Writing in the World of AI

Whether you love to write or feel the opposite, you probably are concerned about whether students today can learn to write for themselves in an AI world. Recently I had the chance to sit down with Director of Curriculum and Instruction Amy Lindsey to discuss Regents’ process of teaching writing and how that is changing in an AI world.
 
What do you want the Regents community to know about how we teach writing?
“I want people to know that writing can be taught to any child. Given proper tools any child can become a strong writer because it’s a skill that can be exercised and developed.  It might be more challenging or less intuitive for some students rather than others. But it’s not a gifting that comes out of the divine ether, it’s a skill that can be learned. We are imitators of God so he has given us the ability to have words and reason. Writing is something that is fulfilling our divine image and is something that we are capable of as humans.”
 
What do you think about using AI for writing?
“AI is trying to take away our ability to be image bearers by changing our relationship with the word. Two canons of rhetoric are invention and style. AI is stripping both of these away. All of a sudden, with AI, you sound the same as everyone else. You are allowing a preponderance of voices to become your own and are losing your voice.”

How has Regents’ approach to teaching writing changed since AI has become universally available?
“In Grammar School, our approach has not changed significantly. Nearly everything is handwritten and follows a structured format from the Institute for Excellence in Writing curriculum which is an imitation-based writing curriculum. Students learn to take a paragraph and then longer sections of a piece of work, and create keyword outlines. They’re learning how to pick out the main idea of each sentence then they rewrite it in their own words. Eventually, they learn how to add ‘dress-ups’ (embellishments) to make their writing more interesting and personalized as well. This step-by-step process depends heavily on what happens in class and makes it highly unlikely in most circumstances that a Grammar School student would be able to use AI for their writing assignments.
 
“Student use of AI is something we have thought a lot about in the Logic and Rhetoric School. Over the last couple of years, we have shifted to do a lot more in-class writing and in-class practice assignments to get a sense of a student’s voice so that we can compare it to anything typed up at home.” While using AI well may be a useful tool later in life, the goal at the 7th to 12th grade level is to develop in students the skills of analyzing information, creating arguments, and communicating well. Unsurprisingly, the overall goal is to eliminate AI usage for writing in the upper school. “The act of putting something in their own words helps both the teacher and student know whether they understand it or not,” says history teacher Jonah Hamilton. “When you take someone else’s words and then use a bot’s words to describe those words, the student is just skimming the surface and not interacting with the material at the depth necessary to get much out of it.”

What is the process of learning to write like in the Grammar School?
“Writing is really imitation-based in the Grammar School,” says Director of Curriculum and Instruction Amy Lindsey. “It starts out with the physical learning of penmanship and copying words and sentences and ideas in kindergarten and first grade. It’s then incorporated into the paragraph and letter writing in the second grade with Shurley Grammar, and fleshed out with personal sentence composition, as students learn to answer questions in complete thoughts.”
 
A lot of our writing curriculum in the Grammar School is embedded in the history curriculum so the writing itself is coming from stories from history. Students apply what they’re learning about writing to the presentations that they’re doing. A classic example would be in third grade’s Greek mythology project where students retell a longer story in their own worlds. They are not only learning how to paraphrase (a sentence by sentence retelling) but also create a summary from keyword outlines and then rewriting it for themselves.
 
We don’t do creative writing in the Grammar School because true creation and invention (which is a canon of rhetoric) is a more advanced skill. There are some intuitive writers but most students are not; they are at a developmental stage that is focused on mimicking and parroting. What we’re doing is similar to when we’re teaching reading and we break down something to phonics and phonemic awareness. We give students the tools and the skills to scaffold the true writing process so that they can eventually create when they have thoughtful ideas of their own as they get older.”

What does learning writing look like in the Logic and Rhetoric School?
“After Grammar School, the focus of the writing curriculum becomes cultivating the five-paragraph essay. From seventh to ninth grade, proper essay writing is the major focus of our writing curriculum as students learn how to construct introductions and conclusions and create and express arguments in a logical manner. Beginning with Rhetoric class in tenth grade, students learn about the common topics (relationship, testimony, circumstance, definition and comparison) and canons of rhetoric (narratio, refutatio, exordium, etc.) and incorporate them into their writing. These become a new framework moving forward for how students think about their writing, and sets them up for success on their senior thesis.”

Interview by Jackie Jamison, College Couneslor and Director of Development