June 27, 2024

Helping Students Build Their Three-Dimensional Selves in the Age of GenAI

In Alan Moore’s BBC Maestro course on writing, he talked about building authentic characters. He discussed how one-dimensional characters were either “goodies” or “baddies,” that everything about that character could be attributed to this label. He then discussed two-dimensional characters, which were one-dimensional characters with some standout physical or emotional trait, a limp or a problem talking to women. Three-dimensional characters, the gold standard, required going much further. The writer needed to know the characters inside and out so that the character possessed his or her own agenda and agency in which to work towards that agenda.

As I was listening, I found what he had to say about creating characters was largely applicable to building curricula. Early in my career, I worked with curricula that sorted the “goodies'' from the “baddies.” I’ve also worked with curricula that assigned an additional trait: a comment from a comment bank or an assigned letter grade for effort and participation–which often boiled down to whether a student was likable or not. It wasn’t until I started with a personalized, competency-based approach, that I really got to working with that gold standard, where I learned so much more about my students, where they learned so much more about themselves, and where I learned how to better help them along their way.

Helping Students Find Their Way
We spend a lot of time talking about purpose in class. It’s also the competency strand that I have the loosest measurements of. I simply ask students to construct a statement that defines a long term goal connected to personal interests that positively impacts others. Most students do not have a clue about this, so the intermediate stage is a more modest commitment to an interest, some goals they can connect to it, and some exploration on how that work might contribute positively to others.
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Despite the loose evidence, it’s the outcome that usually leaves the biggest impact, even if it takes years to come to fruition. I like to introduce it with a riptide analogy–if nothing else, they get the benefit of a free public service announcement. In a riptide, I say, the important thing to remember is that your purpose is to get back to shore, it’s not to beat the riptide. My shorthand for this was to repeatedly ask, “What’s your shore?” The purpose of the metaphor was to get students to accept momentary limitations and to move perpendicular to where they think they should be able to go so that they can reposition themselves for where they truly mean to go. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and hundreds die from riptides each year. As for purpose, I have no idea how many people succumb to the consequences of forgetting theirs or not having one in the first place, but in the US alone, the rampant rate of depression, addiction, and suicide, particularly with teenagers, might give us an inkling. ​

In this work, a number of students come to mind. I received an email recently from a former ninth grader. She wrote to reflect on how the competency-based approach had impacted her, that she eventually grew to like arguing for her grade, but that she had felt that the purpose competency strand was useless. Now considering her options for university, she wanted to tell me that she felt differently about that now, that even though nothing measurable had come from reflecting on purpose during our work together in ninth grade, the focus had planted a seed, and maybe that work had been the most important thing we did all year.

Another particularly challenging student who comes to mind fought me tooth and nail on purpose. He told me that he had no idea what this had to do with an English class, and that there was no value in it. He was good with computers, and he’d get a computer science degree, and he’d make bank. We compromised on him sharing an interest, maybe computers, maybe something else. He said he liked music and that he’d like to learn piano. As I allow students to bring in evidence from outside class for their competency interviews, I thought this was a great opportunity. We had a program at school called 88 Keys, which was an opportunity for students who had no piano experience at all to pair with a proficient player and commit to learning and playing a piece for a concert.

This student immersed himself in the piano, so much so that he got busted for being out after curfew because he was listening to Rachmaninov in the dorm’s courtyard. When the discipline committee got the details, they let him off with a light cleanup duty. For the concert, he decided to play Bethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and there was a professional pianist in the audience. The professional told him he had a lot of mechanical things to improve upon, but that he was genuinely impressed with the skill level he’d risen to in this limited amount of time. When he told me this, I couldn’t help myself; I asked him if he’d found his shore? And he promptly told me what I could do with my shore.

When we met in the fall of the following year, he sought me out. He was still going to apply for computer science, but he was adding a music minor. He made it clear that this was not a shore, but he felt he needed to say thanks.

These stories could easily not have been told. There’s so much that works against this kind of thing, so much that wants to make objectives into singular, linear paths. In a private school context, parents pay a lot of money for this education, and they need the expense to be justified with a career path, as much as that is still possible today. The university programs that students  want are competitive. The demands of high school are a lot to handle. Their peers are always eying their grades. Teachers all feel that their class is the most important and load on the homework accordingly. But amidst this all, each of our student’s purpose is different from every other student in that class, and the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that they need to work towards that purpose are also different. As such, does this linear path towards “success” make sense?

Digging Deeper
Our “growth orientation” and “citizenship” competencies took a while to get right. To be fair, it takes the better part of a career to be able to distill experiences with students and align them with course objectives, department objectives, and a school’s vision and portrait of a graduate. It’s the kind of thing we’ll probably always be tinkering with.

A lot of what is in these strands are what are often called soft skills. I remember being CAS Coordinator (the IB’s co-curricular portfolio–creativity, activity, service) at a previous school and giving a presentation to parents about requirements and expectations. At the time we were using the IB’s Learner Profile in the way that I now use competencies, and I referred to many of them as soft skills. A parent asked me bluntly, “Do you teach these things?” I had to be honest, “No, we don’t.”

