AI and teacher training

Who can tell where a blog post might lead? Over six years ago I wrote about adaptive professional development for teachers. I imagined the possibility of bite-sized, personalized CPD material. Now my vision is becoming real.

For the last two years, I have been working with a start-up that has been using AI to generate text using GPT-3 large language models. GPT-3 has recently been in the news because of the phenomenal success of the newly released ChatGPT. The technology certainly has a wow factor, but it has been around for a while now. ChatGPT can generate texts of various genres on any topic (with a few exceptions like current affairs) and the results are impressive. Imagine, then, how much more impressive the results can be when the kind of text is limited by genre and topic, allowing the software to be trained much more reliably.

This is what we have been working on. We took as our training corpus a huge collection of English language teaching teacher development texts that we could access online: blogs from all the major publishers, personal blogs, transcriptions from recorded conference presentations and webinars, magazine articles directed at teachers, along with books from publishers such as DELTA and Pavilion ELT, etc. We identified topics that seemed to be of current interest and asked our AI to generate blog posts. Later, we were able to get suggestions of topics from the software itself.

We then contacted a number of teachers and trainers who contribute to the publishers’ blogs and contracted them, first, to act as human trainers for the software, and, second, to agree to their names being used as the ‘authors’ of the blog posts we generated. In one or two cases, the authors thought that they had actually written the posts themselves! Next we submitted these posts to the marketing departments of the publishers (who run the blogs). Over twenty were submitted in this way, including:

• What do teachers need to know about teaching 21^st century skills in the English classroom?
• 5 top ways of improving the well-being of English teachers
• Teaching leadership skills in the primary English classroom
• How can we promote eco-literacy in the English classroom?
• My 10 favourite apps for English language learners

We couldn’t, of course, tell the companies that AI had been used to write the copy, but once we were sure that nobody had ever spotted the true authorship of this material, we were ready to move to the next stage of the project. We approached the marketing executives of two publishers and showed how we could generate teacher development material at a fraction of the current cost and in a fraction of the time. Partnerships were quickly signed.

Blog posts were just the beginning. We knew that we could use the same technology to produce webinar scripts, using learning design insights to optimise the webinars. The challenge we faced was that webinars need a presenter. We experimented with using animations, but feedback indicated that participants like to see a face. This is eminently doable, using our contracted authors and deep fake technology, but costs are still prohibitive. It remains cheaper and easier to use our authors delivering the scripts we have generated. This will no doubt change before too long.

The next obvious step was to personalize the development material. Large publishers collect huge amounts of data about visitors to their sites using embedded pixels. It is also relatively cheap and easy to triangulate this data with information from the customer databases and from activity on social media (especially Facebook). We know what kinds of classes people teach, and we know which aspects of teacher development they are interested in.

Publishers have long been interested in personalizing marketing material, and the possibility of extending this to the delivery of real development content is clearly exciting. (See below an email I received this week from the good folks at OUP marketing.)

Earlier this year one of our publishing partners began sending links to personalized materials of the kind we were able to produce with AI. The experiment was such a success that we have already taken it one stage further.

One of the most important clients of our main publishing partner employs hundreds of teachers to deliver online English classes using courseware that has been tailored to the needs of the institution. With so many freelance teachers working for them, along with high turnover of staff, there is inevitably a pressing need for teacher training to ensure optimal delivery. Since the classes are all online, it is possible to capture precisely what is going on. Using an AI-driven tool that was inspired by the Visible Classroom app (informed by the work of John Hattie), we can identify the developmental needs of the teachers. What kinds of activities are they using? How well do they exploit the functionalities of the platform? What can be said about the quality of their teacher talk? We combine this data with everything else and our proprietary algorithms determine what kinds of training materials each teacher receives. It doesn’t stop there. We can also now evaluate the effectiveness of these materials by analysing the learning outcomes of the students.

Teaching efficacy can by massively increased, whilst the training budget of the institution can be slashed. If all goes well, there will be no further need for teacher trainers at all. We won’t be stopping there. If results such as these can be achieved in teacher training, there’s no reason why the same technology cannot be leveraged for the teaching itself. Most of our partner’s teaching and testing materials are now quickly and very cheaply generated using GPT-3.5. If you want to see how this is done, check out the work of edugo.AI (a free trial is available) which can generate gapfills and comprehension test questions in a flash. As for replacing the teachers, we’re getting there. For the time being, though, it’s more cost-effective to use freelancers and to train them up.

Current trends in ELT (UK)

Around 25 years ago, when I worked at International House London, I used to teach a course called ‘Current Trends in ELT’. I no longer have records of the time so I can’t be 100% sure what was included in the course, but task-based learning, the ‘Lexical Approach’, the use of corpora, English as a Lingua Franca, learner autonomy / centredness, reflective practice and technology (CALL and CD-ROMs) were all probably part of it. I see that IH London still offers this course (next available course in January 2021) and I am struck by how similar the list of contents is. Only ‘emerging language’, CLIL, DOGME and motivation are clearly different from the menu of 25 years ago.

The term ‘current trends’ has always been a good hook to sell a product. Each year, any number of ELT conferences chooses it as their theme. Coursebooks, like ‘Cutting Edge’ or ‘Innovations’, suggest in their titles something fresh and appealing. And, since 2003, the British Council has used its English Language Teaching Innovation Awards to position itself as forward-thinking and innovative.

