I’ve been a teacher for 27 years. When ChatGPT first came out, I was terrified; now, I let my students use it to write essays.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Kelly Gibson, 56, a teacher from Oregon, about her personal experience using ChatGPT in her classroom. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been a teacher for 27 years. I currently teach English at a small rural high school in Oregon.

Two years ago, I was on break for Thanksgiving, and a few former students got in touch with me unexpectedly, telling me about a new online tool called ChatGPT. One of them said students would be able to use it to cheat.

It made me nervous. I spent the next few days reading about ChatGPT and became terrified. The tool could generate an entire essay from a prompt I’d give to students.

I started learning how to use ChatGPT, and it got me thinking of how I could use it in my classroom. It had the potential to help students write while reinforcing their critical thinking skills.

Instead of spending all my time trying to catch students using AI to cheat, I’ve found ways to implement it in the classroom. I think educators will increasingly learn how to adapt to AI.

I started playing around with ChatGPT and wanted to use it in class

I experimented with ChatGPT over the holidays. I fed it essay prompts and saw it was able to generate arguments quickly.

At that time, it was making basic mistakes. I gave it a prompt about the Shakespeare play “Much Ado About Nothing,” and it produced quotes from “As You Like It.” But I knew the technology would improve. I began to despair, thinking I’d have to reinvent myself as a teacher.

However, when I tried planning lessons and generating worksheets with ChatGPT, I saw how helpful it could be. I was having fun and wanted to help my students use it as a tool instead of to cheat.

I considered how to suggest uses for ChatGPT where students could still demonstrate their critical thinking skills. When I got back to school, I talked to the school’s administrators and the tech specialist, asking permission to test out ChatGPT in the classroom, starting with my 12th-grade students.

Letting students use AI as a tool has been more helpful than trying to catch cheating

I began by walking students through experiments I’d done with ChatGPT. One activity involved getting them to write an introductory paragraph. I’d feed those paragraphs into AI, asking it to write an essay based on the introduction. Then, I’d ask students to edit and critique what the AI was capable of compared to their writing.

That was around January 2023, and my students were disappointed in the product. They felt the arguments it made were repetitive.

Nowadays, my students mostly use AI for editing. Once they’ve finished an essay, they’ll run it through AI editing software to clean up sentence structure and ensure their tenses are aligned.

I’ve told the students I won’t be checking for AI in their work. I’ve tried using programs that claim to detect AI writing, but they produce false positives and negatives. I tested something I wrote myself, and the detector told me it was 70% AI-generated.

There’s a good chance students are getting away with using more AI than I want them to, but those who want to circumvent systems would have done so without AI, such as by having their big sisters in college help to write their papers.

It seems that students have embraced my message and understand AI can only take you so far. I’ve set assignments where they have to do their own thesis-creation and research prior to using the tools, and they seem to appreciate that combination.

I’ve seen some students feel less overwhelmed by longer writing assignments because they have a tool to help them. But I’ve seen other students use AI to their detriment by getting it to write their work and not editing it at all.

A fellow teacher had a number of students use AI on an assignment without permission. I suggested that she speak with each student to see if they could explain their work. Some had actually learned the information and were able to explain their essays in depth, while others failed at that task, and she asked them to redo the assignment.

I’m taking responsibility for making sure students are really learning. One way I assess their skills is by assigning handwritten in-class essays and take-home essays where they can access AI tools.

I’d guess that AI tools will be used more widely by teachers in the future

I’ve never received negative feedback from a parent about my methods. At our school, some teachers are trying to use ChatGPT as a tool for students, and some don’t use it at all.

I believe every educator is at their best when using rules for the classroom that best fit their teaching style.

As an English teacher, I feel that not teaching students how to use this new tool would be like earlier days in my career when some educators didn’t want students to use spellcheck. I also remember an outcry among teachers when SparkNotes became available online, but nowadays, teachers mostly don’t worry about SparkNotes because we know how to teach around it and work with it.

I understand why some school districts previously responded by banning ChatGPT. This hit us without warning, so there’s a lack of solid training for school districts to give to educators at this point. I’d guess that as the years go on, there’ll be more training, and this will just be another tool under our belt.

It’s hard to say what AI tools will look like a few years from now and whether they will stop being tools and start being a brain that impedes critical thinking.

My guess is that educators will use AI and other tools in the future to help students become better writers while working diligently to make them stronger thinkers and not dependent on AI for their thinking process.

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