Highschool counselors have rather a lot 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 area 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 help, mentioned Jeffrey Neill, director of school counseling at Graded: The American Faculty of São Paulo in Brazil, a personal college that serves college students ages 3 by highschool who use an American curriculum and study in English.
AI has made its manner into many different elements of Ok-12 schooling, serving to academics create lesson plans, grade college students’ work, compose emails to folks, and craft Individualized Schooling Packages, or IEPs, for college kids with disabilities.
Neill mentioned his expertise with incorporating AI instruments into counseling on the Faculty Board’s annual discussion board right here in Austin this week. Neill, whose e-newsletter presents an in depth take 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 can 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 data in a single place, aggregated in a single location, the writing course of doesn’t take so long as they suppose. It used to take me about three hours to jot down a single letter of advice, and I spotted that a minimum of an hour-and-a-half, possibly extra of that, was me gathering the knowledge from all of the totally different places.
Synthetic intelligence can try this, pull all of it collectively in order that once 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 scholar.
There’s additionally plenty of little issues that may assist when it comes to the processes and procedures. About 150 faculties and universities from world wide have visited us on campus to date 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, by myself, nevertheless it does it quicker.
I spent a while [at the College Board forum] speaking concerning the e mail triage device, which is basically a man-made intelligence device that’s educated completely in your previous emails. Anytime a brand new e mail is available in, it drafts based mostly on what it thinks you’ll say based mostly upon what you’ve already mentioned to different folks when answering the identical query. And proper now, I believe it’s in all probability working at like a 90 p.c accuracy fee. I do have to vary some issues, nevertheless it has additionally discovered tips on how to write like me.
How can counselors use AI instruments with their college students?
We’ve been experimenting with plenty of alternative ways to principally 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 personal.”
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 strategy 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 a way I would enhance it.”
There’s no distinction between asking ChatGPT to do this and asking me as their school counselor, asking their English instructor, asking their guardian, impartial guide, whoever. The good thing about ChatGPT and empowering our college students is they will 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 principally the resume part, there’s a 150-character description the place they are saying, “what’s the exercise?” Cross-country. How typically do you do it? After which it says, “in 150 characters, inform us about this.”
And the scholars typically have a extremely arduous 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 collection of questions of the coed to assist formulate what an excellent 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 scholar 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 scholar data just isn’t being put on the market. I strongly advocate that once you work with any device that may be coping with confidential data, like a letter of rec, to be sure you have clear conversations along with your IT division and whoever oversees the info 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 plenty of spare time. We don’t have plenty of time to … go discover, see what sort of different instruments are on the market that I would use.
I believe simply the one different destructive or con on this scenario is … that there was some fairly sloppy language by universities round the usage of synthetic intelligence, the place, one specific 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 coed who goes onto Amazon to get an SAT take a look at prep ebook is utilizing synthetic intelligence. So many children are utilizing issues like Grammarly to grammar spell-check. Are these issues not presupposed to occur? What I believe they imply is, don’t copy and paste. Don’t use it to jot down the essay. There are lots 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 may possess on the outset, once they hear concerning the period of time we spend in writing these [letters of recommendation] the old style manner versus how a lot time we’re given again, and matched with the concept we’re being very intentional about giving that point again to the scholars … even probably the most ardent skeptics heard that and sort of threw their arms up and mentioned, “This sounds wonderful.”
What are a few of the fairness concerns of utilizing AI in counseling?
I’ve about 35 to 38 college students per grade. I get to know every one among them intimately, know their dad and mom and households.
And then you definitely go a public college 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 scholar.
You concentrate on 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 scholar is harm by not having a letter, however the scholar 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 particularly, 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 device based mostly upon the web, when you don’t have the web, … there’s an entry concern from that perspective as effectively that I’m anxious about.
