Activity: design a teaching session

GenAI tools are pretty good at creating plans for teaching, either for a single session or for a whole series of sessions. This is because there are many plans available online so the LLMs have been able to learn what common teaching plan structures look like, and because they can quickly generate a lot of variations on a single theme. In addition, they have been trained on a wide variety of situations and so may be able to generate ideas for different classroom conditions and scenarios and so may come up with ideas that you wouldn't have thought of. For most of us, our course plans/syllabi are public information, so uploading them to a GenAI tool is not giving away any new information. So this may be an acceptable application of GenAI tools for many people.

Activity aim: Use one of the widely available GAI tools to make a session plan

Objective: To explore the potential of GAI tools to support session planning

  1. As usual, you need to start with choosing one of the GenAI tools. Any simple chat tool will be suitable.
  2. Start by writing a general prompt which asks for output about designing a teaching activity in your context. Here is a possible structure:

 “I am planning a teaching session for first year bachelor/undergraduate students on the topic of XXX (insert your own title). The session is X hours long, and I want to have a format of X minutes lecture and X minutes group discussion. Please generate a session plan with learning objectives, timings, and discussion activities. Also generate a suitable question for a one minute paper at the end so that I can evaluate student progress”. 

  1. Review the output, thinking about your own students. Try refining the prompt to be more specific. You can ask it to: 
    1. develop the output in different ways, such as changing the tone or difficulty of the language  - "make the plan more suitable for non-native speakers" or "assume the students have a high level of vocabulary in the subject", 
    2. add in more detail to make the activity suitable for a diverse range of learners -  "don't assume that my students understand all of the terms we use in higher education, and make sure everything is written in simple language"
    3. use different learning theories  - "use active learning principles to design the session", or "use a constructivist approach" or "create a final activity to assess student progress, using constructive alignment with the learning objectives". 
  2. When you are happy with the output, ask the tool to write instructions or a handout for your students, or to create outlines for slides, and see what output you get.
  3. You could also ask the GenAI tool to suggest some pre-reading or follow-up activities.
  4. As you refine your prompts, note how the outputs change and consider whether you could have started with a more specific prompt to get a satisfactory answer more rapidly. 

 

noun-portfolio-2649903.pngBonus: add to your teaching portfolio.

Write some notes about what you did in this activity. Make a note of whether you would try out the teaching session in real life and how it fits in with your underlying approach to teaching. If you do try it out, complete the notes with an evaluation of how good the plan was and what you had to change, and what students were able to do at the end of the session. Could this approach save you time in the future?