I have been a reasonably active member in SgLDC, a Facebook page where Singaporean educators swap experiences and exchange insights on teaching and learning. So, now that the pandemic has been brought under control, the admins want to organise a physical meet-up for us teachers. They want to have an informal gathering for educators to discuss their experience with e-pedagogy. Guess who they asked to be a conversation leader? Me!

So what is the role of a conversation leader? Along with various educators in the fraternity, I will be tasked to lead and facilitate a group discussion based on an e-pedagogy topic of my choice. Some of you may have read my articles on ChatGPT. I decided that since I like to use this platform, I will base my sharing on “Leveraging ChatGPT for Teaching and Learning”.

Now that I get my topic out of the way, it seems that I need to submit a provisional plan for how I intend to encourage my participants to discuss their insights about ChatGPT freely. I am given fifteen minutes to do my sharing. For the next 45 minutes, I think I will have to encourage my participants to speak up, ask questions and share their ideas. If you think that it sounds like a free-flow conversation, it is! This is uncharted territory for me, so I need to plan as well as I can for it. 



That’s me in a nutshell, according to the survey result. Think of all possible scenarios. Let’s see if my plan lives up to this character trait.

First, I ascertained that during the icebreaker, the participants would be given the opportunity to share their name, school, teaching subjects and part of their experience as a teacher. This means that I don’t have to get them to introduce themselves during my 15 minutes. Also, knowing their teaching subjects would allow me to view ChatGPT as a tool from their lens and hopefully help me ask more inclusive questions. Since I’m an English teacher, I believe that a pitfall I need to avoid is that talk exclusively about how I use ChatGPT to teach English.

To kickstart my sharing, I want my participants to understand my WHY so that they know more about me as an individual (as opposed to being a teacher) and understand why I choose to structure the sharing in my idiosyncratic way. I will share that the reason why I agreed to be a conversation leader is that under the Japan Exchange Teaching Program, I once taught Mandarin to a room full of Caucasians and Japanese people for one hour. What was unique about that presentation was that I delivered it entirely in Mandarin and relied on hand puppets and other props, animated gestures and even a song “The Moon Represents My Heart”. So I thought that being a conversation leader this time round would be a good way to add to my presentation portfolio, especially since it’s conducted in a unique manner. Also, because I could hold the attention of my audience for an hour with props and zero English, I am going to refrain from using any laptop and apps because I want to focus on person-to-person interactions. (2 mins)

In one word, I want people to think of my ChatGPT sharing as cool. 😎I take my work seriously, but I don’t take myself seriously.

Now that my participants understand why I decide to go low-tech for my sharing, I want to shift the focus to them and get them to share a bit about their opinions. So I intend to give each participant 3 Post-it notes. I will ask them this question “What are three words that come to your mind when you think of ChatGPT?”

So, I asked some of my educator friends. Here are the responses so far: futuristic, groundbreaking, wow, AI, time-saving, generative, fast, smart, security, efficient, fallible, robotic, quick, convenient, answer. Let’s see if I can get more responses and group their contributions under appropriate categories.

Incidentally, the three words I will use to describe ChatGPT are flowery, lifesaver and privacy.

Anyway, during the workshop, I will get participants to share their Post-it notes with one another and then come up to a standing butcher paper flipchart stand to paste their Post-it notes. Ideally, the participants will take the lead in helping me group their responses under broad categories on the stand. Otherwise, I will scan through the responses and do so myself. (5 mins)

Hopefully, this activity will get participants to warm up and start building connections. With the ice thawed and the mood more relaxed, I can share my experiences with ChatGPT in a lighthearted and informative manner. 

So I’m left with 8 minutes for my sharing, which is admittedly not a lot of time. Based on the three-word responses I got from my friends, I think I will zero in on two specific aspects - Productivity and Privacy. How ChatGPT has enhanced my productivity and how I try to be mindful about upholding privacy in my interactions with it.

You can tell that I’m a fan of alliteration because productivity and privacy both start with the letter “p”.

In regard to privacy, I will plant a question here - to what extent should educators rely on ChatGPT to set their exam papers? 

After my sharing, I hope my group is buzzing with energy so that I can feed off it and go with the flow and capitalise on the prevailing train of thought.

Based on the above personality test, I’m the type to ask the old man questions. So I need to be mindful that other people may prefer to listen to the old man’s words of wisdom. Except that I am not wise, so the onus is on me to get other people to talk! 

To prevent awkward silences, I will come up with a paper fortune teller and get someone to choose a topic. (https://scoutlife.org/hobbies-projects/funstuff/166945/how-to-make-a-paper-fortune-teller/) Then we will discuss our thoughts on this topic. This means that I must come up with 8 topics. One of them can be “How to write effective prompts for ChatGPT”.

I think the paper fortune teller will help me facilitate the conversation for the remaining 45 minutes. Giving my participants choice and control is important.

As a parting shot, I will like to give my participants a Canva poster that provides additional insights on the use of ChatGPT by various prominent members of our teaching fraternity. I also hope to let them know of sites they can visit to get more insights such as the FB page “chatGPT for Teachers”. Let’s see if I can fulfill my other duties first to make space to collate the content necessary to create this poster!

Reminder: Ask ChatGPT to create a TL;DR version of this article.