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00:00:02 

[Mark Arthur] 

Thanks everybody. I hope you're enjoying this year's Global Teachers Festival. Seen some, see some great talks. Thanks for joining me for this one. And what we're going to do in this talk is look at how we can work with AI in ways that serve and support our professional needs, but also strengthen our professional authority as teachers. 

Okay. As Sheila told you, my name is Mark Arthur. I'm an academic consultant with Macmillan. I've been involved in ELT now for about 25 years. Let's begin this session by looking at the the concept of agency. 

00:00:41 

First of all, there are lots of different definitions in the literature which come from different academic fields and different standpoints. But really agency is about making choices and decisions that affect and influence our professional ident, our professional working environments. The definition that we have on the slide works very well for today's session which is professional agency is practiced when individuals or groups influence, make choices and take stances in ways that affect their work and professional identities. And a very well known framework of human agency breaks it down into the three areas that you can see on the slide there. So we've got individual agency, which says they're exercising control over your own actions. 

00:01:30 

For a language teacher, maybe this would mean having the freedom to plan your lessons in line with how you see the needs of your students or in line with your particular teaching approach. This collective agency, which is when we work together with others to achieve shared goals. For example, perhaps we do some hear observations with our colleagues. We can get some feedback on a specific aspect of our teaching planning, collaborating on the design of teaching materials with other teachers, maybe teachers from other curricular areas for clil or cross projects with teachers from different areas. And when we join professional organizations like TESOL or iatefl, that would be example of collective agency. 

00:02:21 

And then of course there's proxy agency, which is when we rely on others to act on our behalf because they have more authority, more power or more resources. So perhaps you need to improve some of the stuff in your classroom and your projector or some new didactical materials, or you detect that there's a student with specific learning needs in your class. So you talk to your managers or your coordinators and try and obtain help with that. This is what we mean by agency. Let's have a look at a couple of real examples of teachers acting with agency from the literature. 

I'm going to read this out and then elaborate just in case anybody's watching on a small screen. So the first example here, real example, says French teacher in Canada embraced a Plurilingual identity by drawing on alternative discourses to establish her legitimacy against native speaker ideology. So this is a teacher who is teaching a language that is not her first language. She's a non native teacher. She experiences some kind of negative stereotypes, some kind of discrimination, perhaps through recruitment practices or just general attitudes that are in language teaching. 

00:03:39 

And rather than being demotivated by that, she reads up on the literature, she reads up on the con on the concept of plurilingualism, the idea that actually being multilingual or plurilingual is a strength and that somebody that successfully learned another language is much better positioned to guide students through that process than somebody who just by accident of birth is a native speaker but hasn't learned another language, for example. And she develops this kind of positive, legitimate teacher identity based on that alternative discourse. She's acting with agency. And a second example here, it says a pre service teacher of English language learners agentively positioned herself as a bridge between her students and the local culture, integrating cultural teaching with linguistic assistance. This is a teacher in the United States. 

She teaches children of immigrants in the usa. Her job is to teach the language skills and language areas of the course. But she decides to incorporate a focus on intercultural skills and a cultural element in her classes so that it will be easier for her students to integrate more easily into society in the United States. She doesn't have to do that. She chooses to do that.  

00:04:53 

She's a teacher acting with agency. So hopefully the concept of agency is clear. Now, why is this important? Well, scholars in this area, writers in this area, talk about how our professional agency shapes how we learn and grow as teachers. It shapes how our careers develop over time. 

For example, it influences maybe the kind of reading that we do outside of the classrooms, the professional decisions that we take, and ultimately it might affect whether or not good teachers stay in the profession. Right? So agency is very, very important. Now, why is this relevant to the discussion of AI? Well, to understand this question, I went around the Internet and I took screenshots of different AI tools on the web to think about what it is that AI can already do for language teaching and learning. 

00:05:58 

So here's a couple of examples. First one on the slide here says listen well. Language practice, listening practice, reading practice, speaking practice. Instant feedback helps you improve quickly. Second one here, AI powered teaching tools to support educators with lesson planning, differentiation, writing assessments, etc. 

Third one, instant English evaluation. This one sounds amazing. Maximize your potential with real time feedback from your AI tutor. Perfect pronunciation, embrace rephrasing, enhance your accent how about this? Create a text on any topic with any vocabulary. 

