Classroom discussions are powerful learning activities that engage students, although they may not be universally loved by students. Discussions require some background knowledge, inquisitiveness, active listening, some note-taking, and knowing when to speak. Discussions also take a skilled facilitator to ensure that the class stays focused, pivot away from misconceptions, and encourage students who may not be actively participating. I have a hypothesis that discussions on a topic by a particular grade level are not dynamic to the point of not being scriptable. Consider a teacher that facilitated a discussion on a particular topic for several class sections over several years. I’m thinking there is enough commonality that a ChatGPT-type engine could facilitate a discussion on a particular subject. This would be a huge boon to online classes, which rely on text-based discussions. I venture to say that none of the text-based classroom discussions where I've been a student have been worthwhile.
A sample use case. There is a database of discussion knowledge and facilitation prompts. This is probably collected from previous student discussions, but it can also include editorial contributions from teachers (“External Data” at least to each group of students). The knowledgebase has a governor (“the Release”) to facilitate an evolution of the discussion and not allow students to progress too quickly. The classroom discussions are facilitated by a ChatGPT-like product and the classroom discussions are captured. The new student interactions will be used to further train the model with more detail on student thinking pathways and related time requirements.
The daily discussion logs are also used to automatically generate asynchronous assignments. This includes asking students to clarify their statements, asking students to reconcile their different viewpoints, and metacognitive prompts. These asynchronous assignments are integrated with the class-specific classroom discussions to assess the class’s understanding as well as fine-tune the facilitation for continuing the class discussion.
