EDUC 5313 Week 4 Blog Post

     I'm moving from a scripted math curriculum (which is all I know..they implemented it in my first year of teaching, and I used it for 3 years) to Theatre Arts, which I'm not even sure has a textbook to even loosely follow along with during the year. I will literally just have my TEKS and whatever resources I can scrounge from other teachers in nearby districts. Luckily collaboration is amazing, but I will be going from having lesson plans created for me (which I just need to adjust a bit) to having no lesson plans at all. I'm wildly excited about the freedom, this is why I left math, but it is also a really overwhelming task. This weeks tech tool feels like it will literally save my life (and I once again feel like I am so behind in what I should know as a teacher because of these scripted curriculums, but that is another blog post for another day).

    I thought about using math standards for this assignment, I am so much more familiar with them and I feel like it would be so much easier to define "rigor" for those standards, but I am using my summer courses to set me up better for my new position, so I decided to stick with Theatre Arts Standards. I focused my lesson plan around characterization standards, and I was pleased with what I had returned to me. The lesson plan is attached below:

        https://app.magicschool.ai/tools/lesson-plan-generator?share=fdfd084b-1443-4f4c-8272-3d5aa38a4a0b

    The lesson plan was complete with an opening and a closing that could be used as an assessment. The students are to get together to create a quick script, perform it, record it, and reflect upon it. I would say that this activity matched the standards that were listed, and I think it was rigorous as it asked students to create material, as well as analyze and reflect upon the outcome of that material. I think that it, as with most AI-generated material, lacks personalization. Some of the things that I noticed were missing would be EB accommodations for our newcomers, as well as scaffolding for SPED students (besides sentence stems, which is pretty standard). It also referenced materials like prompts for initial characterization and said that the warmup should be "an improv activity about characterization", but it did not include these materials. I think that some of that is just refining my search and doing additional searches, but I think it is important to realize that we can't just throw standards in and expect to get an "off-the-shelf" lesson plan that we can just use without putting time and effort in to adjust and improve them to our specific campuses, personalities, and populations of students.

    Some of the recurring themes we have seen in our readings have been choice, autonomy, control, and authentic experiences for students as opposed to just lecture and worksheets, and I think that the lesson that Magic School gave me embraced these ideas. Students needed to invent characters, analyze their character's motives, and use technology to create and post the script for eventual peer review.

    The next thing I did with Magic School was to create a rubric for the assignment that was given in the lesson plan, and I am SO excited about this! I have been terrible about using rubrics, and this is truly a game-changer for me. Yes I will use it, yes it will be key in my assessments from now on, yes it will help me improve student outcomes by providing a clear set of expectations on how to succeed on the assignment. For fun, I popped over to Magic Student and created an AI tool that would answer as if he was William Shakespeare, which I adored, and I am excited to look into that more.

    I think this is a wonderful tool and I am excited to bring it to colleagues. The district I am moving to is on the smaller side, and many of the teachers don't seem to be embracing technology, so I am definitely interested in sharing this knowledge at campus professional development. I think a lot of teachers are just really struggling right now under the weight of all of their responsibilities, and I see these AI tools being very useful as a sort of admin assistant. I do have concerns that teachers will let the AI do too much of the thinking for them. It seems to me that it's best to assume that you are being given a draft of a lesson or worksheet, and to understand that you can't just use it as-is. These lessons still take personal touches, they may contain errors, there may not be your "vibe" (as the kids would say) showing through. They are a useful tool, not a replacement for proper lesson planning. I feel like I can't even begin to speak on the benefits of this tool, as there are so many. But, already, I was able to create a plan for my entire year for all 3 of my theatre sections, making sure that all of my standards were addressed and that I was giving proper time and attention to each topic. The amount of time that saved me is astounding. I still have hours upon hours of information to add in to the lesson plans, but having a framework certainly saved me time so I can spend more time on the actual lessons.  In their Guidance and Considerations for Using Artifical Intellegence in Oklahoma K-12 Schools document, OSDE also warns against using AI to replace critical thinking, and specifically for Fine Arts challenges teachers to help students understand the dangers of AI replacing art (OSDE, 2024). I'm thinking about having my students get into groups to write a short script based on a prompt, then having them put the same prompt into an AI engine, then compare and contrast the results, challenging them with such questions as "Did you create the first script? Did you create the script when you put it in the AI engine?".     

References:

OSDE. (2024). Guidance and Considerations for Using Artificial Intelligence in Oklahoma K-12 Schools. Retrived from:  https://oklahoma.gov/content/dam/ok/en/osde/documents/services/standards-learning/educational-technology/Guidance-and-Considerations-for-Artificial-Intelligence-in-Oklahoma-Schools.pdf