Imagine being able to quickly and easily differentiate your essay questions for your students for all your big writing assignments without spending prep periods or tons of time outside of school to come up with these questions. Chat GPT allows you to pick and choose what essay questions will work best for your students in a matter of seconds!
How Can I Use Chat GPT?
Just like coming up with discussion questions, you can ask Chat GPT to create essential questions for your writing assignments and then easily adjust the level of difficulty for them using the suggestions we shared in the first bonus blog post.
By providing different essay questions for your students, you can ensure that each student is being challenged and engaged at their appropriate level of learning.
We all know, some students may need more support and scaffolding in order to understand the material and write a quality essay, while others may be ready for more complex and advanced questions that require higher-level thinking skills.
By giving different essay questions, you can differentiate the level of difficulty and complexity of the task to meet the needs of each student. This may have been an overwhelming task in the past…of course you wanted to differentiate for your students but it took a lot of time and prep on your part.
Utilizing Chat GPT to help you come up with various essential questions for essay topics is a way for you to differentiate in a fraction of the time!
Easily Differentiate with Chat GPT
Let’s go through an example:
When you type in “What is a text-dependent essential question for the novel The Outsiders, it gives you back a bunch of options to choose from.
One possible choice is: How does Ponyboy’s understanding of his own identity change throughout the novel, and what events or interactions contribute to this change?
For students who may need more support, you can either ask Chat GPT to come up with an easier question OR you can ask it to give you some examples from the novel that illustrate Ponyboy’s understanding of his identity change.
You might determine that this is a challenging question and ideal for your more advanced students.
Then you can guide struggling students to those examples such as Ponyboy identifying as a Greaser at the beginning of the book and how he starts to question that loyalty at the end.
Think about how that will set struggling students up for success when you direct them where to focus their writing! And you were able to provide the necessary scaffolding in a fraction of the time! So, basically, you can use Chat GPT to tweak your essay questions as needed and then give your students options to write about or purposely assign certain questions to specific students to best support them in their writing process.
For teachers who are a bit nervous about embracing this new AI technology in the classroom, using it to generate possible essay questions is a great way to start testing it out and seeing how it can benefit you in your ELA prep!
