Suppose you assign your high school students to write an essay on transgender athletes. It’s a topic to which the regulatory bodies of various sports have responded differently (or not at all). It’s controversial, current and abounding in opinions—a good topic for an essay.
Should you allow your student to use AI to write this essay? If so, at what point in the writing process?
The writing process begins with narrowing down the topic into a main idea or thesis. A good way for a student to do this is to read widely on the topic until a position emerges in the student’s mind. Then the student should narrow this position further, list three or four supporting ideas and identify details and examples to explain these supporting ideas.
This kind of thinking is what schools call critical thinking. It involves understanding a topic by analyzing it, by evaluating various parts of the topic to see how they would support or undermine a position, and by synthesizing or bringing together ideas in a unique way. Then students order the ideas, write sentences and paragraphs, and figure out what to put in the introduction and conclusion. Last comes revising: polishing the writing by improving vocabulary and sentence structure, adding better information, deleting irrelevant information, and fixing grammar, spelling and punctuation problems.
But what if your student begins by asking AI for an essay thesis relating to transgender athletes. In a nanosecond, a thesis appears. Your student asks for three supporting ideas. In another nanosecond, the supporting information appears. Your student reads over AI’s suggestions and concurs. Your student asks AI to write the essay in 350 to 400 words with a striking introduction, three body paragraphs and a humorous conclusion. In another nanosecond, the essay appears. Done.
Which way do you want students working–by thinking deeply about the topic or by asking AI to think for them? Through which method do students learn?
If you want your students to do the work, one way to tell if they do and have learned from the process is to demand that the prewriting notes, organization graphic/chart/bullets, and the first drafts be turned in with the essay. Another is to ask students to paraphrase their thesis and subtopic ideas. If they can’t put their essay’s ideas in their own words, do they really understand what “they” wrote? Another is to ask students what positions they declined to take and why. If students have a full understanding of the topic, they will be able to explain why they took a certain position as well as why they didn’t take another.
For most high school students I have worked with—maybe all—using AI would not be in their self-interest. Making mistakes and learning from them is a far better approach to learning. Students, like athletes, need to have skin in the game. If students have allowed AI to make the choices in their essays, students have no stake in the assignment. It’s like having a robot run the 200 meter or swim the 400 IM. For students to achieve, they have to do the work.
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