ChatGPT for Teachers

Have you played around with ChatGPT yet? I finally got around to it amidst all the things, and I am very excited about some of the possibilities of ChatGPT for teachers using the four moves every literacy lesson plan needs for soaring reading growth.

If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet and aren’t sure where to start, you’ll get the basics from this post and somethings you can do with ChatGPT today to make lesson planning easier.

Chat GPT: What is it?

I am going to put this in super non-technical terms. I am not an expert, but I’ll give you enough for a basic idea. ChatGPT is a chatbot (a robot that can chat). You may have seen them before on website customer service pages and in Facebook Messenger ads. What’s special about ChatGPT is that it synthesizes the entire internet (from 2021 and earlier) to answer complex questions. Because this synthesis is delivered to you without sources, beware of copyright infringement.

Also, it’s still very much in a test version, so how many people can use it at a time is limited. I actually tried for a month before I could get logged in. You have to make an account, which I don’t like doing, but it does save all your chats, which is nice. If you want more detail, Angela Watson at Truth for Teachers has a great guide/blog post/podcast about how it can be used to reduce teacher workload.

chatgpt-what-is-it — Text: If ChatGPT is cheating, goodbye Google. Seriously though, no one gets ideas in a vacuum. We’ve all googled or talked to colleagues. With ChatGPT, your brain is still deciding what to ask and how to use it. You don’t need permission to make your life easier.

What to Ask ChatGPT

Angela’s podcast warns that you often have to ask a question and then rewrite it to get what you want, but I got what I wanted on the first try for the most part (#englishteacherskills). Sometimes I asked it one thing and then another so I would get two versions of something. You’ll see in my examples below using prompts that contained

a request for a specific number of answers or a specific length of answer
terms that I knew ChatGPT could find on the internet and apply
specific texts available on the internet (or I pasted in the text if I wanted it to focus on a specific part)

I focused on how ChatGPT for teachers could do certain parts of my four-move literacy lesson plan for me. The results would save me time as a teacher. I can definitely see myself taking what it gives and improving upon it in the classroom. It’s like a made-to-order curriculum, and with my added expertise, it could be so powerful.

ask-chatgpt — Graphic of what to include in a ChatGPT prompt: result amount or length, technical terms, text title or pasted in text, and ready to rewrite as needed.

1. Anticipating Challenges

I will still swear by reading the text yourself, but ChatGPT can be a helpful tool in sifting through all the different challenges a text presents to help you decide which challenges to teach.

Vocabulary

I get overwhelmed pretty quickly when picking words for us to learn as a class, so I asked ChatGPT about it (see prompt below). The answer was great, but I will keep playing around with asking for an amount and type of word (maybe academic vocabulary next) in a particular text. I can also paste in a shorter text for it to analyze if it isn’t indexed on the web.

Background Knowledge

I also hoped that ChatGPT could help me uncover blind spots in the background knowledge that I taught. By asking it about the background knowledge needed for a particular text, ChatGPT could remind me of anything I may be forgetting.

Structure

I thought structure might be more difficult for ChatGPT, but check out this amazing result. Again, it gave me things I could find and notice for myself, but now I can move past finding them to focus on instructional planning.

Theme

For theme complexities, I went with one that I needed help with last fall (better luck next fall!). I will say that this is a great start, but I would have to use my expertise. Introducing the theme with an entire novel, as #2 suggests, is something I would never do, as it would introduce a ton of extraneous detail. However, I could use this for generating new ideas to launch units and springboard from there.

2. Every Student Reads

I also used ChatGPT to help me generate ideas for ways to read something, since I tend to get stuck in the same old ruts.

what-reading-means — Image of output for the question: Name five ways a class could read a poem.

3. Every Student Discusses

Due to time constraints, I struggle to make daily text-dependent questions consistently well. In this example, I asked for a certain number of questions about a certain text. I would probably want more specific results in the future. For example, I could ask for questions about part of the text that I pasted in and have them be about certain topics that matched the standard focus of the lesson.

how-to-ask-students-questions-in-the-classroom — Image of output for the question: Write ten text-dependent questions to go with the Odysseus and Cyclops scene of *The Odyssey.*

4. Every Student Writes

In addition to daily discussion questions, I need writing prompts that are specific to a text and align to the standard I want to teach.

text-based-writing-activities — Image of output for the question: Write a prompt for CCSS RL.9-10.2 for “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan.

My grade team used “Fish Cheeks” for an assessment in the fall, and we could’ve used something like this as our first draft. Once ChatGPT generated this general version, I asked it for a version I could give to my level 2 English Learners. This could have helped me make sure my class aligned with the general classes. I specified the English Learner level because of the wide difference between a level 1 and a level 5. The more specific I am, the better results I will get.

analysis-writing-prompts — Image of output for the question: Rewrite the prompt for Level 2 English Learners.

Prompts for ChatGPT

Here is a round-up of the prompts I used in ChatGPT for teachers using the four moves every literacy lesson plan needs. Feel free to edit and make them your own!

What are the 10 most frequently occurring tier-2 words in A Raisin in the Sun?
What background knowledge do students need to read Romeo and Juliet?
What is complex about the structure of A Raisin in the Sun?
Name five ways to introduce the theme of belonging to high school English Learners.
Name five ways a class could read a poem.
Write ten text-dependent questions to go with the Odysseus and Cyclops scene of The Odyssey.
Write a prompt for CCSS RL.9-10.2 for “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan.
Rewrite the prompt for Level 2 English Learners.

Applying these prompts in ChatGPT for teachers will make lesson planning with the four moves even more of a breeze. If you haven’t gotten your copy of the four moves every literacy lesson plan needs yet, get it for FREE today.