Provide feedback on this episode before July 19, 2024, and be entered into a drawing for a $50 Amazon gift card.
In our first ever episode, SREB Instructional Coach Daniel Rock comes into the studio to talk about how writing SPICE-y AI prompts can help teachers take advantage of the free teaching assistant they may not have known they had.
Here are the resources we used in this episode:
Follow Us on Social:
Provide feedback on this episode before July 19, 2024, and be entered into a drawing for a $50 Amazon gift card.
In our first ever episode, SREB Instructional Coach Daniel Rock comes into the studio to talk about how writing SPICE-y AI prompts can help teachers take advantage of the free teaching assistant they may not have known they had.
Here are the resources we used in this episode:
Follow Us on Social:
Hello, and welcome to Class-Act Coaching, a podcast for teachers and instructional coaches. I'm your host, Ashley Shaw. And I work in communications here at the Southern Regional Education Board, specifically in school improvement. I also teach dual-enrolled students. And so I'm constantly looking for advice for my SREB coworkers on how to work with my high school students. So I figured why should I keep all their great advice to myself?
That is why each week I'll be inviting a different SREB instructional coach, and maybe some guest coaches along the way, into my imaginary classroom to help me solve real-life issues in the K-12 universe. The topic might be tools to boost engagement, tips on handling disruptive students or ideas for advanced project-based learning assignments, among many others we have in store for you.
For teachers, you'll gain valuable insights from our experts on common classroom concerns. For the instructional coaches out there, you'll get a model coaching session that will help you know how to address these same issues with the teachers you support.
No matter who you are, you'll gain some great teaching skills and hopefully have some fun along the way.
For our test episode, I've invited SREB instructional coach Daniel Rock here to walk me through my first-ever instructional coaching session. Let's see what he has planned for me today. Welcome to my imaginary classroom, Daniel.
Hello, Ashley, how you doing today?
I am great. Thank you so much for being the first coach to come in and help me better my teaching
it is an honor. Thank you for having me.
So one thing I'd like us to do to start is for you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
I grew up in Miami, Florida and I started teaching around 2003. I taught high school English. I went to a magnet school called Design and Architecture Senior High School. I taught there for several years, and I eventually got married and moved to the beautiful state of Georgia DeKalb County, Georgia specifically, and I taught there for several years until I transitioned to instructional coaching. I worked a little while in the Georgia Department of Education, and now I've enjoyed working at SREB for about 10 years where I've helped lead some of our literacy work over the last several years.
Well, you sound really experienced, so I'm sure I can learn a lot.
Hopefully. We'll see. That'll be for you and the audience to assess.
Hopefully we won't add too much stress to your life. So, let me ask you this. What are you going to teach me today?
I wanted to talk to you about how can use some artificial intelligence tools to maybe supercharge some of your planning and save you a little bit of time. How do you feel about that?
I love AI. I don't know how the audience feels. I'm sure there's some of them out there that are like, Hey, I know that's what I've been avoiding, but I love it. So I'm in.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you've used it either in school or how have you used it in your personal life?
So in my personal life, I use it as a personal assistant. I will go on and be like, chat, GPT. What should I have for dinner tonight? Where should I go? What mechanic should I go to? I also use it in my classroom. As like a lesson for brainstorming paper topics. But I haven't really used it for my own teaching yet.
Let me ask you this. If you were to hire somebody to be your teaching assistant, right? What would be some of the traits that you would want from a teaching assistant?
Quickness. I would like them to be faster than me at answering things and getting things done. I would like help with the boring parts of teaching. There's so many fun parts of teaching that I love, but there are also some parts that are just time crunches that take up so much of my time. And if I could get past those hurdles, it would make it where I could do more fun stuff with my class.
And I think something else that you didn't mention, but that's important, is they should be knowledgeable.
You want them to know things, and that's something I would like to emphasize with a lot of people get caught up in the artificialness of artificial intelligence, but the intelligence part is mind blowing and the amount of information that it can pull together is beyond what any human could do.
And so as teachers. I think there's a lot of possibility for you to have what you're asking for using artificial intelligence, but I'm hoping maybe is today I can give you some tips, some really quick tips on how to leverage artificial intelligence for your class and maybe some resources that will also help you.
