Tag Archives: students

New learning paradigm

I heard something in a meeting recently that I haven’t heard in a while. It was in a meeting with some online educational leaders across the province and the topic of Chat GPT and AI came up. It’s really challenging in an online course, with limited opportunities for supervised work or tests, to know if a student is doing the work, or a parent or tutor, or Artificial Intelligence tools. That’s when a conversation came up that I’ve heard before. It was a bit of a stand on a soapbox diatribe, “If an assignment can be done by Chat GPT, then maybe the problem is in the assignment.”

That’s almost the exact line we started to hear about 15 years ago about Google… I might even have said it, “If you can just Google the answer to the question, then how good is the question?” Back then, this prompted some good discussions about assessment and what we valued in learning. But this is far more relevant to Google than it is to AI.

I can easily create a question that would be hard to Google. It is significantly harder to do the same with LLM’s – Large Language Models like Chat GPT. If I do a Google search I can’t find critical thinking challenges not already shared by someone else. However, I can ask Chat GPT to create answers to almost anything. Furthermore, I can ask it to create things like pro’s & con’s lists, then put those in point form, then do a rough draft of an essay, then improve on the essay. I can even ask it to use the vocabulary of a Grade 9 student. I can also give it a writing sample and ask it to write the essay in the same style.

LLM’s are not just a better Google, they are a paradigm shift. If we are trying to have conversations about how to catch cheaters, students using Chat GPT to do their work, we are stuck in the old paradigm. That said, I openly admit this is a much bigger problem in online learning where we don’t see and work closely with students in front of us. And we are heading into an era where there will be no way to verify what’s student work and what’s not, so it’s time to recognize the paradigm shift and start asking ourselves new questions…

The biggest questions we need to ask ourselves are how can we teach students to effectively use AI to help them learn, and what assignments can we create that ask them to use AI effectively to help them develop and share ideas and new learning?

Back when some teachers were saying, “Wikipedia is not a valid website to use as research and to cite.” Many more progressive educators were saying, “Wikipedia is a great place to start your research,” and, “Make sure you include the date you quoted the Wikipedia page because the page changes over time.” The new paradigm will see some teachers making students write essays in class on paper or on wifi-less internet-less computers, and other teachers will be sending students to Chat GPT and helping them understand how to write better prompts.

That’s the difference between old and new paradigm thinking and learning. The transition is going to be messy. Mistakes are going to be made, both by students and teachers. Where I’m excited is in thinking about how learning experiences are going to change. The thing about a paradigm shift is that it’s not just a slow transition but a leap into new territory. The learning experiences of the future will not be the same, and we can either try to hold on to the past, or we can get excited about the possibilities of the future.

School Ambassadors

Last Friday six of our students presented to 34 middle school cohort student teachers from the University of British Columbia. They had prepared the presentation for two visiting Northwest Territories teachers a few weeks back but I didn’t get to see it. In preparing the presentation I had asked them not just to share some of the amazing inquiries they get to do at Inquiry Hub, but also ones that were challenging and did go as well as planned. I didn’t get to see their first presentation but I watched this second iteration.

Most of them didn’t just share a challenging inquiry, but their worst ones. They had me and their audience laughing as they described how things went epically wrong, or how what they thought would be a topic of great interest barely held their attention for 2 days. But more than that, each and every one of them eloquently expressed their learning from that epic failure.

Sitting behind the students, there were a few times I had the urge to say something, but I forced myself to stay quiet. Each time I had the urge, the students ended up helping each other fill in the blanks I thought were missing, and in several of those cases better than I would have… and allowing them to lead, without speaking up, gave more authenticity to the presentation experience than I could ever have contributed. I did come in at the second half of the Q&A and answered a few questions, but at that point the presentation was basically over.

I wrote this in an email to these students and their parents. I couldn’t be more proud of these young learners and leaders:

Greetings to our Inquiry Hub Ambassadors and their parents,

A few weeks back, I asked a few students to present to two educators from the North West Territories during our Pro-D Day. Today, those same school ambassadors provided school tours and presented to 34 Middle School Cohort Student Teachers from UBC. I didn’t get to see the presentation to the NWT teachers but I did get to watch today. I just want to say that it was an honour and a privilege to have these 6 wonderful students represent our school, and share their inquiries and learning experiences here at iHub. 

