10 Ways to Use ChatGPT as a PYP Curriculum Coordinator

Are you resisting Artificial Intelligence (AI), afraid it’s going to lead to the destruction of our humanity, eliminating our jobs and withering our brains? Stop that! No, really that kind of thinking stifles creativity and innovation, and if you are a pedagogical leader, then you have an obligation to embrace emerging technologies. We are guiding our programs to develop our learners to be leaders of tomorrow. We can’t cling to the past. And when I say the past, I’m not talking about 500 B.C.E., I’m talking about 5 months ago. In fact, the past is no longer bygone days of old. It is one hour ago. To keep up with the fast-paced world, we must be open to change and agile.

So, let’s face the facts, just like smartphones aren’t going away, AI isn’t either. I’m not suggesting that you should let AI usurp your intelligence, I’m telling you that can use it to augment it and give your creativity a boost. Our jobs as PYP Curriculum Coordinators are complex, and often times we work in near isolation, so we could use a little help from AI from time to time. Although I plan to dedicate part of my summer learning to tinkering on ChatGPT to figure out more uses, here are at least 10 ways that you might use it to brainstorm and elevate your program right now:

1. Use it to inspire ideas during planning meetings: From provocations to possible field trips to inspiring student action, if teachers are in a rut, then stoke their creativity with a few ideas from AI.
2. Write or re-write central ideas: Wordy or confusing central ideas can be banished easily. If you work in a candidate school or your POI needs enhancing, then put in the related concepts and the aspect of your transdisciplinary theme you want to cover. Don’t forget to put in “child-friendly language” into your request before you hit send.
3. Create newsletters or articles for your learning community: Does your marketing department ask you to create newsletters? Are they due tomorrow? Well, give yourself a helping hand with plugging in your ideas and let it design a first draft so you can improve upon it and make those deadlines.
4. Generate ideas for parent meeting topics and activities: Ever been stumped on planning a parent meeting, or coming up with novel ways to work with parents to address their concerns?
5. Rewrite communication to check for tone and bias: Written communication, particularly emails, sometimes can hurt or upset staff or families. This is especially true when we are stressed or the topic is emotionally charged. Better to have AI rewrite your email so that it is more sensitive to the culture and issues in your community.
6. Come up with ways to improve teacher instructional practice: Some teachers really could use help but you may not be sure how best to help support them. Whether you want to come up with behavior management techniques or approaches to lesson planning, ChatGPT can help you coach teachers.
7. Develop our Program Development Plans: Oh yes, that’s right, struggle with your action research no more! ChatGPT will help you come up with goals, timelines, and possible ways to collect evidence for your school to move forward with its growth.
8. Create solutions to scheduling problems: Time is the only thing I can’t get a refund on, so I want to use it wisely.  Whether I’m trying to find creative ways to get collaborative planning time with homeroom and specialist teachers, or I’m trying to figure out better time-management techniques for myself, using ChatGPT to hack these problems seems like a good use.
9.  Plan Professional Development Sessions: Sometimes I walk out of a week of team meetings and think to myself that I should do a PD. But I don’t always have the time to make good on this desire. Throw the idea into ChatGPT to cut down on the cognitive load of PD design to come up with fun and interesting ways to design professional learning. It doesn’t matter if it is a 15-minute PD or a 2-Day training, it will definitely save time and inspire you to find engaging ways to promote professional learning.
10. Cross-walk standards: There are so many aspects of the curriculum that we have to manage, and mapping out the expectations and objectives of one set of curriculum standards to another is time-consuming. You can input your standards and ask it to find commonalities to ensure that our programme of inquiry and classroom instruction is comprehensive. Imagine what you could do with all that time if you got a head-start with ChatGPT!!

Bonus idea: Make sense of data: AIs are pattern-finding machines! Use it to help you triangulate data and generate optimal assessment practices for your program’s learning goals.

I hope this sparks your imaginative use of ChatGPT, inspiring and supporting your pedagogical leadership. I bet if you copy and pasted my 10 ideas into ChatGPT, it could give 10 more ways that we could use it. Go ahead! And share that with me! I want to expand and excel in my role as a coordinator. Let’s grow together!

And before I hit publish on this post, I’d like to leave you with some ideas from ChatGPT about some considerations for improving our results when we use it; it told me:

1. Be clear and specific: When you ask a question, try to be clear and specific about what you want to know. This will help the ChatGPT algorithm provide you with a more accurate response.

2. Use natural language: ChatGPT is designed to understand natural language, so try to phrase your questions in a way that feels natural to you. Avoid using overly technical or complex language.

3. Be patient: ChatGPT is an AI system that requires a few seconds to process your question and generate a response. Be patient and wait for the system to provide an answer before asking again.

4. Provide feedback: If you feel that ChatGPT is not providing you with useful answers, provide feedback to help the algorithm learn and improve. You can do this by rating the responses or providing additional information.

5. Stay on topic: ChatGPT is designed to answer specific questions. Try to stay on topic and avoid asking unrelated or vague questions. This will help the ChatGPT algorithm provide you with more accurate and relevant responses.

(By the way, I actually wrote this blog post… But who knows next time? lol.)

Well now that you have some ideas and tips, the skies are the limit! Let’s go forward into this new era of AI together!