To be fair, they are not as easy to teach as content. Give some facts, teach a skill, ask a student to replicate that in a novel context. Many of my colleagues would argue with me and say that soft skills are implied, that if the student performs well on a given task, then they have also learned these as well. That never seemed right to me.
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One of my DP Language and Literature students kicked the doors open on that notion. He was a high performing student, bright, skillful writer, but his work was always late. We had a policy, which I agreed with, that stated that lateness should not impact the score given on an assignment. But it really felt like this student was abusing this policy. Both his peers and I expressed repeated frustration and disappointment, so he began ducking us and missing classes. Ignorant of the circumstances, the narrative that we’d all built was that this student was lazy and abusing a forgiving system. When he and I finally sat down to talk about it, I learned a very different story. He’d done all of the work, multiple drafts in fact, but none of them measured up to his expectations of himself, or those of his parents, so he kept starting over. The kid wasn’t lazy, which never felt accurate; he was a perfectionist. Since we didn’t have any course outcomes pertaining to this, he didn’t know that about himself, I didn’t know that about him, and I was not in a place to help him. He was just someone who complicated the “goodie/baddie formula.” That learning experience for me led to our current risk-taking competency strand:

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While I think I’ll forever be tinkering with these competency strands and their descriptors, I do feel that we are now at a place where we can assess a three-dimensional character. To get a sense of how these interview assessments work, I left an excerpt of a recording from a former ninth grade student in the comments who has since moved on to university. She was a high-performing student who, through her competency-based work, became much more aware of how her strengths masked weaknesses and the further work that needed to be done towards having the skills, knowledge, and attitudes to pursue a purpose she hadn’t yet committed to.

How GenAI Factors Into This
While I feel that I am close to realizing my SciFi dreams of having an AI assistant, my students are less enthused. There may be a few reasons for this. For one, as good as the ChatGPT voice mode is, students might be coming up against some form of uncanny paradox. They are different from my generation; they don’t do phone conversations, and much of their lives are already in front of screens that they might be less motivated to add more. Also, GenAI doesn’t lend itself to passive, algorithmic consumption the way social media does. Returns are dependent on what you input, and my students don’t quite know what to look for, and, if they do, they don’t yet have the drive or the patience to keep iterating in order to find it. “Digital Natives” though they may be, it might take some time and patience for them to warm to this new technology, and it might be those who remember a time without these tools who guide the way.

There are for sure concerns about how this technology will be misused for immediate and undeserved gains, but there is also incredible potential for individualized and personalized growth. This is going to take thoughtful policies on the part of administrators, and it is going to take constant monitoring and reflection by teachers to approach a comfortable balance. If nothing else, perhaps this disruptive technology has become a watershed moment for us that education needs to change. A personalized, competency-based approach built on universal design for learning offers us a solid way forward.

Time to Pause and Reflect
This has been an eventful year, and like many, I need a little downtime. I’m sure there will be new announcements to come this summer that might further disrupt how I am thinking about things. Foundationally, though, I feel that we are in a good place. We have a competency-based approach and appropriate student outcomes to work towards in order to support student development.

After taking a break, I plan to “attack my assessments” with GenAI. Some will make the cut, and some will get binned, some things will be done in class, some will be done at home, some will be done without GenAI, but some will require students to use it. That means I’m going to need to play with these tools some more and teach my students how to work with them, and on the teams that I am a part of, I’m going to need to help my colleagues learn how to use them as well. We’re all going to need to understand these tools so that we can have meaningful conversations that allow us to find a balance between trust and accountability with student usage of these tools. That work will be grounded in UDL principles (rubric attached in comments) so that we can redesign courses where…

• All of our students are able to access the content and materials
• All of our students are able to engage meaningfully
• All of our students are empowered to take action and express their understanding of course material.

With both summer reading and the lego piece that I started my day stepping on in mind, I’ll end on an instructive excerpt on legos from one of my favorite books: Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner:

“Why is Lego the most ingenious toy in the world? For a start, Sophie was not at all sure she agreed that it was. It was years since she had played with the little plastic blocks. Moreover she could not for the life of her see what Lego could possibly have to do with philosophy. But she was a dutiful student. Rummaging on the top shelf of her closet, she found a bag full of Lego blocks of all shapes and sizes. For the first time in ages she began to build with them. As she worked, some ideas began to occur to her about the blocks. They are easy to assemble, she thought. Even though they are all different, they all fit together. They are also unbreakable. She couldn’t ever remember having seen a broken Lego block. All her blocks looked as bright and new as the day they were bought, many years ago. The best thing about them was that with Lego she could construct any kind of object. And then she could separate the blocks and construct something new. What more could one ask of a toy? Sophie decided that Lego really could be called the most ingenious toy in the world. But what it had to do with philosophy was beyond her. She had nearly finished constructing a big doll’s house. Much as she hated to admit it, she hadn’t had as much fun in ages. Why did people quit playing when they grew up?”
Perhaps GenAI is a box of lego pieces. Some of us will dive right in and build. Others will need some directions to start with. There’s satisfaction in building both ways, and many build very successful lives and careers by doing little more than the latter. But imagine a world in which that was all that there was, assembling pieces to someone else’s design. If we want more of the former, then we need to trust our students to take greater ownership of their learning. We need to observe them, learn from them, and support them along the way so that they can succeed in their work of building their own three-dimensional selves.
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I wish everyone a restful summer holiday full of joy and play and wonder. And I welcome continued collaboration as we enter what I’m sure will be another eventful year. For now, it’s time for me to get back to work on my own three-dimensional self.