(set: $score to 0)(text-style: "underline")[''Researching Secondary English Teachers' Views on the Pedagogical Affordances of AI'']
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''An Interactive Collection of Research Stories''
by Dr Sam Holdstock
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(Set: $Introduction to "Done")In the summer of 2025, in collaboration with Dr John-Paul Riordan and Sam Clarke, I began researching secondary English teachers' views on the pedagogical affordances of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
We conducted eight interviews with practising English teachers. Once we had conducted these interviews, I reviewed the recordings and composed first person written accounts of the conversations. These 'research stories' document my encounters with the recorded interviews.
In this interactive text, I share these research stories with you. However, instead of putting them all in one document, I have designed this non-linear text. It provides you with different ways of reading and navigating through my written accounts. As you explore, you might think about how the different reading pathways available to you affect your understanding of AI and its affordances in English.
Finally, please note that I offer this text not as a means of criticising or advocating for particular practices, but in the hope that it will stimulate thought, reflection and professional development. Also, there are practical and ethical issues that these accounts do not fully explore, meaning that this text should ''not'' be used as a guide to teaching with AI.
With the introduction out of the way, [[let's begin!->explore]](text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Almond’s Playful Pedagogy ]
Watching back the interview that I conducted with Mr Almond, I am struck by my own formality and rigidity. Framed by the laptop screen in front of me, I see myself wearing a shirt and tie and posing pre-scripted questions. Perhaps this is unsurprising: this interview marked the start of a new project, the first project that I have initiated since submitting my PhD thesis and since shifting from life as a school-based teacher-researcher to a university-based lecturer-researcher. I was nervous and excited. I think I also had a school visit to conduct that afternoon.
Mr. Almond, although also smartly dressed, displayed a sense of playful excitement as he spoke about his experiences with AI. He has used AI (principally generative, pre-trained transformers such as ChatGPT and his own custom-designed GPTs) in a variety of playful and entertaining ways. As the interview progressed, one apparent chain of events struck me as particularly interesting.
Mr Almond stated that he has not had access to a large quantity of training or resources, although he does mention having completed an online course on the ‘ethical use of AI in classrooms’. With a smile and a laugh, he remarked that he has learned a great deal from ‘watching comedy streams on Twitch’. One streamer he watched ‘created an AI version of Napoleon’, against whom the streamer played chess. Inspired by this, Mr Almond started using AI to create literary and historical characters for him and his students to interact with during lessons, as a class. He created these characters in advance of his lessons, I believe through designing appropriate prompts and custom GPTs. For Mr Almond, using AI to get ‘different voices’ into the classroom in such ways has ‘enriched the students’ experience quite a lot’.
Mr Almond gave examples of how he used these AI-characters: he used a microphone that was connected to his computer, carrying it around the room and getting students to ask questions. He said that he had been working with voice and voice recognition to enable students to talk to the AI-characters, and for the AI characters to talk back. In hindsight, I wish that I had asked him for more details about what this looked and sounded like!
He provided one example of a year nine lesson. The class had been reading //To Kill A Mockingbird//. He and his class ‘set up the trial’ of Tom Robinson, ‘with the AI representing Tom Robinson’. Before starting, they ‘fed’ the novel into the GenAI system they were using and ‘discussed with the AI beforehand how it was going to respond’. They were ‘able to ask him questions’, and Mr Almond noticed how it affected the students: ‘They were engaged like I haven't seen a group of year nine boys engaged in a novel for a long time’. I ask myself, to what extent were they engaging with the novel? And more importantly, to what extent were they aware of the ethical dilemmas involved in programming an AI chatbot to take on the voice of a persecuted Black character?
Mr Almond celebrated the fact that, in using AI in these ways, his lessons were becoming more ‘interactive’. He felt that for him, AI was helping bring the subject of English to life. He stressed some of the dangers and risks of using AI within education, but he stated enthusiastically that he was ‘riding the crest of a wave’ through his work with AI.
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Almond on Marking and Feedback ]
Mr Almond struck me as a proactive and innovative AI user who had devoted significant time and energy to exploring its uses. As someone who has experimented with designing customised AI tools that //could// be used in the school classroom, this was exciting for me. Mr Almond was engaging in practices that I had been thinking about and imagining, but which I had not been able to fully explore. He had also explored the practicalities of using AI for marking and feedback to a much greater extent than I had.
Watching the interview back, I observed another noteworthy chain of events that I shall here describe. Even as I do so however, I am nervous: will I be able to discern comparable chains in all the interview recordings? If not, should I avoid relying on discernible chains of events as I assemble this stack of research stories?
Mr Almond appeared to be sat in a school classroom during our remote interview; his background was blurred, but I could make out some windows, the light from which was reflecting against a whiteboard behind him, creating glare. Mr Almond described a trip to ‘the BETT conference’ where he met delegates from a company called Olex.ai. Said delegates claimed that their product could ‘mark English papers using AI’. They provided an ‘impressive demonstration’, photographing and marking some scripts that Mr Almond happened to have brought with him. However, after seeing the pricing of the product, Mr Almond decided that it might be better for him to develop his own custom GPT for marking, feedback and assessment, and this is exactly what he did. The tool is a work in progress, and, at the time of our interview, Mr Almond was experimenting with ‘different APIs for handwriting recognition’ that could improve his model. Listening back, I wonder about the extent to which intellectual property law is being taken into account in the development of this tool, and make a note to raise this with Mr Almond.
As well as occasionally suggesting to students that they use tools like ChatGPT to get feedback on extra practice essays, Mr Almond appears to have made extensive use of the marking tool that he has developed himself. However, he stressed to his students that this AI tool is not replacing him as a human marker; he reported having told students that he would still ‘be marking just as much as I was before’, but that AI would be supplementing this. In our interview, Mr Almond repeatedly mentioned the benefits of using AI in this way, emphasising ‘the fact that the students can keep practising and improving without needing to then wait for me to mark a thing’. Mr Almond felt that this will have ‘improved my [his] grades pretty significantly this year’.
