When I was a graduate student, the professor teaching our pedagogy class gave an unpopular task: we had to write the paper we were about to assign in first-year composition. Then we’d exchange papers and rubrics and grade each other.
We never got to the grading because we hated our own assignments. We’d made them too hard, too onerous, too nitpicky, or too vague. Or too easy. The secret plan of our professor worked—he didn’t want us to write a paper, he wanted us to create better assignments—ones written by writers, not instructors. The difference is one of practice and process versus policing or parameters.
I was recently thinking of that long-ago lesson as I tweaked a lengthy ban on artificial intelligence for Introduction to Creative Writing. My AI ban was precise and clear, all policing and parameters. It was a spike stick of punishment for the next speeding vehicle of an AI submission. But I realized, with dismay (given all the time I’d put into it), that it wasn’t going to help anyone learn how to write a poem or a story.
And so, in the first week, when I gave an in-class prompt to describe three meaningful objects, I knew that the trend now was for me to show how awful AI would be at responding, or to show how AI could help us all get focused. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I wrote my own human response on the board as the students wrote at their desks. When I turned back to the students, they were staring. Had they ever seen anyone else practice the writing process in real time? Maybe not. My brain started reconfiguring the whole semester.
I paused, having not planned this part of the lesson, and said, “I’m a working writer more than I am a professor, and I look forward to learning how you all work on your pieces.” I clarified that “working writer” didn’t mean working for, it meant working on. I didn’t work on a poem for a boss or for a salary, but I worked on my poem because it was an intellectual challenge. Then I reflected on my own response scrawled across the board, followed by opening up the discussion to the students. We never talked about ChatGPT’s bad writing or Scribbr’s bland suggestions. We just talked about what we, as humans, had created.
For the next 15 weeks, I wrote all the prompt responses along with them, modeling the creative process even on days when the last thing I wanted to do was whip up a metaphor in front of everyone. I had to invoke my AI ban only once, for a student with weak attendance who missed most of the in-class action. I felt that my approach was successful, and here are my tips if you want to try it.
- In the first week, frame yourself as a working writer. I show my Submittable page of active, declined, and accepted pieces. I pass around my notebooks.
- Write the prompts along with them.
- Put what you are writing on the board or on the screen. It’s important that the students use some of their prompt time to watch you pause, delete, erase, mumble to yourself, etc. Remember that the students don’t see AI work, they just see it produce a final product. Students often don’t see anybody work. Many come from a life of passive consumption. Model active creation.
- Reflect on your prompt response during the first few weeks, but taper off as the students gain confidence with their own reflection. Sometimes I would not even talk about my own response at all.
- If you give a prompt and realize it’s flawed, take that lesson learned from my old grad school days: redo the prompt. Redo it right there in front of them. I did this with my “write your earliest memory” prompt. The students froze up, as did I, and I swapped it out for “write any early memory that is vivid.” That way, we could get momentum from the vivid memory part, rather than limiting ourselves with the first memory.
I think our students get mixed messages these days, and simply seeing someone work on writing is a clarifying message. Many of them also don’t realize that many instructors actually do the skill they teach. They are hungry for authentic social interactions, and the professor/student dynamic is less authentic than the working writer/emerging writer dynamic. They are also ravenous for permission to fail, although many of them don’t fully realize it. The amount of stress they are under is something I, in my Gen X mindset and ever-increasing age gap, can’t fully comprehend. But I can comprehend the value of honest attempts in a shared workspace, and I’m starting to think that’s more valuable than doling out lessons in a classroom.
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Jen Hirt is the author of the memoir Under Glass, the essay collection Hear Me Ohio, and the poetry chapbook Too Many Questions About Strawberries. She is the co-editor of two anthologies: Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers and Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction. She is an associate professor at Penn State Harrisburg.