Highschool counselors have quite a bit on their plates. They’re holding particular person conferences with college students to assist them take into consideration their futures, fostering connections with school admissions officers, and writing letters of advice.
A lot of the work can get repetitive, as they discipline the identical questions from a number of dad and mom yearly and write dozens of advice letters.
That’s the place synthetic intelligence instruments may also help, stated Jeffrey Neill, director of faculty counseling at Graded: The American College of São Paulo in Brazil, a non-public faculty that serves college students ages 3 via highschool who use an American curriculum and be taught in English.
AI has made its approach into many different elements of Ok-12 training, serving to lecturers create lesson plans, grade college students’ work, compose emails to oldsters, and craft Individualized Schooling Applications, or IEPs, for college students with disabilities.
Neill mentioned his expertise with incorporating AI instruments into counseling on the School Board’s annual discussion board right here in Austin this week. Neill, whose e-newsletter gives an in depth have a look at a few of the free and paid on-line instruments he makes use of, additionally spoke with Schooling Week on greatest practices round AI in counseling highschool college students about school.
This interview has been edited for size and readability.
How can counselors use AI instruments of their common work?
The duties that basically lend themselves towards synthetic intelligence are these which might be repetitive and are easy and information-based. So, for instance … letters of advice.
These are heartfelt, passionate letters, however when a counselor takes the time to cease and take into consideration how a lot time goes into them, I believe most would acknowledge that after they’ve all the info in a single place, aggregated in a single location, the writing course of doesn’t take so long as they assume. It used to take me about three hours to jot down a single letter of advice, and I noticed that at the very least an hour-and-a-half, perhaps extra of that, was me amassing the data from all of the completely different areas.
Synthetic intelligence can try this, pull all of it collectively in order that if you’re going to jot down that letter, you’re working from one supply of data, actually simply hacking away at it, making it into that passionate letter that’s advocating on behalf of the person pupil.
There’s additionally a lot of little issues that may assist by way of the processes and procedures. About 150 schools and universities from around the globe have visited us on campus up to now this yr, and each time a university comes and visits, we attempt to promote it to our college students. We simply ask ChatGPT to jot down a three-sentence blurb concerning the college, together with well-known alums or one thing like that, and we blast that out to the scholars. I may write, generally, alone, however it does it quicker.
I spent a while [at the College Board forum] speaking concerning the e-mail triage software, which is basically a synthetic intelligence software that’s educated solely in your previous emails. Anytime a brand new e-mail is available in, it drafts primarily based on what it thinks you’ll say primarily based upon what you’ve already stated to different individuals when answering the identical query. And proper now, I believe it’s in all probability working at like a 90 p.c accuracy charge. I do have to alter some issues, however it has additionally discovered methods to write like me.
How can counselors use AI instruments with their college students?
We’ve been experimenting with a lot of other ways to mainly empower college students to make good use and accountable and moral use of those instruments.
I begin by saying, “…there is just one rule: don’t copy and paste textual content from ChatGPT and declare it as your individual.”
However there are some methods during which we’re making an attempt to get the scholars to make use of it as a sounding board, a technique to get suggestions. One is to dump in a accomplished essay and ask it, “Please rank this essay on a scale of 1 to 10, and provides me three factors of essential suggestions for the way I’d enhance it.”
There’s no distinction between asking ChatGPT to do this and asking me as their school counselor, asking their English trainer, asking their mother or father, impartial marketing consultant, whoever. The advantage of ChatGPT and empowering our college students is they’ll do it on their timeframe.
We’ve additionally developed some instruments in particular regards to the Frequent Software [which allows students to apply to multiple colleges and universities at once]. The exercise part, which is mainly the resume part, there’s a 150-character description the place they are saying, “what’s the exercise?” Cross-country. How usually do you do it? After which it says, “in 150 characters, inform us about this.”
And the scholars usually have a extremely exhausting time with formulating what that’s, both as a result of they’ve a lot to say, or they simply say so little. So we’ve created an iterative immediate that asks a sequence of questions of the scholar to assist formulate what use of these 150 characters could be.
Are there any cons to utilizing AI in counseling?
It’s extra cautionary, is simply the thought of pupil confidentiality, making an attempt to go to nice lengths to honor FERPA [the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] or GDPR [the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union] or your regional model of these protections, to verify confidential pupil info will not be being put on the market. I strongly advocate that if you work with any software that is perhaps coping with confidential info, like a letter of rec, to ensure you have clear conversations together with your IT division and whoever oversees the information safety to just remember to’re staying inside the realm.
One other con is simply that there are such a lot of instruments on the market. One of many challenges is we don’t have lots of spare time. We don’t have lots of time to … go discover, see what sort of different instruments are on the market that I’d use.
I believe simply the one different unfavourable or con on this scenario is … that there was some fairly sloppy language by universities round using synthetic intelligence, the place, one explicit college acknowledged publicly, college students shouldn’t be utilizing synthetic intelligence in any respect.
What does that imply? As a result of on one hand, the scholar who goes onto Amazon to get an SAT take a look at prep e book is utilizing synthetic intelligence. So many children are utilizing issues like Grammarly to grammar spell-check. Are these issues not speculated to occur? What I believe they imply is, don’t copy and paste. Don’t use it to jot down the essay. There are a lot of different methods, although, and I’m very curious to see how this develops and the way the language turns into extra exact.
Relating to our work, we’ve been very clear with college reps about what we do, and nevertheless a lot skepticism that a few of them would possibly possess on the outset, once they hear concerning the period of time we spend in writing these [letters of recommendation] the old school approach versus how a lot time we’re given again, and paired with the concept we’re being very intentional about giving that point again to the scholars … even essentially the most ardent skeptics heard that and type of threw their fingers up and stated, “This sounds wonderful.”
What are a few of the fairness issues of utilizing AI in counseling?
I’ve about 35 to 38 college students per grade. I get to know every one in all them intimately, know their dad and mom and households.
And then you definately go a public faculty in say, California, the place a few of the student-counselor ratios go as much as 600 to 1. They don’t know their children. They will’t know their children. And as a part of the Frequent App course of, there’s a field that we are able to test that claims, I’m not writing a letter of advice for this pupil.
You consider these two functions—one the place the counselor checked the field and one the place the counselor submitted a two-page, complete letter. It’s to not say that this pupil is harm by not having a letter, however the pupil who has a letter is getting a bonus. There’s a complete lack of fairness on this system that basically rewards an individual like me to be serving to children who ostensibly have already got a leg up.
After which, we run into this in Brazil specifically, simply entry to the web. It isn’t a foregone conclusion that each child has entry to the web. And so when synthetic intelligence is essentially or primarily a software primarily based upon the web, should you don’t have the web, … there may be an entry concern from that perspective as properly that I’m frightened about.
