The toothpaste is out of the tube! ChatGPT is here and, whether we like it or not, we can’t go back to a time before its arrival. The question now is how do we, as educators, move forward? In case you’ve missed all the hubbub, ChatGPT is a new, advanced chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022 that can understand, respond to, and converse with users’ written input similarly to humans—it can even answer questions, tell stories, and engage in conversations.
Due to these advanced capabilities, it has been widely discussed and written about, particularly in the field of education, where some experts predict it could disrupt time-honored instructional practices. In fact, some of the more dire prognostications suggest that ChatGPT could irrevocably alter the way educators teach writing, assign and assess homework, and detect and monitor cheating and plagiarism.
ChatGPT itself is a neutral tool, and how it is used depends on the intentions of those who use it. While it’s understandable that the emergence of ChatGPT has sparked such speculation, it’s important to remember that technology is not inherently good or evil. ChatGPT itself is a neutral tool, and how it is used depends on the intentions of those who use it.
History has shown us that when used appropriately and with discretion, technologies generally enhance education rather than detract from it. One example is the calculator, which was initially feared to inhibit students’ learning and retention of arithmetic but has proven to be a valuable tool for aiding in computational thinking.
Along the same lines, we might think of ChatGPT as a “calculator for the humanities.” By automating lower-order thinking tasks (like basic recall, classifications, comparisons, and summaries), students can spend more time and effort focusing on complex, conceptual tasks and developing higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Of course, tools like calculators should be used at the discretion of the teacher. Much like students ask their math teacher if they can use a calculator on tests or homework, they may soon be asking their humanities teacher whether they can use ChatGPT on their assignments. So, how can educators help students understand appropriate uses for ChatGPT?
Embracing ChatGPT as a Teaching Opportunity
Students tend to approach new technologies through a lens of play and experimentation, seeking to uncover capabilities and limitations through trial and error. Despite the notion of students as “digital natives,” it is important to recognize that students do not inherently understand how to use tools like ChatGPT for academic purposes….
It’s from this perspective that ChatGPT opens opportunities for educators to teach students about these tools—to have important conversations with students about the powers, limitations, and ethical uses of advanced technological tools in education contexts. Read more…
Morning meetings are a good place to start, but what you really need is a toolkit of strategies to meet your students’ social and emotional needs all day long.
“Maslow before Bloom”—we hear it all the time. The idea that educators should meet students’ basic needs for safety and belonging before turning to challenging academic tasks is one that guides the work of many schools.
In this era of high-stakes testing and inflexible curricula, that’s not as easy to do as it sounds. The need to do 45 minutes of preplanned reading instruction, followed in lockstep by 45 minutes of math, leads many teachers, especially newer ones, to conclude that they simply don’t have the time to plan for brain breaks, or to check in with students regularly to make sure they’re feeling OK.
Research indicates that’s a mistake, though. Child psychiatrist Pamela Cantor told Edutopia in 2019 that “when we’re able to combine social, emotional, affective, and cognitive development together, we are creating many, many more interconnections in the developing brain that enable children to accelerate learning and development.” Making time to integrate social and emotional learning into academics, in other words, is a better way for schools to achieve their goals than a focus on academics alone.
This year, that will take some extra preparation and thinking. Prioritizing personal connections and students’ ability to manage their emotions was hard enough in physical classrooms, but it will be harder during distance and hybrid learning. Most of the strategies here—a toolkit drawn from high-quality research and from the experience of successful teachers—can be integrated into both physical and virtual classrooms throughout the day.
Welcoming Students
It starts before students enter the room: Taking a few minutes to personally greet every student at the beginning of the day, or the beginning of each class in middle and high school, can bolster students’ feeling that they belong to a community of learners. A 2018 study showed that positive greetings at the door increased academic engagement by 20 percentage points, and decreased disruptive behavior by 9 percentage points—adding as much as “an additional hour of engagement over the course of a five-hour instructional day,” the researchers said.
When students are working at home, there’s no door to stand in, of course, but you can create a short daily video to say hello, or use a tool like Zoom—which has a virtual waiting room feature—to queue kids up and then welcome them to class one by one. Alternately, you can adapt the 5×5 strategy—in which a teacher spends 25 minutes talking to five students for five minutes each—using the phone or video meetings via Zoom or Google Meet.
Once students are in your classroom, taking a few more minutes for non-academic chat involving all students can build a vibrant community, while giving you a window into whether each student is emotionally prepared for academic work. Students might discuss things like a question of the day—What’s your favorite pizza? or If you could have a superpower, what would you pick?—before describing how they feel by naming their personal roses and thorns, or by dropping a simple thumbs up, sideways thumb, or thumbs down into your chat feature.
Your Social and Emotional Toolkit—Use It All Day
Getting off to a good start primes students for learning, but the need to regulate emotions, find inner calm, and be socially connected will crop up throughout the day—just as it does for adults. Your toolkit of social and emotional strategies enables you to check in with students and help them self-regulate, recharge, and reconnect throughout the day.
If anyone tries to tell you that giving students a short break is wasting time, you can share the research supporting breaks: Students lose focus over periods of direct instruction—for elementary students this starts after about 10 minutes—so shorter lessons with brain breaks in between boost a student’s ability to stay on task and allow for better consolidation of recently learned material.
To shake students out of a rut, longtime Edutopia contributor Lori Desautels uses brain breaks that get them out of their seats, like giving them each two small Dixie cups and some water, and having them pour it back and forth from cup to cup a few times—then having them close their eyes and keep going for 30 seconds to see who has the most water left at the end. There’s, um, some cleanup required.
If kids have been focused for a long time, try a more involved, more intensely kinetic break that works at home or in the classroom: A H.Y.P.E the Breaks video from Hip-Hop Public Health can help students learn a little dance choreography and get in lots of movement. You can take advantage of the power of dual encoding by sneaking some content into your dance routine—Code.org has a dance party coding tutorial that links dance steps to coding algorithms, for example. Alternately, you can just give kids time to sit, relax, and chat happily with their friends.
Part of building your social-emotional and well-being toolkit is having a tool for all occasions. When kids are feeling antsy, Desautels recommends using focused attention practices to help them regain their calm. Try different ways of focusing on breathing, such as inhaling for four beats, holding for four, and then exhaling for four, or visualizing colors as students inhale and exhale—if a student is upset, for example, they might exhale red.
There is some lingering controversy around mindfulness, but the research is increasingly clear: According to Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, California’s surgeon general, mindfulness helps to regulate the parts of the brain associated with the stress response, and is “associated with reduced levels of cortisol and other stress hormones” while positively influencing “the physiological indicators of an active stress response, like blood pressure and heart rate.” Burke Harris uses mindfulness with kids as young as 3 years old.
At Codman Academy in Boston, second grade teacher Lindsey Minder leads her students in a guided mindfulness activity after lunch: “The impact of the mindfulness practice is really this general sense of them being more comfortable and confident with themselves and their varying needs,” Minder says, “and decreases in anxiety around academic work.”
In high school, teacher Aukeem Ballard incorporates a mindfulness activity in his classes once a week for four to seven minutes—a guided focus on breathing followed by a brief reflection with a partner. You can instead opt for a shorter activity used more frequently: Middle school administrator Michael Ray recommends that students regularly relax by kneading play dough or oobleck, both of which can be made cheaply at home.
Periodically, your toolkit will get a real test when a student becomes frustrated and lashes out. Resist the temptation to jump to a punishment, if possible. Instead, try to seek out the underlying causes and teach the child how to return to calmness. Sometimes, just asking a student if they want to step out and get some water may be enough to de-escalate. A more proactive strategy is to set up a peace corner in the classroom—a non-judgmental, dedicated spot in the room where students can go to spend a few minutes either calming themselves down or naming and describing their feelings on a prepared form.
Never Give Up on Recess
It feels like recess is constantly under siege from the pressures of overscheduling, but play is a powerful, natural opportunity to de-stress, connect socially, and give the brain vital time to process and consolidate learned information.
The pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom says that recess should be scheduled for 45 minutes to an hour every day, rather than the more common 20 minutes. That’s not always possible, of course, but it does reinforce the importance of giving kids free rein to play. And the American Academy of Pediatrics reminds us that unstructured play is essential to kids’ well-being.
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School systems tend to give up on recess by high school, but the way our brains process information—and the need for deep social connections—doesn’t change. While brain breaks and movement breaks may look different at different age levels, they’re still needed. That’s why Montpelier High School in Vermont initiated MHS Unplugged—as in, unplugging from the curriculum, and from screens. In this 15-minute break, kids can practice an instrument, play outside, do a little art, play cards. It’s a brief chance for them to have some say about what they do.
You may face pressure to focus on academics, but putting Maslow before Bloom isn’t antithetical to learning—research demonstrates that it’s a way to support better learning. Build a toolkit and use it judiciously throughout the day, in accordance with your read of your students. Using Maslow regularly will help them to Bloom.
There comes a time in some people’s lives when their aspirations for their children begin to rival or even exceed their aspirations for themselves. It’s happened to me since I’ve become a parent myself. As a result, I’ve been on a years-long mission to collect as much science-based advice as possible regarding how to raise successful kids.
Here are five of the most interesting and useful strategies I’ve found and highlighted recently. The science suggests that if you want to do right by your kids, you should probably do these things.
1. Make them do chores.
Researchers at La Trobe University in Australia recently set out to determine whether children who do chores at home would develop better working memory, inhibition, and other success-predicting behaviors.
