Unit Planning with Chatgpt, or working with the enemy, or working smarter, not harder
I’m sure you’ve seen the articles, ChatGPT is coming for our jobs! It will write all our students’ essays! It will lead to the downfall of mankind! Ok, I like SciFi and love a quality AI horror story, but I also decided it would be a good idea if I played around with it myself. So I did, I signed up for an account and pulled out the heavy questions. At first, asking silly things about relationships, zodiac signs, and should the Packers find a new quarterback. Then, a student challenged me to have it plan a lesson. I responded with- “Well, this AI doesn’t know each of you, so it won’t really work.” But curiosity and an upcoming unit to teach Cyrano de Bergerac was hanging over my head so I thought, what the heck let’s see what ChatGPT has to say about this.
So I typed in:
(yeah I spelled it wrong, but this AI knew what I meant).
It responded with a 6-week unit plan:
Ok, cute ChatGPT. I see you in less than 20 seconds came up with a 6-week unit. BUT, is this really all that student-centered? I mean, it kind of it….but I was feeling insecure and annoyed at its ability to do something in 20 seconds that would take me a few hours to do. So I asked this:
What a sweet and excitable AI, its enthusiaum matches my own for being excited about a new and interesting unit and to me it certainly delivered a great starting point for student-centered planning.
I have to say I was blown away. This looks pretty decent. I now have a pretty solid plan that took about 1 minute to pull together. I can now focus on how to target my individual learners better for each section and decide what visible thinking tools to incorporate or discussion strategies to use. This saved me a great deal of time and allowed an outline to be created in seconds. I just earned back a great deal of time to focus on feedback for my students instead and allow for some of my creative takes on these ideas to grow. Not only that I now have several other lesson ideas that have popped up and will incorporate this tool into my classroom. I will use it myself and also find a way for students to use it to help us grow skills and knowledge. This will be coming in the following days and weeks, and I have to tell you I am very excited about it!
Interesting update: When I went to make the video to accompany this post, the AI did a different take on the same question. Within a few hours, the AI in ChatGPT had changed from weeks to lessons as an outline. Very interesting!
