AI Documentation Log and Reflection

My students have finally reached the end of their first unit using AI chatbots, and I have some great takeaways. Here is what the last few weeks have looked like:

Week 1 - Building Background Knowledge & Introduction to AI

Week 2 - Practicing Prompting via Game Play

Week 3 - Rhetorical Situations & Rhetorical Concepts

Week 4 & 5 - Proposal and Annotated Bibliography (more on this below)

Week 6 - Socratic Seminar (aka Culminating Exam)

Week 4 - Proposal

My original curriculum always included a proposal to avoid students mindlessly choosing a research topic that was too specific, too broad, or simply bored them (and me) to death, but the added use of AI really turned the assignment process upside down.

For example, students ran into prompting issues fairly quickly, rewriting and writing prompts to try and fit the requirements of the proposal took the mental energy that would normally have gone into the writing of the proposal itself ended up making the assignment that much more difficult.

Eventually, I had to admit defeat and went back to teaching the proposal as I did pre-AI, but the damage had definitely been done; students were honest with their feedback and told me the process was still unclear to them. Fortunately, every assignment we do is done at least two more times, so now I've learned what not to do for next time.

Week 5 - Annotated Bibliography

The next headache was when we were experimenting with using AI to breakdown PDFs to use with the bibliography. I realized that 1) academic essays are written for academic audiences and 2) my students were intelligent enough to know that they were losing pertinent information when they were trying to use the chatbot to interpret college-level texts.

The big takeaways from both of these experiences was allowing my students to see how AI would not do the critical thinking for them. They all had to work at finding more appropriate leveled choices to use in their bibs and many of them admitted to giving up on using AI for the remainder of the week.

Week 6 - Socratic Seminar Takeaways

As we close on week 6, I can't even express how impressed I am with how far my students have come. The first week of class was a heavily structured and teacher-guided seminar, but this week the students BROUGHT it.

Because Socratic Seminars become harder and harder as the semester continues, students were introduced to a point system: each person in the inner circle needed 5 speaking points but their claim was required to be supported by a credible source (that was supplied by the partner sitting behind them). This upped the competition and it also placed more pressure on the researchers to find credible information. (For the next seminar, we will start point stealing in which students cans steal points by identifying rhetorical fallacies and non-credible sources).

The outer circle used the chatbots to help their partner figure out the best questions to ask in response to the opposition, but they also were required to produce the source the chatbot found the information on. There were many moments when they couldn't find where the chatbot was getting the info and naturally came to the conclusion that the bot lied to them.

All in all, the highs and lows of adding AI tools to my classroom have been well worth the added time and effort. It was an incredible 6 weeks and I'm looking forward to students becoming even more empowered as they continue to practice prompting.