Why I'm an enthusiast about LLMs as teacher assistants, but I quietly started using them a bit less.
A 🧵
Using an LLM is like having a full editorial staff always at hand, but there are a few downsides that made me a bit more cautious —although I surely don't want to go back. I love LLMs because they provide me with precise, specifically tailored texts for the needs of my classes (history and literature, mainly). I only use LLMs on topics I am confident with, as I don't want to be fooled by hallucinations. Even so, I often double-check. 1/n

Italian schools are in crisis. We keep relying on ineffective activities ranging from ill-defined discovery learning to long lectures. Both innovation and tradition spectacularly fail. How come? My hunch is that our pedagogy is unbelievably low-intensity, but we don't see it. A🧵 I won't go into details about the overall architecture of the system -it'll suffice to say that curriculum, marking, and subject hours and teaching techniques are pretty much the same anywhere in Italy. The key activity for summative assessment is elaborative interrogation. 1/n

A small but hopefully useful addition to Turn&Talk. As of late, I've been using T&T extensively, but the idea of an imbalance between the talker and the listener, where the latter is less involved and may get distracted, has been bugging me. I might have found a workaround. A 🧵 It's actually quite simple -so simple that maybe I'm reinventing the wheel. I now ask the listener to take notes of what the talker says. All they have to do is to jot down the key words or phrases that summarize what the talker is saying in a bullet list. 1/n

Turn&Talk, a defense. A few days ago @adamboxer1 claimed that T&T isn't as effective as we usually assume. His criticism stuck with me, although I replied with a sort of improvised defense. I've been focusing on my T&T in these days and I came up with these thoughts. A 🧵 1/n

https://twitter.com/adamboxer1/status/1974759884760760636

Some of his remarks seemed sensible to me: T&T can really lead to distraction or sloppy work, as students don't always make a real effort or get away with muttering a few brief sentences and that's it. I wondered if I should find other ways to let them practice oracy 2/n

My personal way to cold calling, a short 🧵. I started using CC even before reading TLAC. Now I use it a bit less, and differently. In a more structured way, you could say. 1/n In general, I use CC for answers too long to fit on a miniboard. But still, once you pick someone to answer (after a pause, of course), attention fades. Some students might even just hope they won't be called, in spite of your efforts to take everyone in. How to solve that? 2/n