Moreover, Mr Almond mentioned that getting AI to mark student work might provide students with a ‘low pressure environment’ in which to practice, an environment somewhat like a ‘sandbox’. He said that he had created this environment by giving some students the choice of having their work marked by himself or by his AI marking tool. The AI tool gave them a means of receiving feedback ‘without necessarily having me go through it’. He felt that students were therefore ‘able to experiment and try things’, implying that students might feel differently about feedback, depending on its source.
AI is affecting Mr Almond’s feedback and assessment practices in other interesting ways as well. Using the tool that he has developed is changing the way that he interacts with students’ work. As he feels that AI can provide written, ‘mark scheme-based’ feedback of a satisfactory standard, he feels enabled to ‘sit and just read’ his students’ essays, rather than marking them. Consequently, he feels he can have a ‘more interesting conversation’ with students that is more of a ‘human-to-human interaction about their essay’. Similarly, he feels that AI is saving him time on admin tasks, freeing him up to ‘focus on teaching’ and on getting to know his students a bit more.
Having experimented with using AI for marking and feedback, Mr Almond feels that both students and parents recognise the potential benefits. He described a lesson in which he ‘stood at the front’ and asked students if they felt he was just ‘being lazy’ by using AI in this way. Although he said that a few students put up their hands, he also said that, when they understood that AI let them do more practice and get more feedback than other students, they were ‘100% on side’. Likewise, Mr Almond suggested that parents were supportive too. He described a parents’ evening that took place ‘about a month’ after he had started using his AI marking tool. During that parents’ evening, ‘four or five parents from that year 11 class said they were really impressed by what I [he] was doing with AI’.
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Almond and the Bounciness of AI]
Whilst reviewing my interview with Mr Almond and pulling out quotations and passages that I might use to portray the manner in which AI is affecting him, his students and his lessons, I detected a pattern. This pattern did not fit into an obvious chain of events, but it still drew my attention. Mr Almond referred to using AI-generated content as something that he and his students could ‘bounce’ off in different ways. He used the word bounce only once, but I felt that the notion of AI’s bounciness was evident in several of the examples he provided during our interview.
Firstly, Mr Almond said that, during lessons, he had got a generative AI system, ‘to answer some GCSE questions’. He gave it the mark scheme as a guide, and then he and his class marked the essays that it produced together. He described the experience as an ‘interesting way of proving that [...] AI tools don't actually know how to answer a GCSE question effectively’. Moreover, he said that it ‘threw up’ some ‘normie ideas’, meaning that it reproduced fairly ‘standard readings’ of the text in question. As he was trying to push students in his classes towards achieving top grades, he used the AI-generated content as something his students could ‘bounce off’ as he challenged them to produce more novel responses and interpretations.
In the context of Mr Almond’s classroom, AI’s bounciness therefore contributed to the culture that he sought to nurture. He said that, in his classes, it is ‘us against the world’, with his students being encouraged to ‘be the best this year in the school’. He said that AI helps him to build that culture by showing students ‘the aggregate’, thus giving them something to compete with or improve upon.
Mr Almond described other ways in which AI could produce bouncy content. For example, he described a ‘module on Interactive Fiction’ (IF) that he taught. At this point in the interview my own ears pricked up; as a PhD researcher, I explored the pedagogical possibilities of IF within secondary school English classrooms. Mr Almond spoke of how he and his class would ‘write the beginning of a story’ and then divide up into groups, with each group creating different branches of the story they had collaboratively begun. Alongside this, he described having used AI to generate another branch, ‘to see what direction it went’. He and his students compared the branches and experimented with different prompts to see how the style changed. He was using AI to get students thinking comparatively about how their writing might compare to the AI-generated text.
Mr Almond also described having used AI to interact with existing literary texts in more critical-creative ways. For example, he suggested that he might ask an AI system various questions: ‘What if Lady Macbeth was actually just a standard Jacobian housewife? [...] What if the inspector never called?’ According to Mr Almond, the system can ‘write those scenes’, allowing him and his students to ‘look at and discuss’ texts in a different way. Again, he described using AI-generated content as a springboard for further thought.
Upon reflection, I realise that the stories I have written which derive from my interview with Mr Almond seem to cast AI in a positive light, so I feel it important to mention that, in considering the possible bounciness of AI, Mr Almond also drew attention to the inadequacies of AI-generated content. He mentioned that he had seen AI systems ‘making up quotes’ from a text and ‘inexplicably’ mixing up characters from the play //An Inspector Calls// (Eric and Gerald). I ask myself if these are indeed inadequacies, or if they might not also be seen as contributing to the bounciness of AI-generated content. I also remind myself that AI is not the only way to generate such bouncy content!
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(text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Cashew and the Creeping Threat]
As I review the recording and AI-generated transcript of my interview with Mr Cashew, an impression of AI’s stealthy encroachment upon the human, social and interpersonal nature of education (and research) in English emerges. As I listen to him speak again, a sense of threat appears, a sense of threat that I certainly recognise, whilst simultaneously feeling that it forms only part of the picture.
During our conversation, Mr Cashew described some of the ways that he has seen AI creep into schools and classrooms. For example, thinking about whether he had ever used AI in a lesson, Mr Cashew spoke of how he occasionally uses an internet search engine to find illustrative images during lessons, or to find definitions of words if he hasn’t ‘got a dictionary to hand’. However, ‘some of the things that come out now on search engines are produced by AI’, causing him to unintentionally use AI during lessons, in front of his students. Similarly, the school’s management information system (MIS) now has AI tools built in, meaning that Mr Cashew can use a chatbot that is connected to ChatGPT via the school’s MIS on his device. Finally, he also mentioned that an AI company (Write9), ‘got in touch’ with him and showed him ‘a bit of a demo’. They demonstrated how their products can be used to ‘set quiz questions’ and ‘essays’, providing students with ‘feedback, straight away’.
