By Edie Abraham-Macht
I’m Edie, a teacher & curriculum developer at Kaleidoscope, and I’d like to share a few ways we plan to use the new AI tool ChatGPT in our Persuasive Writing class, which I’m teaching this summer!
1. As a thought partner
The topic of the first day of Persuasive Writing is “How To Find Your Angle.” During this class, ChatGPT can help students figure out what it means to “find an angle” on a personal story. We’ll have students prompt ChatGPT to write an essay responding to a given prompt in three different ways:
* “Write an essay about a time I took initiative as part of my high school's debate club."
* Then: "Write an essay about a time I took initiative in the mental health advocacy work I do as a volunteer in high school."
* Finally: "Write an essay about a time I took initiative, using examples from debate club and mental health advocacy work, emphasizing collaboration as part of both examples."
Students will still need to use their own specific opinions, experiences, and voice to meet the demands of the assignment, but they can use ChatGPT as a foundational step to help them understand how to approach a single prompt in different ways—even when writing about the same life event or interest.
2. To turn bullet points into an essay
If students have an outline but are unsure how to make the leap into an essay—how to start, how to conclude, how to connect ideas—ChatGPT can turn their bullet points into a draft output that students can then critique and rework. We’ll likely introduce this usage of ChatGPT multiple times over the course of Persuasive Writing; to ensure that students are actively reflecting on their use of the tool, we’ll ask questions like: “What works about ChatGPT’s essay draft? What needs to change or be improved? What do you notice about how ChatGPT transitions from one paragraph to the next that you can apply to future writing assignments?”
3. To help students edit their own writing
One simple—but incredibly powerful—way that ChatGPT can level up student writing is to help them fix grammatical and linguistic errors. Once Persuasive Writing students have solid essay drafts, we’ll have them prompt ChatGPT to “Identify, explain, and suggest a fix for all errors in the following piece of writing.” The “explain” piece is crucial—in addition to simply telling students what’s wrong and how to fix it, ChatGPT can help students fill in gaps in their knowledge and troubleshoot errors they may have struggled with for years. As a teacher, I’ll likely also have students submit their ChatGPT output to me so I can take note of any errors that pop up in multiple places and address them with the full class.
Note that ChatGPT didn't explain the errors in the above example as it was told to—once we re-prompted it, it did so. This is one of the many reasons that ChatGPT is a thinking person's tool.
4. To provide feedback on student writing
ChatGPT’s feedback capabilities are not limited to the purely formulaic—the tool can also provide more substantive feedback to help students hone their tone, perspective, and use of language. The strength of the feedback ChatGPT provides has everything to do with the strength of the prompt—so in Persuasive Writing, we’ll have students experiment with prompting ChatGPT in multiple different ways to see what yields the most useful feedback. For example: “I want my essay to sound sharper and more authoritative. What should I change to achieve that?” Or “I’m struggling to transition from the second paragraph into the third. Suggest a sentence that would make the paragraphs flow better.” (And this is just the beginning!) Learning how to effectively prompt AI is a skill that will become increasingly relevant for college and career, and we want to help students get a jump on it.
5. To help students build their judgment
Not only can ChatGPT give students feedback, students can give ChatGPT feedback as well! In Persuasive Writing, we’ll have students critique ChatGPT output, developing their ability to discern specific techniques that make writing pop and common errors that make writing flop. We’ll ask questions like: “What’s your favorite sentence in this ChatGPT draft? What do you like about it?”, “What’s the weakest part of this essay and how would you rewrite it?”, and “If you could give ChatGPT one piece of advice on its writing, what would it be?”
6. To assist with an understanding of perspective and voice
While providing feedback on student writing is one way that ChatGPT can help with perspective and voice, it can also generate examples that build students’ knowledge of what these ideas look like in action. Students can, for example, ask the tool to “Write a paragraph about technological progress in the voice of Margaret Atwood.” They can then cross-reference the output with a real Margaret Atwood sample—What did ChatGPT successfully capture? What’s missing? Which aspects of Atwood’s voice are the hardest to emulate? What makes her voice unique? Ironically, with its sub-par emulations of great writing, ChatGPT can enable a deeper understanding of why great writing is so great and how it got that way.
If you’d like to learn more about the kinds of things we’ll teach in Persuasive Writing this summer, register here for an interactive video lesson on using story structure to transform your personal essay.