AI Lesson Planning - Student-Centered Lessons

Introduction

WHY Important 

A toolbox of ideas for creating students-centered lessons, putting learners in the driver's seat.

WHAT Will Be Learned 

The focus will be on:

  • Station-rotation alignment to topic/standard
  • Playlists of varied access to knowledge and assessments 
  • Projects vs Project-based Learning
  • Higher-order of the 4Cs

Building engagement into learning experiences is highly effective when students are at the center of the action. The more that students have opportunities to lead their learning through voice, choice, and agency, buy-in can increase. Generative AI can assist with evaluating, ideating, and researching strategies, ideas, and protocols that aid in placing students at the center of their learning experiences.

Examples of tools that may be useful for this task:

Many of the suggestions shared in Reflective Practices can be done by crafting a prompt that is specific to what you want accomplished. Here is a reference guide:

Reflective Practices

References

Guiding Reflection Questions

Suggested Action Steps

1.

AI in the Classroom: Enhancing Student Engagement, Digitally Enhanced Education Webinars, July 2023 (Video - 15:11)

AI in Education: Transforming Learning and Student Engagement, Global Education, June 2023 (Video - 4:02)

This collection of videos include educators talking about different ways that AI can support student learning. Here is a video for context about the concept of Student-Centered Learning. The examples demonstrate placing the students at the center of the learning experiences.

Why Should I Read This?

AI can support a wide range of activities that enhance student ownership of their learning, such as supporting personalized learning. Some examples include tutoring, simulations, feedback, and more.d

How can I give students agency to use AI while ensuring appropriate and professional practices and behaviors?

Ethical Use

The range of what AI can do includes many structures that teachers can use to empower, observe, and protect students in their use of AI. Consider how teachers can facilitate guided learning experiences, coach when issues become opportunities to reflect and grow, and monitor students as they practice making decisions. The key in such student-centered activities is that teachers are present and aware of what and how students are using AI through approved methods.

Review one or all of the videos for ideas that align with your work. Or, find a different video that shares apps that are currently regarded as supportive of student-centered learning.

Based on the above options, choose one idea or tool and incorporate it into your practice with learners.

Consider designing a prompt for AI that helps you create the learner experience that would best achieve the objectives while supporting some level of student voice and/or choice.


2.

Using ChatGPT to Support Student-Led Inquiry, Edutopia., October 2023

9 Tips for Using AI for Learning (and Fun!), Edutopia., October 2023. (Article)

Gen AI Is A PBL Teacher’s Best Design Companion, Center for Excellence. March 2024 (Article)

These articles touch on a variety of areas for promoting student-centered learning and how AI can aid in the goal.

Why Should I Read This?

Explore and expand your ideas for how AI can support existing quality practices for promoting student-centered learning.

What are different ways I can use AI to offer quality student-centered learning activities and experiences?

Ethical Use

When using AI to support student-centered learning, there are many ways to create experiences that both provide students with agency to lead their learning and establish structured and sometimes controlled environments within which to coach students while ensuring appropriate and ethical use of AI.

Choose from the different topics that these articles provide, from student-led inquiry to Project-Based Learning experiences.

Explore and expand your understanding and the possibilities of the chosen topic.

Create an initial outline for how best to incorporate AI as suggested in the readings.

3.

How AI Can Help Teachers Guide Students to Active Learning, Edutopia., March 2024 (Article)

This article offers a variety of examples for how teachers have used AI tools to engage in work. In each example, the teacher created a structured approach that included guardrails for how students engaged in using AI for a specific task, such as providing the prompts.

Why Should I Read This?

With AI freely available and accessible, students are using tools. Providing structured learning experiences aid students to learn quality ways for using AI under the supervision of a teacher.

How can students use AI tools using appropriate practices and habits?

Ethical Use

Supervised coaching by teachers can best ensure that students learn to use AI tools appropriately. This could include reflective conversations about how the students used AI in the current assignment compared to how they may have used AI on their own, ie., structured vs informal approaches.

Choose one of the ideas from the article and explore it for greater knowledge and understanding. Next, try a “draft” approach of the idea in your own practice.


Design or Automate

How can we use AI to enhance and support student-led learning experiences?

AI can be used to support the development of student-centered activities by generating key components and giving feedback. The examples come from the article, Strategies for Giving Secondary Students Plenty of Practice Writing, Edutopia., June 2024. It includes two strategies: 

  1. Create images that support the writing strategy: The Window Activity.

  2. Use AI as a thought partner to give feedback about author’s craft based on different parts of a writing task.

Prompt:

Review the examples in this PDF or at REMC. Go here for a complete list of transcripts or view the video. At Copilot, here are the transcripts: