Undoubtedly, AI has come to stay, and it represents a challenge in many fields. Ours is no exception. Therefore, our teaching practice needs to change. In a world where there are permanent and varied stimuli, first, we need to plan in order to inspire students to learn and create. And second, to ensure they are really learning and not just copying and pasting. Nowadays, students rely way too much on AI and they are not processing information and, much less, producing authentic content.
We cannot just focus on presenting critical content, we need to help them achieve conceptual understanding, skill mastery, and why not, create knowledge. In Bloom’s terms, currently, many students are just accomplishing application-like abilities, at most. How can we, as teachers, help them achieve a creator category level when AI is calling all the shots?
This blog post is a first approach to finding a pathway we teachers can use to implement AI-Proof strategies to teaching and assessment. I will try to draw both strategies and a roadmap that can be adapted to different content and topics.
Strategies
For starters, it is important to understand that knowledge, content and materials should be immersed within a specific context or narrative to help students make connections, in our case, as language teachers, a context to link a specific set of lexicon and syntax to functions and pragmatics. When we ask students to create something for a specific context, we are reducing the chance for them to use AI as it won’t know the particularities of that context, or at least the student will need to read and adapt the information given.
Usually, AI produces a written outcome, which is easy for students to just copy and paste in their writing assignments, examinations, or traditional homework. Hence, oral performance and improvisation will bring a useful component to the table. Even when a student has a written text with AI authorship, if they need to orally report about it, they will need to manipulate that initial information to convey it (improvisation), adapt it to the audience (context specificity), answer questions about it (critical thinking), create something new based on it (negotiation, decision-making, collaboration).
In addition, when students need to report, answer questions, produce something new based on the initial input, creativity and personalization will play a determinant role in the truthful process of a student. Asking students to use AI-generated content to produce something new within a specific context, it will ask students to use their creativity, critical thinking, and decision-making skills. Moreover, context specificity will demand from them some personalization and adaptation of the initial information.
Besides the previous element, we need to start designing more collaborative experiences. Activities, tasks, and projects with a collaborative and negotiation component will prevent students from using AI to achieve the final goal. It’s true they might still use it during the process, but when others’ opinions or tasks are needed to achieve a common goal, they cannot depend on what AI establishes without negotiating with peers and agree on an outcome together. In these types of activities, students need to process information, negotiate, agree on, provide reasons to support their ideas during decision-making stages, and ultimately produce something (a product, a role-play, a simulation).
Roadmap
This leads me to the roadmap. As inferred, we need a paradigm shift of a product-based assessment (a test, an infographic, an essay, etc.) to a process-oriented assessment. Project-based learning poses an excellent means to accomplish all the previous elements.
Once a project is decided upon, the teacher will have several opportunities to address assessment in different ways. Let’s take a look:
• Brainstorming. Once students know what they need to accomplish and are divided into working groups, they will need to brainstorm ideas based on a needs analysis (or challenge). It can be performed individually first, and then in groups to make sure everyone will collaborate by providing ideas.
Groups will discuss their individual lists/ideas, identify common themes, prioritize the most important information/activities, and brainstorm solutions for the identified challenges. Then they will need to outline a structure for the next stages. These stages involve the following skills: negotiation, supporting ideas, decision-making, and team work.
Deliverables to assess: Individual lists/ideas; recording of the discussions; a mind-map or bullet list of the stages to follow.
• Planning and Drafting. Groups develop a detailed plan, including specific activities, times, locations, materials, how-to, to achieve the common goal. They write brief descriptions for each activity. The linguistic component will be created progressively with the teacher.
Groups interchange their agenda / flow chart and other groups provide constructive peer feedback using a feedback sheet focusing on clarity, feasibility, specific language items, etc.
Deliverables to assess: An agenda / chronogram / flow chart; recording of the discussion; description of activities.
• Visuals and Presentation. Groups refine their initial work based on feedback and prepare their oral presentation about their project. Groups will need to create a visual aid (creativity): a poster, slides, a physical model, a map, etc. –each project will determine the possibilities. The focus will be on clarity and visual communication, not advanced design or tech skills.
Students will also need to assign roles to each member of the team and every member should also have a clear speaking role during the presentation. For this, they will need to create a presentation outline and prompt cards. Groups can prepare brief notes on cue cards to remember key points and vocabulary (not a full script) to guide their presentation. This forces them not to simply read AI-generated text but organize their thoughts in a personalized manner to help them remember.
Deliverables to assess: the visual element; cue cards.
• Presentation and Q&A Round. Each group presents their work to the class and the teacher in turns (oral performance and improvisation). Meanwhile, peers are encouraged to write down questions or comments about their presentation (critical thinking). After the presentation finishes, peers ask questions and make constructive comments (improvisation, oral performance). Responding to unforeseen questions based on their work is a pivotal element to determining if there was a real learning of the content.
Deliverables to assess: Peer feedback sheet; and the teacher will also assess their speaking performance based on previously created and socialized rubrics.
To conclude, the previous strategies and roadmap to lesson planning will help the teacher identify if students can demonstrate genuine understanding and ability to apply their language in real-time, real-life situations, as well as analyze, evaluate, and create new content/knowledge. With these ideas, hopefully we can overcome AI-generated products and boost students’ language performance.
Here is a summary:
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