Classroom differentiation is a lot easier now when we can harness the power of ChatGPT. I wish it was around a few years ago!
I remember when I had two science classes in the same year. 24 in each class. How different could they be?
Night and day.
One class was well-behaved and wanted to learn. The other class? Well, they were …different. It was down to four students. These four had no interest in science (or they kept it well hidden). They were definitely interested in disrupting the class. Not mad stuff, but low-grade. And it was constant. They were also the catalyst for others who would generally be well-behaved.
I didn’t look forward to teaching that class.
The reason I’m mentioning this is that I came up with an idea to hook them. I let the whole class choose their own method of remembering the periodic table (just the basics, groups, periods etc, not the whole table!) I gave the class ideas such as making an illustration, maybe a bit of drama/sketch, a poem and ….a rap.
Their eyes lit up. “You’ll let us do a rap?”.
“Absolutely, as long as it’s about the Periodic Table”.
And it worked really well. They surprised me with their creativity.
If only ChatGPT had been around!
Have you dabbled with AI yet? If not, give it a try. It makes classroom differentiation really easy. The more information you feed it about what it is you want it to do, the better. I asked it to create a poem about the structure of the atom in the style of Seamus Heaney (a famous Irish poet). Pretty niche.
Here’s what it returned.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this will not appeal to most middle schoolers (I like it, though!).
But a rap might work.
So here’s what I did next.
Impressive!
I went a step further.
AI has the potential to make classroom differentiation really easy for us. It won’t work magic and suddenly change a challenging class into a more manageable one, but it helps. My class was still challenging throughout the year, and there’s no denying that. But this small little thing, this rap, did make things a little easier. I think the fact that the kids made up their own rap was the best part. But we don’t always have time for that, so ChatGPT will be able to help in those cases. And the four that were disruptive often mentioned how they remembered that class even in later years! It made a class I was dreading into one that I remember fondly after all these years. A small win.