This is how I use AI: Dr Walter Barbieri
For final-year Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary) students, transiting to the high school classroom can present a range of challenges in a dynamic environment.
Professional Experience and Classroom Management (EDUC 4215) is a course that prepares students (pre-service teachers) for a 25-day placement in secondary schools, where they are expected to teach to a level expected of fully registered, professional teachers. Course coordinator Dr Walter Barbieri, senior lecturer in the University’s School of Education, shares how he’s embracing gen AI to help prepare pre-service teachers for excellence in the classroom.
Dr Walter Barbieri, a senior lecturer in the University of Adelaide's School of Education, coordinates and teaches several courses in the Bachelor and Master of Teaching degrees and leads school placements for pre-service teachers. His research interests span the breadth of educational technologies, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence in education.
How are you using AI in your course?
This course introduces an innovative approach to leverage ChatGPT as a challenge-management ally for pre-service teachers during their school placements. Gen AI is used to provide real-time assistance during placements in topics such as classroom management, lesson planning and enhancing professional relationships with mentor teachers.
In this course, pre-service teachers are taught principles of effective gen AI prompt design. They then input carefully curated prompts related to classroom management and professionalism into ChatGPT. They test, critique and discuss the quality of responses and advice generated by ChatGPT during course learning activities. The learning accrued during this preparatory course is then directly actioned while on placement, where pre-service teachers use gen AI as one layer of support for advice during unforeseen challenges.
What are the main reasons for using AI in this course?
The significance of this innovation lies in understanding gen AI as a learning resource for work-integrated learning (WIL) that addresses the lack of support that pre-service teachers face during placements. This lack of support is due to a range of factors, including: the unavailability of university lecturers on placement; the inherent difficulty faced by mentor teachers in balancing coaching and assessing duties; and the contextual challenges of operating in a new school environment during placement.
Faced with these challenges, pre-service teachers can turn to gen AI as an ally to assist them in real time and in situ. The services that can be provided by gen AI extend beyond completing routine tasks, for instance advising pre-service teachers on how to tailor lesson plans based on the outcomes of previously taught lessons or suggesting balanced ways to approach conversations with mentor teachers about complex placement matters.
How are you maintaining academic integrity?
Academic integrity is not placed at risk by this learning activity. Gen AI is used as a source of support and professional advice while on placement. The placement itself is assessed by mentor teachers in school sites. Indeed, because the assessment of this course is based on in-class performance and is largely therefore impervious to academic integrity hazards, using gen AI to support performance during placements is a low-risk and high-benefit proposition. I expect that this would be the case in most work-integrated learning (WIL) contexts.
Did you encounter any problems, how were they resolved?
So far, the initiative has yielded nothing but positive results, both throughout the preparatory course and during placements in schools. Pre-service teachers speak of how gen AI helps to prevent them feeling overwhelmed and it helps to guide them through considered options and approaches before deciding what pathway to take when faced with a challenge while on placement.
Since the introduction of this innovative approach to preparing pre-service teachers, placement failure rates have dropped from 15% to 3%. Though this is evidently a correlation, not a causation, I attribute part of this improved outcome to the benefits of using gen AI during WIL.
What tips do you have for other educators interested in using gen AI in their teaching?
It’s important for academics and students to learn how to construct effective prompts and how to use follow-up prompts in order to train the chat tool into giving more effective, reliable answers. If we are disappointed with or critical of the response given by a gen AI tool, it is worthwhile considering in the first instance if our prompt was sufficiently contextualised, detailed and specific, and if our follow-up prompts were targeted enough to guide AI towards a desirable output.
There are a range of professional learning opportunities made available to academics to develop skills in this area. The workshops offered by Learning Enhancement & Innovation (LEI) are particularly well-planned and are delivered by colleagues who have thought about AI deeply and who have practical experience in its application in teaching and learning.
We’re sharing these case examples to profile the different ways educators are approaching generative AI in their teaching practice. Before using any gen AI software tools, University of Adelaide staff should understand the ITDS Generative AI IT Security Guidelines and ensure they maintain information security and data privacy.
If you’re encouraging students to use gen AI tools in their studies, be mindful of how varying levels of access to software (including paid subscriptions) might impact education equity among diverse student cohorts.
Feel free to encourage your students to check out the for study and research in an ethical, responsible and evaluative way.