They represented our community, and their learning, extremely well and the student teachers were impressed, and I’d even say ‘blown away’ by their presentation. Their ability to respond to the Q&A questions the student teachers asked was also exceptional. 

I wanted to share this with them and their parents and to say on behalf of our school… Thank you!

Have a great weekend,

Dave

Good game

I love when sportsmanship shines through. I walked up to a student during lunch and he was playing chess on Chess.com. My daughter gifted me a paid account for my birthday and so I told the student my username and said he could challenge me if he wanted. He said he would. I told him that I wouldn’t be making moves during the school day so the game might go fairly slow.

The game was quite even with him being up a minor piece for a bit, then I made a lucky move that put me a piece ahead. I say it was lucky because when I made the move before it, I didn’t realize how good the move was… so it wasn’t like I was seeing ahead and planning it to work as well as it did. He never recovered and I won the game.

But what I found interesting was that even when he was down to two pawns blocked by my pawns that were fully protected by my king, and I had two knights hunting his king down, he didn’t resign. He played the game out until he was checkmated. Then, the next time I visited his class, he came up to me and extended his hand for a handshake. “Good game,” he said shaking my hand and looking me in the eye.

I’m sure he wanted to beat his principal, and I think he might in a future game, we are pretty even in skill. And when he does, I’ll be sure to not resign and allow him the complete victory. And I’ll be sure to shake his hand, and congratulate him on a good game.

The easy way out

I love the ingenuity of students when it comes to avoiding work. I remember a student showing me how playing 3 French YouTube videos in different tabs simultaneously somehow fooled the Rosetta Stone language learning software to think he was responding to oral tests correctly. How on earth did he figure that out?

Here’s a video of a kid who, while doing an online math quiz for homework, figured out that if you go to the web browser’s developer ‘inspect element’ tool you can find out the correct answer. Just hover over the code of the multiple choice questions and it highlights the choices and the code tells you if that choice is true or false.

@imemezy

Kids know every trick in the book…i mean computer #computer #maths #homework #madeeasy #lol #children #schoolwork #schools #hack #hacks #tricks #tips #test #exam #learning #learn

♬ original sound – Memezy

If there is an easy way to solve things, students will figure it out.

There isn’t an AI detector that can figure out with full certainty that someone cheated using a tool like Chat GPT. And if you find one, it probably would not detect it if the student also used an AI paraphrasing tool to rework the final product. It would be harder again if their prompt said something like, ‘Use grammar, sentence structure, and word choice that a Grade 10 student would use’.

So AI will be used for assignments. Students will go into the inspector code of a web page and find the right answers, and it’s probably already the case that shy students have trained an AI tool to speak with their voice so that they could submit oral (and even video) work without actually having to read anything aloud.

These tools are getting better and better, and thus much harder to detect.

I think tricks and tools like this invite educators to be more creative about what they do in class. We are seeing some of this already, but we are also seeing a lot of backwards sliding: School districts blocking AI tools, teachers giving tests on computers that are blocked from accessing the internet, and even teachers making students, who are used to working with computers, write paper tests.

Meanwhile other teachers are embracing the changes. Wes Fryer created AI Guidelines for students to tell them how to use these tools appropriately for school work. That seems far more enabling than locking tools down and blocking them. Besides, I think that if students are going to use these tools outside of school anyway, we should focus on teaching them appropriate use rather than creating a learning environment that is nothing like the real world.

All that said, if you send home online math quizzes, some students will find an easy way to avoid doing the work. If you have students write essays at home and aren’t actively having them revise that work in class, some will use AI. Basically, some students will cheat the system, and themselves of the learning experience, if they are given the opportunity to do so.

The difference is that innovative, creative teachers will use these tools to enhance learning, and they will be in position to learn along with students how to embrace these tools openly, rather than kids sneakily using them to avoid work, or to lessen the work they need to do… either way, kids are going to use these tools.

