Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Teach
Sleep. Repeat.
My name is. Dylan, and my name is Hayden.
Why, Hayden, have you spent all morning hating the Black Eyed
Peas? I haven't, but you've been
singing the same thing. Oh man, oh man, oh man, man.
God, it's, it's a tune. It's not, though it takes.
Me back anyone around our age? I'm 31.
You're 4732. Actually, that's the same
difference. Everyone around our age there
was that boom when we're like teenagers and they I remember
what album it was, but it was like the album of like the the
computerised Queen, the end. Oh, we know it was good.
I was a huge banger. Base band was good, but it was
just it was full of banger off the banger.
What was the other one that was like boom, pow, yes, boom, Boom
Pow. I guess when you look at it,
it's it might not be the most intricately written song.
Yeah, yeah. Listen, as like a a big Black
Eyed Peas fan before that, you know, Monkey Business and
Elephant. The two hours before that,
obviously I go. But when this came out, it was
different. I was like, this is not their
style, you know, when you're a kid.
And it's like, how dare they. How dare they experiment with
their genre. Yeah.
And so I was very annoyed. But they don't produce.
I don't. Remember ever being a child and
thinking how dare they experiment with their genre?
I didn't. Think that?
Well, we live very different lives, Dylan.
You know you're out partying to Boom Boom, Pow and other.
Song pow. Those something, something man
Pow. Yeah, that's those people trying
to be Power I. Think that's how it went, yeah.
Something like that's indistinguishable.
Can you? Imagine now if we got writing,
we, our children in school, produced an independent bear.
Writing that was like that. We'd be like, what is?
Where's the front of the verbal here?
But Sir, you said we're going to write songs today we need.
To have the determiner in the right place please.
What is Boom Boom power if not on a matter here?
Take that off the writing list. You've done that.
You've evidenced that we've. Got writing moderation coming
up? Come on, Black Eyed.
Do you know, do you know what you Speaking of writing
moderation? I have to tell you about this
because I forgot to mention the other day to you, right?
I, I saw someone online and this it ground my gears a little bit
because I was a bit like, oh, how are we still at this point
where people think this, right? Someone was saying in a year six
group that they got writing moderation coming up and they
were like what what's what, what's a good way to get year
5-6 spelling words in in their writing so that I can take off
that they can spell. Because one of the like famously
with with writing moderation, there's this, there's the
objective of using the national curriculum words.
Yeah. And.
So having yeah, any, so anyone who doesn't know what that is,
it's a list of like 40 to 50 words, right, for the F500.
Wow. OK.
And, and it's, and it is, it is it in the curriculum that you've
got to use it just for anyone because people might not be
aware of this, especially they have newer teachers and lower
down in the school. What you're saying is there's a
list from the government of words that they should learn and
is it to spell or is it to use in writing?
I think it's a bit of both. It's very vague.
That's the point. And people have over the years
we've decided ourselves obviously as a culture that was
like, OK, well then to prove, to prove that they can meet that
objective of using, if I explain words, we must see lots of
evidence of them in their writing.
We're going to look specifically for those words and it's just
not true. It's just not true.
I've been to enough writing moderations now where everyone's
like, no, that's rubbish. What you talking?
About, is it not true? That is what you're saying that
we don't need to use them, right?
That's what you're saying. Is that actually the case or is
it classic? What always seems to happen,
education, is there'll be some pockets of people doing
moderation where that is seen and looked for, and therefore
actually those people do need to do it because you'll be marked
down where it's just inconsistent.
I don't know. My gut feeling is honestly just
no. Yeah, my gut feeling is no.
I think people will convince themselves that happens and it
just doesn't. If you've got a kid, right, it's
just it's that OK, I'm getting too carried away and calm down a
bit. If you've got a kid who clearly
can spell age expected for your six, like their spelling is very
good in the writing, but you can't find the word soldier in
it or you can't find the word guarantees not in there.
Like all the government, all these words on this very
specific list. Isn't it weird the government
chose government? Yeah, it's got government in
there. You can't find hindrance in
there. It's like you're not going to
go. Oh yeah, I don't think we, I
don't think they can spell. You're just going to go, well,
obviously they can spell. It's just such a such a nonsense
thing. People worry about it.
And I know the only reason it gets my back up a little bit is
because I once worked at a school and it was a long time
ago where they were really, really, really particular about
that. And they were saying, we cannot
say they can spell unless there's like at least three
examples and every bit of writing of a year 5-6 spelling
word. So they were, they were
basically shoehorning them in being like, they need word mats
with them all the time. You need to, you need to
classify these word mats so that they're words that would fit
with this genre to really encourage them to use them.
You need to take them off and highlight the words as you see
them and then go back. And then honestly, it got to the
point where they were like, Oh, you didn't do it for this one.
Can you go back through all of their writing?
And I'm just write down on this little list here.
I made an Excel sheet for you, the words that they did using
that bit of writing and I was like, what are we doing?
What do you mean? Firstly, this kid can spell, and
this kid probably won't pass the spell anything anyway.
Regardless of these words, what are we talking about?
That is crazy. And also it's it's just 100
words. If you've seen the list, you'll
know how random they've seen. And when we when we make
children shoe wand them into their writing, we're already
struggling to make their writing always make sense.
But then you'll have, like, a, a diary entry of a girl, let's say
a young girl who's had a day at their aunt's house.
And you'll be reading a sentence.
And you'll know when a teacher has said, put in one of these
words because it'll just stick out like a sore thumb.
They'll say something like, yeah.
And then my aunt sat me down for some breakfast, which the
government said has to be healthy.
Yeah, yeah, they crossed out. They're like with my with my
three siblings and they've crossed it down.
But 40, because 40 is one of the words on my 12th birthday, 12
footer, 12 footer. My teacher told me it's 12
footer. On my 12th birthday brackets,
the elf came 12th, the elf came 12th.
That's how I remember to spell this word, which shows that I
can spell. It's just nonsense, like we're
losing our minds. I was shocked to see it.
Basically that's. Not still OK, so just, I'm just
trying to side with these people a bit here because there'll be
some really good teachers. Like, again, earlier in my
career, I'd have fallen for that trap and been like, oh, OK, you
do need to have these 100 curriculum words that are in
the, in the national curriculum where.
But I, I want to dig deeper into it and maybe some people
listening can help us with this because, you know, do you have
to show evidence of those words in your children's writing all
the time? Because if you don't, why are
they even there? Like surely they're only there
because we do need to evidence them and show that children can
write them. Do they come up more often in
the spelling sats? Do they do do are, are there, is
there a barometer there where maybe there's more spending
rules involved and therefore that's why they're good?
Or are they just exception random words?
What is, what is it? I think what's happened is
we've, we've just thought about it the wrong way around.
It's, I think that it's my understanding that the intention
is, it's not that we have to shoehorn them in.
It's that when children naturally write these words, we
should be just checking to see if that's spelling them right.
So for example, if a, if a kid happens to have used 5 words
from this list and all five of them are spelt wrong, then we
can say, right, OK, well, there's an indicator there that
these words, they've been exposed to this, this list that
the government have chosen which kid is happening to write
hindrance. Yeah, no, I know.
But some of them are like, you know, some of them are more
shoehorn. Yeah.
A lot of the words do come up because they are generally when
you look through the list, they are generally a lot of them are
just like kind of common. They're age conception words,
like words where it's like they do kind of just not follow a
rule, but they're fairly common. Well, like for example, I know
environments in there and I know a lot of children do a lot of
work in science and stuff about the environment and I can see
how that can maybe that's that's a good example there of how well
that's on the list we're going to teach about the environment.
Let's just make sure my kids know how to spell it.
But at the end of the day, if they finish year 6 and you're
sat in a writing moderation and you can't find evidence of the
word environment in any. Of them, you're not going to say
that can't stop. No, exactly, exactly.
So I think I don't know it's it's a weird.
I'm sure there's a grey area there.
Hence like my school did it years ago to me and but I've
been at so many moderations since then.
I've grown maybe more confidence and I've been to internal
moderations in multiple schools and I've been an external
moderation where you go to like, you know, work with other
teachers and so on, runs it. And there's other experts in the
room. And everyone just unanimously
agrees that you really don't need to be that picky.
You can just get a general feel of spellings and just look to
see if they're spelling things right in general.
And if there's a clearly a problem with spellings, then
there's a problem with spellings.
And you can't take off that objective of like, OK, you know,
there's a lot of year 3 spelling rules here that are getting
wrong consistently. Maybe spellings is not something
we can take off for them. So when you compare it to
something like if the children aren't consistently using
capital letters for names, etcetera, that's that can be
something that stops them getting to age expected.
But you're saying this list alone should be as like a
supplementary thing that that doesn't necessarily have the
same weight as OK, they're missing a word.
It doesn't make sense that can stop you.
Whereas not spelling soldier incorrectly once or not
including it at all. Yeah, that's that.
Shouldn't, yeah, it's not and it doesn't.
It's not going to happen. Honestly, in reality, that is
not going to happen if they spell everything else correctly
and they've got clearly evidence of let's say we're doing year 6
moderation, clearly got evidence of tonnes of year 6 spending
rules being spelled fairly consistent.
It doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be every time as
well, just fairly consistently correctly.
They're going to get through on the spelling objective and it's
just not, it's just not going to matter.
I think we just put so much emphasis on them.
Just to clarify, I'm also siding with the teachers.
I'm not getting annoyed at the teachers for asking this.
I'm getting annoyed at the fact that there are still places
where like they put this on an insane pedestal.
Yeah, I'm like, why are you asking me that about?
Your school shouldn't be making you a half term like feel like
you have to go away and ask for how to shoehorn in these random
words. Like if you're going to worry
about anything, it should probably be of the stuff that
actually matters in terms of like just how they word, how how
they form their sentences and grammar and punctuation and
stuff that actually impacts the flow of writing and how a reader
interprets it. And inference and
personification, figurative language, All of the stuff that
like actually matters for being good at writing.
I tell you what spelling, that random list of words that the
government have decided is, is important.
The government, the government with an N is honestly at the
absolute bottom. It's the absolute bottom.
It should not be anywhere near the top.
And it just is for some reason for some people, so.
Staying on moderation for a minute, then it's moderation
season, I guess at the moment in schools and a lot of people be
going through this process. I always remember deputy head
that I worked with mentioning how, and you might remember from
school where writing was assessed for more formally and
then it came in that it was more teacher assessment and then
therefore moderation came in. Do you think in general then
based on what you're saying, you could you could frame what
you're saying to, to argue that moderation is really important
because we won't have these people stuck in schools who have
this kind of top down heavy of this is really important.
When actually it's not like the only way you might actually find
out that it's not important and is through moderation, going to
other schools and seeing experts, etcetera.
So I guess I've got a broad question to you now as a Year 6
teacher who who teaches writing to some very capable writers.
Do you think that the moderation process is is the correct way to
go about assessing children in their writing?
I think it look, it's a flawed system.
I don't know if I think I don't want to say right now, yes, it's
the correct way. I think it is a fairly good
system. Is it?
Better than having an assessed piece that's timed and then just
40 minutes and it goes off to someone who marks it because I
I'm struggling to see how it can't be better than that.
I think so, and I'm going to trust a lot of my elder teachers
who will unanimously also tell me that moderation is much more
of a fair system to that old system like that.
So I do think it is, but just thinking about moderation again,
having had lots of experience going to moderations, firstly, I
do agree, I think it does allow a bit more of a like a, rather
than 15 different schools interpreting something all
separately, right? It does kind of bring you
together and be like, hang on a minute, let's just like fresh
page here, let's all agree together now that this is kind
of the standard we're looking for.
Now go back to your schools and make sure like we've got the
same information. It does kind of level the
playing field a bit in terms of that, but also people do just
ignore it sometimes. Not everyone goes to every
moderation. Sometimes there's an internal
moderation. So you will just be isolated
with one person coming in. Is that is that so with an
internal moderation. So throughout the year, lots of
schools and trusts, etcetera will set up moderations into
school and you'll kind of go and there'll be 5 other
representatives represent representatives from other
schools on the same table as you.
Maybe you're all in year 4, for example, you'll bring a book and
you'll say something like, I think this is expected because
of that. I don't think this child's quite
expected because of this. And then everyone kind of brings
what they say is each level and you look at them and you go,
well, actually that's better than what I thought.
Oh, no, that all right. You would you would say this is
expected interesting, because I wouldn't.
And that is a nice way to balance the playing field.
I think that's where it's good. But what I still see a lot
online of, and maybe you could comment on this, is there's
still huge discrepancies out there and there's still the the
the thing that gets my back up about moderation is how easy it
is to fudge things through and basically cheat because the the
amount of times you've seen like, you know, moderation where
well, if just if, if this one gets through, we can argue the
rest. We'll just make sure if this
person gets through, that gives us 15 expected and we won't
really look at those or and, you know, we can talk about cheating
in general aside of what you do with the children.
But moderation itself can be kind of a green flag sometimes
to usher your way through and get your your stats up.
Yeah. And and also there's people
online who put a piece of writing up and say, just
wondering, is this greater depth and it's not even expected?
Yeah, yeah, it's not even at the expected level.
And so is moderation failing because we still have people who
clearly, you know, clearly we're miles off and.
I don't think it's failing. I think it's, it's a system that
is constantly being fed in new teachers and old teachers are
leaving. Do you know what I mean?
Like old, that's horrible teachers are leaving.
They don't be old, but new teachers are constantly coming
in. It might just be they haven't
had experience with it yet. I think when we see examples of
that, they're probably just less experienced and this is their
learning curve. And then maybe they'll go to
moderation at some point. Maybe it's their first year in
year 6 where they're going to an official moderation.
I don't know, like I don't think it's failing.
I think it's probably just fringe examples where where it,
you know, hasn't caught them yet Or like you said, it's not
perfect system. There are still going to be
people that do go to moderation and ultimately don't get out of
it. Probably what they should have
got out of it. But I reckon the vast majority
of people do go to moderation and come out feeling pretty,
pretty well understood in terms of what the expectations are.
But going back to one point, you're so right, because with
with moderation, cross moderation, we get invited to
it. It's very official as year six
teachers, we do get invited to it and it's very much expected
to attend. You don't have to, but it does
open the door for more scrutiny and checking with internal
moderations in future years. It's kind of like come along or
you're going to end up, there's going to be a consequence.
So you have to pretty much have to go for people who aren't in
year 6 very quickly. It's, it's important because
year six teachers will decide the grade at the end, whereas
other year groups, you can kind of have a linear approach and
schools can decide. But for you, it's vital.
Yeah, it's the actual key. It'll actually be recorded.
The actual end of key stage 2, right?
Writing assessment is genuinely down to us and it will go down
on paper, but it just says bring either five books or 15% of your
cohort if your cohort's over like a certain number.
So we end up taking like of our 90 odd cohort, we take like 15
odd books and 14/14/15 books. And it just has to have a, you
know, a variety of levels there. So most of those books will be
expected. You'll take a couple of greater
depths because you're realistically, you're not going
to get loads of them and you'll take a few you're sort of
working towards or maybe even below just so you've got a
variety and you can, and you can go there and then you can say,
right, have we got this right? And if all 15 books have kind of
been assessed appropriately and, and people around you agree,
maybe the lead moderator that's there who kind of wandering
around, they agree of your gradings as well.
All gets written down. And generally what happens is if
everyone agrees, you go back, they're like, OK, we can trust
that school to, to grade the other 85% of their books.
Yes, crack on, right. But you've got free choice of
which 15 books. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, yeah. Obviously, and I don't, you
know, you can tell me whether you what where you think this is
on the scale of cheating to not Obviously people are naturally
going to pick books they're more confident in that are actually
going to be upgraded as the thing they said they are because
you are rewarded for getting the grading right.
Yeah. So obviously you're going to
not. No one's really going there.
The idea is you take your custom books, you take your custom
books to help work out whether they are.
Yeah, but really, people just want to go there.
OK, so to me, right, that is why I think moderation where it's
pointless. Yeah, that's the biggest.
So this, this is where I think there is a huge fall in the
system because it becomes playing a game and we all sit
there and smile and, and not at each other as if they say,
aren't we all fantastic at bringing what is clearly an
expected book to the table? Isn't that great?
And the government don't help because the government, what
they give us examples of expecting and working towards,
etcetera, are very strong, secure, expected.
So and then, and then the conversation is, Oh yeah, well,
we don't want to go too close to the custody line between what is
expected and what isn't because, you know, we, we might muddy the
waters and there's a, there's a professional dialogue to have
and you can decide yourself. I'm like, OK, cool.
Well, if you're not going to give me that, I'm obviously
going to take my strong books. This moderation and what we
aren't doing at all, I don't think efficiently is teaching
staff exactly what makes something very, very high
working towards nearly there but not quite and what makes someone
absolutely. Yeah.
OK. You just got there, but you are
expecting? Very low working.
That line exactly that very low expected that line is not to me
being made very clear to most of the profession which allows for
this like, well, obviously, OK, I'm going to bump them up then.
And when I go to moderation, I'm not going to take the kid I
think who is just about on that line because what moderation
should be is you take your lowest child of what you think
has achieved expected. It gets nodded through maybe
like, OK, yeah, do you know what just about.
And then that does give you the green flag to everyone above
that to be like, well, if this is then that's great.
What's actually happening is you're taking your most secure
expected children and then going down the line and being like,
well, because that because this person who never no one would
ever disagree is expected has been agreed to be expected.
Who would ever have thought that?
Wow. Because of that, everyone I've
put expected now is that is not, to me, an accurate use or a good
use of moderation time because we're jumping through hoops.
We're trying to get data, we're trying to boost our scores more
than we are actually trying to properly decide where children
are on the. Scale.
And that's why I think it's a flawed system and I don't want
to discredit everyone because I'm sure some people do actually
go with the proper intent of I am actually going to take the
kids that I'm not too sure of and I'm going to use the
moderation process to get this right.
But then, but then those people get punished because other
people on the table will also say, OK, these are all my
expected children and that someone else has brought someone
who's solid expected, who clearly is gets compared then to
your one who's Cusby. And what's more likely to happen
is say, well, they're not there. So probably that's working
towards because unless everyone's doing it properly,
you're gonna be punished for bringing your lower children in
that moderation. Process.
Yeah, I agree. And why ultimately does this
happen because there is pressure to hit data standards from the
government. The government are saying well
national average is 72% is inflated every year by the
previous year, sure. Then our national standards are
74% of children are are expected in writing so you better hit
that. So OK, well, if you're telling
that to teachers, oh, by the way, your pay is performance
related. OK, well it's funny that
everyone's suddenly getting 74 plus percent, isn't it?
You know, I'm obviously knocks, that's how averages work, but.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know, I think that the
the top down pressure doesn't help.
I think, I think moderation itself could be more straight in
terms of the rules of like how it works.
It might be able to do moderation, yeah, rather than
just saying bring books and oh, you know.
Try on the back. Try on the back, try and bring
books that around, you know, the cusp.
Oh yeah, cool. Everyone's like, yeah, OK, cool,
I'll bring books around the cusp level.
Bloody not gonna make sure my date is good because I'm gonna
I'm in an Academy trust and they're not gonna pay me next
year unless I get this hit this target.
Yeah, what it could, you know, maybe, maybe moderation could be
redesigned a little bit where it's like, no, no, no, this game
is like you're bringing way fewer books now everyone has to
bring you have to bring your top working towards and your lowest
expected. You have to.
And if you get it vastly wrong, if you're bringing your best
expected and trying to pretend that it's lowest expected, it'll
be obviously get called out. It's like, OK, well you're
great. It always backfires.
Like if you think that's your lowest expected, you're not,
you're not very secure of the teacher assessment framework,
which means your gradings are probably quite wrong.
So I guess we need to do internal moderation with you
because even if that's wrong, so it's like being held more
accountable maybe to like the very strict parameters could be
a good way of identifying whether teachers, because the
whole point is, do they understand the teacher
assessment framework and are therefore assessing their
children's books correctly? That's all we want to know at
moderation. From a moderation's perspective,
are schools doing it properly? Because you can't go, you can't
go in. When we say internally moderate,
we mean like an external source coming into a school, moderating
that school in particular. And that's a really stressful
time. Actually, if you get chosen for
that internal moderation, it is stressful because then you are
under much more of a microscope. So you've got to ask yourself
the question, why is that more stressful than the other
moderation? It's because it's more of a
moderation. Yeah, because the other
moderation, which is just between schools and the choice
is much more laid back, is much more backpacking, is much more
saying, OK, cool, aren't we all great?
That internal moderation, the reason people get their cackles
up if they get chosen, is because they know they're about
to be exposed as inflating the scores.
Yeah. Also, you can't pick your books,
right? When it's when internal
moderators come through, you give them a class list and they
just pick randomly kids. So if they pick a kid that you
wouldn't have taken the moderation because you're like,
oh, that's one of my custody ones that I want to put as
expected, but someone might argue.
It down and they pick it then tough luck mate, because you've
already put it as expected. And if they knock it down, yeah,
if they knock it down, they have to.
It triggers like if they do it with a few books, yeah, it
triggers them having to look at every single book, yeah.
Yeah, so and what's gonna happen when they do pick a random book
and it happens to be a random book you've forgotten to take
your post it notes out of where you've completely cheated and
told the children what to write. What happens then?
Oh. Yeah, just very quickly last
thing on this point about writing and stuff because it
does really annoy me the fact we've all kind of accepted and
it's just normal to say, yeah, just do feedback with post it
notes so we can take it out and no one will see it at the end
that is. Cheating.
Yeah, it's crazy how it's cheating.
Some people might be like, don't do that in my school.
Okay, maybe you don't, but I tell you what, we speak to a lot
of teachers now and we get stories all the time about stuff
like this. This is happening in this
school. I worked in a school that did
this. I know someone who works in a
school, did this all the time, about how they just cheat, flirt
around. No, no, no, no.
Cheat. No.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what this is.
I'm, I'm not, I'm not annoyed at you or anything.
I'm just saying in general, we do consistently cheat as a
profession. Yeah, we we absolutely do.
Because as soon as you're saying, oh, it's OK, put it on
the post it note. So it's not in the book, you are
by definition saying it's because you know that's cheating
to do that. And you know by definition that
if that exact same thing you've done is witnessed by someone, it
would then be not an independent piece of writing.
So you when, if, if you know of anyone or a school who is doing
that kind of thing where there are post it notes going into
work to rewrite stuff or teachers sat with children to
say, no, no, rewrite this, this is wrong.
Because of that, it's not independent in writing anymore.
It can't be used in moderation and it doesn't show that child's
ability in writing. Whether we want to say it's
because of external pressures or not or things from the top, I'm
all I'm all ears and we should maybe change that.
But it But please call a spade a spade, because that is.
Cheating, Yeah, fair play. Can we finish this conversation
with one little Horror Story? Just just my own experience is
not to do not to do with that. I'm not going to sit here and be
like I was cheating and the thing I'm not going to go.
That's just not what's happened. But there are just a Horror
Story of moderation in general, right?
With a school I worked in again many, many years ago, right.
And to be given credit, it was all fairly new for them as well.
It was a fairly new process. It was a new cohort or whatever
new year says, quite a new curriculum, I suppose, quite a
new curriculum. It was a fairly new school in
all this case or whatever, and all people were nice and
well-intentioned. But it did end up getting to the
point where we had an internal moderation booked in.
We knew someone was coming in. We knew it was the scary
version. I was the E6 teacher and I
basically just got coerced into taking all the books home and
having to sit there with an open, open document and have to
make honestly, like a page table per piece of writing per kid for
the last like 5 bits of writing to show all of the evidence of
all the stuff that they could do.
Right. And I remember saying to them,
this seems really pointless because the moderator will just
look for the book and find it themselves.
That's like, that's like the entire point of their job.
Why are we providing them like this list of like exactly where
to find it? And they were, they were like,
oh, it's, you know, firstly, it's a good way for us to check
that these books are definitely expected.
I was like, OK, fair enough. You're making sure our
assessments are right by going through the bits of writing,
making sure we definitely have ticked off all these things.
But come on. And I spent my whole half term,
not joking, like 2-3 hours per book per kid where I was going
through that blast, like 5 bits of writing, having to write down
this table. And one of the columns was EFI 6
spelling words, what words they've used.
One of them was I just had to take off every single objective,
whether that objective was ticked off in that bit of
writing. And it took me days and days and
days of my term. And I really didn't want to do
it. But they were at the point where
they were basically like, I felt like I was doing a terrible job
if I didn't do this. Like I was an awful teacher
because they were putting so much pressure on and then do you
know what happened in moderation?
Exactly what I told them would happen in moderation 5000 times
before that, which was the moderator won't even pick these
up. Didn't sat there in a pile the
whole time. My a whole half term just sat
there in this pile. Even said oh, we've got this and
said oh, OK, yeah, let's have a look at the book.
Spent 3 minutes looking at the book.
Yeah, obviously expected. Yeah.
Exactly. Cool.
OK, so you can just get a feel. Yeah, of course I can get a
feel. I'm a moderator and I've looked
at thousands of books. I I can see when a kid is
clearly expected because do you know what the the range of being
expected is freaking huge. So when they're up in this top
range, it's really obvious immediately that they're there.
You don't even have to sit there and go from every single
objective. It's so obvious.
So as a trained moderator, you go, OK, that's clearly expected.
Well, maybe should we check for greater depth?
Let's have a look. No, they haven't really hit
these standards of greater depth, but very strong expected.
Well done. There's my 3 hours of work on
that child going through and writing out every single time
they wrote the word government and hindrance in there.
Oh my God, like that to me, I quit that school.
I'd already quit by that point because I could see how I was
just going to hate working in conditions like that because it
was just absence of common sense and I just couldn't do it.
I just couldn't do it. That is the killer, isn't it?
That is the killer in school, I must say.
You know, I've, I've not got the most experience in the world
about other workplaces and stuff, but I have worked in
other workplaces beforehand for a bit.
I did AI did a couple of weeks. I got, you know, headhunted
classic like out of graduate scheme to come and do this thing
and, and the job was basically head hunting for, for tech firms
and getting people in. I, I did all that for a few
weeks up in London. I travelled in and stuff.
And I, I, I just think from what I've seen and what I've heard
from people, the, the amount of in education, the stuff we do
that is so ridiculously pointless, like what you've just
said, utterly, completely absolute waste of time.
The amount of stuff that we do in education, which falls into
that bracket is completely insane.
And This is why I'm really passionate about when we do this
podcast and when we talk about this stuff, because the idea of
having Someone Like You, what you just said in the air of
someone now who's 2-3 years in the same position, being forced
to do something. And you're there saying, guys,
I've come out the other side. And you are right.
It is pointless. Yeah.
It to know that sometimes just because someone's in a position
of power over you in work does not automatically mean that they
know what they're talking about. Because in that situation, you
were right. And it didn't matter.
You were three years into your career and they were 74 years
into their career. It didn't matter that they could
try and justify it in some way. Yeah.
The argument was so balanced to
your side, but you still did it because you felt pressured into
doing it. Guys, don't feel pressured into
doing anything like. That I wish I had the Gump back
then to, to have this voice I have now.
Because I knew what I what I just said there.
I knew that then. I knew it, but I just wasn't as
confident. So what's the only difference
between then and now for you? Is it that confidence to be like
I know my right to know I've is it experience?
Does it just come with experience?
For me it's. Experience and because I because
I have been through, I guess now I can look back and be like, I
literally know it's not even a guess anymore.
I know this is pointless. And I tell you what, if you
don't believe me, let's go back in time and I'll go show them
what I did and be like, look, none of these got looked at.
Just so you know, but and also, like you said, just like, you
know, I like to think that if, if this, what we've produced
here existed and I was telling myself this, that that that
amount of time ago, I might genuinely have not done it if I
had to have had a bit back up. I was alone.
I was completely alone. No one was on my side.
I didn't have anyone backing up my voice.
I was just alone, so I fell for the pressure.
Well, guys, look, you're not alone.
You've got us, Dylan and Hayden to talk you through all this
stuff. We're going to go now and talk
about after that lovely chat about moderation.
I think if I were to define 2, two things that that are really
important at this part of the year and take up so much time
for teachers, it is writing moderation that we've just
spoken about and it is writing reports.
So let's dive into it, Look a little bit AI in general and how
it can help and just that kind of whole discussion.
I'm really excited if you've got this fine to the episode which
you have because you're listening to me right now and
you haven't left us a review yet.
Wherever you're listening to us, where it's Spotify, Apple
podcast, all that good stuff. It really helps us out if you
can just leave us a five star review right now.
Because also I think a big thing that we're going to notice in
the next few years, all podcasts will be completely dead because
AI is going to take over and there won't be here we go
anyway, here we go. So whilst we can, if you can
give us a review guys, we would really appreciate it.
Please, let's get to 300 before the bots take over.
Wow. Well, that's that's at the tone,
didn't it? That's my segue.
Yeah, yeah. Should we talk about AI Dylan?
Yeah, I think let's just root it in the fact that we're going to
be talking about reports and a big thing in the last few years.
We've done an episode I think every year since 2023.
We did one in 2024 and this time we're doing one now.
Because I do think there is a huge force for good in using AI
to help save time, in particular parts of teaching and especially
in report writing when we are making big huge reams of text.
We're going to, we get into that and why we think it's a good
thing, the drawbacks, etcetera. And have a bit of a debate.
But I think first I want to talk about AI in general in
education. And then even before that, I
want to take a meta look at the minute very quickly about AI.
Because there'll be lots of people listening.
There'll be some people who are really down a rabbit hole with
what AI is doing at the minute. And there'll be some people who
still just see AI as ChatGPT writing me a waggle, like what a
good one looks like in my class with some determiners in there.
Hayden, can you just try and summarise briefly for people
listening right now where we're at in terms of AI and, and what
it's doing and why? Actually, there's a little bit,
we feel a bit of trepidation about it.
Yeah, OK, So large language models, what everyone thinks of
ChatGPT in its infancy. When we first got it a couple of
years ago, it was just a really good large language model.
It was very good at predicting how to say things to us.
And everyone was like, oh, it seems so human.
We were like, no, it's not human.
It just knows how to predict the best words in order to say to
us. That's all it is.
Couple of years down the line, a lot of money's been pumped into
AI. It's getting insanely good at
reasoning now. It's getting considerably better
at solving problems and logistics and reasoning.
It's in the background. It's gone down this whole lines
of like developing code and developing apps.
And we're at the point now where it's even getting to the idea of
like, oh, we can actually replace entire jobs with AI now.
We can make things called AI agents, which is essentially a
huge workflow of lots of AI doing loads of different things
into one culmination of, oh, this is basically what a job is.
And importantly, the thing with an AI agent is where it used to
be a language model, where it predict text or use the Internet
to find information, etc, but it would just do that job.
Yeah, with an AI model, I'm right in thinking that there's
reasoning involved. There's thinking involved.
There's a lot of reasoning involved and there's a lot of
collaboration with other applications.
Sure, that's what it can do really, really well now.
So it's the point where people can build an AI agent to do
honestly, to do an entire like a marketing job.
You can click a button and it will go for this huge workflow
of things. And it will and it will write a
Gmail and it will send the Gmail.
It will collect the data. It will then create because it's
because image generation is really good now.
It will then create an image post.
It will post it on your platforms because you've given
it access to do that. It will harvest the data.
It will repost good ones. Like you can build a whole
machine, which is someone's job out of AI now.
And it's crazy, the. Stuff isn't there like where you
know you can have it like, for example, weather dependent and
like if if raining in this area, put a post out about selling my
umbrellas and things like let's just say for example.
So that's where the reasoning comes in like it will it will
firstly check the weather if it's not raining, it won't put
any money out into ads That where this is a very crude
example but where if it's raining someone might see an
advert and go oh, I do need this thing yeah.
It it it does all that reasoning for you and it's built in and
it's completely insane. And something I saw recently
linked with education, because this is something I have predict
I have thought would happen for a long time and it is happening
now is AI tutors this this idea of education because I think we
see education in general is quite safe from the AI
revolution in that whether we like it or not we are to a
certain degree childcare for the for the society to go out and do
work. Yeah, children need somewhere to
go during. Safety in that.
And it's also in terms of, you know, education and school.
I'm not trying to diminish the job we do in terms of education,
but I think it would be quite daft for us to pretend that
we're not also serving the purpose of looking after
children in our society so it can function.
Yeah, so. So that's always where I think
we've got kind of a safe safeness to our job because
children always need somewhere to go.
However, the actual idea of tutoring to me, having seen this
video of an AI bot talking to a child and responding and
teaching them something, picking up misconceptions, giving them
more, more, more questions of what they need to practise and
stuff that is real. That that when people say, oh,
you can never really build a bond with a child or oh, you can
never really understand the misconceptions of a child, yes,
you could. Because we are at the point now
where it is getting so close to what a human brain does in terms
of reasoning and problem solving that you need to just see that
video search AI Tutor now and see it happen in real time with
children. It is incredibly good.
Yeah. And is it perfect?
No, But I tell you what, it will get good extremely quickly.
The trajectory of AI is, is crazy.
And the last thing I guess I'll mention on it is you probably
notice if you're on social media a lot, you'll notice that
there's a lot of AI video generation now.
So we kind of had the whole image generation revolution like
not even a year ago. That's how fast this is
developing, right? And they just were bad.
Weren't they? Yeah, they were.
They were terrible at 1st, and so was video.
A couple of years ago it was laughable.
And even honestly, six months ago, AI video was laughable.
It's at the point now where it's basically indistinguishable from
real life. It's completely insanely good.
It has audio built in as as well.
So you've got voices, you've got music, soundtracks and visuals
now completely being generated from written prompts, have AI to
the point where I've even seen, I haven't told you this before,
but I've even seen now people are developing apps for just
making podcasts and you basically just say what I want
the podcast to be, what I want the host to look like, what I
want them to talk about the length, press the button, there
you go. Just generates that and that's
what we are. Yeah.
Can you can you generate one about writing moderation that
leads nicely into writing about AI and where AI is self kind of
looking at itself and and just assessing where it's going?
To go in the future and you can. And we we laugh.
Honestly, we could make one that's probably relatively
indistinguishable from what we're producing.
Yeah, 100%. I know you heard of the podcast
Diver CEO Stephen Bartlett. He he said he's got to the point
now where he's created like a, a sister parallel podcast where
his own voice has been trained on it.
So it's him speaking which gets as much click through and user
retention for an episode as his actual one does.
Wow. So, so the, the, the, the, it's
already there. It already exists.
It's just so you know, it's, it's not like, oh, you click on
it. This is a fun gimmick.
Oh, I'm listening for for two minutes and I'll click off it.
He's getting the same retention rate on episodes because it's
indistinguishable. Yeah.
So I guess my wider point here about AI is, look, this is
happening. We we can have this discussion
about whether it's safe, where you can have this discussion
about whether it's good for the environment that we'll come on
to later on. We can have we can have all
these discussions and that's lovely and it's fantastic.
But it's happening whether you like it.
Or not. Oh yes, it's already way too far
gone. It's too far.
It's there. It's basically a race.
It's like the best way I sort of described was by Sam Altman who
made Open AI which made chat and he was saying it was like a bit
like the moon race. Firstly, it's just it's just
happening and the and it's not the race to the moon now, it's
race to super intelligence. He was like, I will be the first
person to create super intelligence.
I will make an AI that's clever than all human beings put
together. And the current trajectory of
that is within five years. Yeah.
So it is like. I think I think the scales are
low. It is mad and that scale has
gone down, down, down. You know, three years ago people
were like, oh, by 2050, by 2029, probably realistically we'll
have probably have a super intelligent AI that can just do
absolutely everything and think like us and utilise.
I just think it's it's what will happen.
I just do. So let's let's reframe this in
terms of education now. Yeah, because OK, again, we can
have these long term discussions about where I was going.
Let's park that for a minute. Make existential thread.
Yeah, over there. I'm just going to put it into my
nice little packet and just ignore that for a second.
We'll come back to that later on.
But in, in terms of AI for education, there are lots of
good use cases. There are lots of fantastic ways
we can use AI to help. And I think the traditional way
of they're called LLM you, you mentioned earlier large language
models, which is what ChatGPT essentially is.
It has access to the entirety of the Internet, which is huge.
And then based on what you put it predicts what a good response
would be essentially, and it's very good at doing that.
So you can create texts very quickly.
You know, I've created diary entries, I've created newspaper
reports, I've created setting descriptions, and they can all
do that based on prompts that I give them and create texts that
my children can use. And I can edit myself and even
some questions, have some retrieval questions, have some
inference questions, find the five trickiest words in here and
do some word meaning questions in this style, etcetera.
It's really, really good at that.
And I think in general, a lot of people kind of understand that
and. Why that can be useful reports,
we'll come into more detail in a second.
Then we'll try and try and explain to you guys how you can
actually use that to help your reports.
But what, what else can AI do at the minute?
Well, firstly, I just do a little bit more on the text
thing, right? One really good thing to
understand is even when you're generating text, it's so much
better now than it was even a year ago when we talked about
this. You can really, really tailor
the style of it as well. Like if you wanted to write it
with a particular flow or like look a particular way with its
grammar and punctuation, you can really just prompt it to do that
now. So don't, don't assume that, oh,
everything looks like AI. It kind of does unless you give
it a bit more prompting to, to do to create the text exactly
how you want. So you think, I think that's a
good point. It's as good as the prompt,
isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And again, we're going to kind of crossover with that when we
talk about reports again, but that's one thing.
But you can also, I mean, word banks are another great one just
for text. I use it all the time for word
banks, especially on the spot where I've not thought about
something. I'm like, oh, do you know what?
The kids really just, they keep asking me, what's another word
for this? Sure.
And I'm like, sometimes I want to say I go and get a
dictionary, but you know what? In the modern day, honestly,
honestly, it's a waste of time. I'd rather I'd rather they had
they don't because there's no money.
I'd rather they had a little, little little app with them
where they can just Google it or synonyms for this word.
You know what? That's what I'd do in real life.
So what it often ends up happening in the middle ground
here is I'll very quickly whip up a a word Bank of things that
were suitable for that genre, including what they want.
And then be like, OK, right, We've got a word bank here,
guys. If you're really stuck for words
for said look, here's 20 more or you know, rather than asking me
every single time, just stuff like that is really good, but
also image generation. I know you used it, you've
mentioned it on the pod before. How you you got their
descriptions? So.
Engaging. Into it, right?
Like image generation is insanely good.
Now you'll do honestly, anything you write it to do, it'll be.
It'll be pretty good at it. I used it the other day.
We know literally recently we did.
We did a setting. We've been reading Narnia, and
we did a setting description. I can't remember if I mentioned
this in the podcast or not, but essentially we did some writing
where we took the kind of structure of Narnia in terms of
a child walking through a portal, which wardrobe is.
So we took it as, OK, look, we're going to do it writing.
You are yourself. You're writing a diary entry of
your day and it started off of you walking through whatever you
want to walk through. Some children chose a Bush.
That one child had a really good idea.
They were playing football. The football got kicked into the
Bush. They went through the Bush to
find football, but they kept going and kept going and then
eventually got the ball, but they were in a desert.
Landscape. So you can change the landscape
at the end, you can change how what what door you go through.
You can change how you got there.
You can change whether you were your siblings or your friends,
how you felt about the experience.
Exactly that. But what ChatGPT did amazingly
well then was I said you need to be really vivid with your
descriptions. Then it gave them that purpose
because I said I'm going to feed this into the AI for it to
create a picture for you and it will only go off your prompt.
So if you're vague, it will give you something that you're
probably not imagining in your. Head, you've got to be clear if
you're. Specific and clearer and use the
right language, the better the picture will be.
I've never seen. So much description.
And then I picked about two or three of what I deemed the
children who tried to do that the most, whacked it into AI and
it made these images. And it was 1 was stepping
through, 1 was stepping through the Bush.
Like I mentioned, 1 was like the door of a rocket, Right.
So like, they go, they go into a rocket.
They, they go on their journey, they step out.
Yeah, they're in a new land. You could have travelled there,
but it's the idea of you're still stepping through into this
new land. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And AI did that and it was in space.
And this other, this other boy I've net, it's a classic boy
where you think it's, it can be like drawing blood out of a
stone, trying lots of description in their writing
because he's just not bothered. And it's fine that he's not
bothered because he's 8. And why would he care about this
thing? He's got something else he wants
to think about. But as soon as he realised that
it was going to be created into an actual picture based on his
words and his words would come to life immediately as well.
Immediately that that was enough for him to be like, I want to be
picked, I'm gonna do this. So I chose him at the end.
And his whole idea was the world was upside down.
He stepped into an upside with trees growing down and what was
really amazing, he thought of all this himself in his world.
The rain went up okay, because obviously it's upside down.
So there was rain going up from the floor, down from the trees.
There were some buildings and houses.
He wrote this really interesting and he said what colour was it
was dark and gloomy and purpley and, and it made it and his like
his face lit up. And that's to me, that's the
power of this kind of thing where it can give purpose to
some children who didn't have it before where me saying, oh guys,
it's for imagination isn't that great?
And and you the words can come to life.
For some kids that's not enough. They don't have that ability to
imagine that kind of thing. But when the when the computer
can make it in 1.5 seconds. Yeah, I got better writing out
of this child and there's so much potential after that.
You can do all sorts of things that say it doesn't generate
what they want. OK, Analyse that picture.
What's it missing? Where can you edit that in your
writing? Go back what is clearly you've
got something in your head that you've not described clearly.
There's so many things you can do.
A really interesting parallel came to my mind then when you
when you were talking about this and it and it is hilariously a
parallel because 10 years ago, and it wasn't my first year of
teaching because I've been teaching 10 years.
You've been teaching nine years, not quite a decade like me, 10
years ago. I also happened to be doing
Narnia in a different school. And a task that I thought of and
I, and I was really proud of this task because I thought this
is really cool was it was a scene with Mr Tumnus in, in his,
in his house. And Lucy was there and they were
doing some setting description. And I said, I gave them this
colouring in sheet, which was a picture of that.
And I said, you're only allowed to colour bits in, in the
picture when you've written it into one of your sensors.
And the, it was very much the same concept of what you're
doing there. I was like it.
I was thinking that it's going to make them be vivid with their
descriptions because they can't colour it in unless they've
written about it. And that was the idea.
And I just love how what you've done is, is the, is the natural
advancement of that using technology to the absolute MTH
degree because they got instant gratification.
Wildly different pictures. Mine were all said they all had
the exact same colouring engine. Given the freedom doesn't.
It they had so much more read them, you could immediately
analyse it and change it, you know, and you could retype bits
in that's yeah, it's so. Interesting, what we're
basically saying is my lesson was way better than yours.
Yeah, but ten years ago I was, you know, well ahead of the
curve, mate. I basically invented the idea.
But you, but that's not even a bad lesson because what what
you're doing there, you're still teaching children to take things
into account when you're doing a setting description.
Don't get me wrong, I think that's still a good thing.
But yeah, this just unlocked it in terms of the the ceiling is
your imagination. The ceiling is your imagination
now. So the more you're descriptive,
the more you explain, the more it will actually be in
existence. And I just find personally that
that hook is so powerful for writing to inspire children who
otherwise aren't inspired and struggle to make that link
between what they can imagine and what they can write down.
Yeah, this was like almost a bridge between that, where I got
more interesting. Look, did it always make sense?
Was it always perfectly punctuated?
That's a separate part of my job.
And that's fine. But you know what?
Realistically, as a teacher, at the end of the day, I was so
excited that he was excited to write.
Yeah. Did you make his own world up?
Yeah, it did. It Did they aspire.
Have to write something yeah, exactly.
Cool. Done That's that's like 80% of
your job done. That's it honestly, yeah,
honestly when you're when you're 14 do you know what if it
doesn't click by then then you've still got time because
you've got a brain that's over 14 year old.
And I can say to you, by the way, guy that needs to have a
that needs to have a full stop there, that needs to have a
capital ethic, by the way, you'd probably learn that before
you're an adult, right? And it's like, yeah, sure, it's,
it's OK. It's funny.
We have archaic systems of, of grids of what we expect children
to be able to do by their eight. Forget it.
I just don't care. I'm going to teach them it.