So you've got your vocabulary list from class, you stick it in the AI and it generates a reading text for you. And finally, this one, upload a whole folder of student work from Google Drive or Google Classroom and generate high quality personalized feedback in one go. Now, who wouldn't want to do these things? And it's very clear that AI can bring efficiencies and benefits to teachers and learners. But there's also, we need to be aware, a big crossover here with agency.  

00:07:16 

Because choosing, selecting, creating, adapting materials, planning lessons, thinking about how we give feedback, thinking about how we organize a course, how a course develops over time based on our student needs, are all areas that are traditionally associated with teacher agency. These are all areas related to choices and decisions that we make in the classroom, related to our professional authority and our agency. So on the one hand, while we need to bring AI into the classroom because it's not going away, and we need to take advantage of the benefits that it brings for teaching and learning, we need to do it in such a way that it strengthens our position and strengthens our professional authority in the classroom. We don't want to become over reliant on these kinds of tools because it's through lesson planning, it's through creating and selecting and adapting materials that we perfect or we, we move towards perfecting the art of teaching, right, that cannot be replaced. We don't want to lose these opportunities to develop our teaching skills in real time and decisions about what to do next in a lesson, what works, what doesn't work, whether a student passes a course or whether a student needs to review a course, these need to be made with human agency. 

00:08:42 

The human needs to be in a loop to make those decisions. AI does not know the social emotional profile of our students. The AI does not know the cultural sensitivities of our class. AI does not know anything about the learning culture of our school. So we need to be in there making those decisions. 

And we also need to make sure that the outputs that we get from AI platforms match with the pedagogical culture of our classroom and our school. There's really interesting research on this. Teachers in Sweden talked about how the outputs from the AI platform that they were using was very, very American and didn't reflect the education culture. Sweden. Right. 

00:09:26 

So what I'm proposing today are four broad strategies that we need to take into consideration as we welcome AI into our classrooms and as we, you know, move with the times and start using AI. And taking advantage of all of the benefits that it brings. Right. You can see the four areas on the slide. We're going to work through them one at a time and we're going to start with this first one which is engage in self directed, collaborative cpd, continuous professional development. 

On the slide we have some AI teacher AI competencies. I'm going to read them out loud again in case anybody's watching on a small screen. As I read them out, think to what extent do you agree or disagree with these statements? Okay, you don't have to answer, but just think about it. Right? 

00:10:01 

So I teach lessons that appropriately combine my teaching subject and AI tools and teaching approaches. So to what extent do you agree or disagree with that? I can clearly explain the practical benefits and potential dangers of common AI tools like chatbots or generators within my specific teaching subject. I teach students how to behave safely and responsible when learning with AI tools. I actively seek out information and training to keep pace with new AI technologies and understand how they affect my long term career. 

So just think for a second, to what extent do you agree or disagree with those statements? 

I'll give you 20 seconds or so to think about that. 

When I've talked to teachers about this recently, they will usually give themselves five for all of them. 

00:11:22 

So these are all examples of AI competencies for teachers and they are based on the competencies that are listed in this document from UNESCO. The AI Competency Framework for Teachers. Most of you are probably familiar with this came out in 2004. But it's a very useful starting point for benchmarking teacher AI competencies and understanding what it means for teachers to be AI literate. It breaks down AI competencies and into five core aspects. 

So we have human centered mindset, which is about values and attitudes about AI ethics of AI, which is obviously about following guidelines, regulations and safe procedures when using AI in the classroom. AI foundations and applications refers to the kind of conceptual knowledge and practical use of AI for different purposes. AI pedagogy obviously is about integrating AI into our work for teaching, learning and assessment. And AI for professional development is about lifelong learning and collaboration. And then there are competencies at three levels of progression. 

00:12:33 

So this is essentially a road map which goes from acquire which basic AI literacy all the way up to create, which is where teachers are experts who are able to configure AI tools for specific learning purposes. So what's great about this document is it is very much focused on a human centered approach. It emphasizes that, it emphasizes teacher agency and it maintains teacher accountability in the classroom and stresses that AI supports but does not replace teachers. And it also addresses issues around AI and some of the challenges around AI that I'm not really supposed to mention, but things like violation of data privacy, acceleration of climate change and widening of societal inequalities. So very, very useful starting point to understand what it means to be AI literate. 