You could be forgiven for wondering what is especially innovative about many of the ELTon award-winners, or indeed, why neophilia actually matters at all. The problem, in a relatively limited world like language teaching, is that only so much innovation is either possible or desirable.

A year after the ELTons appeared, Adrian Underhill wrote an article about ‘Trends in English Language Teaching Today’. Almost ten years after I was teaching ‘current trends’, Adrian’s list included the use of corpora, English as a Lingua Franca, reflective practice and learner-centredness. His main guess was that practitioners would be working more with ‘the fuzzy, the unclear, the unfinished’. He hadn’t reckoned on the influence of the CEFR, Pearson’s Global Scale of English and our current obsession with measuring everything!

Jump just over ten years and Chia Suan Chong offered a listicle of ‘Ten innovations that have changed English language teaching’ for the British Council. Most of these were technological developments (platforms, online CPD, mobile learning) but a significant newcomer to the list was ‘soft skills’ (especially critical thinking).

Zooming forward nearer to the present, Chia then offered her list of ‘Ten trends and innovations in English language teaching for 2018’ in another post for the British Council. English as a Lingua Franca was still there, but gone were task-based learning and the ‘Lexical Approach’, corpora, learner-centredness and reflective practice. In their place came SpLNs, multi-literacies, inquiry-based learning and, above all, more about technology – platforms, mobile and blended learning, gamification.

I decided to explore current ‘current trends’ by taking a look at the last twelve months of blog posts from the four biggest UK ELT publishers. Posts such as these are interesting in two ways: (1) they are an attempt to capture what is perceived as ‘new’ and therefore more likely to attract clicks, and (2) they are also an attempt to set an agenda – they reflect what these commercial organisations would like us to be talking and thinking about. The posts reflect reasonably well the sorts of topics that are chosen for webinars, whether directly hosted or sponsored.

The most immediate and unsurprising observation is that technology is ubiquitous. No longer one among a number of topics, technology now informs (almost) all other topics. Before I draw a few conclusion, here are more detailed notes.

Pearson English blog

Along with other publishers, Pearson were keen to show how supportive to teachers they were, and the months following the appearance of the pandemic saw a greater number than normal of blog posts that did not focus on particular Pearson products. Over the last twelve months as a whole, Pearson made strenuous efforts to draw attention to their Global Scale of English and the Pearson Test of English. Assessment of one kind or another was never far away. But the other big themes of the last twelve months have been ‘soft / 21^st century skills (creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, leadership, etc.), and aspects of social and emotional learning (especially engagement / motivation, anxiety and mindfulness). Three other topics also featured more than once: mediation, personalization and SpLN (dyslexia).

OUP ELT Global blog

The OUP blog has, on the whole, longer, rather more informative posts than Pearson. They also tend to be less obviously product-oriented, and fewer are written by in-house marketing people. The main message that comes across is the putative importance of ‘soft / 21^st century skills’, which Oxford likes to call ‘global skills’ (along with the assessment of these skills). One post manages to pack three buzzwords into one title: ‘Global Skills – Create Empowered 21st Century Learners’. As with Pearson, ‘engagement / engaging’ is probably the most over-used word in the last twelve months. In the social and emotional area, OUP focuses on teacher well-being, rather than mindfulness (although, of course, mindfulness is a path to this well-being). There is also an interest in inquiry-based learning, literacies (digital and assessment), formative assessment and blended learning.

Macmillan English blog

The Macmillan English ‘Advancing Learning’ blog is a much less corporate beast than the Pearson and OUP blogs. There have been relatively few posts in the last twelve months, and no clear message emerges. The last year has seen posts on the Image Conference, preparing for IELTS, student retention, extensive reading, ELF pronunciation, drama, mindfulness, Zoom, EMI, and collaboration skills.

CUP World of Better Learning blog

The CUP blog, like Macmillan’s, is an eclectic affair, with no clearly discernible messages beyond supporting teachers with tips and tools to deal with the shift to online teaching. Motivation and engagement are fairly prominent (with Sarah Mercer contributing both here and at OUP). Well-being (and the inevitable nod to mindfulness) gets a look-in. Other topics include SpLNs, video and ELF pronunciation (with Laura Patsko contributing both here and at the Macmillan site).

Macro trends

My survey has certainly not been ‘scientific’, but I think it allows us to note a few macro-trends. Here are my thoughts:

• Measurement of language and skills (both learning and teaching skills) has become central to many of our current concerns.
• We are now much less interested in issues which are unique to language learning and teaching (e.g. task-based learning, the ‘Lexical Approach’, corpora) than we used to be.
• Current concerns reflect much more closely the major concerns of general education (measurement, 21^st century skills, social-emotional learning) than they used to. It is no coincidence that these reflect the priorities of those who shape global educational policy (OECD, World Bank, etc.).
• 25 years ago, current trends were more like zones of interest. They were areas to explore, research and critique further. As such, we might think of them as areas of exploratory practice (‘Exploratory Practice’ itself was a ‘current trend’ in the mid 1990s). Current ‘current trends’ are much more enshrined. They are things to be implemented, and exploration of them concerns the ‘how’, not the ‘whether’.