I'm going to, I'm, I'm, I'm not saying let's not do that.
I'm not saying it's not important to teach them because
other children will pick it up. But if some kids still don't
quite get it after the 57th time of me saying it, it's OK if they
don't get it the 58th time. But you know, what's amazing is
that child now wants to do some writing.
Win, win, win. And that's what I think my job
is. The obsession with metrics has
really flipped what it's supposed to be about.
The foundation in the culture of teaching, I think, is the
foundation is we teach them how to do all the grammar,
punctuation and spelling, and on top of that they can then write
lovely things. No, it's not.
The foundation should be where kids want to write something
honestly, just if you've done that should be the the absolute
first that you work on because progress is fairly natural for
most children if they just want to do it honestly.
Like if you, if a kid enjoys writing for seven years in a
row, it's very, very, very unlikely.
And there probably will be reasons for it if not that they
won't make progress in, in the stuff that we think is more
important than metrics, the first stuff we can measure.
And I think if we had the attitude as teachers, we would
be creating a better generation of writers in general.
They might just not get some of the stuff as early as we think.
Oh no. But they like writing still when
they're 15, so. As early as we've arbitrarily
decided they need to like who, who actually decided that 8 year
olds need to use frontal verbals in their text free like
frequently and different phrases?
Like so it's not objective. Is it Yeah.
It's not objective that they put the comma there or not.
I, you know what really, I don't really care too much.
And the great thing about AI and other use of, of it in school is
it is getting better at doing that anyway for teachers that it
can be, it can become an analysing tool.
You can upload a picture of something that someone's written
and you can ask it to based on the year 4 curriculum.
Can you please give me some pros and cons for this piece of
writing, Some strengths and some weaknesses or some next steps,
etcetera. And it will be able to very
quickly say, oh, we're using sentences that makes sense.
That's awesome. There are some fronted clauses
in there for maybe their prepositions, maybe adverbs or
some whatever is going on. The the child isn't always clear
of their writing, their descendants, Those aren't going
down very far. And also sometimes it just
doesn't quite make sense at the end when they're trying to use
conjunctions. Yeah.
OK, look, I can do that as an experienced teacher quite
quickly. But if you're learning your
trade, this is an amazing tool to have next year as a teacher.
Or even if you're more. Experienced, experienced, it's
just another pair of eyes. I wouldn't say no to look at
myself and like, no, I can do it, Dylan, I can do it.
But if you were offering to help me like analyse looking through
some work and I'd be like, yeah, cool, cheers.
Moderation, Why wouldn't I? What moderation is AI is going
to be, and I'm saying this now on the podcast because I think
in two years time when we're still doing this podcast,
hopefully we'll look back and be like, yeah, we were right.
AI is going to absolutely transform the world in the next
three years. It's really interesting because
that's what I've told you for a year and you've told me no until
now. And now you've stolen my
prediction. So it was my, you heard it here
first from me. You heard it here first.
Hayden from TCP, not Deeden, that we talked about said that
AI is going to transform the world.
But it really is. And you're absolutely right.
Like I thought the trajectory was much slower.
And I've only changed my mind honestly in the last like two or
three months where I've seen what AI was doing at the
exponential growth rate. And I'm like, this is, this is
actually mad because we weren't a year ago, we weren't supposed
to be doing these things. And by this time it's it's just
completely crazy. I think, yeah, in general,
there's always going to be some gimmicks.
Like we said, we went to bet, you know, 90% of the businesses
there had AI in the name and stuff.
There's some, don't get me wrong, there's some cool stuff
out there. I think there's going to be a
split between what we can use almost on a daily basis, which
is really having a massive impact on the children.
Yeah. And I, I, I feel rude calling
them gimmicks, but they kind of are gimmicky to a degree because
they have such a limited use niche tools.
Yeah. Like, you know, making up,
inventing songs. I think that's, that's an
amazing technology to be able to create a song.
But in, in a school, I'll use that.
Sometimes I'll make a song. I've, I've spoke about this
before, I made a song before about the water cycle because
that's something tricky to remember.
It's another hook for some children.
They might remember the song, remember the Jingle, the words
are embedded. We use the vocab, we do some
signs. Yeah.
That's just pedagogy to me. And I think there's, there's
always going to be those kind of tools where we think as a
teacher, that's helpful for me to teach this just like I used
to. Maybe going to YouTube and find
a water cycle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I would spend ages trying to find the right one and maybe I'd
pause it at one minute 47 because then it goes into
something that's irrelevant. Yeah.
With this kind of AI tool, it could be bespoke to you.
You can create it straight away again.
You know, this, this is less gimmicky, I guess, but in terms
of just on the idea of like, they're just going to be more
and more and more tools and tools and tools and tools and
tools as AI gets better. And people just put wrappers
around them and say, here's a really good tool we've packaged
up from it. I saw something the other day
and I can't think of the name of it, annoyingly, because it was
just sort of on my Instagram and I and I watched the video and it
was insanely good at making PowerPoints.
And I was like, I know that's been around for a little while.
AI has kind of been involved in like helping you make
PowerPoints, but this was like next level.
It was basically just put in one text prompt and it will use the
powers of the Internet and its image and video creation to make
the most insanely good PowerPoint presentation at
whatever level you want it for either a lesson or for like a
business meeting, whatever it is insanely good engaging
PowerPoint presentation on that thing.
And I was like, do you know what?
There are some teachers. There are a lot of schools still
where maybe their schemes of learning are not in place or
they change them every year because they're toxic or, you
know, for whatever reason, teachers are having to still
generate stuff that's been in the career for 10 years.
It's been the same objective for 10 years.
We're still having to, for some reason, generate new PowerPoints
for it. And I was like that would be a
useful tool for them because that will do that in 20 seconds.
Can you put the school logo in the corner please?
And can you change the font to Sansferi?
Serif, the AI has been trained to say no.
Actually. That's so ridiculous even I
won't do it. You have to take yourself anyway
yourself. Yeah, the AI knows how stupid
that is. Right.
So in general, obviously it's good use for AI.
We talked about our existential dread about where the whole
planet's going. So that's.
Been fun and the episode's over, no?
No, no, no, because now we're going to talk about specifically
for writing reports, because Hayden and I have used AI to
help us write reports. This will be the third year I
think you've used it. I think it's getting better and
better, but we still have many, many colleagues out there.
And we'll talk about some of the attracting statements later,
maybe about why people argue against doing this and why we
think it's OK. But in general, Hayden, can you
just outline what does someone have to do in order to save time
right in their reports using AI? What do you even do?
What are the options? What does it look like?
OK, I'll start about 400 questions.
I'll start with the options. Firstly, there's there's free
and there's paid options. By free I mean ChatGPT or any
other large language model. I only use ChatGPT as anyone I
can recommend, right? There are other paid services
out there. I know that I see Mr P's got his
teach my AI. I know there's another friend of
ours has made something called Rocket AI and there's probably
other companies things out there as well that do the same sort of
thing. Really what they're doing is
they're putting a wrapper around different language models with
lots of other other restrictions and things in place.
I'm not going to pretend I know exactly how they do it and
scaffolds scaffolds, but they are essentially utilising large
language models and just packaging it up to be a slightly
more easier. I've used these models before
and they are really good because you know what they do?
They package it up and make it really easy.
I can put the kids name in, I can put this what, what year
group they're in, what I want it to be about.
I can put the formality, I can bullet point some things in
there and it generates me a lovely comment.
You can also do this on ChatGPT if you get your prompts right.
So and. ChatGPT has a free account
option right? You can pay for ChatGPT and it
like it boosts how many models you can get or how quick that
you get stuff. But you can just sign up for
free to ChatGPT and get it to do.
This yeah, you can and and I wouldn't be surprised if you
know if you're listening to this in a few months time or a year,
I wouldn't be surprised if this information isn't perfectly
accurate because I know that they are as they monetize it
more and as more people use it that putting in more
restrictions for the free users. They'd be like, oh, you've used
up your, you get to wait 10 minutes now to do another
prompt. So like, don't you know, quote
me exactly on that because that might change.
But we've used the paid, paid version before and it was, it
was, it was very quick. Yeah.
Anyway, so should we talk about how to prompt now?
Should we talk? About that, sure, because a lot
of people, again, you know, I've comment, I've done memes and
stuff about I did one me which said me, ChatGPT and I having a
dance after we finished our reports and it's just me and
it's like it's a person and a robot just doing a dance.
Like what do you mean dancing? And you know, a lot of people go
haha, yeah, me too, ChatGPT is with my mate, etcetera.
But we still get comments from people saying how do I do this?
Yeah. OK so here's my recommendation
because this is what I did this year and this is the first time
I've done it this way by the way and I thought it was extremely
effective. And just for context to get you
excited, I did my reports in under 2 hours this year and I'd
say they are by far the best reports I've ever I will ever
deliver to parents and children. One of the reasons is AI, as
we've said very clearly, it is getting insanely better.
Like by the year. If you had a year ago
experienced AI and thought now this isn't for me, this isn't
quite how I want it. Honestly, wipe that, give it
another go because it is tenfold better now that doing its job.
