teaching depends on the capacity to connect with students and design a personalized learning experience, and depending too heavily on automation might compromise this part of the job.
It’s crucial to balance employing ChatGPT’s timesaving features and keeping the imagination and interpersonal connections essential to the teaching profession. Instead of using ChatGPT in place of their own knowledge and skills, teachers should see it as a tool to help them in their work.
To sum up, ChatGPT can completely change how teachers devise classes, provide feedback, and interact with parents and students. However, it’s crucial to think about the consequences of automating some tasks and to use this technology in a way that strengthens rather than lessens the human component of instruction. Teachers should think of ChatGPT as a tool to aid them, not as a substitute for their own knowledge.
