Teaching in the Age of GPT-4

November 14, 2023

For more than two decades, I have watched technology rotate through American classrooms like a parade of well-funded distractions. Overhead projectors rolled in like museum exhibits. SMART Boards blinked their way out of calibration. Clickers devoured department budgets and delivered nothing a hand-raise could not. Every new tool arrived with slogans about “transforming learning” and every one quietly faded into irrelevance while a single human voice kept doing the real work.

That pattern broke on March 14, 2023.

On that date, OpenAI released ChatGPT-4, a large language model that doesn’t pretend to replace teachers but actually assists them. NOT another overhyped prop.

It’s chalk that talks.

Ask it to translate a news article for ninth-grade readers and it generates two differentiated versions in seconds. Paste a rough student paragraph into the prompt and it returns precise, probing questions that push for stronger evidence. It role-plays Harriet Tubman in the morning and a biotech CEO in the afternoon. It creates multiple-choice quizzes, drafts parent emails, translates lesson plans into Spanish, and it never asks for a prep period or a sub.

Since early September, I have used GPT-4 in real instructional work to:

Differentiate reading levels. I paste in a dense NOAA climate report and ask for one version at a 900 Lexile and another at 1300. The results are ready before I can even adjust the margins in Word.

Get tutored without burnout. I ask the model to find flaws in my reasoning and it returns clear feedback, identifies unsupported claims, and even provides relevant links for stronger evidence.

Stage historical interviews. The AI becomes Tubman and cites primary source material, then later impersonates a pharmaceutical executive for an economics simulation.

Build assessments. I prompt GPT-4 to write ten SAT-style analogies about photosynthesis, each with a correct answer and three logical distractors. The results are copy-paste ready for Canvas.

Write better parent emails. I give it a prompt about late work and it drafts a message that is firm but fair, saving teachers the midnight stress of rewriting tone and grammar.

Yes, some people panic about cheating. They said the same thing when Google arrived.

The solution is not to block tools. It is to raise the bar. A chatbot cannot film the flooding behind your school. It cannot persuade a city council to fix a drainage issue. It cannot synthesize an experience it never lived. That is where education should live now: in synthesis, not recall.

Other critics point to hallucinations, the moments when GPT-4 invents facts. This concern is real, but also solvable. Teenagers do the same thing. Ask any teacher who has ever read a research paper with six questionable sources. The Stanford AI Index 2023 shows a sharp drop in hallucinated content when the model is required to provide citations. With proper prompting, GPT-4 behaves less like a confident liar and more like a collaborative editor.

The idea that AI will replace teachers misses the entire point of teaching. Instruction is not just delivering content. It’s also diagnosing confusion. It is sensing tone, noticing fatigue, encouraging a risk, spotting dishonesty, and holding presence in the room. That is not something a language model can replicate. Yet.

To test the broader impact, I asked a colleague at St. Petersburg College to integrate GPT-4 into her writing curriculum. Students submitted rough drafts, asked the model for three counter-arguments, selected the strongest, and then found live sources to support or challenge the claim. Nine out of ten papers came back with sharper thesis work. Turnitin flagged any AI-generated phrasing, which was then revised. Total prep time: twenty minutes. That used to take half a Saturday for me.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is already adapting:

Khan Academy launched its GPT-powered assistant Khanmigo, which began pilot testing in March and expanded access by April.

Microsoft embedded GPT-4 into its productivity suite through Copilot for Word and Excel by September.

Google Bard now writes functional Python code on request and added new features for developers starting in May.

A survey by the AAC&U published in July 2023 revealed that nearly half of college faculty see generative AI as a threat, yet only one in four had even tried it.

If you have not used GPT-4, start now. Open a free account at chat.openai.com and type: “Write a lesson on the hero’s journey for ninth grade with three discussion questions and a formative quiz.” In under fifteen seconds, you will understand what I mean.

Here is a simple starting point for skeptical teachers. Require students to submit their prompt along with the AI’s response. Then grade the revision. Ask for links when GPT-4 offers data. Make students verify those facts. The real literacy lives in the verification.

I remember in 2001 when Berkeley Preparatory School brought in laptops for pre-K students. Half the staff mocked the idea. Two years later, teachers were fighting over the laptop carts. Innovation always follows the same arc: ridicule, resistance, routine, and eventually, amnesia. With AI, the arc just moves faster.

Use GPT-4, or stand back and watch someone else teach your students better.