Well, now that definitely sounds great. I'm really excited. What are you going to do to help me get that?
What we want to look at is something called chatbots. And chatbots are different from other websites that use AI. A lot of our teachers have heard of things like School, EduAid, things like that, DiffIt. And these are all good websites. The issue is they have a cost. A premium that makes them really effective.
Whereas what I always say is if you can use a chat bot and you can ask the right question, it can do anything for free that you would get from a paid version. So I feel like I can save you some money by teaching you how to use a chat bot.
Well, that sounds perfect because I'm always looking for ways to make my life easier without having to pay more money to do so.
We're going to use something called ChatGPT. And ChatGPT is the most famous one out there. And it's free. Anybody can use it. There is a paid version, but the free one is very good.
So we're thinking about AI and AI is essentially another, think of it as a, I said a super assistant. You can also think of it as a super brain, right? Like just a brain that's plugged into all the information. So what I want to share with you and our listeners is a way to supercharge the responses you get from your chatbots, like ChatGPT and Gemini. And it's just simply an acronym. I love acronyms, they really help us remember things.
I'm going to use an acronym called B. I. C. E. It helps you remember, I want to make a spicy prompt.
The acronym stands for Specificity, Purpose, Inclusion, Context, and Expectations. So shall we make a spicy prompt together?
Absolutely.
Okay, so I'm just going to ask you some questions as we go, as we look at this.
This is a little worksheet. That I'll put into the resources for everybody. And just so that you and I can look at this together. I'm sharing my screen and you can just see what I type in.
Great. That sounds perfect. And for everybody listening, I'll provide all of these resources. He's showing me when we post the podcast, you'll find them in the podcast notes. So anybody that's listening to this at their desk or anything like that, if you want to follow along, feel free to use the resources we've included. Now for those of you driving.
Wait. It will be there. You'll see it later. But for now, I'll try to make the audio as clear as possible so that you don't need it. So be safe.
So first, tell me. exactly what it is you're teaching. What is it that you are teaching students to do?
Okay. So every semester in one of my classes, I have the students do this big research paper. And what I have them do is investigate a mystery. They pick the mystery at the beginning of the semester. And it's what they work on all semester long. And they can define what mystery means. I try to be as broad as possible with that, so that they have a lot of freedom to pick their own topic. I do my own topic all semester long.
And each semester I pick who murdered Jane Stanford. She was the founder of Stanford's wife and she died mysteriously, but they pick things from other murder mysteries to are. They're really multi-verse is out there and so much in between. So I let them be as broad as possible with what mystery is.
And what, may I ask, is the purpose of this whole lesson? What are you trying to get them to learn from this experience?
Well, the purpose of it is the research project or the research process itself. So they're learning to research a topic. They have to pick a research question. They need to find and evaluate sources. They need to be able to come up with a theory or a thesis based off of the research that they've done.
Okay, excellent.
The next letter in SPICE is I for inclusion. When we put this in the prompt, what do you want to be included in the results?
So I designed this project to be something that everybody will be interested in. Because they get to pick their own topic, but it's still a school subject in a school class. And a lot of students. So, yeah, they might've got to pick their own topic, but they're not always engaged with it. They're not necessarily interested in writing a paper, even if it is on a topic that they're theoretically interested in. So I think getting students engaged.
I know that's not just a me problem. I know there's a lot of people that that's the struggle.
But yeah, I think that's what I'm looking for is ideas on how to get my students more engaged with this project.
Yeah. Excellent.
So when you think about an engaging lesson or engaging activities. When you think about a lesson in general, what are some things that you want to have in a great lesson?
Hm. Let's see. Well, obviously I want students to enjoy it. At least as many students as possible. But that can't be the key thing. They also have to learn something from it. If I just wanted them to have fun, I just let them go do their own things. So I need them to learn whatever I'm trying to teach them. In this case, that's the research and evaluation process.
I put, I want students to enjoy what they are learning and I want them to learn the key skills discussed above.
We have specificity, purpose, inclusion.
Okay, now tell me the C in SPICE. C for context.
What's the context of this lesson? First of all, who are your students? What is their grade level and what is the subject?