00:13:26 

The descriptors are quite detailed. They look like this. I'm not going to read it, but just to give you an idea. But it's free to download and it's an amazing starting point. If you're a teacher and you want to know what it means to be AI literate, or if you're a teacher trainer or a coordinator who's responsible for training teachers in the use of AI, this would probably be the best place to start. 

Now, of course, there's lots of stuff available online. The European Union has an amazing course called AI for Teachers, or it's shortened to AI4T. And as part of that course there's a free course book with GPT prompts for teachers covering a wide range of different areas. Lesson planning, differentiation, introducing culture into the classroom, presenting different language topics. And it comes with prompts that teachers can use in class. 

00:14:16 

Again, free to download. And a fantastic place to start with using GPT in your classes. It's part of a broader massive online Open Course or MOOC, for teachers who we see AI4T, a video based course which covers a very broad range of teacher competencies. So this would be a great place to start. It also makes sense to connect with teachers at your school, teachers in your local community, to establish communities of practice where you can get together and you can talk about, for example, how you can use AI in your lessons. 

Maybe you can plan lessons that integrate AI resources, AI tools or AI competencies. Or if your school is already using AI platforms, maybe you can evaluate the tools in terms of their pedagogical and cultural appropriateness. And perhaps you can explore how to communicate to parents the role that technology and AI can play in supporting interaction or supporting human interaction in the language learning process. But it makes sense to get together with your colleagues and share expertise. There's research that teachers. 

00:15:27 

I mean, it's. It's obvious, right? Research things are always obvious once research points them out, right? But teachers benefit from collaboration. It's motivating. 

We develop a sense of community. There's even research that shows, for example, that there's lower rates of absenteeism in schools where teachers collaborate. So it makes sense to get together with your colleagues and share your expertise and share ideas. And finally, something that we've been saying for almost 20 years now, developing online professional learning networks through social media. A lot of this used to be done through Twitter, not so much now. 

But people like Joe Dale, Nick Peachey, Sydney Sullivan are all active on LinkedIn and Substack, and they're sharing amazing resources. And not just them, Joanne, who was on earlier, is also always publishing resources online too, of course, YouTube, webinars from people like the British Council at Macmillan. We have our own Advancing Learning podcast. And there are organizations like the AI Education Project, which has resources for teachers, curriculum planning documents, infographics, policy guidelines for teachers for using AI. Right, so first strategy for safeguarding our professional agency is to engage in self directed collaborative cpd. 

00:16:47 

The second is to be the human in the loop. I'm just going to pause for a moment and ask you to think again. Imagine you are the teachers at this school. You are present in this highly motivating teachers meeting that we see here and you are told that for the next school year we are going to implement an AI platform for lesson planning and assessment. What questions would you like to ask about the platform? 

If you're in this meeting with these teachers and with your manager or coordinator here and you're given this information, what questions would you like to ask about the specific AI tool that is going to be implemented? I'll give you a few seconds to think about that. 

What would you like to know about it? What questions would you have? 

00:17:45 

Let's have a look at the chat. So when I open the chat in these sessions, always get distracted and then start answering people in the chat out loud. Yeah, some great questions. Usability, is it easy to use? 

What data is it? Yeah, exactly, exactly. These are great questions, guys. Thank you for participating. It's nice to know that people are actually listening. 

So, yeah, being a human in the loop means being able to ask critical questions before and after adopting any AI tool, any technological tool, so that we can kind of engage in professional conversations with providers of platforms, publishers, but also parents, school owners and managers about exactly how tools. My English is going weird about how tools will be used. Right. So when we have, I mean, if we're experts in AI or if we're experts in technology, like Joanne, for example, it's easy to ask these kinds of critical questions. But if you're just starting out on this AI journey, there's an amazing resource from the European Union which is called Ethical Guidelines on the Use of Artificial Intelligence and Data in Teaching and Learning for Educators and it lists critical questions under different categories that we should ask when thinking about adopting or implementing an AI platform.  

00:19:20 

Now for amazingly, for the convenience of this session, there are questions on the topic of human agency and they include the questions that you see here. For example, is the teacher role clearly defined so as to ensure that there's a teacher in the loop while the AI system is being used? How does the AI system affect the didactical role of the teacher? The third one here are procedures in place for teachers to monitor and intervene, for example, in situations where empathy is required when dealing with learners or parents and I love this one at the end, do teachers and school leaders have all the training and information needed to effectively use the system? Et cetera, et cetera? 