Authentically empowered

In a recent post. Process, product, and purpose, I shared that there are some teachers coming to learn about our self-directed, inquiry based school. And that our students will be planning and presenting to these teachers. I wanted to expand a bit on the process.

One of our teachers shared this diagram with the students to help them:

Then yesterday they pulled me into their meeting to ask a few questions, (the teacher I mentioned above was teaching or he would have joined us too). The students asked me what my vision for the presentation was.

I said I would like it to be story based. That there are two stories to tell:

1. What’s the experience of a student – both their experience in a school day, and moving from Grade 9 to Grade 12.

2. What is their story? How can they share their personal stories of doing progressively more challenging inquiries?

I also made sure to ask questions about how they would do this and not just make suggestions. My talk with them was a discussion not a one-way sharing. They invited me to the conversation. My final suggestion was that I knew what they were planning was going to answer all the questions the educators asked in advance… So rather than addressing those questions directly, which would disrupt the flow of their narrative, they should end the presentation with a slide of their questions and ask if they missed anything or needed to answer any of them with more depth. They liked this idea as a way to start off their Q&A at the end.

That’s all the direction they got. I was in the room with them for about 15-20 minutes. They will create the presentation and they will want to show it to us before presenting. We won’t have to ask them to see it, they will ask us for feedback and input. That’s part of the process they’ve learned. Further to this, there are 6 of them and we didn’t pick a leader, we didn’t tell them how to organize themselves or the presentation. I did mention that the presentation should be cohesive and not look like 6 different presentations, but I gave no examples of what I meant by this. They didn’t ask, they understood.

If these were a group of Grade 9’s & 10’s we would have scaffolded this a bit more, but these four Grade 11’s and two Grade 12’s are now seasoned presenters. At least one of them will inject some humour into the conversation, any one of could will ‘wow’ the guests with the depth of their inquires, all of them will be incredible ambassadors.

And one final note: none of them are doing this for extra credit. All 6 of them are coming in on a professional development day when all their peers are off school, and they are doing this voluntarily. Why? Because we asked. Because they get to design it, and because they know they go to a pretty unique school and they want to share their story. If they didn’t get the chance to be authentically empowered in this way, it would have been unlikely that the first 6 students I asked all agreed to volunteer. They are six awesome ambassadors, sharing their stories, in their own way, and still meeting the goals of the presentation.

Our guests are going to have a great experience learning about our school from our students, while we will be in a room next door doing our own professional development.

Process, product, and purpose

I love this quote from David Jakes:

“Design creates useful things. Much has been written by various educators about valuing process over product, but in the real world, people create things. It’s easy to value process over product when the product is a grade or points on a test. In your classroom, shift from a transactional approach to a design-based transformational one where the product has value and meaning to students and has the potential to impact intellectual growth, spark personal development, or contribute to improving the human condition.”

There is a lot of talk about process over product. However this comparison is built on a false dichotomy. It’s not about one over the other, rather it’s process with the purpose of producing a product.

For example, when looking at design thinking, we start with empathy for the end user. The final product is the goal, it’s the purpose we are designing for, but the process of design thinking is the journey we go on.

So, it’s not process over product, it’s process with purpose. The final product is important, be it a presentation, an app, a business or business plan, a play, or a piece of art. How you get there is important too. Understanding the purpose, having a real reason to produce a final product is the reason to go through the process.

What’s exciting is having students learn, value, and be motivated to go through the process to get to that final product. That’s a shift from a more traditional test, or a cookie-cutter assignment where everyone produces an identical final product. Instead the students are part of the process, and understand the purpose of getting to the final product… which they have constructed or co-constructed.

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Here is a specific example: There are a couple educators from the Northwest Territories coming to visit us at Inquiry Hub. They are heading this way to see Trevor Mackenzie on Vancouver Island, and he recommended they come visit our school. Unfortunately the only day they can come is a professional development day when there are no kids at our school. So, I asked 6 kids if they would be willing to come in and present to these teachers.