These examples might not, when seen in isolation, feel like a creeping threat. However, in the context of the interview as a whole, they take on such a characterisation. This is because of the ways in which Mr Cashew repeatedly stressed how AI could threaten his identity as a teacher. He wants ‘to be seen as the expert facilitator’ and using AI to ‘generate content’ in or for lessons might undermine this status. He also wants students to ‘trust’ his feedback and does not want the process of feedback to be entirely ‘outsourced to AI’ because this would make the process feel ‘soulless’. Similarly, if AI is used a great deal for planning, Mr Cashew worries that students may think, ‘oh, you've just got AI to plan these resources, and they may start to view the teacher differently’. He recalled a lesson in which his students said that the resource he was using was ‘AI stuff’. Overall, he noted that an excessive use of AI within lessons themselves ‘denigrates the status of the teacher’, potentially reducing teachers from ‘subject specialists’ to ‘glorified cover teachers’.
More profoundly, for Mr Cashew, AI threatens the ‘very human process’ that is classroom learning in English. For him, AI ‘just gets in the way’ of the ‘human process’ of writing, inhibiting our imaginative capabilities. Likewise, he does not see AI as being particularly capable of supporting the facilitation of classroom talk. He reflects upon how it could negatively impact the extent to which students and teachers think for themselves, for if AI is used to generate content, the students and teachers involved will not do the thinking that comes with the writing or creation of texts. In fact, Mr Cashew highlighted that a focus on such content is ‘dehumanising’ the whole profession and even threatening his own ‘principles’ as an English teacher. While Mr Cashew did highlight some potentially useful affordances of AI, I felt a persistent sense of angst coupled with an urge to resist AI-creep running throughout the whole interview.
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Cashew Values Time]
Mr Cashew values lesson time, and during our interview, I got the impression that his feelings about time influenced his attitude towards AI.
Looking over our interview transcript, my own interest in the ‘live’ usage of generative AI comes to the fore through the questions that I ask. For Mr Cashew, such live AI usage threatens to take up time that might be better spent. For example, Mr Cashew spoke compellingly about the importance of making time for modelling and handwriting, describing an activity sequence that he frequently employs: ‘I’ll do something, we’ll do something together, and then [...] on you go: you do it yourself.’ In describing how he might model the writing process as part of such activity sequences, he also emphasised that he prefers to write by hand on the whiteboard, ‘modelling handwriting’ at an appropriate ‘speed’ for the students to process. In Mr Cashew’s words, ‘if I'm modelling a paragraph live, they can see the struggle I have. They can see my struggles with my own handwriting’. By contrast, using AI to produce a written model ‘skips that process because you just see the three dots generating an answer’. Although AI might produce text for the class to consider swiftly, Mr Cashew feels (as I do) that, in so doing, AI undermines the modelling process. He also emphasised to me the joyous aesthetic experience of handwriting: ‘Isn't it lovely that you can buy a fountain pen and write beautifully?’ He seemed to feel that AI could detract from the embodied experience of writing.
However, Mr Cashew also recognised the ways that AI might be usefully employed to provide students with timely feedback. He described an AI company whose services he was trialling. They offer an automated AI marking and feedback tool that Mr Cashew felt could be used to support students when he did not have the time to mark their work. He described an example scenario: ‘I’ve got top set year 10 and they’re going into year 11. If they're going to do lots and lots of extended writing off their own back in addition to the homework I set, that [AI marking and feedback tool] might give them the feedback that they need there and then’. In this way, the ‘feedback loop’ can ‘be accelerated’. He described how this could provide students with more ‘autonomy and independence’. It could also, ‘empower’ some students: ‘If they use it in an iterative way to say right, well, I've written an essay, let me tweak it now and see what it throws out differently’.
Using AI in this way would enable Mr Cashew to ensure students receive feedback that, due to teacher time constraints, they would not otherwise receive. Mr Cashew therefore felt that allowing AI to support students by providing ‘instant detailed feedback’ could be useful. In terms of ‘live’ AI usage during lessons, this was one of the only roles that Mr Cashew felt AI might usefully play. He said that AI can provide feedback ‘much quicker’ than he can, but that otherwise, AI doesn’t have ‘a huge role to play’ in English lessons. He did, however, state that he had used AI to produce lesson resources such as comprehension questions and grid activities for students to complete, recognising that this could save him time when planning, freeing him up to ‘think more about the relationships [that he wants] to have with the class’.
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Chestnut’s Trepidation ]
When I meet with Mr Chestnut, he is at home – I can vaguely make out a family photo framed on the wall behind him. However, rewatching the interview, I cannot recall whether I too was working from home that afternoon. No visual prompts jog my memory, for during our call, I employed a background image that I had downloaded from my institution’s internal website; it depicts the most state-of-the-art building which stands on campus. Behind it, the sky is strikingly blue, and the image is marked by my university’s logo in one corner.
The school day is over. Neither Mr Chestnut nor I are wearing ties. Nevertheless, some quivers of trepidation ripple across the surface of our interview. On my part, I am aware that Mr Chestnut has taught in schools for almost three times as long as I have. Whilst I have a PhD in Education and English teaching, I acknowledge that he has more extensive and varied classroom experience. Does this explain why I pose fewer follow-up questions? Or is this because, as Mr Chestnut reveals, he has not yet actually used AI during one of his lessons?
In Mr Chestnut, I do detect some comparable ripples of anxiety. Although he is excited about AI, he is also somewhat fearful. His gut feeling is that AI could become a ‘positive’ and ‘transformational tool’ in the classroom. He states that it could help teachers to ‘model good work’ and that, in the classroom, it could render the teacher more of ‘a collaborative figure’ who is ‘more mobile in the room’. Consequently, lessons could become ‘less teacher focused’. However, Mr Chestnut also makes frequent references to fear. He worries that, were he to use AI in the classroom, he would ‘produce something incomprehensible or that wouldn’t aid learning’. He links this worry to his own ‘fear of making mistakes’. He also references concern relating to ‘optics’ and ‘parental fears and expectations’; He would not want parents to hear about AI being used at school and for them to think that it was being used ‘as a shortcut or some other kind of cheat’. He also recognises that the notion of cheating, in relation to AI, can affect teacher-student relationships. At the minute, he says, AI usage is ‘something you don't talk to teachers about’ because it could potentially be ‘misconstrued as cheating’.
