With ChatGPT, Teachers Can Plan Lessons, Write Emails, and More. What's the Catch?

The education community has been abuzz with the rise of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that can write anything with just a simple prompt. Most of the conversation has been centered on the extent to which students will use the chat bot--but ChatGPT could also fundamentally change the nature of teachers' jobs. So far, teachers have used--or considered using--the chat bot to plan lessons, put together rubrics, offer students feedback on assignments, respond to parent emails, and write letters of recommendation, among other tasks. While some educators worry about the implications of automating these parts of teaching, others say that the tool can save them hours of work, freeing up time for student interactions or their personal life. After all, a typical teacher works about 54 hours a week, but just under half of that time is devoted to directly teaching students, according to a nationally representative survey of teachers conducted by the EdWeek Research Center last year. Just under a third of teachers said if they could spend less time on any one task, it would be general administrative work.