While some students may be familiar with how they use AI in their everyday life, it’s important to never assume a baseline of background experiences. Shout out to Scholastic Action Magazine for an absolutely engaging article on ChatGPT and how we use AI in everyday life with Alexa, Siri, Youtube Recommendations and more!

Pair Reading about Content with a Strategy

Their article Could a Chatbot Write This Story? builds background and context and then includes the comprehension questions pictured below. The comprehension questions are comprehensive! They establish a solid understanding of what ChatGPT is and provide a framework of how other Artificial Intelligence may work.

My newcomer to advanced students all engaged these questions. While this series is primarily a content series on AI, this post focuses on an English language development strategy particularly useful when we build prior knowledge with reading & answering comprehension questions. It is key for EL teachers to combine content with functional cross-curricular strategies that students can leverage across their content classes.

After a read through, I taught the Sentence Mirroring strategy. This is how Tan Huynh, a prolific ML teacher and author, references it. In the past, I have called it the “Start with the Question” strategy but will change to Huynh’s term Sentence Mirroring because I love the imagery of a mirror, how the student creates a reflection of the question in the answer. It requires no prep, simply instruction on the part of the teacher. It is iterative and can be applied later on to any other questions/responses.

In this strategy, we teach students to use the question to create their own sentence starters. The question itself is a built-in word bank. This tool is absolutely empowering to students. They don’t need a teacher to provide them with the sentence starter–they create it themselves. Equally powerful, it teaches the student to examine the question’s content before attempting to answer it. Further, it reinforces word order, pronouns, and spelling. This is how I approach it:

How to Employ the Sentence Mirroring Strategy

1. Read the question. Reread the question.
2. Number the first word in the question to start the answer, then copy it in the answer space.
3. Continue to number the second, third, fourth word etc in the question to continue the answer, then copy in the answer space.
4. Read the newly created sentence starter for clarity. *This is where students can check for pronoun changes like you to I and identify any word order corrections.

Sentence Mirroring in Action! (Enjoy the pun) 🙂

At that point, the students answered their questions searching the text and their own sentence starters.

Now Apply & Code in Scratch!

We weren’t done! I then used this exercise to introduce basic coding to my students in Scratch, a free web-based coding platform designed for students to explore coding their own interactive games, stories, and animations. The task was this:

• My beginners/ early intermediate students coded one character (a sprite) to share their answers from the ChatGPT article in a monologue.
• My upper intermediate/advanced students coded two characters (two sprites) to share their questions and answers in a dialogue.

See a beginner/ early intermediate student example here. 
See an upper intermediate/advanced student example here.

Check out my original assignment “Let me tell you about ChatGPT!” and remix it to make it your own!

Students created and customized. They revisited and reviewed the content. They interacted with English Language Arts concepts, conversational discourse conventions (do we talk in sentences? or phrases?), and engaged basic, traditional computer programming. They had a blast and are well ready to engage foundational principles behind AI. We’ve just scratched the surface of this unit.

To be continued!