I have just finished my first year of work as a Teacher Librarian. I had come from an English teaching background and had taught English at the school in the previous year.
I knew about the existence of ChatGPT. It was certainly a word that was thrown around a lot in the library by the students. I knew that students were most likely using it but I didn’t experience it first hand until about June of this year.
I ran a competition in the library as part of a ‘Page to Screen’ event where students wrote a book review about a book that had been turned into a film or tv show. There were some specific criteria but the main point was that the students had to review the book and state whether they thought the film adaptation or the original text was better. I was counting on reading students’ personal opinions in an informal manner.
Of the 97 reviews I received, only 43 were eligible to receive a merit award, meaning that 54 reviews did not meet the criteria for publication. I noticed an alarming trend. Those 54 reviews were plagiarised and it was very obvious to me that the students had used a generative ai tool to complete their work. The reviews were written by completely different students from different grades and about different books. Yet they followed the same macro and micro structures, critiqued the same features of the books, utilised the same grammatical structures and even down to the vocabulary choice, they were nearly identical.
I was so disappointed because this was a non compulsory activity and it was a chance for the students to have a go and tell me their personal opinions about something they were interested in. It was a low/no stakes opportunity to have a go and win something. Yet the temptation to cheat was too great.
I have been tasked with teaching a year 7 literacy class this year as is part of the TL’s job at my school. I teach each of the four classes one period per fortnight, as my school has a two week cycle. This means I have 20 periods a year to cover all things literacy with the students. It is not a lot of time. One of the tasks I worked on with the students was to write a book review based on a book they had read this year as part of their wide reading program. I was able to show them the examples from the ‘Page to Screen’ event and have a good discussion about the ethics of plagiarism and the downsides of using tools like ChatGPT. I explained that these large language models are formulaic in their construction with detached, overly formal writing without a unique student ‘voice’. Low and behold, when the students submitted their own reviews, I still had a large amount of AI generated reviews submitted, despite being shown that these were ineffective and didn’t meet the criteria for the task, and proving that I could tell when students plagiarised.
I spoke with the executive staff at my school about what was being done to address this growing misuse of these tools amongst the students. He explained a section of the 2024 assessment booklets addressing the use of AI as a form of plagiarism.
In term 3, I attended a one day mini-conference for Teacher Librarians working at selective and partially selective high schools in Sydney. At the conference, one of the guest speakers was Edward De Luca, Director of Academic Services at the University of Sydney’s Fisher Library who spoke about tertiary expectations for student research skills, the gaps between expectations and reality and how university libraries work with undergraduate clients across faculties and the future of AI in university teaching and learning (2023).
His presentation was very informative and quite eye-opening for me from both a Literacy standpoint and from an AI standpoint. He demonstrated how the university is utilising these Generative AI tools to their advantage and some faculties are incorporating them into some aspects of their assessment processes for example, where students are assessed on their algorithmic search skills in a similar manner to utilising research databases.
I also read this article, by Dr Kay Oddone herself, where school library staff are encouraged to take a leading role in both teaching about AI but also with AI. Oddone raises an excellent point, that I hadn’t considered until this point, that as educators preparing students for the world of the future, we actually have a responsibility to teach students how to use these technologies effectively. We can’t shy away from AI tools; they’re not going away. We need to get ahead of the curve if, as TLs, we are going to be leaders in our schools (Oddone, 2023, para. 4-6).
I was also asked to do a staff presentation on the future of AI in education. I had to really think about what I was going to cover in a short amount of time. Drawing on conversations with other colleagues before the presentation, I knew that some staff were already utilising AI in their teaching and learning and others had no idea about it. So I knew I was working with the whole range of prior knowledge levels and had to tailor this to be applicable to everyone. I also knew I needed to think about – what is the most important lesson that I want the staff to take away from this? I drew heavily on the ideas presented in Kay’s article and from the ideas presented on this page by Monash University on generative AI and assessments.
I wanted to address the central question; what are we going to do about AI in our teaching and learning?
I stressed the following;. AI is not going away. Our methods for detecting AI based plagiarism are always going to be one step (at least) behind the abilities of the tools themselves. Moving towards a reliance on high stakes exams using pen and paper, is not a step forward but a step backwards. High-stakes summative assessments like this often increase students’ already high anxiety levels and are not equitable and inclusive to students with disabilities and extra learning support needs. Trying to ‘ban’ these tools within school intranets is a laughable ‘solution’. We can’t bury our heads in the sand and pretend these AI tools don’t exist. We need to face them head-on and get ahead of the curve if we are to fully do our jobs as educators to prepare our students appropriately for their futures; we need to give students the skills to use these tools effectively and ethically. We should therefore be incorporating AI tools into our teaching and learning.
Firstly, we can minimise the ‘risk’ of students using these tools by checking our assessment designs against them. We can change our assessment formats and processes to target higher order thinking and by using formative assessment models and utilising assessment modes that are harder to plagiarise through AI. We can incorporate generative AI tools into aspects of the assessment so that students can gain these new literacy skills. We need to discuss the ethical considerations of these tools with students. We need to rethink what we are actually assessing when we set assessment tasks – do the students know the content or can they take the test? After all, at the end of the day, that is at the heart of our jobs as educators; to teach students, not to manufacture test-takers.
In the weeks following my presentation, many colleagues thanked me and shared anecdotes of how students were using AI tools in their subjects and how they were dealing with it as individual staff members and within their faculties. I feel like this presentation was a small step in the right direction for my school.
Later in term 4, I was able to work with the six year 10 classes to complete the HSC: All My Own Work modules with them. I was asked by my head teacher, and the executive staff, to give a similar presentation on plagiarism and AI before the students completed the online modules. I had an hour with each group and I was able to facilitate some very interesting and eye opening discussions with the students about their perspectives on plagiarism and AI in education.
Overall, I advocated for myself and the need for this education with my head-teacher, deputy principals and the principal and was able to facilitate discussions and teaching and learning opportunities with the students and staff about the future of AI in education. I have really had the opportunity this year to put into practice the notions of ‘leading from the middle’ as taught in ETL504: Teacher Librarian as Leader. I can see that the individual steps I have taken have been somewhat small, but the tide of change it is creating, is much bigger.
References:
De Luca, E. (2023, August, 17). Perspectives from an academic library: Services, skillsets and literacies [PowerPoint ]. 2023 Selective School Teacher Librarian Mini-Conference, North Sydney, NSW.
Monash Australia. (2023, August). Generative AI and assessment. Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ. Retrieved August 1, 2023 from https://www.monash.edu/learning-teaching/teachhq/Teaching-practices/artificial-intelligence/generative-ai-and-assessment
Oddone, K. (2023). Empowering school library staff to navigate the AI frontier. Connections, Term 3, 2023(126). https://www.scisdata.com/connections/issue-126/empowering-school-library-staff-to-navigate-the-ai-frontier/