The “Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services” has officially come into effect, leading to rapid development of generative AI in China that provides services to the public. This has provided technical support for teachers to use generative AI, making it possible for schools to incorporate generative AI into their teaching.
The door to education with generative AI has already opened.
1
The first step for every teacher to use generative AI software is to open it up. It is recommended that everyone hands-on experience by registering and using the national internet information office-approved AI large model on their mobile phone or computer, and send your ideas via prompts.
Regardless of what educational issues you focus on, generative AI can provide unexpected responses. The more specific and precise the prompt design, the more specific and precise the response will be.This kind of human-computer dialogue can broaden your original thinking, but it may also be inaccurate, even “seriously talking nonsense”, which has a lot of uncertainty and requires you to think independently and judge.
This learning process based on generative AI is very similar to playing chess:
As one side in the game, you give prompts to the AI, just like placing a piece on the chessboard, and the AI does not know in advance how you will ask;
It will calculate based on your prompts and provide a response, and you cannot predict how the AI will respond;
You ask follow-up questions based on the AI’s response and give the next move, which the AI also cannot foresee;
It continues to calculate based on your current moves and gives responses… and so on in a cycle.
This kind of uncertain and deeply interactive generative learning activity can continuously stimulate the imagination and interest of both parties. This is why chess has maintained its charm throughout human history, and it is also what distinguishes generative AI from other past teaching methods and applications of information technology.
When generative AI is applied in the field of education, regardless of which learning theories and teaching needs you study and practice, it ultimately comes down to its greatest difference from other technologies: Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC).
Due to the sudden emergence of generative AI, there are currently no relevant discussions in classical works such as pedagogy, teaching theory, curriculum theory, educational psychology, and learning science. In teacher training activities across various regions, to explain the new developments in the application of generative AI in teaching to frontline teachers, we refer to this new learning method as generative inquiry-based learning.
What is generative inquiry-based learning?Generative inquiry-based learning refers to a teaching method where teachers and students strictly adhere to national regulations, ethical standards, and information security requirements while reasonably applying generative AI to assist teaching, and through the learners’ independent inquiry, critical thinking, and creative thinking, promote optimized learning.
Generative inquiry-based learning is a student-centered teaching method under the generative AI environment, emphasizing student autonomy in exploration and practical operation, constructing a knowledge system through human-machine interactive dialogue, cooperation, and communication between teachers and students, requiring students to use generative AI to assist teaching under the guidance, support, and control of teachers, aiming to cultivate students’ critical thinking, problem-solving ability, teamwork spirit, and innovative thinking.
The generative inquiry-based learning model includes the following six steps, with the dialogue exploration step being the most attractive and challenging.
Generative Inquiry-Based Learning Model
Stimulating Interest.Teachers can stimulate students’ interest in learning through various methods, such as creating problem situations to guide students’ learning interest. The setup of problem situations should ideally be closely related to real life, course content, and learning tasks. If the problem is based on open-ended questions from real life, it can better stimulate students’ initiative to explore.
Task Assignment.Teachers clearly present the tasks of generative inquiry-based learning to students based on curriculum standards and teaching objectives, guiding and controlling students’ learning process through task-driven methods.
Dialogue Exploration.Under the guidance of teachers, students aim to complete learning tasks and interact with generative AI in a dialogue, recording their critical thinking in a chain of thought dialogue and exploring through various means. For example, five basic search types (Baidu and Bing search, WeChat article search, Bilibili video search, China National Knowledge Infrastructure journal paper search, library book search), group peer exchange, consulting teachers, parents, and field experts, conducting experiments, and natural and social surveys, etc. Record their learning experiences and fill out learning process sheets. The learning sheet is a scaffold prepared by the teacher before class to guide the students’ learning process, specifically outlining the steps and process records for students to conduct generative inquiry-based learning under the teaching objectives, which can be used for process evaluation.
Transfer Practice.Students independently think about solving problems in new contextual issues, completing assignments and exercises assigned by teachers.
Conclusion Sharing.Students summarize their learning gains, integrating their experiential learning into rational cognitive structures and sharing their learning gains and research conclusions with group members. The sixth step is evaluation feedback. Teachers provide learning evaluations and further development suggestions.
Unlike various familiar teaching methods in the past,generative inquiry-based learning allows learners to interactively learn with AI in a chain of thought dialogue.The thought chain is a strategy used by artificial intelligence to handle complex tasks. This technology breaks down complex large tasks into smaller tasks containing multiple intermediate steps through a series of related instructions, guiding each small task with relatively simple instructions to assist the model in generating and solving complex logical reasoning tasks.
