By Katie Durkin
What I love most about teaching is it’s a profession of collaboration and inspiration. At any time, you can see a colleague’s lesson or have a brainstorming session, and your work is transformed.
But it is also a profession where there is a lot on teachers’ plates, and there often is not a lot of time in the school day to do everything that needs to be done.
Similar to my work with using AI to provide students with feedback on their writing, I really never imagined I would use AI to create assessments for my classroom. But this year I have found myself consistently returning to AI to help me with assessments because it has freed up more time in my teaching day.
AI has helped me to create all kinds of assessments: pre-assessments, summative, formative, and small group work. For the purposes of this article, I want to give you a taste of how I have used AI to brainstorm ideas for formative assessments, alongside small group instruction and extra practice.
Using AI begins with due diligence
To begin, I think it’s important to address three important points.
First, before I use AI to help with assessments, I always make sure to personally examine and evaluate student work. To me, this is the critical first step and why I’ve liked using AI in this way – I know where my students have been. Now AI can help me plan where I want them to go. Rather than worrying about what I’m going to need to create next, I can spend more time examining student data because I know that AI will help me create something to use with students, as long as I have a place to start.
I also think it’s important to note that I have used AI to plan assessments, and it has been wrong. This year, I’ve been lucky enough to sit in on technology lessons with our amazing library staff, and I’ve learned that these are called hallucinations. AI isn’t always right or doesn’t always know, and it sometimes makes up things rather than disappoint you.
Even though this is a current flaw with AI, it hasn’t deterred me from continuing to use it. I have the background knowledge to know when something is inaccurate or used incorrectly and can make that adjustment. Overall, I feel like the time I’m gaining back that I can use with my students outweighs the extra time spent correcting AI’s mistakes.
Finally, I have been fortunate that we use SchoolAI in my district. SchoolAI is an AI platform specifically designed for use in the classroom and by teachers. For the purposes of brainstorming ideas for assessments, I have used SchoolAI exclusively. Its bots (it has several) are specifically designed to help teachers. The bot I primarily use for this work is the Co-teacher.
Here’s my process for formative assessments
The first way I used AI with formative assessments is through a review worksheet I use with my students. Every week, students complete a worksheet that asks them to work on grammar skills. AI has helped me to brainstorm ideas for two parts of this work: the Homophone of the Week and Correcting Grammar.
My students this year have needed a lot of extra practice with homophones and recognizing grammar mistakes in writing. Here are some example prompts I have used this year with AI:
- Create different prompts for 7th grade students to practice using there, their and they’re multiple times in a paragraph.
- Create a paragraph with the following grammar mistakes for 7th grade students to correct: run-on sentences, the F.A.N.B.O.Y.S. comma rule, and the coordinating adjectives comma rule.
- Create challenging practice questions for 7th grade students to recognize the difference between independent and dependent clauses.
I use what AI provides as a jumping off point to either revise what it’s given me or ask it to change something. AI usually gives me some good options that I could potentially use and revise to fit the needs of my students. But sometimes I also notice that the bot gives me something too simplistic, and I can ask it for something a bit more difficult (or vice versa). I like that I can interact with the bot, knowing what my students are able to do, and then customize the work to be specific to their needs.
Here’s a detailed example
Recently, my students were struggling with independent and dependent clauses and simple and complex sentences. I prompted the AI to provide some activities 7th grade students could complete on a weekly worksheet, and it gave me some different options to consider.
The particular prompt about simple and complex sentences also provided me with an idea for an activity I could complete with a small group. The AI suggested having students use strips of paper with different types of clauses to pair them up to understand simple and complex sentences.
It also provided some ideas about dependent and independent clauses that could possibly go together. I edited some of them to be a bit more catered to my students and their abilities. Then I was able to print and cut out the results to use with my students the next day.
AI’s idea about sorting clauses to understand sentence structure also helped me customize an activity to use with a few students to help them better understand this grammar concept. This is an activity that would have taken me a much longer time in the past to create, but because AI gave me a starting point, I was able to make something I could use that day.
Creating quick reviews
I continue to use AI to create quick reviews for my students. Here are some examples:
- After I’ve reviewed their work and know what they need, I can produce a quick half-sheet of review questions for any concept I’m teaching. I’ve used this to create review questions for comma rules or homophones: affect and effect was a favorite of mine since my students struggled a bit with this one.
- Students recently took a test on some of the grammar concepts I had taught this year, and I created a study guide using AI, thanks to my colleague Dr. Silver-Bonito, who taught me how to do this.
- One of my students wanted a bit more practice with a particular topic. I was able to go on AI, ask it to give me five practice sentences for the F.A.N.B.O.Y.S. comma rule, and email the student right at the end of class.
If a student had asked that of me before AI, I most likely would have had to look in my arsenal of teacher resources or tried to create something “quick and dirty” on the spot. But AI saved me time, and I was able to fulfill the student’s request quickly and efficiently. When this particular student immediately asked for more help with another grammar topic, it was another great opportunity to use AI to quickly create something tailored to his exact question.
I’ve only just begun!
I know that there’s still a lot to learn about AI, and I am definitely in the experimentation phase. But what AI has done in its “assistant” role this year has been transformative. It has helped me save time brainstorming ideas for assessments, which I believe has given me more time to provide students personal feedback – a feat for any English teacher.
My goal is to continue trying to find ways to use AI efficiently and ethically to help my students build important skills I know they will need in the future. And to make my busy teacher life a little less crazy.
Dr. Katie Durkin has been teaching middle school students for over a decade, and currently teaches English Language Arts at public Middlebrook School (6-8) in Wilton, Connecticut, where she is a 7th Grade Team Leader. Katie was the 2020 recipient of the Edwyna Wheadon Postgraduate Training Scholarship from the NCTE. She writes regularly for MiddleWeb.
Katie is a zealous reader of middle grade and young adult books and enjoys sharing her love and passion for reading with her students. In 2022 she earned her doctorate from Northeastern University, where her dissertation research examined the impact of classroom libraries on middle school students’ reading engagement.