Some of Mr Chestnut’s anxiety is linked to his extensive teaching experience. He mentions the ‘old dogs, new tricks thing’. He thinks that teachers who are currently in training will be ‘the pioneers’ of AI in education. Contrastingly, he references his own age, and states that his established approach to teaching is more ‘text-driven’ than it is technology-driven. He predicts a time when it will be ‘considered the norm to use AI software, and those who don’t will seem anachronistic or old’. In such a future, teachers who don’t use AI could be viewed ‘as being slightly ineffective’.
Despite any worries that Mr Chestnut may have, he recognises that AI is likely to play a role in shaping what it means to be a teacher over the coming years. Having spoken to colleagues about AI’s affordances in the classroom, he feels he understands what he might do with AI, but that he could benefit from further training and support, perhaps from ‘other people who can do it more proficiently.’ Mr Chestnut sees a need for ‘CPD or training for teachers’ that will support them to ‘deploy AI in English or their subject area’.
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Hazelnut and the Plughole of Public Exams]
Mr Hazelnut joins our call from home, using his mobile phone. He holds the device in his hands, so the picture wobbles and shakes slightly at various points in our conversation. He is also sporting headphones. Is this to hear me better, or to prevent our conversation from disrupting someone in the next room? Perhaps the nature of our relationship makes him comfortable to speak to me from home, via his personal device.
At the school where Mr Hazelnut currently works, AI appears to be being embraced. He speaks of how they have been ‘offering [training] sessions on various AI things’. However, he has not been able to attend these sessions and has instead learned by ‘googling’ and by exploring a ‘teaching subreddit on reddit’. It is unclear to me how directly these ideas have influenced his classroom practice, but he mentions a variety of ways in which he has used AI, stating that AI can be a useful ‘time saver’: he has used AI to create cover sheets and to write letters to parents. He has also experimented with getting AI to produce ‘modern translations of Shakespeare plays’, but he has found that it often ‘gets the tone completely wrong’. Furthermore, he has trained AI tools to generate written ‘models’ that ‘mimic’ his own writing style. However, when using these models, he has become aware that he does not know the model text as well as he would have done if he had written it himself. In his words, ‘It’s not the same as producing it yourself’. Therefore, these models come with a healthy dollop of ‘guilt’ for Mr Hazelnut.
Mr Hazelnut also seems concerned about the ways in which AI might impact how students and teachers think and write in the subject of English. He says that students might come to see AI-generated answers as ‘absolutely correct’, and that writing with GPTs can become ‘formulaic’ – to produce a good or desirable answer, we must provide precisely formulated prompts. For Mr Hazelnut, this is akin to ‘breaking English down into a problem to be solved’, and he ‘is not quite sure’ this is what ‘English is all about’.
As I review and write about my interview with Mr Hazelnut, my attention is repeatedly drawn back to a particular topic. Like water drawn irrevocably towards an open plughole, I find that my attention is drawn persistently towards the way Mr Hazelnut portrays the relationship between AI, public examinations and pedagogy. This is largely because Mr Hazelnut repeatedly refers to one example of how he used AI in the classroom.
Mr Hazelnut used a GPT in a year nine lesson that took place in the run-up to the students’ end-of-year exam, an exam which Mr Hazelnut says ‘is marked on a GCSE syllabus’. During the lesson, Mr Hazelnut showed students how AI could support revision; he gave the GPT a list of themes and asked it to generate ‘GCSE-style questions’. In a follow-up lesson that took place in a ‘multi-computer classroom’, students were asked to revise using ‘what they thought the best method was’. Mr Hazelnut saw a ‘handful’ of students using a GPT to support their revision in that lesson. Therefore, for Mr Hazelnut, AI can be a ‘tool to revise with’. However, he also acknowledges that there is a risk students might become ‘too reliant’ on such AI tools. Having spoken to teachers of year 11 students, Mr Hazelnut recognises that there is an ‘issue’ with students in ‘lower sets’ simply regurgitating AI-generated responses.
Mr Hazelnut makes an interesting follow-up comment about this issue: ‘the closer we get towards the exam, the more like //whatever…//’ What does that ‘whatever’ mean here? I worry it might mean that, as exams draw closer, teachers stop caring about students thinking for themselves. The GCSE syllabus is clearly affecting teaching in year nine at Mr Hazelnut’s school, so where might that //whatever// really begin and end?
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Hazelnut and Mr H-AI-zelnut]
Having conducted and begun to review these interviews, I’m struck by the ways in which AI is affecting what it means to be a student or a teacher, and how it is affecting teacher-student relationships. A scattering of remarks made by Mr Hazelnut draws my attention back to this issue.
For example, Mr Hazelnut reports being an active AI user for roughly six months. His AI usage, and the questions I put to him, are shaping his thoughts about teaching and learning. In the example he describes of in-lesson AI usage during a year nine revision lesson, he speaks of the way AI ‘allowed’ him to ‘step away a bit’. This could have been due to one of the lessons taking place in a multi-computer classroom, but Mr Hazelnut certainly here suggests that AI is changing how he relates to students. Is this //stepping away// physical, or more metaphorical? Perhaps it is both. He also remarks that students ‘will ask it [AI] questions rather than me’. To some extent, Mr Hazelnut feels that AI is fulfilling a role that teachers might otherwise fulfil. Contrastingly, he also describes the way that, after he showed students how AI could be used to generate questions that could support them with revision, he ‘got a lot of students coming to me with questions they'd written’. The students, therefore, still come to Mr Hazelnut for something that AI is not providing.
While AI is affecting the way Mr Hazelnut speaks about teachers and students, his role as a teacher is also affecting the way that the GPT he uses generates text. He has programmed a GPT so that ‘every response is tailored to [...] mimic [his] writing style’. While he says it is ‘not perfect’, I am struck by his awareness of how his style is seeping into the tools he selects and develops. Somewhat similarly, Mr Hazelnut remarks that his students ‘treat it [AI] like a person, a lot of the time’; they don’t recognise that ‘a computer doesn't understand context or nuance or anything like that’. I am struck by the ways in which AI can adopt a human’s style, but should not, according to Mr Hazelnut, be treated like a person.
Finally, one fleeting remark from Mr Hazelnut highlighted the way that AI mediates the ways students interact with one another and the language that they use. He said that he has heard comments such as ‘“that’s a ChatGPT response”, chucked around occasionally’. Is AI therefore affecting the ways students listen to one another, and the extent to which they trust one another’s classroom contributions?