Well, since I teach dual enrolled classes. All my students are high school students and probably most of them are around 11th grade. Some of them are there because they're the students that always make A's. And of course they're taking the college classes and then some of them might be going to college to play sports or something like that.
And they just wanted to have all their general classes or as many as possible, at least off their plates so that they can take electives while they focus on sports or making friends or whatever they want to do when they're actually freshmen in college. So most of them are probably college bound students though.
Excellent. And then my last question is, and I might help you with this, is expectations. And that's expectations can both be, what do I want in the response, right? So I'm gonna say here, give me 10 ideas.
Ways that I can increase the motivation of students, and I'm going to say include ways that I can do this, both in a face to face context. And in a online context,
So I want this to be able to apply both groups. I'm going to read this whole thing. So that everyone can hear what we've created. This is a prompt that we're going to put into ChatGPT. I am teaching students the research process where they are learning to research a topic, choose a question, evaluate and find sources, and evaluate different sources.
It's repetitive, that's okay. I want to make this more engaging and increase motivation, specifically when students are finding and evaluating sources. I want students to enjoy what they are learning and I want them to learn the key skills discussed above
these are dual enrollment students in 11th grade who are high flyers, most are college bound. Give me, this is the expectations, give me 10 ideas for ways that I can make this experience highly engaging and increase the motivation of students.
Include ways I can do this both in face to face context. And an online context,
Okay. That's a really long prompt. So I just want to take a moment and point out that to do this good prompt that you just helped me write. That was a lot of writing and a lot of critical thinking. So we're not outsourcing those skills just because we're using chat GPT to help us with this.
There's an old saying,. Garbage in, garbage out, right? And it goes on the other way, right? The better you put in, the better you'll get it out. We're going to go to chat GPT. And we are going to paste it in, and let's see what it does.
Okay. So it's given me 10 ideas, which makes sense. Cause that's what we asked for. And yeah, I'll put these in the notes that you can all see them, but for now, I'll just tell you a few of them. So for example, one is gamification. It's recommended a game to me called research. Bingo. Where I give a bingo card out to each student with various research skills that they could practice. Like find a peer review article.
And when they do one, they mark it off on their board and I would have a leaderboard in class to track progress. Oh, oh, here's one. That's interesting. It says to bring experts into the class. So I guess like I could have guest speakers, like a detective or something. That could come in and talk about how they do research for real mysteries.
That's great idea.
When kids see somebody using what they're learning in class and think about how does a detective or even somebody, a doctor is a mystery solver, right? And how do they evaluate the different sources?
A lot of jobs involve Yeah. Trying to solve mysteries of some kind and to see that skill used or involve research So I actually think that's an excellent idea
Yeah, I agree. That's a good one. So let's see what else create a podcast. That's what we're doing right now. Uh, simulations and role playing. Now that one I really liked. That would be fun to me. I don't know whether students would agree, but I would love that. So it's just telling me to have mysteries in class to like re-enact key events or debates.
I actually do have a murder mystery night in class where we act out the mysteries, but I've never tried reenacting key events from real mysteries that we might be talking about in class.
Sounds like you have a fun class actually
I try, at least I don't want to be bored in class either. So I definitely don't want them to be.
We also see here competitions where they hold a competition for the best sources Evaluated based on a certain criteria or a presentation showcase where they're going to present their research to an audience outside the class, and that's another big idea for teaching to increase motivation is give your kids an authentic audience.
And so what I love what we're seeing here is we're seeing some evidence based ideas, things that are effective. Some of them are, they're not all going to be winners, but they're all interesting. Now I want to talk. About a second component of using AI. First thing we talked about was the prompt and having a prompt that is specific, that is purposeful.
You tell it what you want to include, you give context and you share your expectations. That's key to getting information that is geared towards exactly what you want and what you're trying to learn. The second component of AI is iteration. Iteration simply means having a conversation to get exactly what you want.
So if you have an assistant and your assistant, you say, I want ideas for engaging, and she gave you this list. The next question would be, okay, so which one of these do you like, and then what are you going to do with it? So what I'd like you to do is choose one of these that you like.
Well, since I've already said that I really like the historical reenactments, the role-playing one. I guess I'll stick to that.
Do you like the historical reenactment for mysteries with historical elements, have students reenact key events or debates? Or do you like detective role play? Let students take on the role of a detective solving their chosen mystery through a series of planned activities and presentations.