So how so? How do we do it?
So how do we do it? So I did like this.
I had AI used the Word document, right, because you want to know
you can, you can just drag word documents into ChatGPT and or
just read the text on that. You don't have to type directly
into it. I, I put a made a Word document
and I made a table in it. And on the left hand side, I
just listed the kids as ABCDEFG, right.
So we're not going to be Oh, I didn't want to use names for
obvious GDPR reasons. I'm not going to get into it.
So don't use names. I just put ABCD.
I know who they are because it's just my, it's just my class
register in order. So I know B is the second kid on
my register and then I put 2 columns to the right of it and
you can simplify it or complexify it as much as you
want. My first column was general
notes and I just bullet pointed anything that came to mind based
on I know you did this as well, based on like a little thing.
I Yeah. Let's talk about that.
Yeah, we'll talk about. In a second.
So yeah, you've done your generic points, done my points.
And on the right hand side I put specific points as well.
I put like actual like anecdotes from the year that I would, I
would want to mention in the report.
Not everyone got something in that.
It depends if there was something that came to mind.
I dragged that into ChatGPT and I just wrote a prompt of it that
set the parameters and it was along the lines of it's there
for end of year 6 reports in the UKI want the word count to be
around 180 words. I want, I want it to be
informal, but with a professional tone.
You went informal? Yeah.
I, I find when you say informal, the professional tone, it
actually comes out way better when you.
But it's formal. Yeah.
It's still formal because it's because it understands
professional, but it keeps it in a tone where I would write,
Yeah. Because.
Because reports have to be professional still.
Yeah, but you want your voice to come through.
Yeah, exactly. So I found that as a little
cheat there, rather than putting formal, I put informal, the
professional tone. Brilliant.
A lot of other parameters of exactly what I want, you know,
if I want to split into two paragraphs, say split into two
paragraphs, if I said keep it really positive, I want it to,
you know, I want it to be friendly and approach well and
that's it. Honestly, it's clever enough at
that point where it's like it knows what year, it knows
honestly what end of year 6 reports are supposed to look
like. For whatever reason.
It is good at that now. It was right in things like, you
know, like referencing secondary school.
I didn't tell it that we weren't a free school.
It just knows that probably the chances are if it's a year 6,
they're going to be going to a secondary school next.
Year if you do all of it, like you said, you you've done all of
that. Maybe we'll come some push backs
in a second about it and and things you can do to, you know,
streamline it. You've done all that, but you're
still not happy with it. What would what would you say to
someone? Because you spent a lot of time
making that table and I can imagine if people didn't get
what they want straight away them I think what a waste of
time this is. This is silly and one of the
push backs I see is it takes just as long as me writing it
myself. What?
What would be your pushback to someone who says that?
You're a teacher market. Yeah, honestly, give it
feedback. Just give it feedback.
Child B didn't really capture this part of their their
personality. Can you hone in on that and just
do a little bit less of this? Okay, thanks.
I'll I'll regenerate child B for you.
And but even in general, if it's not doing what you want in
general, like to say they're too long or it's not quite as
formal, just train it right. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah. That's, that's what you're
getting at. Absolutely.
Right. You can put in.
I actually did this. I probably should have mentioned
it. I actually fed it a few examples
of my own personal handwritten, handwritten but typed reports
and said this is my tone. This is my style of writing.
Use it to help you. And it did.
Yeah. It was so good at doing that.
There's loads of things you can do.
And at the end of the day, you can always manually edit as
well. Were there a few that I still
just took a sentence out and replaced it because I was like,
I just, it be quicker for me to just rewrite that sentence than
it will be to reprompt it? Yeah, Just use your common sense
at that point. And it was quick.
I did them all in under a couple of hours.
And they were so precisely, exactly what I wanted to say.
Yeah. And I was almost like I.
I, I couldn't have written these more personalised and better
myself. This is just what I'm thinking,
but written perfectly well. This is the issue I've always
found with writing reports is that by far the biggest amount
of brain power goes on to formulating how the paragraph
will be laid out and the structure and making sure it
flows and it's written at a certain formality, etcetera.
And doesn't just sound the same every single time.
Because what ended up happening before was Oh my God, by the
end, I'm I'm copying and pasting changing names, right?
And that is the least personal you can possibly go, whereas
this, the computer does it for you.
It means immediately, and I want to touch on what you said a
minute ago because I know for a fact I've spoken about AI with
other teachers and they've said it takes me just as long to do
those bullet points because we've said you just use bullet
points. Yeah, write down the headline
things that you think for each child and the people going oh,
but that just takes me just as long to think of and and maybe
I'll miss something, but also like it takes me ages just to
write it. There's a way around it.
You've spoken about something we both do, which is before you do
anything, before you do anything at all, it take any notes for
any children, write down, write down.
Firstly, maybe a report of what you want it to look like.
So spend, you know, 1520 minutes writing it perfectly.
Yeah, because you can then upload that later on to ChatGPT,
like you said. But also alongside that, the way
I've always done reports, even when I've been writing it
myself, is I've created a structure to the report.
Yeah. And it's an overarching theme
for each part. For example, first bullet point
attitude in class, second bullet point social circle and
friendship groups. Third bullet point effort.
Yeah. 4th bullet point behaviour in class and how they respond to
how they treat other adults and other other people, for example.
5th bullet point, you know core personal strength so.
You have that always there to see.
That's a reference. Exactly.
So when I've got when I've got then child A, what I used to do
was go, I'm going to write a sentence now about their, their
social bonds with the children. Yeah.
And I'd sit there and I go, OK, well, I know, I know I could
write a bullet point now. I could write in 10 seconds.
A few strong individual friend friendship bonds with children
in the class struggle sometimes with making friends in larger
groups on playtime. That's said there's.
A bullet point. That's a bullet point.
It's not acceptable as a formal written report because it's not
written in a formal way. It's not written in a way, but
maybe that is sympathetic to the child as much because I've just
written the fact that they're not very good at making friends
in the playground. I'd never put that in the actual
report. That would take me 5 seconds.
So I know that information. What would take me time
previously about AI would be formulating that in a nicely
written way that isn't repeating what I've said for every other
child in the same situation and then moving on to the next
thing. So the reason why it's really
powerful just to spend a bit of time, I think is the thing here.
Spend a bit of time having a plan, having your bullet points,
spend a bit of time just writing it out and it'd be very quick
because you know your children so well by the end of the year.
Through your bullet points. And spend a bit of time just
training up the AI. Don't make it create every
single report for you immediately.
Don't do that. Play around with one child.
Say what you're going to do the prompts and say do it for this
child. OK, Well, that OK, that doesn't
fit in the box that my school will give me as a pro forma.
OK, do it again, but this time 140 words long.
Yeah, yeah, do it again, but make it more formal.
Because even though I said in formal tone, I know this is a
formal document, You played around with it a bit.
Track GBT. Instead of giving up, spend a
bit of time training. Yeah.
And then when you're happy, then you've written your notes for
the child. It takes it takes honesty.
It takes me. I'm going to be realistic
probably 1/5 of the time to write bullet point notes about a
child compared to writing a fully fledged out formal piece
of piece of writing a paragraph. But it's still got 100% of the
personal touch. Yeah.
Because all all that my brain power is going on is formulating
it and writing it in a certain way.
Yeah, Yeah, yeah. That's where the large.
Language model comes in just cutting out the last step where
you would have turned your informal bullet point in your
head into your own formal sentence.
You're now just saying, here's my informal bullet point.
Can you just do the last bit for me and turn it into a formal
sentence? Because that's a bit that
doesn't really matter about us. Who cares if we do that?
But it just needs to be personal.
That's very different to the opinion a couple of years ago.
People like we can't use AIT reports.
They had this idea that we were literally saying here is here's
32 names, right, missing reports and it's just completely
made-up. It's like, do you know what?
I, I can't imagine anyone was even doing that.
Then I think people just made-up some some circumstances like no
one's doing that what you're talking.
About and and if they did you know what you would do to that
person you would talk to that person and explain why that's
bad and get them to do it in a different way What you wouldn't
do was just take away this mechanism from everyone in the
whole country yeah yeah classic, classic, classic like that it's
crazy yeah. I think understanding ChatGPT in
general is going to be able to unlock I think a lot of these
for. Can I add one thing to it as
well, because it's important to understand this again, I'm
really I'm really here to try and convert people that maybe
had a dabble in this last year and weren't completely
convinced, right. ChatGPT since then has developed
its memory system really, really, really well.
So ChatGPT 3 was the first one that came out in 2022.
It actually didn't have memory. It didn't have a memory system,
right. Whereas now if you if you have
like 1 long stream of chat with ChatGPT or even another whole
new chat, it kind of starts learning you as a person, right.
So if you've done all this grunt work, like Dylan said with one
just to get the report perfectly how you said it is, you don't
then have to re prompt it underneath and be like, OK, I
want you to do this, this, this, this, this and this and this for
all my other kids. You just say do that for this
whole list now. And it knows what that is
because it has it's it's understanding of reasoning and
it's understanding of even nuance is is crazy good.