This document is amazing. If you're just starting out on this journey and you're not sure what questions you should be asking, this is a great resource and it covers questions in many, many different areas. So we have on the slide here transparency, diversity, well being, and as some of you mentioned in the chat data government. So do teachers and school leaders understand how specific assessment or personalization algorithms work within the AI system? Is it accessible to everyone in the same way? 

00:20:24 

How does it affect the social, emotional well being of learners and teachers? Are there mechanisms to ensure that sensitive data is kept anonymous? Right. And so a fantastic resource. And these are questions that we should be asking about the implementation of any tool. 

But we're not alone. There are amazing free resources that we can use to be able to answer, to ask these questions. Okay, so we also need to be able to ask these kind of critical questions with regard to pedagogy. All of us as teachers have strong beliefs about what is good teaching, what is effective teaching, what are effective teaching practices. And ideally, these would be based on evidence, on research. 

00:21:08 

So if you've read up on the SLA or second language acquisition research, for example, you know that massive exposure to input is required for learning to take place. You know that learning is essentially an implicit process. You know that learners don't learn in straight lines. If the intention is to adopt some kind of platform or tool for AI in your classrooms, how does it support those beliefs? Is it going to provide the students with massive amounts of input, varied input in different contexts? 

Is it going to recognize developmental mistakes and not overcorrect natural mistakes that students make? For example, things like that? At my school, for example, if we were introducing a platform just for grammar to generate grammar practice exercises, how does that really support learning? Is that what we really need? We need to be able to ask these kinds of pedagogical questions as well as questions about the functionality of the platform. 

00:22:03 

Right. Hopefully that makes sense. So, going to move on to the third strategy which is to adopt and excel with innovative teaching practice. All right. And a quote from Ethan Mollock's CO Intelligence book, an amazing book about AI, an amazing introductory text on the topic of AI. 

Eva Malik amusingly says it's a blow that the first impact of large language models at scale was to usher in the homework apocalypse. So the homework apocalypse here is this idea that now with AI traditional assignments, I don't know, like a four paragraph essay can be done in seconds by AI. And maybe students are going to question what's the point? I think Joanne said this. What's the point of doing this kind of homework if AI can do it automatically for me? 

00:23:01 

Right. And so perhaps this is an opportunity for us to kind of change the way we do things in the classroom, to stop relying on these old fashioned techniques and to adopt more active learning approaches in the classroom. Now, most of you are probably familiar with the model of flipped learning. This is a kind of visual representation of a flipped classroom that I created a few years ago for a different talk. But it works well here. 

The idea of the flipped classroom, just in case you don't know, is that we give the students some preparation work to do before class so that there's more time in class for active learning, higher order thinking skills, and in our case, production and communication. As teachers we always complain that we never get to the speaking activity at the end of the lesson with a flipped classroom fixes that by having students do some of the receptive work or study work before class. In a flipped model, typically there's a preparation stage where we ask the students to do something at home. Could be study, could be exercises, could be research. But there needs to be an engagement strategy. 

00:24:09 

They need to know they're going to be checked on that. So when they come to class there's a verification stage where we check that they did the pre class work. It doesn't have to be me personally checking their work, but maybe there's a kahoot quiz or maybe some other kind of quiz. Maybe there's a self assessment, how did you get on with the task? What was challenging? 

Or maybe there's pair share or group work where the students share their research. And then finally there's an active learning stage with, with high order thinking skills, problem solving, collaboration, communication. So if you think like classic kind of ELT methodology, a debate the preparation stage, students read two points of view on a controversial topic. Well, they research, not read, they research two different perspectives on the controversial topic in the preparation stage. But they know when they come to class they're going to have to share their research.  

00:25:00 

They come to class, they in the verification stage, we assign them to debate teams. They share their notes, they plan their arguments for the debate, and then in the active learning stage, they engage in the debate and they use their research and their notes from the previous stage to challenge the thinking and the reasoning of the other team. Right, so that's how a flipped learning model would work with a debate. Imagine for example, students in the preparation stage are given a complex article to translate or simplify or summarize. They bring the, the outputs to class, they share with a colleague, and then they report to the group how the meaning was distorted or lost or changed through the process of simplification or translation. 