These scattered remarks pose interesting questions about identity for me, and they can be understood in a wider context. At the very end of the interview, Mr Hazelnut says ‘I think something should be said [...] of the environmental impact of the use of these language models, and how that ties in with [...] schools’ obligations to be environmentally sound institutions’. Again, this is a single, brief comment, but it shows that Mr Hazelnut is aware of the ways his identity as a member of the school community is being affected on an environmental and institutional level as well as on a sociotechnical and interpersonal one.
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Ms Macadamia and I Explore The Easy Roads]
Although Ms Macadamia has not yet made use of AI during her lessons, she is excited by the possibilities that it offers. She believes that AI could become an effective ‘springboard’, helping students to generate ideas for writing and supporting teachers with their planning. She imagines lessons in which students could ‘think like an examiner’ as they evaluate written texts that have been generated using AI. She is particularly excited by the image-generating capabilities of AI tools, imagining, for example, how ‘generated images’ of ‘Curley’s wife and Crooks’ might help students to ‘visualise what's happening in the text //[Of Mice and Men]// more effectively’. She feels AI could also be used to ‘create a stimulus for creative writing’. Such images could be used to support ‘group work’ and ‘discussion’ in the classroom, rendering lessons more ‘student-led’. Whilst Ms Macadamia suggests that this might ‘affect behaviour’ and oblige teachers to ensure ‘strict expectations’ are in place, she speaks optimistically about the ways AI could support education in English.
However, Ms Macadamia is not unfalteringly optimistic. In fact, a short phrase she uses during our discussion significantly influences how I make sense of our interview. She says that she is ‘worried about kids just kind of taking the back seat and taking [...] ''the easy road'' and just using it to create responses without putting any effort in’. Her concerns about the easy road that AI offers arises from experiences she has already had. She suspects that students are using AI to complete homework tasks because, sometimes, ‘you'll compare them and they'll be identical’. At A Level, she is aware of the risk that students will use AI to complete coursework tasks. She compares AI to ‘Pandora’s box’, stressing the risk that students will regularly use AI to commit plagiarism.
AI might also offer teachers an ‘easy road’, a road which Ms Macadamia has yet to take, but which, I sense, she surveys with optimism. As I have already mentioned, she recognises that AI-generated texts and images could be used to support teaching and learning. However, the suggestions she makes about how AI could be used represent forms of teaching that could be achieved without the use of AI. Teachers can write or locate texts for students to mark and evaluate. They can create or find images to support students as they engage with new and challenging texts, using these images to structure group work. AI might merely alter and speed up these processes. At one stage, Ms Macadamia does suggest that AI tools could pose questions to students, encouraging ‘higher level’ responses. However, we did not discuss what this might look like in the classroom. All the other ideas she has about how AI might affect teaching and learning in English might be seen as ‘easy roads’ or ‘short cuts’, as opposed to novel, unmapped pedagogical terrain.
Ms Macadamia’s mention of the easy road also forces me to reflect on the easy roads that I am taking as a researcher. For example, as I review our interview recording and the AI-generated transcript that accompanies it, I notice that the transcript is incomplete, and that at times, short sections are entirely omitted. The AI-generated transcript that Microsoft Teams creates for me is, on this occasion, flawed, and could therefore negatively impact my research. Also, at times I make encouraging ‘Mm hmm’ sounds as Ms Macadamia speaks. Sometimes, in the transcript, these utterances are not placed in quite the right place; instead of recognising that I made these sounds during an extended response from Ms Macadamia, the transcript positions them all at the end of the response, so that I seem to say “Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.” The repetition that the transcript conjures highlights, for me, an easy road that I have taken as an interviewer. I used an interview schedule to structure the conversation, posing follow-up questions to explore certain ideas further. However, my nods and noises did little to challenge or probe Ms Macadamia, and I did not, for example, ask whether she felt AI would fundamentally change her classroom practice, or simply speed up processes in which she was already engaged.
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Mr Peanut’s Patter ]
Mr Peanut has his ‘patter’: his lessons, his plans, his ways of doing things. He tells me that this patter is part of the reason he has not made very much use of AI in his teaching. His established ways of working are resistant to the pedagogical change that AI might herald. It will take time for him to adapt or change the way he plans and delivers lessons. He admits to having been ‘quite slow to the AI revolution’, saying that he hasn’t done as much as he ‘should have done’. Is that word //should// used for my benefit, as a researcher investigating AI usage? Or does it reflect a sense of obligation and guilt on the part of Mr Peanut?
It is true to say that Mr Peanut’s patter has, to some extent, resisted AI’s influence. However, this patter does not appear to be //inherently// resistant. It is a resistance that relates to the misgivings about AI that Mr Peanut shares with me, and the values that he wants to uphold. For example, Mr Peanut considers whether he should ‘utilise it [AI] in writing models’, concluding that, no, he ‘probably shouldn’t’. This is because, when writing a model, he is trying to put himself ‘in the shoes of the student’, and using AI would undermine this endeavour. Furthermore, when modelling, Mr Peanut wants to demonstrate something that he himself has been teaching his students, meaning that he is more comfortable enacting the process himself, without the aid of AI. He feels that this is a ‘more professional’ way of working. It also resonates with his belief that teaching is a fundamentally ‘human thing’ that involves ‘making connections’ with students, understanding their interests, experiences and circumstances. On top of this, he also worries that an excessive use of AI might ‘stymie’ the ‘academic growth’ of his students, diminishing their ability to think critically about language usage. Finally, he expresses ethical and logistical concerns: he fears that, in education, AI is ‘pretty unregulated’ and that the parties involved are ‘driven by profit’, whilst also recognising that managing a classroom of students who are all using AI tools on their own devices would be tricky!
It is also true to say that Mr Peanut’s professional patter has not escaped the influence of AI entirely. AI is affecting his students’ relationship with writing, which has a knock-on effect upon his interactions with them. He has seen AI-generated text ‘creep into a lot of A Level essays’ and BTEC assignments. Consequently, he has worked with students and colleagues, trying to support students to use AI in appropriate ways.
