Another area of interest for Bill has been using AI tools to facilitate the work of collaborative teams. He has been creating collections of “prompt sets” that give participants a series of prompts to ask popular AI chatbots (think: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude) while completing common collaborative tasks.
You can find those prompt sets below.
Tool – Using AI to Deconstruct Essential Standards
Regardless of the approach that teams choose to use to build a shared understanding of the skills and concepts that students are expected to master, this shared understanding is an essential first step in crafting a targeted instructional plan.
Failing to deconstruct an essential standard before planning instruction is akin to overlooking a recipe before preparing a special family dinner. While the meal will eventually get cooked, you are bound to waste time making repeated trips to the grocery store for forgotten ingredients.
The good news for teachers is that deconstructing standards has gotten a lot easier now that artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have become widely available. This tool can show you how to use ChatGPT to help your team deconstruct an essential standard in 60 minutes or less.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Write Proficiency Scales
Teams can also enhance their shared understanding of essential standards by creating proficiency scales.
These scales outline the sequential steps a student must take to master an essential, helping teams to develop instructional sequences that lead students to mastery. Additionally, proficiency scales assist in targeting interventions and extensions for students struggling with or exceeding grade-level expectations.
To accelerate the process of creating a proficiency scale, teams can use the ChatGPT prompts detailed in this tool.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Increase the DOK Levels of Assessment Questions
If teachers are going to use assessments to accurately identify students in need of intervention or extension, they first must understand the level of rigor required by the standard they are working to assess and second they must be able to write assessment questions that accurately align with the rigor required in the standard being assessed.
Write assessment questions at a lower level of rigor and you end up believing students have mastered an outcome that they haven’t yet mastered. Write assessment questions at a higher level of rigor and you end up providing interventions for students who have already mastered the outcome you are assessing.
The good news is that AI chatbots can become thoughtful partners for evaluating an assessment’s overall level of rigor. Use the prompts in the following tool to experiment with that process now.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Develop Alternative Demonstrations of Mastery
This tool is designed to help teachers create meaningful, rigorous demonstrations of mastery that meet the needs of any student who needs modifications to demonstrate mastery.
By using a sequence of prompts and examples, this resource shows how an AI chatbot can be a powerful thinking partner for brainstorming creative ways to modify assignments for grade-level standards without lowering expectations.
All students deserve the chance to show what they know in ways that work for them—and with the right support, designing those opportunities is finally doable.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Develop Intervention Tasks
Collaborative teams can face significant challenges when designing and leading supplemental interventions for academic essential standards. These challenges often involve finding innovative ways to introduce essentials and creating customized content for struggling students.
Artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com), Gemini (https://gemini.google.com), and Claude (https://claude.ai) can effectively address both of these obstacles.
Explore this tool to discover ways that AI chatbots can help you provide additional support to your struggling learners.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Develop Extension Tasks
Teacher teams frequently emphasize interventions over extension when planning at Tier 2 in the RTI at Work process.
While this approach may seem logical due to the urgency of supporting students who haven’t yet mastered grade-level essentials, it can inadvertently put our highest-achieving students at risk by not providing them with adequate challenges
The prompts outlined in this tool, designed to be used in AI chatbots like ChatGPT (chat.openai.com), Gemini (gemini.google.com), or Claude (claude.ai) can help classroom teachers to develop meaningful extensions for their Question 4 students.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Facilitate Professional Learning
One of the things that often overwhelms teachers is keeping up with the pace of new learning about instructional practices and strategies encouraged by experts beyond the classroom.
We hear phrases like, “You need to scaffold the learning!” or “Have you considered embracing a project-based approach to this unit?” and wonder what that even means.
That lack of understanding and expertise is a barrier to improvement in professional learning communities. It is impossible to implement good Tier 1 instruction or Tier 2 interventions without a deep understanding of the pedagogies that have the greatest impact on students as learners.
The good news is that AI chatbots* can become thoughtful professional learning partners for every teacher and collaborative team. Use the prompts in the following tool to learn more about an instructional concept or practice that you are working to understand.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Develop a New Lesson Plan
No matter how times change, the primary job of a classroom teacher remains the same: We were hired to design and deliver instruction in essential academic concepts, skills, and dispositions to students.
That instructional design process may be the most important work that we do. Get it right, and more students learn at high levels during initial instruction, saving teachers and collaborative teams from having to provide reteaching to large groups of students. Get it wrong, and students will fail to master the content that we’ve identified as essential, requiring additional instruction during our Tier 2 intervention periods.
Sometimes, planning lessons is easy for classroom teachers. After all, we are the experts in content-specific pedagogy for the standards that we teach. Other times, planning lessons is difficult and we need support in identifying strategies for helping students to master our curriculum.
The good news is that AI chatbots can become thoughtful planning partners for every teacher and collaborative team. Use the prompts in the following tool to develop a lesson plan for concept, skill, or disposition that you are required to teach.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Evaluate and Improve an Existing Lesson Plan
For most teachers, planning lessons rarely starts from scratch.
Instead, planning lessons often begins with an existing lesson — something that teachers have used in the past, something in the district curriculum materials already, something purchased from an online source like Teachers Pay Teachers, or something from online lesson libraries maintained by content-specific websites like PBS or NCTM.
While those lessons have potential — and certainly save time by providing a first-draft of instructional strategies to consider — AI chatbots* can help teachers to analyze and improve these lessons.
Use the prompts in the this tool to analyze an existing lesson that you are already planning to use.
Tool – Using AI Chatbots to Develop a Survey on Belief in the Abilities of Learners
Research on successful schools consistently points to four core beliefs that must be in place for professional learning communities to achieve meaningful results:
- Teachers must believe in their collaborative teams’ ability to develop solutions that enable all students to learn at high levels.
- Teachers must believe in the capacity of all students to achieve at high levels.
- Students must believe their teachers are competent, trustworthy, and caring.
- Students must believe in their own ability to persevere and succeed, even when learning is challenging.
(Hattie, Visible Learning MetaX, 2024)
Without these beliefs embedded in a school’s culture, meaningful learning for all students is impossible. That’s why it’s essential for a school’s guiding coalition to regularly survey staff and students to gauge the current reality of these beliefs within their community.
The good news is that AI chatbots make creating effective surveys easier than ever. Use the prompts in this tool to design a survey tailored to your school today!
Tool – Tier 2 AI Chatbot Prompts for High School Students
Artificial intelligence tools are set to transform the way that people work and learn. That means it is essential that we equip high school students with the skills necessary to utilize widely accessible AI tools such as ChatGPT as collaborative learning partners.
In the short-term, doing so ensures that every student has access to timely assistance in mastering grade-level essentials. In the long-term, doing so enables every student to realize the full potential in the artificial intelligence tools available to them.
Use this collection of prompts to introduce students to the range of support that ChatGPT can provide to learners.
Tool – Developing a Parent Permission Slip for Student Use of ChatGPT in High School Classrooms
High school teachers face a significant challenge when it comes to providing supplemental interventions for academic essentials due to the diverse range of student needs that can arise at any given moment. The task of tailoring support for a cohort of over 100 students can be overwhelming, if not seemingly insurmountable.
High school students can be empowered to take initiative in seeking out their own support, however, by using emerging artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT as collaborative thought partners.
Educators interested in teaching high school students to harness the potential of artificial intelligence tools as aids on their learning journey should craft a permission slip that informs parents of their intentions and provides them with the chance to opt their students out of this opportunity.
This permission slip, collaboratively developed with the support of ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2023), can serve as a template for schools in the process of creating their own permission slips for students’ use of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT in the classroom.