Once they agreed, I sent this in an email to the teachers coming to visit:

“As an FYI, I’ll be handing over the presentation fully to the students, they will design what it looks like. With the design thinking model in mind, the big question is “What does the end user want/need”… so, please give me a short write-up of what you are looking for.

They will give you the shape of our day, what the student experience is like, but beyond that what do you want to get out of the visit? Whatever you share is exactly what I’ll be sharing with them to prepare with.”

Our students will design the presentation, they will understand the purpose of their final product, and while the process is important, and while they have had a ton of practice producing great presentations, they know that delivering a good final presentation to an authentic audience is what will matter in the end.

It’s not one over the other, it’s process for the purpose of a good final product.

Behind the curtain

I remember running an assembly as the leadership teacher back when I was in middle school. It was for a Terry Fox run, and we had a former teacher and coach of Terry as a guest speaker. I’d heard him before, he’s both articulate and engaging, and I knew it would be a good presentation. But what I remember most about that assembly was that our guest speaker was the only adult who spoke.

My grade 8 leadership kids completely ran the show. They helped classes get seated. They greeted him. They quieted the audience. They introduced him. They thanked him. They gave out the instructions for the run. These aren’t huge tasks, but they take planning and rehearsing to do well. And to me it looks so much better when students run the show.

Tonight we have our grad and I have an amazing teacher who is behind the scenes helping make sure everything goes smoothly. But it’s a student who set up the YouTube live stream, it’s students performing musical acts, it’s students doing most of the work. And it’s student MC’s that will host the show.

It wouldn’t happen all that smoothly without this teacher behind the curtain, but no one in the audience is going to know what he did, how hard he worked, and how other teachers also helped from behind the curtain. What everyone will see is a student run show.

Our school prides itself in being student driven and led… and it really is. But it isn’t like this just because of the students, it’s because of teachers providing the opportunity. Teachers making sure students have the skills, and have put in the practice. It doesn’t just take student leaders, it takes teachers that make room for students to lead and to shine.

My teacher won’t take a bow today. He won’t get any of the limelight. He’ll stay behind the curtain and he’ll get satisfaction from the students doing a great job. That’s what great teachers do.

It’s going to be messy

“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it” ~ Max Frisch

One of my favourite presentations I’ve ever created was back in 2008 for Alan November’s BLC – ‘Building Leadership Capacity’ conference. It was called: The Rant, I Can’t, The Elephant and the Ant, and it was about embracing new technology, specifically smartphones in schools.

The rant was about how every new technology is going to undermine education in a negative way, starting with the ball point pen.

I can’t was about the frustrations educators have with learning to use new tools.

The elephant was the smartphone, it was this incredibly powerful new tool that was in the room. You can’t ignore an elephant in the room.

The Ant was a metaphor for networking and learning from others… using a learning community to help you with the transformation of your classroom.

I ended this with a music slideshow that I later converted to video called, Brave New World Wide Web. This went a bit viral on BlipTV, a now defunct rival of YouTube.

The next year I presented at the conference again and my favourite of my two presentations was, The POD’s are Coming, about Personally Owned Devices… essentially laptops and tablets being brought into schools by students. These may be ubiquitous now, but it was still pretty novel in 2009.

These two presentations and video give a pretty strong message around embracing new technology in schools. So my next message about embracing AI tools like Chat GPT in schools is going to come across fairly negatively:

It’s going to be a bumpy and messy ride.

There is not going to be any easy transition. It’s not just about embracing a new technology, it’s about managing the disruption… And it’s not going to be managed well. I already had an issue in my school where a teacher used Chat GPT to verify if AI wrote an assignment for students. However Chat GPT is not a good AI checker and it turned out to be wrong for a few students who insisted they wrote the work themselves, and several AI detectors agreed. But this was only checked after the students were accused of cheating. Messy.

Some teachers are now expecting students to write in-class essays with paper and pen to avoid students using AI tools. These are kids that have been using a laptop since elementary school. Messy.

Students are using prompts in Chat GPT that instruct the AI to write with language complexity based on their age. Or, they are putting AI written work into free paraphrasing tools that fool the AI detectors. Messy.

