Colleagues and friends have asked me about Chat GPT and its implications for the teaching of writing. I predict it and other artificial intelligence platforms will have a revolutionary legacy, though whether that legacy will lead us in a more positive direction is hard to say.
Many districts have either no coordinated strategies for the prevention of AI-related academic dishonesty, or they have frameworks that students do not always find compelling. In my own classroom, I do my best to help students transcend the entire phenomenon when they write.
Most simply and effectively, I require students to do most of their writing on paper. If only for their middle-school years, students in my classes have someone emphasizing neatness, margins, indentations, and other basic elements of motor skills and mindfulness. This happens alongside the development of strategies to enable the development and maturity of a writing voice, as well as distinctive promotion of techniques related to analysis and synthesis. All of this lies outside of what current AI technology can simulate in any fashion particular enough to live up to the expectations specified in the assessment rubrics for our assignments–even if students were working digitally.
For our spring research projects, I require students to develop specific, individualized research questions, rather than select topics that will lead to hours of desultory roaming online. They must then write a first draft (not a rough draft) on paper, using no sources and referring to no specific information from putative or potential sources. They simply write from their own understanding of principles related to their topic, with their thesis statements being answers to their research questions. The drafts turn out to be sparse in many cases, but I provide students with color-coded exemplars of my own first and final drafts, so they can see in my final product where I have added not only information I have found from outside sources, but also what I have synthesized from the additional information.
Essentially, I do my best to eliminate any incentive for plagiarism or shortcuts, even though students complete and submit their final drafts digitally. They instead have a motivation to show off that they have found authoritative sources with helpful information and insights. The only remaining temptation might relate to the requirement that they add their own synthesis–they could lift it from some source without including attribution–but an encouraging number of students simply approach me for possible directions of interpretation, and after a brief conference, many of them seem to have what they need.
Any determined student can easily evade what I have in place, but it would seem an awful lot more work than simply doing things honestly. At that point, larger concerns come into play than I can address on my own. This may merely be part of the nature of education in our digital age.
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Real Teaching 
All of the mindfulness YOU devote to thinking through the process for your students is key. They are lucky. I would have middle school kids write the same kind of first drafts. It also helped cement their dedication to the topics they’d chosen. I loved reading this approach for the good teaching that I find here.
So kind of you to write that remark. Thank you! Anything that we can do to foster enthusiasm will trump any particular teaching technique.
I hope you are having a fun time camping! We like camping also! I, too, have concerns about AI and also some guarded excitement. It truly is revolutionizing the way we work and prepare letters and lesson plans – and papers. It is a capable tool with almost human thinking, and it scares me a little.
I am a few years away from retirement, and I strongly suspect the implications for education will be negative on balance but not critically so. Perhaps I have deeper concerns for what it may mean for genuine human expression, but art and literature have flourished through revolutions that brought us telecommunications, cinema, and the Internet. I believe in our humanity.
This interests me: “I require students to develop specific, individualized research questions, rather than select topics that will lead to hours of desultory roaming online.” THIS could be its own post. How do you help them find/locate/land on their “specific” and “individualized” topic?
I hope you have S’mores and a campfire and you see the half moon.
Haha! No S’mores this time. I binged last summer and got a belly ache! We had a nice campfire, though.
I teach middle-school students, and we have lots of conferences. This greatly facilitates the process of generating research questions. I enjoy the conferences because they seem to energize students, especially if they have a keen interest in a particular topic.
It is not an easy time to be a teacher in this digital world, but it’s awesome that you work hard to create authentic writing experiences for your students. I think the relationships you have with your students is a huge part of your success.
Apt remark–thanks! I do work hard to build a rapport with students, and I know many of their parents and families. That does give me some leverage.
“I require students to develop specific, individualized research questions, rather than select topics that will lead to hours of desultory roaming online.” – I do the same, and it makes a heap of difference. I also have students write about things they genuinely care about. That’s how I’ve eliminated most plagiarism in my classes, though there are always the one or two who still cheat. Still, after having multiple plagiarism cases my first few years of teaching, I realized that assignment design was key. Nice to see how you approach the issue.
Thanks for validating my approach. As I say, a few determined students will still cheat, and that likely comes courtesy of a public-school learning paradigm that lacks relevance and works counter to the efforts of genuine educators. Sadly, we cannot reach every student.