That's what a flip classroom model might look like. So we're using AI skills, they're developing their AI competencies, but they're also, you know, doing communicative activities in the classroom and there's more time for production, communication, higher order thinking skills. I feel like I'm waffling guys, so I'm gonna move on to the next point. 

00:26:03 

It also might mean that we start to develop students AI competencies in the classroom. And I don't think it will be long before we see English course books from Macmillan and other publishers which integrate AI competencies with language skills in lessons. Now one framework of, of AI competencies from students that we see on the slide here breaks the competencies down into areas like accessing, which is being able to choose the right AI tool to match specific needs. But then the one that probably gets the most attention in the literature and social media is prompting being able to create good instructions for AI tools to get useful answers. But on top of that, students need to be able to check that the outputs are reliable, compare them to trustable reliable sources, and, and students need to be able to use those outputs and those results in an honest way that shows their own ideas and their own learning. 

00:27:04 

There was a question in the previous session about that issue about how AI affects students thinking or intelligence. And I think it's just a question of making sure they develop these competencies to know that there is a right way to use AI to, in, in order to show their own thinking. I mean it's obvious when something most as teachers, you know, it's obvious when your student is handing in just AI Outputs. So adopting innovative teaching practices means probably developing these kinds of competencies in class. Nick Peachy does show some great examples of this in one of his books, I think It's AI and Critical Thinking. 

He suggests prompts that we can give students which aim to develop their critical thinking skills and their language skills. This is an amazing. I'm going to read this out. Forgive me, but just in case anybody's watching on a small screen. So the aim here is to develop logical arguments and the prompt is act as a critical thinking expert. 

00:28:04 

Help me develop my arguing skills. I'm an intermediate level learner of English. Do this by providing the first part of an argument and asking me to complete or support the argument. Wait for me to complete the argument and then provide the first part the of of another argument. So for example, the AI responds to the prompt with mobile phone should be banned in the classroom. 

And then the student follows up with a logical argument for or against that point and continues. You can imagine how this could work in a flipped classroom. Students could be given five, could be asked to do five of these and they bring them to class, share them with a colleague and then report them to the group. Group Nick, I see lots of applause there for these prompts. This is not my work. 

This is Nick Peachy's work. He also gives the example of identifying bias. So here's a prompt that students could use. Act as a critical thinking expert. Read through the answers, read through this news article and identify areas where the writer may be showing bias.  

00:29:03 

Describe the areas of bias in a suitable way for a B1 level Teenage English language learners. Right. Great example there of how students could develop their English skills and their critical thinking skills through AI at home. And Morehouse and Wong take a similar approach, but they focus on self regulated learning by showing students how to develop prompts for generating practice exercises for themselves. So I'm a high school student learning English and I struggle with verb tenses and phrasal verbs. 

Please create a quiz with 10 sentences where I have to choose the correct verb tense and explain why the answer is correct. So the idea is that we are showing students how to become self regulated learners while using AI, right? So those are just some examples developing students AI competencies of how we might adopt and excel with innovative teaching practices. Now the final strategy that I'm going to talk about in this session is to bring peace to the classroom. And you're probably looking at me thinking this long haired guy talking about peace. 

00:30:10 

This is going to be some hippie stuff, but really it isn't it's very, very interesting. Hopefully you agree with the sentiment on this slide, which is that AI can give me the answers, but my teacher gives me the reason to care about the answers. We are no longer the source of all knowledge. AI knows way more than we do. So perhaps our role now is accepting that AI has the answers. 

And our job is to make students want to be in the classroom and to create an environment that students feel comfortable participating in. The Idea of Peace is actually an acronym from the researcher and professor Don Socier, and it stands for the points that you see on the slide. So the P of piece is preparation, which is obviously being prepared for your classes, being familiar with your. Your content, having alternative activities up your sleeve. Right. 

00:31:08 

Being ready to go wherever the lesson takes you. Expertise are all the things that we do well as teachers. So for language teachers, it's about being able to scaffold input so that it's comprehensible to students. Giving instructions in such a way that everybody knows what they're supposed to do. Asking questions that support learning, giving feedback in a motivating way that helps students continue to learn. 