It is possible that my interview with Mr Peanut could further destabilise his patter. Towards the end of our meeting, he says that ‘having had this discussion,’ he wants to try out some new AI-based activities with the students he teaches. He feels the interview has ‘triggered some questions and insight’, and that he might otherwise have ‘buried his head in the sand’. Again, is he saying this for my benefit? I recognise that, during the course of our interview, Mr Peanut has articulated ideas about how AI could be used fruitfully. For example, he imagines a lesson where students use AI to produce descriptions of a forest that are written in a range of different styles, before then exploring the ‘differences’ between these various texts. Similarly, he also imagines using AI to stimulate discussion, imagining lessons in which he says to students, ‘this is what AI says. Do you agree?’
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[Space Making with Ms Pecan]
Artificial intelligence shapes the space in which I meet with Ms Pecan. We meet via Microsoft Teams, and Ms Pecan opts to blur the background that appears behind her. Microsoft Teams uses AI to achieve this blurred effect, and it prevents me from gleaning very much information about the room in which Ms Pecan is sat. Is it her office? A classroom? Her home?
AI also shapes the conceptual space that we explore during our conversation and my reflections in this account. Early in the interview, when she speaks about AI’s role in her planning, Ms Pecan refers to AI as a ‘springboard’, and the metaphor now opens doors in my thinking: a springboard changes our relationship with space, affecting the spaces we can access and the ways we might move through them.
One space that AI affects is that which lies between students and the model responses they encounter. Ms Pecan imagines a model answer that has been generated using AI and suggests that students might be asked to think about what is ‘wrong with it’ and where it might not have ‘met assessment objectives’. Her reference to ‘the exam board's assessment objectives’ suggests that AI might also mediate the space that students perceive between themselves and the mark schemes against which they are assessed.
Similarly, an anecdote that Ms Pecan shares with me sheds light on the ways in which generative AI might affect the space between student-writers, their teachers and their imagined readers. Inspired by something that happened at her own child’s primary school, Ms Pecan describes a lesson in which she got students to write a description before using an AI tool to generate an image in response to their work. According to Ms Pecan, this got students asking whether the image looked ‘like what they had in their mind and were hoping to describe’, and ‘how they could change it?’
I can also use the metaphor of space to frame a concern that Ms Pecan shares with me about the ways in which people might engage with AI; if we become too close to AI, reducing the space between AI and us, we risk becoming overly dependent on it. Students who recognise the capacities of GenAI might well ask why they should bother to produce a text, ‘if AI can write it for me’.
In her role as an English teacher Ms Pecan indicates that she has used AI tools to venture into unfamiliar curricular spaces. Having recently taken up the teaching of an A-Level course, Ms Pecan reports using AI to look up and summarise relevant information, whilst recognising the need to be ‘really careful’ and noting that her existing knowledge of the exam board she was working with differed from the information that the AI tool generated for her.
Where curricular space is concerned, Ms Pecan did also highlight the potentially influential role of AI. Although she notes that teachers are ‘so bound by the national curriculum [...]’ that there is not an abundance of space for innovation, she also observes that there is scope to teach students ‘how to use it [AI] appropriately’, suggesting to me that she feels AI might open up curricular spaces for teachers of English.
Interestingly, Ms Pecan noted a lack of space and time being made available for subject-specific training, remarking that, although staff at the school where she works had been introduced to Microsoft Copilot when it became available on their devices, there had been ‘no specific training’ on ‘how you can use it in the English classroom’.
However, Ms Pecan did begin to explore the extent to which AI might affect the ways that students and teachers navigate and behave within the classroom space. Firstly, she felt that AI would not remove the need for the English teacher as ‘someone at the front’ of the classroom who has ‘opinions’ and who can encourage students to ‘think critically’. Secondly, she felt that getting students to use AI tools in a multi-device classroom would make ‘behaviour management’ ‘quite difficult’, recognising that it would be hard to get students to ‘use it sensibly’ and to prevent them from going off ‘on tangents’ by asking ‘random things’ of the AI tool. Interestingly, she mentioned the school’s ‘see it – lose it’ policy on mobile phones. In such contexts, AI usage on mobile devices is restricted to and constituent of unseen, hidden and marginalised spaces within classrooms and schools.
Finally, Ms Pecan began to consider the impact of AI upon the school spaces of the future. Commenting on AI’s capabilities, she asked ‘if it can do that now, what's it going to be able to do in 20 years’ time? In 30 years’ time? Like, where would that leave me, you know, in terms of teaching?’ She remarked that, ‘in five years’ time’, AI tools ‘could be producing a whole PowerPoint and voice over and delivering it’. To me, her comments suggest an anxiety regarding her place in future educational spaces, whilst also gesturing towards the ways in which PowerPoint has become so deeply embedded in the ways that teachers think about classroom-based education.
{($storyControl:)}(text-style:"bold","underline")[On Missing Out, with Ms Pistachio]
Unfortunately, Ms Pistachio was the one participant in this study whom I was unable to interview myself. Fortunately, my colleague and co-researcher John-Paul was able to conduct the interview. However, I feel as though I missed out. Ms Pistachio has thought long and hard about the role AI can play in her teaching, and I would have relished the opportunity to speak with her.
Ms Pistachio works at an independent school, and as I have read that there could be a divide developing between the ways in which state and independent schools make use of AI, the notion of inequality and the experience of ‘missing out’ influences the way I make sense of the interview as I watch it back. For example, I am struck by the amount of AI-oriented research and training with which Ms Pistachio has proactively engaged. For her MA dissertation, she researched how AI tools ‘could be used to help reading comprehension of Shakespeare’, focusing on tools such as the Pickaxe Shakespeare translator and an AI-powered interactive storytelling platform called WillPlay. These are subject-specific tools that other interviewees have not mentioned. Moreover, Ms Pistachio also mentions things she has learned from ‘an arts and humanities outreach event’, a ‘Microsoft training video’ and various ‘blogs’ and ‘articles’. It appears to me that Ms Pistachio has engaged with more research and training than other teachers might have done, even those working within her own school; although the English department within which she works has been ‘quite proactive’ in thinking about ‘AI and education’, this is ‘not the case across the school’. Moreover, teachers at the school have access to Microsoft Copilot, but they ‘haven't had any training on it as a school’. Thinking through the lens of ‘missing out’, I am struck by the huge differences that exist between teachers when it comes to the training, research and development opportunities they have been able to take up.