Now, even like one more thing, just I'm trying to think of
anything that people might have against this.
Right. When you said your bullet point
might be quite harsh and to the point and you obviously wouldn't
word it like that. People might say, well, if
you're just giving ChatGPT A harsh point, it might word it
with your harsh wordings. Nope, It is so good at
understanding nuance. Now it knows that's rude.
I know it sounds crazy. Me saying it's just, it's just
an AI bot. It knows that's rude and it will
not word it like. That and if it doesn't retrain
it, that's the point. If it doesn't do that, just say
to it that was to on the nose. Although we still want this
truth to come through because it is something that a parent
should know about a child if they're struggling socially.
Can we do it in a way that's more sensitive, perhaps, but
still formal, And it will do it. Yeah, and the chances are if you
get your prompt right at the start, you won't have to.
I think in my prompt I put remember this is has to be
appropriate for parents reading about their children.
Yeah, something like that along the lines.
So and it just, it just extrapolated that OK, this needs
to be appropriate because it's it knows everything about every
text in the Internet ever. It knows what it looks like.
It's just, it's insanely good. I I couldn't recommend it
anymore. I.
Think that's that That is the big point though, isn't it about
spending time getting it to the level it should be?
Yeah. But of course, Dylan, there are
always drawbacks, right? There are, There are, there are
things that people will counteract this with that there
are arguments. People say, yeah, but we
shouldn't be using AI for this reason.
Yeah. Should we go through a few of
those? And.
And yeah, I feel like we've covered quite a few of them.
Yeah, because we talked about GDPRGDPR is a big problem.
We don't want to be uploading names that's identifiable for
children. Easy way around that is simply
if you, especially if you're going down the free route of
using ChatGPT yourself, just build in that yourself, label
the children like you said, ABCD, go back in and just put a
name in. It's still quicker.
I think you can avoid GDPR risks and by taking away any
identifiable names with the children.
I think that's then fine. Yeah.
The fact it takes so long, we've talked about that.
I just don't think that's true. If you're doing it properly, if
you're doing it in a way which saves time, obviously it's gonna
save time. Yeah.
If you're essentially writing it and then just putting it into
chat TPT and it just changes what you've already written as a
fully fledged paragraph, yeah, that won't save you time.
You're adding an extra step in. So just be sensible about what
you're doing. I think there's a couple of
things we can touch upon here that we haven't maybe, but we
can briefly talk about now because there'll be people who
sat through this whole thing going AI is, yeah, it's
brilliant. It is fantastic.
It does all this stuff. It can have like beautiful
outcomes for the children. I spoke earlier about how that
child's now engaged to do writing.
Isn't that amazing? But isn't it's awful for the
environment? Yeah, There are just things
where it's like, I don't have an answer for this, but we should.
We should acknowledge them because if we're here, we should
be responsible. Like, yeah, it is it.
Using energy that we otherwise wouldn't be.
Using it uses a lot of energy, a lot more.
I think people realise that to generate one prompt, it's a lot
of computing power and computing power generally generates heat
and to how do we, how do we generally cool down computing
systems Normally with water, we and we need a lot of water to do
it. And do you know what I mean?
The whole system goes there. It does create a lot of energy.
So it's worth considering. I think a lot of AI companies
are are trying to build their new infrastructure with this in
mind to like reduce it as much. But at the end of the day, it
will always use loads more energy.
They're not. They're not ever going to get to
the point where they're like, oh, it doesn't use energy
anymore, Of course it will. They might create better cooling
systems. I'm not suddenly not sceptical
about big business, just I like AI.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to be like they'll give me a free pass
because it does this really cool thing for me.
No, no, this is huge business making billions of pounds.
They're going to do shortcuts and they're going to rinse
energy. And that is a.
Problem. It's a huge challenge and it's a
huge downfall and a downside to use.
Is it enough to not use? It depends where you stand on
it, I suppose, isn't it? For some people it is do.
You drive to the shop, you know driving is is 100 times more
than doing prompts. Yeah, I think I read somewhere
that per kilometre driving in a petrol car is equivalent to
about 250 AI prompts, right. OK, so I'm not, I'm not
justifying stuff here because because again, using AI, using
AI is like I think 15 to 20 times more energy than using
Google. So there's obviously layers
here. I'm don't get me wrong.
And the small things are still important.
They are. I'm not saying they aren't.
But if you can, for example, if you're working from home, you've
chosen to work from home and you're not no longer driving 10
kilometres there and back, OK? That is, you've got over 2000 AI
prompts you can use that day and still be in the green for how
much energy you've consumed. Yeah, because you've saved the
driving energy for doing that. It's just a game of give and
take and I think you've just got to be sensible about it,
understand what you're doing, be be able to defend it in the same
way that I defend driving to Tesco, which is 2 minutes down
the road. I'll do that.
Sometimes I'll walk, but sometimes I'm like, no, it'll
take half the time. I'll just drive quickly.
I think it's easy to forget that that like that compared to
something new. When something new comes in,
it's like, Oh no, no, it's using energy that wasn't there before.
Yeah, But there are other things I can do in my life if I'm
really, truly worried about that level of energy usage.
That can easily compensate for that Yeah, yeah, just to do 1
less drive a month, honestly, and that'll probably account for
all the amount of times you use ChatGPT as a normal, but as a
normal user. That's fair enough.
And the and the last big one, I think we kind of covered it, but
it's worth mentioning. It's just that people say it's
just morally wrong. It's morally wrong to not write
it yourself. These are reports that are going
to parents. It shouldn't be under the
disguise that you didn't write it entirely yourself.
It's a big argument that people make.
I I don't think it has many legs.
What do you think about that? Morally wrong to use AI?
Did I hope this person turned off spell check when they used
their Word document to write their reports?
I hope this person never looked up a synonym for a word like
what? At what point does everything
have to come from your own brain?
I think what has to come from your own brain is the fact and
information about the children that has to come from the person
who's been with the child all year.
That's just a fact. The the prose and the way we
write it and the formality of it and the word choice of it
absolutely doesn't have to come from a human.
And it never has done. No, it's never been.
We used to have banks. I think Twinkle used to release
a bank or they still do, where you would take sentence stems
because you, the adult, have chosen which sentence stem
matches the child. That's your input.
But it doesn't matter how it's written and if the same child
gets the same sentence. Yeah, they just need the
information. They just need the information.
So I think there's a clear distinction, and that always has
been between what clearly has to come from the teacher and what
doesn't. Yeah, we're just adding AI to
this side of things that it doesn't have to, making it
cleaner, making it way more personal, making it better than
what already existed. But we're kind of just some
people are seeing AI and going morally wrong.
I was like, well, it's no less wrong than using a Bank of
words. Yeah, you're still choosing as
the adult. And if anything, it's better
because it's more personal. It's funny what the perception
of being professional does, doesn't it?
Because really, if we go down this Fort train, why aren't we
just giving them the bullet points?
Yeah. Why aren't we just giving the
parents the bullet points that we write that we put into
ChatGPT and they have to decipher it back into bullet
points? Because that's basically what
they're doing is they're reading it, they're interpreting it and
then going, oh, OK, so my kids. Are so the bullet points are
this, yeah. They go my kids a bit silly in
class, but obviously the professionals, they've worded it
nicely. Yeah, it's funny enough, mate.
I actually put that in my original bullet point.
Your kid is a bit silly in class.
Yeah, Doesn't this, I think there's a meta conversation
maybe just to finish this off when I was like 30 seconds.
Yeah. How useful are reports anyway?
We've spoken about this. What are reports?
To me, they're like a keepsake to see what you were like when
you were younger, when you're older.
And and they're statutory needed to give to the parents of
government. Say you have to report on the
children. They don't have to be all
singing and dancing. No, from school to school
reports look different. I've worked in a school where
you got like a 30 page booklet for your report and there was
some massively in depth stuff. And we as teachers, you had to
write so much. And that was before AI.
And I've worked in another school where it's one side of a
four. So, so like there's, there's a
discrepancy there. Wait, it's coming full circle
here. Because it seems to me like,
yes, there are sometimes things in schools that are mental that
we simply don't have to do, but we convince ourselves we do for
some reason. And then that from the knock on
effect of someone in charge who's decided that means
hundreds and hundreds of hours for teachers to have to do in
their own time. Guess what?
Guys use AI. My school said I can't use AI.
Do it anyway. They're not going to know.
They don't come full circle on this episode.
You just wait, give it a couple of years, and moderations won't
exist. You know what's going to happen?
Everyone has to upload their children's writing into this
insane AI machine that knows the teacher assessment framework and
it tells you whether it's expected or not.
CLA everybody. No one's got a job anymore and
this episode is over. Yeah, thank you, everyone.
Potential, literally, literally. And yeah, I just want to spread
my thanks everyone for watching this AI generated piece of
content. If you enjoyed this AI generated
podcast, please leave us a review.
See you next time. Bye.
I'm real, I promise.