Teacher Skills: Using AI To Practice Marking Ahead Of Time

Practice makes perfect…

Or better put: practice makes things perfectable…

As a teacher, you’ll find yourself saying some version of this to students on an almost daily basis. Whether it be in terms of skills related to reading, writing, or arithmetic. Or how to execute a proper cross-stitch, or how to enter successive lines of code. 

The more you practise something, the more you understand it. The more you come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your own particular skill set for dealing with whatever the ‘it’ you are working on happens to be. The better you’ll become at applying and continuing to develop the skill in the future. 

Interestingly, while teachers constantly urge students to practise, they rarely get to practise teaching skills themselves.

Yet, when it comes to those of us who are of the teacher persuasion, there are a great many teaching related skills we only get to ‘practice’ once we’ve been parachuted into a classroom.

And if teaching social studies has taught me one thing– it is that being dropped blind onto the front lines is rarely a good thing…

More Time Is A Teacher’s Reward For Putting More Practice Into Their Practice

An oddity of our profession is that teaching doesn’t really focus on, or reward, skills development in a tangible sense. Your average teacher isn’t going to be paid more for being brilliant at classroom management. Or be offered a performance bonus for reliably teaching students to understand the actual importance of tangible personal growth as opposed to grubbing for grades. 

Teaching is unusual in that it doesn’t tangibly reward skills development like other professions do. Teachers don’t get raises for mastering classroom management. Nor do they get bonuses for teaching students the value of personal growth over chasing grades.

If you’ve had the chance to teach the same class, unit, or lesson three times across multiple semesters or years. Then there’s a high likelihood that you’ll feel less stressed, and more confident in delivering the content, and in completing all of the various tasks which go along with it. 

Yet this form of optimization over time still happens within the context of the classroom and over the course of years. When taken as a whole, this can be seen as quite an inefficient way of developing the skills you need in order to buy back that most precious of teacher resources– time! 

Marking & The Importance Of Putting Your First Reps Back Where They Belong

This month I have talked about the importance of automation, optimization, and min/maxing when it comes to teaching. And the key to achieving, and improving upon all of the above, is practice!

The cool thing, for new teachers, those thinking about getting into the teaching profession, and especially for teachers who are looking to get ahead in their careers right now, is that AI Chatbots provide the means for teachers to develop their skills ahead of time in ways which we have never seen before. 

Particularly true when it comes to marking…

Marking Is A Weird Thing

It falls into the rather broad categories of assessment for, and assessment of learning. Ideally, anything which a teacher chooses to mark should be optimised for time, understanding, and actionable feedback.

With time, being the amount of time it takes you to ‘mark’ the assignment. Understanding, being that the assignment actually shows you the students depth of knowledge and thinking about the topic. And the actionable feedback being what the student can do to improve on future assignments or in future instances of learning. 

Prior to AI Chatbots, simulating each of these three criteria wasn’t really possible. Thankfully, this is no longer the case.

It is now possible for teachers and would-be-teachers to practise developing their marking skill ahead of time. This can be done by creating an assignment, simulating a class, and then measuring how much time it takes to mark the  submissions. 

It is also possible to receive feedback on your feedback, but we won’t be touching on that in this blog entry. 

Level Up Your Marking Skills By Simulating Your Practice Grounds

Open up your Chatbot’s folks! It's prompt engineering time!

Step 1: Create Your Assignment 

Create the assignment or project you want to simulate and then upload it along with any necessary supplementary materials. 

Note: If you’d like to play around with this first, feel free to ask the chatbot to come up with an assignment and a number of question types for the simulated students to interact with.

Step 2: Create Your Simulated Classroom Composition

Come up with a description of the types of students who are likely to be in your simulated class. Consider adding things like: 

• the number of students in your class

• the range of their reading levels 

• their level of engagement 

• the occurence of particular learning needs 

• the percentage of students with English as an alternate language.

• Other: ________________

  • the percentage of students who are likely to upload the wrong assignment.

  • the percentage of students who directly copied another student’s work.

  • etc

Step 3: Prompt The Bot

Let the chatbot know what you would like it to do.

For example:

Chat, I am looking to practise my marking skills. I would like you to simulate a class worth of students’ responses to the assignment I am about to upload. The class needs to be made up of 30 students with names, ranging from a grade 6 to a grade 9 reading level. 10% of the students are not very engaged with the material. 60% of the students are engaged but don’t tend to elaborate or go beyond the scope of the assignment with their thinking. English is not the first language of 15% of the students, and they tend to respond in point form to written questions. Three of the students will submit identical assignments. Please create a class set of submissions for the assignment based on these criteria

Chat, don’t start simulating until I upload all of the necessary files. 

If you are not sure about how to construct a prompt consider checking out the IFC (Identify, Frame, & Constrain) system for a more in-depth look at how to use an AI for your classroom needs. 

Step 4: Start Marking 

Grab a notebook, a timer, and your favourite marking pen. As you mark, take note of the types of answers you are receiving and whether you might need to adjust or add questions to better assess your students' understanding.  

Step 5: Revise As Necessary  

The last step is to revise as necessary. If the assignment took longer to mark then you anticipated, consider shortening it. If the simulated students seemed confused by a particular question, consider adjusting it. If the prompt didn’t produce the results you were looking for, consider asking the Chatbot to help you adjust it. 

Marking Thoughts To Consider

Remember, the big takeaway here is that ChatBot’s offer teachers, and those thinking of getting into teaching, ways of practising their skills ahead of time. Whether that be to get in the habit of creating assignments, and figuring out how to ballpark how much time it will take to you mark something. Or to figure out whether the types of questions that you are asking are getting the students to produce the types of answers you were looking for. 

Will the Chatbot always get things right?

No!

But the beautiful thing is that you can adjust your prompts to better fit a wide variety of submissions from a wide variety of class compositions. The added benefit is that by putting in these simulated reps you’ll also be developing your skills at adjusting your teaching materials to meet the needs of your students ahead of time. 

The tremendous upside of this is that you, unlike generations of teachers before you, will be able to show up to your classroom having put in the reps ahead of the game. As opposed to us wizened elders who might not have had the chance to practise before we got called into the game.   

Building Your Practice Schedule

So consider how you will build this pregame marking strategy into your teacher practice.

For aspiring teachers, consider setting aside two hours of week to practise your marking while you are doing your in-class volunteering.

For those of you who are in teacher training, consider asking your instructors whether you can set aside one or two days out of the month to practise marking simulated assignments. And also to play around with some of the materials which you’ll be using during your teaching practicums ahead of time. 

For established teachers, consider putting this into practice with new assignments that you are playing with. Or, to keep in the practice of marking over the summer. Or as part of your back to school prep.

It might sound strange, but practice is the best means of successfully automating, optimising, and min/maxing all aspects of your teaching practice. And the main benefit to you will be the time you buy back by developing the skills that you need ahead of time!

So give it a try!