ELA Lesson: Gen AI Pros and Cons
Lesson Plan
1 hourGrades9, 10English Language Arts
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Written by Kara Hisatake
About this lesson
Students define generative artificial intelligence, discuss the potential pros and cons of GAI’s impact on learning, and then practice using GAI as a class. Students identify ways to address the problem of bias in GAI’s results and independently test GAI by using prompts of their choosing.
Inquire: Students brainstorm what generative artificial intelligence is, and how they feel about it.
Investigate: Students experiment with different generative artificial intelligence prompts.
Inspire: Students test the efficiency and bias of generative artificial intelligence.
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Suggestions
- This lesson aligns with Hawai’i’s Nā Hopena A‘o HĀ-BREATH Framework.
- This lesson can be taught at the beginning of the year or semester to help teach about academic integrity, plagiarism, and citations.
- This lesson can be taught by librarians or technology departments.
- This lesson can be repeated to see the differences in new and emerging technology, especially the differences between generative AI and the databases they are trained on.
- This lesson can be expanded to take a deeper dive into data privacy through the following articles: How to Stop Your Data From Being Used to Train AI (Wired, 2024) and Your Personal Information is Probably Being Used to Train Generative AI Models (Scientific American, 2023).
- This lesson highlights the injustice of bias that is present in all technology.
- Teachers may encounter potentially offensive or biased images or text. Teachers can use this as a learning opportunity to question the generative AI about how it came up with the image or discuss why some people might consider the image or text biased and why others might disagree.
Prerequisites
- This is lesson 1 of 3 in our 9th-10th grade ELA Unit: Generative AI.
- Teacher should test out or be familiar with ChatGPT and Gemini, and have an account for both.
- Teacher should review best-use practices for technology at their school and what websites or applications are allowed.
- Teacher should consider in advance how to address with students potentially offensive or harmful stereotypes that generative AI might produce.
Differentiation
- Teachers can scaffold this lesson by providing sentence stems or sentence examples for students to copy and paste as a prompt into generative AI. More advanced students can create their own prompts to test.
- Teacher can challenge more advanced students by asking them to research and analyze:
- the real-world impacts of AI bias, and the potential effectiveness of proposals for eliminating bias in generative AI. How could AI help or hinder justice?
- the ethics of generative AI tools using the work of authors and artists without consent, and/or the lack of citation of sources. Are some GAI tools better than others?
- the relationship between generative AI and the spread of false or misleading images and information on social media. How can this be countered?
From the scientist review
Learners will be able to comprehend the operation of the Generative AI tool, as well as its benefits and drawbacks, and how it may be used in the classroom to improve student learning. After reviewing the lesson, we were satisfied that it met our scientific credibility requirements.
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About the teacher writer
Kara Hisatake
Teacher
Kara Hisatake holds a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She has more than six years of experience teaching high school English Language Arts for grades 9–12. Her expertise is in literature and English language arts education.
