Reflections on Eaquals Online
by Kenneth Mark Fine
Reflections on Eaquals Online plenary session “Adopting a Pedagogy-first Approach to AI Integration in Language Learning”, presented by Dr. Hakan Tarhan, senior lecturer and Professional Development facilitator at TOBB University of Economics and Technology.
Overview:
Prior to attending these Eaquals Online plenary sessions on 11-12 October, 2024, I must confess that the majority of my thoughts concerning the use of AI in my classroom dealt with preventing students from surreptitiously incorporating it in their essays. While I was, in fact, eager to hear about the latest strategies for tackling this dilemma, I was even more keen on learning some techniques and methods of utilizing AI in my language teaching. As most of our students already tend to be tech savvy in their daily lives, I’ve been of the mindset that, we as educators, need to find ways to try and keep up with them. This ought to manifest itself not only in ensuring the veracity and authenticity of our students’ work, but also in our mindset and approach to lesson planning and teaching. For these reasons, I was so pleased to have the opportunity to attend Dr. Hakan Tarhan’s plenary session titled “Adopting a Pedagogy-first Approach to AI Integration in Language Learning.”
Key Takeaways:
From the start of his session, I was rather intrigued by what Dr. Tarhan called the “paradox of choice” that we as teachers face when choosing to create any class content with ChatGTP. He stressed that when designing any AI-enhanced language tasks, we must only use the aforementioned technology if it facilitates the link between content and pedagogy. To that end, Dr. Tarhan posited that as AI is here not to replace us but rather to enhance, augment, and assist, it is our duty to first identify the pedagogical principle before adding in any AI element to our lesson content. In order to create efficient prompts for AI, we need to be as clear and specific as possible in our requests. This includes knowing the role of AI, the context of what we want, our lesson aims, and of course, the pedagogical framework. Furthermore, it could also be a good idea to have AI ask us questions about our prompt with the aim of refining the results.
Activity Ideas:
Generally speaking, it was advised to have students do brainstorming on their own first, and then integrate AI as a tool. For example, this could be applicable with TPS (Think-Pair-Share), so AI may serve to actually augment creativity and stimulate student engagement. Such an approach encourages student-centered learning, learner-centered education, learner autonomy, responsibility of learning, personalized learning, competency-based education, and the adaptation of learning based on each student’s strengths, needs, and interests.
Among the many creative activity ideas Dr. Tarhan presented which incorporate AI as a tool for augmentation to pedagogy, there was the “Fact-checking Challenge”, in which the teacher has AI generate various “facts”, some true, some not. Students then need to research and explain which are true or false, while also providing justification and supporting details from their research. Another activity involves the teacher designing Critical Thinking tasks with open-ended problems, or assignments with real world implications. An example could be “Problem-Solving Cases”, which begins with students working on a relevant and complex problem scenario. Students may then use the AI tool to brainstorm possible solutions or gather information. Lastly, students collaborate to evaluate and refine the solutions, and propose a detailed solution or action plan. Such tasks encourage students’ creativity and enhance production as opposed to replacing it. One other example of a similarly beneficial AI-supported activity for students is “Collaborative Storytelling”. Here, students may use AI to tell a story collectively sentence by sentence, which is a refreshing and innovative twist on the traditional activity. Collectively, these activity ideas can increase language skills via communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and information literacy.