In teaching, the thought chain dialogue between teachers, students, and generative AI means that users ask a series of continuous questions and iterative follow-up questions, progressing from surface to depth, like squeezing toothpaste or peeling an onion, gradually forming a human-machine dialogue method to solve complex problems.
This game-like thinking training allows teachers and students to gain a completely different learning experience from past computer-assisted teaching and the use of digital educational resource platforms.
For example, in generative inquiry-based learning activities, teachers and students should cultivate independent thinking, critical thinking, decision-making thinking, challenging thinking, human-machine collaborative thinking, holistic system thinking, resilience of not being overly competitive, rigorous reasoning thinking, unconventional thinking, innovative thinking, and contextual thinking that considers the development of things over time and space, deep learning thinking that emphasizes depth over breadth, and philosophical thinking that likens chess to life, among others, gaining insights that cannot be learned from other teaching methods.
2
An important technological innovation supporting generative inquiry-based learning is the upgrade of the previously mature course management system in the mobile internet era to the “Generative Inquiry-Based Learning Course Management System”.
Frontline teachers report that there are two major challenges in applying generative AI in classroom teaching:
The first is that AI large models can “seriously talk nonsense”, making them unusable in teaching;
The second is that according to the Ministry of Education’s “Five Management” and the UNESCO’s “Guidelines for the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education and Research”: minors under 13 cannot independently use generative AI, and the entire class of students cannot register for generative AI using mobile phones in class.
First, regarding the accuracy of large models. The “large” of large models makes it impossible for them to delve into specialized academic fields. Developing focused “small models” for specific subjects and teaching scenarios is the new thinking to solve the first challenge.
Small Language Models (SLMs) are the future direction for applying generative AI in education: small language models are highly customizable and can be tailored to user needs, focusing on specific goals. For example, a small model can be customized for a subject, a textbook, or even a specific teaching application scenario. It is more cost-effective, efficient, safer, and more accurate, which is especially important for education.
Regarding the issue of widespread student use, teachers suggest two methods: first, students can form small groups, and teachers can register a large model account using their own mobile phone, requiring only a few teachers’ accounts for the entire class; second, large model providers can directly offer generative AI services to local education departments, allowing teachers and students to access large models through the intelligent education systems developed by the company.
3
Mr. Li Bingde categorized teaching activities into seven elements. What changes would occur if each element were combined with generative artificial intelligence?
Relationship of Teaching Elements
Every teacher has an intelligent teaching assistant.Teachers who master prompt design skills can have generative AI assist them in many tasks, just like a wise and capable teaching assistant. For example, grading assignments, writing lesson plans, designing assignments and exercises, creating PPT slides, writing research articles, designing micro-videos, drafting various work documents, writing program code, designing and managing experiments, etc., improving teachers’ work efficiency and reducing their workload while enhancing quality. In the near future, any teacher can have an AI-powered personal assistant available around the clock, far exceeding today’s information technology capabilities.
Every student has an intelligent tutor and learning partner.Students using generative AI can ask knowledge-related questions one-on-one and receive help; it can provide writing ideas, polish essay examples, and enhance imagination in writing; it can offer varied practice assignments, enriching problem-solving approaches; it can provide project-based learning suggestions; it can provide examples for writing program code; it can serve as a conversational partner and mentor for language learning; it can participate in large units and interdisciplinary learning activities, answer students’ questions, provide learning reference resources, and promote personalized teaching and tailored education.
Every principal has an intelligent assistant.Generative AI helps principals design various educational management documents; provides reference strategies for educational governance; searches for educational resource websites; builds campus culture; assists in writing educational research papers; offers suggestions for specific tasks; provides reference plans for school environment design; and offers advice on the development of educational information technology. Various assistants in schools can share large and small model data, connecting with each other to form an educational assistant network that can provide intelligent services around the clock.
Every textbook has a supporting generative AI small model assistant.Using generative AI to reshape educational publishing is a new avenue for various textbook publishers’ digital textbook publishing transformation. Based on past multimedia textbooks and cloud-based digital textbooks, AI small models tailored to different textbook versions can be developed and trained, combined with digital human technology, metaverse virtual learning space technology, speech synthesis technology, etc., to provide intelligent learning assistants for students. This requires collaboration between publishers and large model developers to provide a “small model editing training system” for textbook editors, assisting users in customizing scenarios; using proprietary data to train small models, allowing users to attach exclusive knowledge bases, with users fine-tuning or evaluating prompts, relying on large models for algorithms and computing power to enhance the efficiency of user-customized small model training.