These differences are consequential, for Ms Pistachio’s extensive engagement with AI and its role within English enables her to articulate the ways in which it can affect teaching and learning. She mentions the useful activities it can help facilitate, the ways in which it can be positioned within an English curriculum and the students for whom it might be most useful. She thinks beyond simply using AI for the creation of ‘workbooks and resources’, stating that such resources are usually not ‘as good as what [she] would do anyway’.
Where teaching activities are concerned, Ms Pistachio mentions that her students in year seven study a mythology unit, during which they are asked to invent and describe a monster. Ms Pistachio states that plugging student descriptions into an AI-powered image generator can help them to reflect upon questions such as ‘Is this a good description? Do we need to add more detail? Is this how you imagined it?’. She also describes the way she used WillPlay’s //Romeo and Juliet// chatbot, getting students to work their way through the experience before feeding back. Where ‘transactional writing’ is concerned, she noted that ChatGPT can create very effective models which students can then use to learn about the ‘conventions of a nonfiction writing form’. Finally, she highlights the value of Google's NotebookLM and its ability to create podcasts from uploaded material. She stresses that her ‘dyslexic learners [...] love it’, as ‘they love a podcast and it's a really good way of them taking on board the information’. Ms Pistachio notes that podcasts generated in this way can become valuable revision materials.
Thinking on a more curricular level, Ms Pistachio articulates a structured approach to the ways in which AI can be integrated into a secondary school English curriculum. She says that, in key stage three, Ms Pistachio and her colleagues focus on supporting students to understand AI. In key stage four, they introduce students to useful tools and show them how to use them. In the sixth form, they support students to think ‘a little bit more critically’ with AI, for example by getting an AI tool to answer a question before having students critique it. While this is not the only way of conceptualising AI’s role in the English curriculum, it seems a structured and coherent way of doing so.
Returning to the theme of ‘missing out’, the interview recording makes me think about the variety of ways in which AI might engender inequality between learners and across schools. Firstly, from year nine upwards, students at Ms Pistachio’s school bring their own device to class. Not every secondary school student has easy access to an appropriate network and device during their English lessons or when they are at home, affecting the extent to which AI tools can be used during lessons and for homework. Interestingly, where homework is concerned, Ms Pistachio says that, because generative AI can so easily be used to complete writing tasks, they have moved away from ‘take-home homework where you do extended writing’. Does the arrival of AI mean that students are missing out on the opportunity to complete independent writing tasks outside of the classroom? Students might not view it this way, but I feel some concern that students might come to see writing as a classroom-bound activity. Where non-examined assessments are concerned, the ease with which AI can be used for plagiarism has caused Ms Pistachio and her colleagues to have students work in shared documents that can be monitored by the teacher. This helps the teacher to monitor ‘how long they've worked on it’ and whether or not students are ‘cutting and pasting things in’. If we view this through the lens of ‘missing out’, we could argue that students are losing access to private spaces for academic writing, and teachers are losing time to academic forms of surveillance.
Overall, Ms Pistachio has a positive and proactive attitude to the affordances of AI, an attitude which seems to be shared by colleagues in her department, and which seems to benefit her pupils. She feels that students are ‘quite excited’ by the role AI can play in English at her school, partly because so much of the messaging around AI is more negative: ‘A lot of the messaging is like, don't do it! Don't do it! It's bad! It's kind of plagiarism’. By embracing AI, Ms Pistachio is able to ‘flip the narrative’ to a more positive one. Returning to my ‘missing out’ lens, I observe that many students in other subjects or schools might be missing out on this more positive form of messaging.
{($storyControl:)}Now that you have read some of my research stories, what are your thoughts?
How did the research stories compare, and how did they affect one another?
How have these stories affected your views on the pedagogical affordances of AI?
* [[Exit->Farewell]]
* [[Keep Exploring->explore]]
(text-style:"bold")[Explore the Research Stories by title:]
0. (link: "Mr Almond’s Playful Pedagogy")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S1")]
0. (link: "Mr Almond on Marking and Feedback")[(set: $score $score +1)(goto: "S2")]
0. (link: "Mr Almond and the Bounciness of AI")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S3")]
0. (link: "Mr Cashew and the Creeping Threat")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S4")]
0. (link: "Mr Cashew Values Time")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S5")]
0. (link: "Mr Chestnut’s Trepidation")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S6")]
0. (link: "Mr Hazelnut and the Plughole of Public Exams")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S7")]
0. (link: "Mr Hazelnut and Mr H-AI-zelnut")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S8")]
0. (link: "Ms Macadamia and I Explore the Easy Roads")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S9")]
0. (link: "Mr Peanut’s Patter")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S10")]
0. (link: "Space Making with Ms Pecan")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S11")]
0. (link: "On Missing Out, with Ms Pistachio")[(set: $score to $score +1)(goto: "S12")]
(text-style:"bold")[I have curated groups of research stories based upon the topics that they touch upon. Select a topic from the list below to read two random research stories from that curated group:]
0. (link: "Me and my Research Methods")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Methods)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Writing")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Writing)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Lesson Activities")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Activities)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Emotional Responses")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Emotions)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Training and Development")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Training)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Modelling")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Modelling)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Speaking, Listening, and Discussion")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Oracy)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Teacher Identity")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Identity)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Public Examinations")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Exams)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Time and Workload")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Time)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Multi-Device Classrooms")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Classrooms)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Planning and Resourcing")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Planning)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Plagiarism and Shortcuts")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Plagiarism)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Marking and Feedback")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Marking)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Shakespeare")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Shakespeare)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "AI-Generated Images")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Images)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
0. (link: "Homework")[(set: $score to 1)(set: $Group to $Homework)(set: $remainder to $Group)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]
Thank you for exploring this story map.