They broke chores into three categories: self-care, other care, and pet care. Writing in the peer-reviewed Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, they said their studies showed that kids who did self-care and other-care chores were in fact more likely to exhibit better academic performances and problem-solving skills.
But pet-care chores did nothing either way for the kids’ later development. Why not? Maybe it’s because pet care chores aren’t as strenuous as other chores, or maybe because the kids didn’t really view the kinds of things you have to do to take care of a pet dog (walk it, feed it, etc.) to be work. The bottom line, however? Make your kids do chores. They might not love the idea to start with, but you’ve got science on your side.
2. Teach them to be polite.
This one focuses on three specific words: please, thank you, and you’re welcome. Teaching kids to say “please” when they ask for something can reinforce their tendency to be polite, which makes them more persuasive when they’re older. Teaching them to say “thank you” habitually encourages gratitude, which stimulates happiness and makes stress easier to deal with.
And teaching them to say “you’re welcome” reinforces confidence by emphasizing that the things they do for others are worthy of thanks. (This is especially true when you juxtapose “you’re welcome” with other things people say in response to “thank you,” like “no worries!” or “no problem!”)
3. Work on their emotional intelligence.
Children who develop emotional intelligence also develop “a higher chance of graduating, getting a good job, and just being happy,” according to Rachael Katz and Helen Shwe Hadani, authors of The Emotionally Intelligent Child: Effective Strategies for Parenting Self-Aware, Cooperative, and Well-Balanced Kids.
There are many things you can do to develop emotional intelligence (many more listed here), but at the outset, model your good thinking and use of emotions for them, ask them for their ideas, and try not to judge. Oh, and remember that kids are just that: kids. It’s unfair often to expect them to react and respond to things like adults would (or at least, should!).
4. Steer them toward video games.
Wait, what? Tell them to play video games? Yes, indeed. A new study out of Europe that used a “massive” amount of data determined that kids who spend an above-average amount of time playing them wind up with higher IQs than kids who spend their screen time watching videos or scrolling through social media.
Kids today spent a massive amount of time glued to screens, on average. This study of 5,000 children at least suggests that if they’re going to be using screens that much, the higher the percentage of that time they spend on video games, the better.
In short, passion turned out to be far more predictive of whether kids were successful; while mindset and grit might have predicted that young people would continue attempting to succeed, it was passion that best predicted whether they actually would. “For people who are the best of the best in their field, passion is absolutely the biggest factor. It’s the essential key to success,” one researcher said.
So, when kids are kids, let them explore different things to determine the ones that they’re truly passionate about. That’s where they’re most likely to become the absolute best in their field. Look, no matter what any of us does as entrepreneurs, chances are our kids will be a very big part of our legacies.
That’s why I’m so drawn into these little hacks, and it’s why I’ve compiled an entire free e-book full of similar tips and tricks: How to Raise Successful Kids (7th Edition). There’s always another study with another interesting bit of information to consider. I read and share as many as I can, so you don’t have to look for them.
Learning a new skill can be one of the most satisfying things you can do to grow. Learning a new skill is not just a financially smart decision, but it is also good for your mental health. When you learn new skills, you feel more powerful. New neural connections are formed in your brain when you learn something new. The best way to change your life is to change your mind. And learning new skills is the best way to change your mind, literally.
When the normal routine of life makes your life dull, having entertainment alone is not enough to recharge yourself. Entertainment can be good for a weekend — but if you do not learn anything new for years, you will start hating your work.
The traditional system of education expects us to finish school and college and then work for the rest of our lives. That strategy might have worked 30 years back as the world was slowly moving towards the information age. It is not going to work anymore. To thrive in this day and age, learning has to become a habit and continuous up-gradation of skills is required to stay relevant and competitive.
One of the biggest challenges in learning after school and college is that the learning journey becomes lonely. If you are trying to learn from a book or an online course with a set of video tutorials, your learning can become quite stressful. Students learn best when they are energetic and happy. And the only way to feel energetic and happy during your learning journey is to be part of a community that has the same learning goals as yours.
1. Sign up for a cohort-based online course
Many online courses nowadays are cohort-based, and cohort-based online courses usually have a community around them. Being part of a community can impact your learning journey in very subtle ways that are not obvious. Remember, you are the average of the five people around you.
If you are part of a learning community where you see other students have similar goals such as yours and if you see that they are making progress with their professional journey, you are highly likely to grow along with them. You will have a positive pressure to achieve results.
After the completion of the online course, you can think about becoming part of a mastermind community where the learning journey continues beyond the course duration. A mastermind community is usually led by a mentor, and you will have the best of the best students as part of the community.
Mastermind community memberships usually come at a premium, but it is worth the premium because the ideas that you get from the community for your career and business will be well worth the price.
3. Start blogging about what you’ve learned
To make sure that you do not forget what you learn, take notes and write about what you have learned in your blog. Writing organizes your thought process and it is one of the best ways to remember.
