The Play’s the Thing
- Stone Paper Cloud
- Apr 16
- 3 min read
How a spirit of playfulness can help teachers make the most of Generative AI
Say the words ‘Generative AI’ to most teachers and you get a hunted look; the sort of look I used to give when a keen Year 9 asked me when I was going to hand back their essays and I realised I had absolutely no idea where I’d left them.
Many seek to deny the existence of AI in their classrooms. The few who admit to using it, do so in whispered, guilty tones. No-one talks about how much fun it can be.
And it can be. With a group of lively students it can be hilarious.
Not just hilarious, in fact. Hilarious and educational.
I’m not pretending the subject of generative AI doesn’t have serious issues we need to think about but, actually, we undermine some of those worries by approaching it in a spirit of fun.
Creating a low-stakes environment at times is important - we tend to be more creative and imaginative when we don’t think too much about how, or if, we are going to be judged. If we want our students to think deeply and imaginatively about a concept then we have to make it possible for them to be playful with it. And we have to give them agency to explore it without too much direction.
A great way to do this is by getting AI to create impossible conversations.
Working with a group of students on ‘Romeo and Juliet’, the idea of loyalty had emerged as an important theme in the play. A traditional approach to ‘exploring’ this idea might be to discuss it as a group and then get the students to write an essay about it, “making sure you include lots of quotes.” The problem with this approach is that it takes the students ages. And it’s rather dull.
We actually started our impossible conversations in quite a serious tone and asked the bots to use the format of a socratic dialogue and write a conversation with Shakespeare on the subject of loyalty.
As usual, we asked a number of bots - Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. This is good practice partly because it embeds the idea that AI only provides an answer not the answer, but also because comparing the responses can throw up even more ideas.
Within moments, they had generated lots of really good material. The speed is the key here. Compare it with the traditional method of asking a class for ideas, gradually overcoming the bemused or recalcitrant silence, laboriously writing up the answers on some kind of board…even the keenest students would be thinking longingly about lunch.
One of my students was reading ‘The Lord of the Rings’ so he wanted to see a conversation between Shakespeare and Samwise Gamgee, a character who embodies loyalty in that novel. Again, the results were full of good ideas but they were also funny; the faux-familiarity of the bots is hilarious. If you don’t believe me, try it out - or watch this sketch from Saturday Night Live.
We were off and running. Another student wanted to know if Shakespeare thought the play would have been very different if the characters had been on Instagram. So she asked.
Lots more ‘conversations’ followed. Some were explicitly about loyalty, some more tangentially. Some not at all.
That wasn’t the important thing. The students were thinking in a genuinely creative and adaptive way. Exploring is about finding something you don’t know is there, not uncovering something someone else has already hidden.
And they encountered many more complex ideas about loyalty in an hour than they would have found in a term of traditional teaching.
This is where we, as teachers, need to be precise about the purpose of a task - and then how, or if, we are going to assess it. If we want students to explore a theme, then we need to simply let them explore.
Of course, we could ask the students to write their own conversations with Shakespeare but then it becomes something different. Is it about developing understanding? Is it a creative writing task? To quote Tim Minchin’s Groundhog Day entirely out of context, it’s ‘Kinda both but not quite either’.
The more precisely we can define our intentions, the easier it becomes to identify those times when generative AI can augment the educational experience and we actively want students to use it, and those times when it would be harmful or unethical and we don’t want them to use it.
And we have to remember that, sometimes, great profundities emerge from the trivial.
I’ve included links to some of the conversations here:
Socratic Dialogues - loyalty
Shakespeare and Samwise Gamgee
Shakespeare and Social Media
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