If you have any questions, or if you'd like to discuss this research, please contact me via email:
<a href="mailto:sam.holdstock@canterbury.ac.uk">sam.holdstock@canterbury.ac.uk</a>Can I add an enlarge / shrink text size option?
More proof reading
play with fontsize etc.
Header styling
<div style="position: fixed; top: 0.5em; left: 50%; transform: translateX(-50%); border: 2px solid black; padding: 0.4em 0.6em; background: yellow; display: flex; gap: 1em; align-items: center; z-index: 9999;">
Stylesheet code:
tw-passage[tags~="Title"] {
text-align: center;
font-size: 2em;
line-height: normal;
}
tw-link {
color: #0000FF;
}
tw-link.visited {
color: #0000FF;
}
tw-passage {
text-align: left;
font-size: 1.5em;
line-height: normal;
font-family: century gothic;
}
tw-story {
padding: 5%;
background-color: #FFE4C4;
color: black;
}
tw-story[tags="Para"] {
background-color: #ECFFE9;
}
tw-sidebar {
display: block;
position: fixed;
left: 10px;
top: 10px;
width: 120px;
padding: 10px;
border: 2px solid black;
background: white;
color: black;
z-index: 9999;
}
Then share with colleagues
THe code at the end of each passage could be simplified:
{
(if: $score < 2)[
(if: $navigate is "title")[
(link: "Return")[
(set: $score to $score + 1)
(goto: "Titles")
]
]
(else:)[
(link: "Next Story")[
(set: $score to $score + 1)
(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))
(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))
(goto: $nextStory)
]
]
]
(else:)[
(link-goto: "Finish", "End")
]
}
Or I could create a custom macro that runs the whole thing. THis would need to go in a startup passage
(set: $storyControl to (macro: [
(if: $score < 2)[
(if: $navigate is "title")[
(link: "Return")[
(set: $score to $score + 1)
(goto: "Titles")
]
]
(else:)[
(link: "Next Story")[
(if: $remainder's length > 0)[
(set: $score to $score + 1)
(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))
(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))
(goto: $nextStory)
]
(else:)[
(goto: "End")
]
]
]
]
(else:)[
(link-goto: "Finish", "End")
]
]))
This would then be used as follows:
($storyControl:)
{<div style="position: fixed; top: 0.5em; left: 50%; transform: translateX(-50%); border: 2px solid black; padding: 0.4em 0.6em; background: yellow; display: flex; gap: 1em; align-items: center; z-index: 9999;">
<span style="font-size: 150%;">
(link-goto: "⌂", "Home")
(link: "←")[
(undo:)]</span></div>}
{(Set: $Introduction to "Not Done")
(set: $score to 0)
(set: $AllStories to (a: "S1", "S2", "S3", "S4", "S5", "S6", "S7", "S8", "S9", "S10", "S11", "S12"))
(set: $Methods to (a: "S1", "S2", "S3", "S4", "S5", "S6", "S7", "S8", "S9", "S10", "S11", "S12"))
(set: $Writing to (a: "S3", "S4", "S5", "S7", "S8", "S9", "S10", "S11", "S12"))
(set: $Activities to (a: "S1", "S3", "S7", "S9", "S10", "S11", "S12"))
(set: $Emotions to (a: "S2", "S3", "S6", "S7", "S9", "S10", "S12"))
(set: $Training to (a: "S1", "S2", "S6", "S7", "S11", "S12"))
(set: $Modelling to (a: "S2", "S5", "S8", "S10", "S11", "S12"))
(set: $Oracy to (a: "S2", "S4", "S6", "S8", "S9", "S10"))
(set: $Identity to (a: "S4", "S6", "S8", "S10", "S11"))
(set: $Exams to (a: "S2", "S3", "S7", "S9", "S11"))
(set: $Time to (a: "S2", "S5", "S7", "S9", "S12"))
(set: $Classrooms to (a: "S7", "S8", "S10", "S11", "S12"))
(set: $Planning to (a: "S4", "S5", "S7", "S9", "S12"))
(set: $Plagiarism to (a: "S6", "S9", "S10", "S11"))
(set: $Marking to (a: "S2", "S3", "S5"))
(set: $Shakespeare to (a: "S3", "S7", "S12"))
(set: $Images to (a: "S9", "S11", "S12"))
(set: $Homework to (a: "S5", "S9", "S12"))
(set: $storyControl to (macro: [(output:)[(if: $score < 2)[(if: $navigate is "title")[(link: "Return")[(set: $score to $score + 1)(goto: "Titles")]](else:)[(link: "Next Story")[(set: $score to $score + 1)(set: $nextStory to (either: ...$remainder))(set: $remainder to $remainder - (a: $nextStory))(goto: $nextStory)]]](else:)[(link-goto: "Finish", "End")]]]))}
(set: $score to 0)Before we begin, a bit of housekeeping.
This passage is your home page, your basecamp. At any moment during your exploration of this text, you can use the home button (⌂) located at the top left of your screen to return here, to this passage.
You can also use the back button at the top right of each passage to return to the previous passage that you visited.
(link: "Continue")[
(if: $Introduction is "Done")[
(goto: "explore")]
(else:)[
(goto: "Introduction")
]
]<div style="
position: fixed;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
border-bottom: 1px solid #d8d8d8;
padding: 0 0.8em;
background: #f3f3f3;
display: flex;
align-items: center;
z-index: 9999;
box-sizing: border-box;
min-height: 2.2em;
">
<div style="
flex:1;
display:flex;
justify-content:flex-start;
align-items:center;
padding-left:1em;
font-size:1em;
line-height:1;
">
(link-goto: "<span style='font-size:1.2em;'>⌂</span>", "Home")
</div>
<div class="header-title" style="
flex:1;
display:flex;
justify-content:center;
align-items:center;
font-size:clamp(0.7em, 2vw, 1em);
font-weight:bold;
letter-spacing:0.03em;
line-height:1;
text-align: center;
overflow-wrap:break-word;
transform: translateY(-0.5em);
">
English Teachers on AI
</div>
<div style="
flex:1;
display:flex;
justify-content:flex-end;
align-items:center;
padding-right:1em;
font-size:1em;
line-height:1;
">
(link: "←")[
(undo:)
]
</div>
</div>