If you write in a public blog, you can also build your brand at the same time and may even start having some subscribers who want to copy your notes. A lot of digital mentors have built their following because they started taking their notes in public.
You also have to make sure that you implement what you learn. Implementation is very important because when you implement your leaningsconcepts
perspectives
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and get results, you are going to have validated learning. Validating what you have learned will make sure that the concepts you are trying to learn will go from information to understanding.
Once you understand something new, you will feel powerful and your perspective will expand. Once your perspective has expanded to new horizons, you will never be able to get back to your original state of thinking.
Also, implementing what you have learned gives you a project in hand. You get hired for what you can do, not what you know. Online course certificates usually prove that the student knows something, but not that they can do something. When you do a project, the project proves that you can do something. And who knows — the project can become a side hustle and may even become a business someday.
5. Become a digital mentor and teach
And finally, start teaching what you have learned to your followers. If you are already blogging and blogging about what you know, you will have an audience. Create a smaller mastermind group where you are the mentor and help your students. This will mostly happen online. You are effectively becoming a digital mentor for your students. Teaching is one of the best ways to learn, because it forces you to simplify the concepts you already have in your mind.
We spend a lot of time in school learning things we rarely use in life. And then, a massive chunk of our lives after formal education, gathering practical knowledge to build a good life. The irony of learning in school is that we don’t apply much of what we learn in our lives.
The practical skills to build a great life is learned through experimentation, imitation and deliberate self-learning.
Success is built on permanent skills, but society values hard skills more. Therefore, people are encouraged to learn hard skills to be “successful” in life. Traditional skills (engineering, programming, accounting, expertise, etc.) are easy to measure and job-specific. The problem is, not all skills are permanent. Some skills are valuable for a while, and then they become obsolete as technology evolves and gets better at doing specific tasks.
Many people have lost their jobs because employers found a faster way to save money. If your skills are indispensable, you are among the lucky few who can rely on their skills for as long as possible. Permanent skills have been around for centuries. They help people navigate life and do their jobs effectively.
Successful people learn both hard skills (through formal education) and permanent skills (via self-learning) to become efficient or effective humans. Their permanent skills complement their hard skills. Sheryl Sandberg once said, “Build your skills, not your resume.” A few permanent skills that can help you thrive in the next decade.
Dealing with uncertainties and change — In the wake of the pandemic, your ability to rise above things you cannot control is now more important than ever. How you react when most things are out of your control changes determines your level of stress and anxiety.
“Knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security,” says mathematician John Allen Paulos. Of course, there are no guarantees in life, but knowing what you can and can’t control can help you plan for inevitable change.
When you are worried about the future, focus on the outcomes you can control and be proactive about them. And always remember, don’t believe everything you think, live in the present but be proactive about the future.
The ability to spend and invest time wisely — Time is all we have to do more great work, change, improve, learn or make money. How are you spending your time? If you are bad at using time, you won’t get anywhere in life. Time management skill is what separates successful people from everyone else.
“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst,” is one of my favourite quotes. William Penn said that. It’s a powerful statement that reminds us of the shortness of life. You can achieve almost anything if you learn how to invest, spend or save time.
The willingness to change your mind — If you can’t change your mind, you can’t improve, can’t adapt, and can’t work with people. You are not right all the time. Your reality is only the only truth. So it’s vital to maintain an open mind. “Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” George Bernard Shaw said.
Your perceptions, assumptions, beliefs, and mental models inform your life choices — improving them can help you make better judgements. When the facts change, I change my mind.” John Maynard Keynes said.
The ability to understand emotional language — Humans are social beings. We communicate through language, emotions and body language. If you want to get far, influence people, change minds or make friends, develop a better understanding of your emotions to respond better to how other’s feel.
“In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.”Daniel Goleman said. Nurture your emotional brain. You can do a lot better in life if you understand the emotions of others deeply.
The art of persuasion is an emotional job. Emotional skills improve our relationship with ourselves, which helps us build healthy relationships with the people we love and those we work with.
The ability to think through problems and situations — The decisions we make (small and big) in life have long-term consequences on ourselves and the people we care about.
Learning to think could mean the difference between good decisions and bad ones. “He who thinks little errs much.” Leonardo Da Vinci said.
In almost every decision-making process, we have multiple options to consider. Knowing the consequences of every course of action, their short-term effects and long-term implications can help you make better judgements.
Permanent skills don’t get old. They won’t become obsolete. You will continue to rely on them over and over again to build a good life. And the good news is, these permanent skills can be learned. “All skills are learnable.” Brian Tracy said. You can improve yourself every day to become a skilful and better human.
Education can take place in formal or informal settings and any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational. The methodology of teaching is called pedagogy.
Credit: GoodStudio / Shutterstock
Embracing ChatGPT as a Teaching Opportunity
