The Stonar Way 26 May

The impact of a new innovation in education usually brings with it debate, fear and disruption. In a recent article, the New York Times claimed that Plato was concerned about the impact of the birth of the alphabet on memory-based storytelling. I wonder if the Victorians were concerned about the rise of pen and ink, or how mathematicians regarded the calculator and its likely effect on a person’s ability to do maths? From the machinery used in factories during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century, through to the invention of the internet, societies and education has often feared the “new unknown”.

‘Robots threaten to terminate normal school life’ is not an exaggeration of some of the fears stoked by the recent widespread uptake of generative artificial intelligence (AI). The end of homework, the death of coursework - we even have some questioning whether AI will replace teachers.

ChatGPT is an AI programme. It is apparently the fastest growing app of all time. In the education sector, Generative AI, including ChatGPT, allows users to:

• Research information in real time and get very personalised results.
• Create content indistinguishable from human work.
• Write essays, describe art in great detail, create music and have philosophical conversations.
• Build a CV as well as help write your cover letter and personal statements.

In the University of Wharton in 2022, ChatGPT was capable of passing a series of benchmark exams. For example, ChatGPT scored a “B” on their MBA programme.

Those who view these new developments negatively focus on the potential for misuse, and there’s no doubt that a digital tool that can do a good job on many homework assignments can be a problem, but the majority of students don’t want to cheat - they want to learn. ChatGPT, AI and other technologies are innovations that have the potential to personalise learning, improve pupil engagement, build skills and increase accessibility to educational resources.

The key to all this is to understand that the issue is not the tool itself but the way it is used. Pupils have discovered generative AI and find it helpful for suggesting ideas. Teachers are finding it helpful as a tool for generating customised, focussed resources for immediate classroom deployment. Let’s also not forget that for a significant proportion of pupils, coping daily with the challenges of specific learning needs, neurodiversity, or working in a second language, a whole lot of barriers to learning are going to come tumbling down thanks to AI.

AI offers the opportunity for us to develop classrooms where a teacher can give immediate and personalised feedback, where tasks are personalised and differentiated to suit the needs of learners, and where pupils are engaged and challenged. Now, you might argue that this is what classrooms should be like without AI, but any tool that can make this easier to achieve and supports each individual, rather than broad learning groups, has to be a good thing. The good news, also, is that digital technology offers unparalleled tools for tracking and tracing learners’ work, so we can build secure spaces where usage is appropriately monitored, and limits can be placed around the access to tools, depending on the nature of the assignment and its role in learning or assessment settings.

Whilst I am keen to encourage positive thinking around AI, I also think it will bring about big change in the education sector. Not least this might finally spur us on to assessment reform. It is simply not going to be tenable to spend countless hours training pupils to produce model responses to questions that an AI can answer in seconds.

Dr John Taylor puts it like this: “The forward momentum should carry us in the direction of a more learner-centred, responsive, creative assessment framework, one framed around deeper, authentic challenges. We have to move away from the conception of learning as the recall of right answers to envisaging it as a creative process of responding to open-ended questions.” Amen to that.

Technology will not replace hard work, mastery and understanding. The introduction of Google did not end the essay, nor will ChatGPT. Technology will not replace the teacher. The teacher’s job as director and instructor will still be present, working in a productive relationship with both learner and their digital learning assistants. Over lockdown, staff were astounded by some of the projects that pupils produced. They had the time to develop ideas from the ‘classroom’ and expand tasks set into projects that used multiple sources and showed off their academic curiosity, research skills and creativity.

Teachers can become, what we value most in them, sources of inspiration, who communicate a joy of learning, rather than spoon feeders of vast amounts of information in a style that can be regurgitated in an exam hall.

Of course, we have a responsibility, as with all technological innovations, to warn of the potential for AI to be used with malice and malpractice and, of course, we have to acknowledge the dangers to honesty and academic integrity and work to counter them. Indeed, I suspect that AI will soon be able to detect the use of AI! However, the huge potential of AI means that the net effect could be a transformative, life-enhancing rediscovery of what learning really can be at its best.

I hope that you have a lovely half-term.

Matt Way

Headmaster