Teaching Thursday: Listening, ChatGTP, and Teaching More

I’m hunkered down by the fire with a hot cup of coffee as we brace for the second winter storm in as many days, but this has also given me a bit more time to think my past semester, listen to the current buzz, and to look forward a bit to the spring (semester, but also to spring in general!).

In the spirit of Three Things Thursday, here are three gentle thoughts about teaching inspired by last semester, the moment, and the future.

Thing the First

One of the things that I’m really trying to work on in the classroom is unrelated to teaching goals, pedagogical methods, or even content. I’m trying to listen to my students more. This involves not just listening to how the students are doing in my class or in the classroom, but also how students are faring outside the classroom. 

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that I have any interest in becoming involved in my student’s lives when their not in class, but it has helped me come to recognize that the greatest variable in student performance often has nothing to do with what I am doing in the classroom. I think as an early career instructor, I assumed that if I got everything right in the classroom, then learning would happen and I would achieve whatever outcomes that I had set out. As I’ve spend more time in the classroom and had the good fortune to teach students at multiple levels and in a wider range of settings, I’ve come to appreciate that my planning for any given lesson or class, is only one variable in the complicated matrix that has to exist for a positive student learning outcome.

Listening to my students talk about their weeks, being flexible with my demands, and trying to anticipate patterns in their off campus lives that impact classroom performance should, ideally, make me a better instructor and help me cater my class to the students that I have in my classes rather than the students who I imagine when I construct my syllabus.

Thing the Second

I’m very much enjoying the current conversation about the impact of the AI large language model driven chat and writing programs. ChatGPT3.5, which was launched in November, is the most prominent of these programs and it has a remarkable ability to engage in conversations and produce plausible blocks of texts based on certain prompts.

Any number of teachers have pointed out that despite the uncanny ability of this software to produce plausible sounding text, they are rarely accurate or insightful. At the same time, the very plausibility of the text that this software generates has caused some alarm among faculty responsible for teaching writing. The ability to write well (or at least plausibly) has long been a hallmark of an educated individual and a foundational element of a college education. The seemingly sudden appearance of a computer program to perform a task that has long represented a key element of social differentiation in our society has (once again) remind us that the markers of social status are often not especially difficult to attain or at very least mimic.

This should cause us to reconsider (or at least reflect upon) what we think education is doing, the role of writing (or speaking) well as an indicator of clear and critical thinking, and the status afforded to individuals with so-called “expertise” in contemporary society. It may be that ChatGPT could not have arrived at a better time in our development as a society. I’m not ready to say that it will reveal that the emperor has no clothes, but I hope that it at least supports continued reflection on why we afford some individuals more respect, prestige, and status than others.

Thing the Third

I’m teaching a lot in the spring and despite some lingering anxieties about workload and such, I’m pretty excited. I’m teaching an internship in public history, another semester of a practicum in writing, editing, and publishing for our English Department, Roman History, our department’s methods course called The Historians’ Craft, and at the introductory level Western Civilization I.  

It should be hectic, but I often find that these hectic teaching semesters help me refine what I’m doing in the classroom, build the kind of intellectual stamina necessary to manage a range of subjects in a range of classes at once, and contribute to me becoming a better teacher in the future. Even now, as I look ahead to next semester, I’m starting to think about ways to cut out unnecessary or distracting content, assignments, and exercises, and focus my courses on a small number of neatly defined educational outcomes. 

It’ll also remind me that when students take 15 credits a semester (and are expected to work, have personal and family lives, and negotiate all the little things that we all do every day to survive in the world), their lives are busy and the margin for error is slim.

At the risk of sounding privileged, I’m excited about the spring and the opportunity to teach five classes on five very different topics.