Teacher’s favourite assignments that usually get students to really stretch their skills are now done much faster and almost as good with AI tools. And even very bright students are using these tools frequently. While prompt generation is a good skill to have, AI takes the effort and the depth of understanding away from the learners. Messy.

That final point is the messiest. For many thoughtful and thought provoking assignments, AI can now decrease the effort to asking AI the right prompt. And while the answer may be far from perfect, AI will provide an answer that simplifies the response for the the learner. It will dumb down the question, or produce a response that makes the question easier.

Ai is not necessarily a problem solver, it’s a problem simplifier. But that reduces the critical thinking needed. It waters down the complexity of work required. It transforms the learning process into something easier, and less directly thoughtful. Everything is messier except the problem the teacher has created, which is just much simpler to complete.

Learning should be messy, but instead what’s getting messy is the ability to pose problems that inspire learning. Students need to experience the struggle of messy questions instead of seeking an intelligent agent to mess up the learning opportunities.

Just like any other tool, there are places to use AI in education and places to avoid using the tool. The challenge ahead is creating learning opportunities where it is obvious when the tool is and isn’t used. It’s having the tool in your tool box, but not using it for every job… and getting students to do the same.

And so no matter how I look at this, the path ahead is very messy.

Attention to what really matters

Yesterday I had a couple meetings that took me out of my school for most of the morning. I got back to my building and immediately started my lunch. It was about 20 minutes before teachers would be in the staff room and so I was there alone. A student saw me through the clear glass walls and asked to speak to me.

She was honoured with doing a speech at our district’s indigenous student graduation ceremony next week and she wanted advice. I invited her in, listened while I ate, and provided some initial feedback. She’ll work on it and come back to me.

Just as I was ending that discussion there was another student at the door. She invited me to see her Independent Directed Study final presentation the next day (today). I told her I’d love to see it and set an alarm on my phone to remind me.

What a productive lunch! Instead of sitting and eating alone, I got to spend time talking with students, and it was by far the best part of my day. I love that students feel they can come to me for help and want me to see them present. It reminds me of why I like my job, of what my job is all about.

It’s easy to get buried in the work of running a school. I can spend my entire day in my office and in meetings… doing important work that needs to be done. But if I don’t make time for students, if they only see me as a guy in my office too busy to talk to them, then I don’t know why I got into this position.

As I come off an extended leave due to a herniated disc, I’ve been absolutely swamped trying to get back up to speed. It’s easy to get lost in the work and to forget what really matters… our students. And if we can’t find time for them, they won’t look for us to help and support them. They won’t see us as part of their learning community. These relationships are key to foster, and moments like this lunch remind me that I’ve got to put the time in, or moments like this won’t happen.

Something really special

I sometimes forget how lucky I was at the start of my teaching career. I worked with some amazing leaders and educators, and we created very special learning experiences for our students. When I meet former students from those teaching years, they often share a few different comments such as:

  • Middle school was my favourite time in school.
  • You guys made school so much fun.
  • You taught us life skills I still think about.
  • We could tell you all loved teaching and loved working together.
  • It was such a special school!

Today my wife and I (we both taught at the school back then) met up with a former student visiting from Ottawa. She had invited friends and former teachers to meet at a local park. This student is pregnant with her first child and she talked about wanting to find a future school for her newborn that was as special as Como Lake Middle was to her.

She said, ‘For years I thought every middle school was as fantastic as our school’, and that it was comments on our Facebook pages about how special our experience was (from other former students) that made her realize, ‘Wait, that isn’t normal for every middle school?’ She said she thought that’s just what middle school was before talking to her husband and others that didn’t have such an amazing experience.

She brought up a specific lesson I’d shared in a leadership class, and like others she mentioned how much fun the teachers had together. She brought up an experience in PE class where the Vice Principal highlighted her effort in PE, even though she was, as she described it, ‘in the middle of the pack athletically’. And she mentioned a teacher visiting her class on the first day and teasing her teacher in such a fun way that everyone had a good laugh (including her teacher being teased).

I need to spend more time reflecting, fondly reminiscing, and appreciating those years, and the connections to students from those years. They really were something special.