Pedagogy and Practice 

Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT and Educating for the Future

For almost everyone working in the field of education, the past few months have presented a truly worthwhile disruption to the status quo of what we see as the rightful place of teaching, learning within a highly digitally enabled world. With Open AI releasing its Large Language Model, (LLM), called “ChatGPT” and making it free to access (at least for now) for everyone in the world, it has become the hottest topic in education right now, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Teachers and students will need to come to appreciate how this technology is changing the educational landscape and prepare to move ahead with it as an embedded reality of learning within a rapidly changing world.

Whilst there is expected and warranted push-back from many educational administrations who rightfully raise concerns about how this latest technology might be misused or even abused by some who take the opportunity to access this digital assistant, there is a definite need for all of us as teachers, as parents, as human beings, to become deeply familiar with the capabilities of this latest technological advancement. Only by being aware of the world around us, including the most recent technological innovations, can we truly be capable of influencing the direction the future takes. This is at the heart of education - how to make the future even better than the past. We do this knowing that progress can be challenging at times, but we do not shy away from that challenge - we engage in it so that the best ideas are the ones that prevail.

It is now, more than ever, that we need to teach our students how to be discerning decision makers, ones that are appreciative of the complexities of our world and capable of engaging with it through well-informed, critical thinking processes. These are the skills we are developing here at St Andrews.

I encourage all of our St Andrews College community members to engage as full participants in the exciting future-world our students will be living in as we, the dedicated teaching staff of St Andrews College, continue to go above-and-beyond the call of duty in order to best prepare all of our students for their future.

God Bless

Mr Paul Haras
Leader of Pedagogy and Practice