The small model editing training system will prompt publishers to transform from traditional print book publishing institutions to new publishing organizations that integrate “full-media textbook + intelligent learning assistant”. This will be a disruptive revolution in textbook construction.
The curriculum system is evolving towards generative courses.Generative courses in the age of artificial intelligence refer to the dynamic generation of new learning content, including text, images, audio, video, and code, through the thinking chain dialogue between teachers and students with generative AI, changing the ways of teaching and learning activities, reshaping curriculum resources and teaching structures. The learning content and curriculum resources of generative courses are generated during the human-machine interactive dialogue process, which cannot be predicted by the previously planned curriculum compilation and print textbook publishing process. This intelligent generation method disrupts people’s cognitive models of traditional curriculum and textbooks.
Characteristics of Generative Courses
Generative AI integrates into every aspect of the curriculum, and the course learning content resources generated through AI and teacher-student interactive dialogue possess characteristics of generativity, uncertainty, and richness, allowing teachers to link educational theories, teaching strategies, and subject teaching training data sets to the design of courses, the generation of course resources, and the management of teaching activities, enhancing AI’s understanding of course teaching content and its adaptive learning resource generation capability, forming a complementary relationship with traditional course resources. This is the new avenue for future curriculum construction.
4
-
Top-Level Design
Every school needs to establish management measures for the educational application of generative AI. Due to the powerful content generation capabilities of generative AI, there are also unpredictable risks and hazards. The UNESCO’s “Guidelines for the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education and Research” repeatedly emphasize that researchers, teachers, and learners need to be aware that generative AI does not understand the texts it generates; it can, and often does, produce incorrect statements. A critical approach should be taken to everything it generates, and the supervision of generative AI applications in education should be strengthened.
Governments, educational institutions, generative AI providers, school administrators, and teachers must seriously assess and supervise the potential risks of artificial intelligence, establish basic principles, procedures, measures, regulations, etc., for the use of generative AI in education and teaching, ensure information security, evaluate and strictly control the potential impacts of AI-generated content on the development of human abilities such as critical thinking and creativity, and implement specific provisions regarding the ethics and morals of artificial intelligence.
-
Teacher Training
Enhancing the generative AI literacy of all teachers, including basic skills for using generative AI, prompt design skills, management abilities for using generative AI in teaching, changes in teaching design, the development of assignments and evaluations, and even how teachers speak in class, requires re-learning.
Everyone can try to explore how to guide students in using AI functions in class.
Prompt 1: If students use generative artificial intelligence to assist learning in class, what changes will occur in the language used by teachers in teaching activities? Please provide 10 examples of teacher classroom language.
Prompt 2: When teachers let students interact with generative artificial intelligence during learning activities, how should students ask questions to AI? Please provide 20 examples of prompts that students can use to ask generative artificial intelligence.
Prompt 3: How to improve the skills of teachers and students in using generative artificial intelligence in teaching? Please provide 10 suggestions. Follow-up: How to avoid negative risks of students using generative artificial intelligence in learning? Please provide 10 suggestions for teachers.
-
Teaching Research
It is suggested that everyone try to make generative AI an educational research assistant, with prompts such as:
Assuming you are a high school Chinese teacher, how would you research the application of generative artificial intelligence in the thematic teaching activities of the People’s Education Press’s high school Chinese curriculum (you can replace it with your course name)? Please provide 10 innovative ideas for educational research topics, listing the research topics, significance of the research, and specific implementation plans in a table format.
-
Overall Reform
Education needs to be prepared to welcome the knowledge industrial revolution of the AI era, adapting to the challenges posed by the rapid development of artificial intelligence on future talent cultivation methods. The application of generative AI in teaching represents a profound transformation in teaching and learning methods, requiring both teachers and students to rethink everything from curriculum and textbook construction to the transformation of learning resources. This is a systemic change that necessitates comprehensive reform and development across educational concepts, institutional construction, organizational development, teacher training, curriculum reform, and educational evaluation.
Today, AI is creating a whole new world through generative means. This revolution is forcing all knowledge economy sectors to join the ranks of generative AI, and all social services must face digital and intelligent transformation. The new generation of intelligent ecological systems in society is beginning to take shape.
