Leadership Isn’t About Your Job Title

 Harvard Business Review:

Leadership Isn’t About Your Job Title

You don’t need to be the boss to be a leader. Here are three actions you can take to hone your leadership skills right now and become a highly respected and influential team member. Embrace your existing strengths. Start by asking yourself: Which tasks at work feel most energizing and natural to you? Which projects do you excel at and enjoy? What unique perspective do you bring to the table? Your strengths, identity, and interests are what set you apart. The more you understand yourself, the more you’ll be able to carry yourself with the confidence of a leader. Devote time to daily development. Improving your skills will help you expand your impact and influence. For example, maybe your organization values leaders who can back up their ideas with hard data and insights, or those who project empathy, curiosity, and compassion. Whatever it is, take note and prioritize developing those skills and projecting growth on a daily basis. Connect with people. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert (or somewhere in between), you can establish the kinds of meaningful relationships that are key to building influence on your team. Commit to being vulnerable, authentic, and empathetic in your interactions with your colleagues.

How to Use ChatGPT in Class

 From this Edutopia article: "Some ideas for Using ChatGPT in Middle and High School Classes"

SPOT THE COMPUTER ESSAY 

John Warner, blogger for Inside Higher Ed and author of Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, reminds us that these tools are only rearranging words and not applying feeling, heart, or other emotional components; the results lack energy. In a language arts classroom, we might describe such a piece of writing as having a weak “voice.”

For a playful exercise, share two or three pieces of human writing from the past year or two and slip in an example from ChatGPT, and have students discuss what makes these examples human—or decidedly not. Nuance, passion, and, perhaps, even fallibility will be clues that students can investigate.

USE PRIMARY SOURCES AND FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNTS 

My colleague Joy Xu in the English department asks students to interview someone and connect this person’s experience to a text. First of all, the narrative/expository combination provides more points of entry for student writing.

Second, this synthesis ensures that no machine prompt can provide language to express new learning.

COMPARE TWO READINGS 

Peter Greene, a senior writer for Forbes magazine and a high school English teacher of nearly 40 years, suggests that we require students “to compare and contrast a pair of literary works (provided the comparison is not a time-worn one).”

Students will create unique essays that demonstrate their learning, the connections they’ve made, and the meaning. Again, because these AI tools are trained on what can be found on the internet, the rarer the story, the rarer the computer-generated analysis.

EXPECT CLASSROOM DISCUSSION TO BE USED AS A RESOURCE 

This idea, loosely based on another Peter Greene suggestion, considers a key component of what he calls “authentic writing” class discussions. He recommends that the discussion “[become] one of the texts being considered.”

A rather positive result that would likely emerge from this idea would be students paying closer attention during classroom conversations. Dare I say they may even take notes?

ChatGPT: What to do what it happens?

 From Edweek article by Alyson Klein: link

1. Make your expectations very clear

Students need to know what exactly constitutes cheating, whether AI tools are involved or not.“Every school or district needs to put stakes in the ground [on a] policy around academic dishonesty, and what that means specifically,” said Michelle Brown, the founder and CEO of CommonLit. Schools can decide how much or how little students can rely on AI to make cosmetic changes or do research, she said, and should make that clear to students. She recommended “the heart of the policy [be] about allowing students to do intellectually rigorous work.”

2. Talk to students about AI in general and ChatGPT in particular

If it appears a student may have passed off ChatGPT’s work as their own, sit down with them one on one, CommonLit and Quill recommend. Then talk about the tool and AI in general. Questions could include: Have you heard of ChatGPT? What are other students saying about it? What do you think it should be used for? Discuss the promises—and potential pitfalls—of artificial intelligence.

3. If students use ChatGPT for an assignment, they must attribute what material they used from it

If students are allowed to use ChatGPT or another AI tool for research or other help, let them know how and why they should credit that information, Brown said. Since users can’t link back to a ChatGPT response, she suggested students share the prompt they used to generate the information in their citation.

4. Ask students directly if they used ChatGPT

If students say “yes,” Romoslawski likes to get a sense of why. “More often than not, the student was just struggling on the assignment. They had a roadblock. They didn’t know what to do,” he said. “They were crunched for time, because we’re a high-achieving high school and our students are taking some pretty rigorous courses. This was their third homework assignment of the night and they just wanted to get through it.”

5. Don’t rely on ChatGPT detectors alone to determine if there was cheating

There are a number of tools—including one from OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer—that purport to be able to distinguish an AI-crafted story or essay from one written by a human. But most of these detectors don’t publish their accuracy rates. And those that do are ineffective about 10 to 20 percent of the time.

6. Make it clear why learning to write on your own is important

Students in general, and particularly students who take advantage of AI to cheat, need to understand what they are missing out on when they take a technology-enabled shortcut. Educators should try to persuade students that learning to write on their own will help them reason and think, or be critical to future job success, Gault said.

But others will need a more immediate incentive. The strongest argument one teacher came up with, according to Quill’s Gault? Tell students that learning to write will make them more persuasive, and therefore, “you can convince your parents to do what you want.”

Build Learning into the Day

 Harvard Business Review:

Build Learning into Your Team’s Day-to-Day Work

How can you help your team learn in the flow of work? Here are three strategies to try. To start, normalize making mistakes so employees fear them less and learn from them more. Encourage them to quickly share with someone else when they mess up, focusing on the question: What did you learn from that mistake? To model this behavior, you might start your monthly team meeting by sharing an insight you learned from a mistake you made. Next, build constructive feedback into your team’s regular workflows. Allot time in meeting agendas and project calendars to consider both what worked well and what would make the process and outcomes even better. Proactively showing your team what they’re doing well will increase confidence and prompt people to continue stretching their potential. Finally, encourage experimentation. Show your team that you’re open to their pitches—and that you’re willing to prototype and pilot good ideas. You might ask: What is one idea for improvement that would support you to achieve your objectives for this quarter? To make that idea happen, what would you need to start, stop, or change? And how could you test that idea quickly? Asking your employees to think outside the box will stoke learning and development on your team.

Our job in life - Fred Rogers

 “As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has – or ever will have – something inside that is unique to all time.” ~ Fred Rogers

DeSantis and Education

 NYT article here.

Mr. Corcoran will replace Patricia Okker, a longtime English professor and college administrator who was appointed in 2021.

While expressing her love for both the college and its students, Dr. Okker called the move a hostile takeover. “I do not believe that students are being indoctrinated here at New College,” she said. “They are taught, they read Marx and they argue with Marx. They take world religions, they do not become Buddhists in February and turn into Christians in March.”