As principal, I frequently get asked to write letters of reference or requests to fill out reference questionnaires. Something that I’ve always done is asked for a ‘brag sheet’ so that I don’t end up forgetting something about the person I’m writing the reference for. An example is that I might forget that a student was a major organizer of an event we ran, or I might have forgotten about their service they do for the community outside of school.

Recently I have been using AI to assist me, specifically Google’s Notebook LM. What I did was I took 8 old reference letters that I wrote and changed the names so that there was no reference to the actual student I wrote them for, and I inputted these into the notebook as style references. For one of them I also included a brag sheet.

Now when a student gives me a brag sheet, I write a prompt that says to write a reference letter for the scholarship I specify, giving criteria for the scholarship, sharing the brag sheet, and asking for it to be written in the exact style of the 8 examples I shared, using the information from the brag sheet.

At this point the reference letter is over 90% complete. A few changes by me and the whole process is done in about 10 minutes (this includes a name change because I don’t put the new student’s name in either). Normally, this would take me over a 1/2 hour and sometimes longer to ensure that I’m hitting all the chords relating to both the brag sheet and the scholarship requirements.

Most of my minor changes are either up or downplaying something from the brag sheet or editing to ensure the reference is in my voice, although this is often already evident based on the examples I provided. My last part of this is copying the text as plain text onto letterhead.

In all honesty, I think these new letters of reference are better than my originals. I often focused on fewer items that I knew about and didn’t give the full scope of the brag sheet. Now I just add a sentence or two about the parts I really know about the student to highlight my connection and understanding of them, and what they do at the school. I feel like my voice comes through and the AI provides more detail than I normally do. So not only is this a great time saver, I’m actually doing a better job to support my students.