Teaching: How I Deal with AI in Writing Classes
When I tell people what I do, it’s often not long until they ask me how I deal with AI in the classroom. In the past few years, I’ve heavily overhauled my writing courses to disincentivize AI use. Here is a brief snapshot of what I’ve done.
Increased number of one-on-one writing conferences. This helps me get a better sense of how a student is learning and where they’re struggling. My hope is that it also helps us build a positive teacher/student relationship such that they know they can trust me and talk candidly about their writing. We also collaborate to identify personalized goals for them to work on in their writing. I grade them on how well they meet these. I do this to increase students’ sense of agency and, hopefully, their buy-in to what the course is trying to teach.
Minimized rewards for grammar and spelling. I do mark significant or recurring grammar and style errors, but I do not weigh grammar and spelling especially highly in my grading rubric. This may seem counter-intuitive for a writing class, but my goal is to reduce incentives for students to put their paper into an AI and tell the AI to correct grammar and spelling for them.
Increased focus on documented revision work and metacognition. In my first-year writing courses, students one rough draft and a final draft. I compare the two using Microsoft Word’s compare feature in the review tab. The rubric I use to evaluate these changes rewards highly for substantive changes (addition of paragraphs, sentences, rearranging text) and minimally for proofreading-level corrections. After students complete the assignment, a few days later they submit responses to metacognition questions. These ask students to talk about their revision process, how they addressed peer feedback, rhetorical audience and purpose, and how they used a specific writing technology in their work. To minimize AI tool incentives, I do not check metacognition question responses for spelling or grammar.
These measures are not expected to eliminate AI use in student papers—I think that genie is far out of the bottle and nearly impossible to truly police, as many folks have documented elsewhere.
They are intended, though, to increase students’ buy-in on the course. I want them to feel invested in what they’re doing, and I want them to think carefully and deliberately about what they’re doing.
In that sense, while I often wish AI never existed, I do find that trying to deal with it from an instructional design perspective has made me a better teacher.