I guess since I've done the murder mystery in class, I've kind of done that before. But I've never done reenacting key moments from mysteries. I think I want to do the reenactment.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight it, and when I highlight it, it pulls up a little quotation mark, which means I can reply and it puts it down here. And I'm going to write here detail what this lesson looks like and what the teacher would do, and what the students would do. Create a step by step lesson plan, and any student resources they would need. Again, remember my spice. I'm still creating a spicy prompt. I'm giving the purpose I'm giving the specificity, telling it what to include. Now I'm not thinking S P I C E, but I'm just thinking, be specific, what do I want to include, right?
Why am I doing this?
So what are you seeing now?
So now it's giving me a whole lesson plan, which does save me a lot of time. I'm assuming I'd want to go through and edit this if I was going to use it in a class, but the fact that it just pulled together a whole lesson plan in like 10 seconds. Is great because sometimes the hardest part is just getting started and getting it down on paper
and it's broken down as what the student does, what the teacher does, what the student does, what the teacher does. So the teacher introduces the project, displaying the objectives, present examples.
So now, if it knew how long my class was, like, if I told it I have a 60 minute class, it would break it down that way too.
Didn't include that, did we?
.
But if I made it even more specific using your term. And told them the length of my class, then it would tell me things like spend five minutes on this, spend 10 minutes on that.
I'm going to write, I'm going to iterate. This is a 15 minute class. Break. down how much time spent on each activity.
Okay. Now it's telling me five minutes for the introduction and objectives. 10 minutes for the proposal. Check-in 20 minutes for script writing 15 minutes for this 10 minutes for that.
Good. So the other thing is assessment. You know how are the kids going to be assessed? So I'm going to look up here I noticed it said rubric for assessment, right?
So I'm going to click here. I'm gonna say create. A rubric for assessment. Now, if I was the teacher and we had more time, I'd pull up the learning standards that lay out exactly what students are supposed to learn in the research process. But since we don't have that, I'm just going to say, create the rubric for assessment.
And it's going to make a rubric
based on its understanding of research which may not be the same as yours. So you would then, it's going to be much better again, because we're being spicy. It's going to be much better if we are specific and we tell it what needs to be included, what's the purpose, all of those things.
Can I share with you a bonus tool?
I just want to point out that we've been talking for like half an hour. And you just helped me create a whole bunch of ideas for my class. Pick one that I liked, create a lesson plan for it and get a rubric. For that lesson plan.
Now you're saying that there's also a bonus tool you're going to give me. So you've been a great guest. Of course you can give me.
So I'm just going to share my screen one more time because what I find is a lot of teachers don't know where to start
And so what you see here, and this is going to be posted for everybody. Is a cheat sheet. And on the left hand side, you'll see challenges or issues that a teacher might have, and they want help with. For example, fostering background knowledge, right?
How do I help build background knowledge with students who don't know anything about what I'm talking about? Or, I want to increase choice. I want to gamify learning. I want to help make content applicable. These are all challenges that teachers have.
So what a teacher can do with this resource here is to plug in their subject, the topic, and some additional information, maybe like the type of assessment or activities, or if there's a project that they're working on, and it will make a spicy prompt, right?
Wow, this is great. Thank you once more. Uh, I will definitely be using this and hopefully other people will.
That bell means we're almost out of time. And before we go, I know that you brought me some homework so I can practice the skills you just taught me. What's my homework.
I want you to create from scratch a spicy prompt that uses S P I C E,
Okay. So I'm going to go work on that and I'll share what I come up with on social media. And anybody out there who wants to create their own spicy prompt with me, please feel free to share with us. We'd love to see what you come up with. You'll find all of our social media handles in the notes for this podcast.
So thank you for coming in Daniel. I mean, I really appreciated everything.
It's my pleasure. I enjoyed it.
I really appreciated this whole thing and I feel like this was something that I'll actually use in my own classes. And hopefully everybody listening can use it too. So for all of you listeners, thank you for joining us in our first ever episode. Let us know your feedback in our survey.
And then tell us if there's any topics you'd like us to cover and future episodes. Which we will be producing this fall. So see you next.
Okay. Bye.