Authenticity refers to being able to connect with students in a way that goes beyond just the subject material. So if you're teaching language, maybe the students connect with you as a person as you share your passion for languages and culture or elements of your own language learning struggles and your own language learning journey. Caring is about understanding when students are low on confidence, for example, and adapting the demands of a task accordingly. And finally, perhaps most importantly, engagement, which is about, as I mentioned before, creating conditions in a classroom where students want to participate, they want to try out the new language, they want to work together, and they want to take risks. Right? 

00:32:16 

So maybe our job is more about bringing peace to the classroom than about having all of the answers. AI can't do these things. We can do these things. Right. What does this look like in practice? 

Well, I was delighted as an older member of the English language teaching community to see that Joanne mentioned Jill Hadfield in her talk. And many years ago, Jill Hadfield published a book called Classroom Dynamics. And those activities, 30 years old, are more relevant today than they ever have been. So let's have a look at a couple of her examples for building a positive classroom dynamic. These are examples of how we might bring peace to the classroom. 

We're going to think about the linguistic and non linguistic aims of these activities. So the first one here, shaking hands. Students circulate the room in three rounds. First, they shake hands with everyone, post Covid. Maybe this is fist pumps. 

00:33:16 

Is that what you call that? Fist bumps? Then they shake hands and say their names. And then they go around again and they introduce someone to someone else that they met. So we circulate the room in three rounds, right? 

And we get to know each other. Obviously, we're practicing language. We're giving personal information for introducing each other. But we're also breaking the ice and getting to know our classmates at the start course. Now check out this one. 

You think that was outstanding, Gabrielle, Check out this one. Group advert. This is one of my favorite activities. After analyzing language from written ads, students use positive, superlative adjectives to design and to design an ad promoting their class. The goal is to persuade another teacher to take over the group by showcasing its strengths. 

00:34:05 

Okay, think about that for a second. The students are going to write an ad about themselves, about their strengths as a group to convince another teacher to take over the class next semester. And it might look like this. The most amazing class ever. Are you ready to teach the friendliest, funniest, most enthusiastic group of students in London? 

We are the most curious, most creative, most supportive teammates. Teaching us will be the most rewarding experience of your career. So look, lots of target language in here, but also building a sense of belonging, building a group identity. One more again from Jill Hadfield from 1992. If I were you. 

Students work in pairs, preferably back to back, and complete a questionnaire as if they were their partner without conferring. Then they compare answers and discuss accuracy. So look, this is a classic conditionals exercise, which usually we'll just do students in their workbooks or whatever, but how about we do it back to back and I try and anticipate what you would do in these situations. We then turn around and we compare our sheets. Not only do you practice conditionals, practice language, but we. 

00:35:19 

We build empathy. We get to know each other. Right. And it's highly communicative at the same time. There's a real purpose to the communication. 

Right? So these are just examples of how we might bring peace to the classroom. I think I'm going a little bit over time. Let me just give you one more example, just to move beyond Hadfield's 1992 book. Lately, in language teaching, there's been a focus on developing social emotional competencies. 

Well, at least in course books. And I think this is a good thing. There's an activity that I do with teachers in workshops sometimes. It's called the yes But Game. And this is where we get. 

Get teachers to think about A negative. We can get your students to do it as well. Of course. Think about a negative situation. Think about all of your neg.  

00:36:01 

All of the negatives that you associated with this challenging situation and then try to reframe those negatives with the phrase yes, but. And oftentimes I'll tell teachers, for example, in the context of this session, I'll tell them, you are responsible for implementing an AI platform at your school. What negative thoughts do you have? Write them down. And they say things like, I don't know much about AI and then they have to reframe those and they can collaborate on those reformations. 

If that's a word with the phrase. Yes, but. So, yes, but it'll be a great opportunity for you to learn about it. And here we're practicing English, but we're also developing social emotional competencies to be able to deal with challenges and look at challenges in a positive way. Way.  

00:36:49 

Just another example of how we might bring peace to the classroom. Okay, so this is what we did today. I think I suggested that there are four general strategies that we can use to safeguard our professional agency and to make sure that we stay relevant and to make sure that the, you know, there's human accountability in the classroom. Self directed, collaborative CBD using frameworks like the UNESCO document. Being able to ask those kind of critical questions when we talk to parents, when we talk to publishers, when we talk to colleagues at the school. 