At this critical juncture of transitioning from a knowledge economy to an intelligent economy, the Ministry of Education has proposed accelerating the digital transformation development strategy in education. We must adhere to the principle of “balancing development and security, promoting innovation and lawful governance”, fully utilizing digital technology to seek new developments in education:
First, change students’ learning through digital education, initiating a learning revolution; second, empower teachers’ teaching through digital means, driving a teaching revolution; third, change school management through data-driven approaches, accelerating precise educational governance reform; fourth, lead with educational digitalization, reshaping the new ecology of education and teaching.
Chinese education needs to comprehensively analyze the impacts and changes brought by generative AI on society and education, conduct transformation research on curriculum, textbooks, and teaching methods, and actively adapt to the arrival of the generative AI era.
– END –
Statement | The content of the article is valuable for sharing, with copyright belonging to the original author and source. If there are copyright issues, please leave a message at the end or contact us through the background.
The Beauty of Education: Measuring Education from the Scale of Beauty | Born for Beauty, Beautifying Humanity——Exploring the Internal Driving Force for High-Quality Development in Preschool Education | Anchoring the “Curriculum Reform” Motivation: From Understanding to Empowerment, Reshaping Teachers’ Professional Lives | The Essence of Being Human: Reshaping the Collaborative Education Ecosystem of Home, School, and Society Theme Salon and Opening Ceremony of the “Between Education” Humanities Space for Teachers | In the Name of Nature, Cultivating Education, Allowing Life to Open Up Limitlessly | Collaborative Education: Following the Rhythm of Life, Building a “Psychological Moat” for Children | Awake, Restore, Grow: From “Emotional Shift” to “Life Resilience”, Returning to Happy Education | Reimagining Learning: Making Learning to Learn Truly Happen in the Age of Artificial Intelligence | Science and Humanities Share Roots: Cultivating Innovative Talents for the Future | Teaching through “Theatrical Play”, Moving Towards a Rich and Aesthetic Holistic Education | Appreciating Life Aesthetically: Existence, Transcendence, Placement——Roundtable Sharing of “Goodbye to the Shining Stars” | Why Modern People Still Want to Read Tang Poetry?——Roundtable of “Goodbye to the Shining Stars” | Connecting, Helping, Coexisting: A “Good Utopia” on the Wilderness——Home, School, and Society Flourishing Together in Relationships and Connections | Rediscovering Poetry Education: Paying Tribute to the Lyric Tradition Theme Forum and Opening of the “Finding the Beauty of Ancient Poetry” Illustration Exhibition in Nanjing | Dialoguing with Humanistic Spirit: Rebuilding Education to Reach “Being Human” | The Poetic Existence and Professional Growth of Educators | The Life of Qian Zhongshu: Thoughts Linger in Scholarship | Seeking Roots, Asking Questions, Exploring Beauty: Eaton’s Education Forum on Educators in Bihshan
“I-You” Encounter: May Every Teacher Wander on the Earth, Meeting the Vast World with All Their Existence |Li Qingming: “Deep Thinking is Rooted in Present Life”——The Call of the Field Takes Me from the Study to the Frontline | Cao Yongjun: The Spiritual Growth of a Language Teacher | Gan Guoxiang: Sincere and Profound Reading Sows New Narrative Possibilities for Life | Humanistic Educator Fan Yang: In Reading and Walking, Engaging in Understanding “Humanity” | Zhang Yanyin: Measuring Life with Natural Scales: To Be a Child of Clouds and Mud | Cheng Shangrong: Telling One’s Story on a Larger Life Scale | Fu Guoyong: Life is a Process of Drawing Circles | Zhang WenQuality: In the Intersection of Diverse Lives, “He” Guides You to a Broader World | Every Teacher Has Their Own Room, Opening Up a Bright Daily Life, Living an Aesthetic Educational Life | Cheng Shangrong: A Study Room Connecting the Past and Future | Li Qingming: We are Full of Achievements, How Can We Dwell Poetically? | Chen Wenyang × Zhao Yi: Dialogue by the Vegetable Patch · How a Principal and a Teacher Sculpt Leisure Time | Zhang Yanyin: Only in Motion Does Meaning Arise | Yin Tao: Engaged in Rooted Endeavors, Tao Ge Wants to Bloom Like a Flower | Zhan Danian: Walking 108 kilometers across the Gobi Desert, Just for Fun | Xia Kun: Leisurely Leisure——My Reading, Writing, and Play
