ChatGPT: 64 Pages of Engaging Lessons for Using It to Improve Student Writing

ChatGPT is a powerful new tool. Much has already been made of its potential pitfalls, but what about how it can be harnessed in the classroom to actually improve student writing and encourage kids to become more thoughtful and engaged authors?

This set of lesson plans is designed to achieve just that. It views ChatGPT as an opportunity to push students to become better writers by leveraging the strengths of ChatGPT and better understanding its weaknesses.

Here are the sections you will find in these lesson plans (titles below written by ChatGPT):

ChatGPT in the Classroom: A Discussion on Using AI for Student Writing

Allowing students to use ChatGPT should begin with discussing how it works, what it can bring to the classroom, and where it falls short. In this section, we provide 16 key questions to guide full-class discussion.

Revitalizing Student Writing: Benefits of ChatGPT's Essay Topic Generation

Many students struggle to come up with ideas for their writing. ChatGPT can help, but in this lesson we don't want AI to do all the work. We ask students to prompt ChatGPT multiple times, honing down selections and digging deeper before finally asking students to reflect on why they are drawn to a particular topic.

Unlocking the Power of Outlining with ChatGPT's AI Assistance for Students

ChatGPT excels at outlining, which happens to be another weakness for most writing students. As with generating ideas, this lesson requires students to work through multiple drafts of outlines in order to better understand how to filter ideas and explore new territory.

ChatGPT's Innovative Resource Discovery: A Game-Changer for Essay Research

ChatGPT can provide endless lists of resources students may never have discovered on their own. However, this lesson plan also pushes students to evaluate those resources and determine if they are real and realiable.

Revolutionizing Essay Title Creation: ChatGPT's Impact on Student Writing

This lesson lets students explore ChatGPT's skills at crafting titles. Again the emphasis is on sifting and refining and improving upon ChatGPT's first efforts.

Effortlessly Writing Topic Sentences with ChatGPT

This lesson takes students through leveraging ChatGPT to craft topic sentences. Students are then asked to prompt ChatGPT to rewrite those sentences in the style/voice of various characters. This provides context in which to discuss how style and word choice are unique to different writers.

AI-Powered Feedback: ChatGPT's Role in Improving Student Writing

In this lesson students are asked to provide ChatGPT with examples of their writing and prompt ChatGPT to give them feedback for improvement. However, instead of simply trusting ChatGPT to know best, this lesson asks students to analyze the feedback and reflect on what they agree with and what they do not.

AI Writing Smackdown: Comparing ChatGPT's Best Texts

In this small group activity, students use ChatGPT to generate and improve sentences. Then they bring their own skills to bear, improving upon ChatGPT's efforts. Finally, they must explain why they believe their group's sentence is the best.

Enhancing Learning with ChatGPT Literary Quizzes: A New Way to Assess Your Knowledge

This lesson puts students in the teacher's seat and guides them through utilizing ChatGPT to create a quiz for their classmates. Students are asked to explain why they select particular types of questions and what they hope their classmates have learned before taking the quiz.

Writing Wars: Human Creativity vs ChatGPT's AI

In this lesson, students are asked to read sets of sentences: one written by ChatGPT, one written by a human being. They are asked to explain their choices, leading to discussion about what qualities (if any) distinguish human writing.

Simplifying the Citation Process: Creating Bibliographies with ChatGPT

This lesson allows students to utilize ChatGPT to create bibliographies for their essays.

Unleashing the Beast: A Case Study of ChatGPT's Dominance in the World of AI Writing Assistance

In this section, we walk through a real-world example where we use ChatGPT in the pre-writing stages: idea generation, outlining, etc. This case study demonstrates not only ChatGPT's strengths but also it's inherent flaws, thus showcasing how students can navigate the tool successfully.

Each section of this unit comes with a set of worksheets that will take students through multiple rounds of ideation and reflection.

This multi-stage approach encourages students to push both ChatGPT and themselves, digging ever deeper into the various stages of the writing process to produce quality results.