Innovative teaching practice by integrating AI competencies into our lessons and bringing peace to the classroom by building a positive classroom dynamic. If you found that interesting, here are some references and I think, well, that brings me to the end, guys. Thanks very much for listening all. I don't know how many there are now. 1.2 K. That's my biggest audience ever, Sheila. 

00:37:56 

There you go. Thanks, everybody. 

[Sheila Moreno] 

Awesome, Mark. Yeah, it's, it's a very great audience, a huge one. And actually highly into the session, they were participating a lot. 

They didn't stop typing comments and sending reactions. So very interesting. Thank you very much for this, Mark. And we have a couple of questions over here. If you allow me, I will be reading them for you.  

[Mark Arthur] 

Joanne's questions were so hard. Be nice to me, Sheila. Come on.  

[Sheila Moreno] 

Okay, I will try, but it's not me, it's the audience. They are so interested. 

So we have this first question by Ms. Rowland and well, the question says, for flipped learning, would you ask the students to look for the vocabulary and grammar even if they haven't encountered that, or do you use like article or video with a First approach, like what would you suggest in this situation?  

00:38:57 

[Mark Arthur] 

Yeah, it's always hard to understand. It's always hard to understand exactly what's meant by a question like that. But I think researching vocabulary can definitely be part of a preparation stage of a flip model. Right. 

So if students know that they have to look for certain words on a particular topic, that could work. If you're talking about language that students don't know in a reading or listening text, it kind of depends. Right. Because it depends what the purpose of the lesson is. But if we want students to comprehend what they're reading and listening to, then perhaps we would give them a glossary or translation glossary to support comprehension there, which they could use at home while they, while they do the research or while they work with those texts. 

Yeah, I think that would be perfectly acceptable if I understood the question correctly. 

00:39:47 

[Sheila Moreno] 

Thank you. I'm pretty sure you did. Or the teacher will text again. And we will be glad to read the question again. 

Yeah, sure. And, well, here's another one. And this question says, how can we use AI authentically in a meaningful way that brings real change in our students skills and knowledge? 

[Mark Arthur] 

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think those examples from Nick Peachy, the prompts that he suggests for analyzing texts, those would be a good way so that students can use those prompts at home to prepare for lessons in class. Or I mean, teachers that I've talked to that work in literature programs tell their students up front, you know, these are teachers I work with here in Mexico. I'm not going to accept work that's just produced by AI. But if you use AI, you need to tell me what you did. And so understanding that students will be using AI in their professional working lives, in their academic careers, I think we probably need to allow them to do that. 

00:40:58 

But we need to make sure that there were classroom guidelines or school policy on what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. And when students submit their work, maybe as part of a portfolio process or part of meetings with students about their work, about their progress, they need to talk, they need to share how they used AI or explain what AI was used and how it was used in the process of producing the work. 

[Sheila Moreno] 

Sure, agree. Thank you very much for that. Mark, one more question over here. 

How can AI be used, used to promote shared responsibility for learning between teachers and students? 

[Mark Arthur] 

I think the examples from Morehouse and Wong, like creating prompts to generate your own practice activities is a really good example of that. So anything that kind of pushes self regulated learning, I mean this session has focused, I suppose, on generative AI, but of course, that's not. Generative AI is not the only kind of AI. There are things like flashcard apps which use some kind of AI principles for spaced repetition and will facilitate the effective learning of vocabulary items. 

00:42:13 

So using different technology tools to support learning would be one way to do that. The most obvious one would be flashcard apps, but also reading. Extensive reading, extensive listening outside of the classroom. Any tool that can support those kinds of things. I've seen teachers. 

I've seen teachers on LinkedIn, for example. Joe Dale's got lots of examples of teachers using Google tools to generate graded readers. So maybe teachers and students could collaborate on a graded reader project and generate graded readers using AI tools and they could share their graded readers in the class. But if you search for Joe Dale and work on graded readers, there's some really good stuff. 

00:42:56 

[Sheila Moreno] 

Great, great. Thank you very much, Mark. Well, it's been a pleasure to have you here, teachers. Really enjoyed this session. Thanks again on behalf of all the. The attendees and also on behalf of Macmillan education. 

Mark, thanks a lot and enjoy your day.  

[Mark Arthur] 

Yeah, thanks, guys.