I’m pretty darn confident in the fact that secondary teachers, especially ELA teachers, are looking for ways to combat our students’ use of AI in our classrooms these days. If there is one thing that I have learned about teaching writing in the age of AI, it is that simply telling students, “Don’t use ChatGPT,” isn’t going to work.
I don’t want to spend my time trying to catch them, though. I would much rather spend my time designing assignments where AI isn’t particularly helpful in the first place. Making those kinds of assignments has two really strong selling points for me. First, the assignment itself is kind of AI-Proof…. or should we call it AI-Resistant?
And secondly, AI use is SOOOOO easy to spot when they think they’re going to pull one over on me. I have stories, y’all! Do you?
I do think that this assignment could work for a lot of different novels and units but I use it when I teach Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
What is this AI-Proof Assignment?
Instead of asking students to write a traditional literary analysis about the novel, I ask them to rewrite portions of the story by changing one really important aspect of what happens. For example, we start off really easy by changing who gets put in charge in the beginning of the novel. Instead of Ralph leading the rest of the boys, I task students with giving the conch to someone else and then write how that will play out.
The further we get into the novel, the harder the changes become. The result is a creative writing assignment that requires students to actually understand the plot, characters, motivations, and cause & effect relationships in the novel. AND they also work through the writing process several times throughout the unit. Depending on how much time that we actually have, we do this 3-5 times throughout the reading of the novel.
For the final writing piece of the unit, I present the final death in the story as one of their options. They can decide to change how, or even if, that happens (or they can choose to revise one of their previous rewrites).
And, perhaps most importantly, it is really tough to phone this one in, and I can spot an AI crafted response a mile away.
So what exactly are students doing with this?
After finishing our reading of certain chapters and scenes, I point students to a section of the story that held a profound choice that a character made. Think, Ralph being named leader or Roger throwing rocks. I’m not going to include spoilers so I’m going to leave it at that but I’m sure that you can guess at some other really good plot points that include characters making big deal kind of choices.
The key part to the writing assignment is that I require my students to rewrite the scene by changing one important element from the original. Maybe the character makes a different decision or doesn’t show up at all. Something happens differently. Whatever the change is, students then have to figure out… what else changes as a result?
And that is where the real, critical thinking happens! Lord of the Flies is one giant cause & effect chain reaction. One decision leads to another and another and so on. It is such a great story for analyzing character motivation. Even if one small change happens, so many bigger changes could occur so you can’t just copy the rest of the story. Students have to follow the consequences.
We start REALLY Easy
The first rewrite that we do is intentionally easy. We look at the introduction of Jack and the choir boys and when the boys vote for a leader. We’re still getting used to the idea of changing the original story. The goal isn’t to see how creative they can be. It is to get them to understand what we’re doing. Change one thing and figure out what would realistically happen next.
This gives students an opportunity to practice without being overwhelmed by too much information yet. And it also lets us talk about something really important about creative writing. You can’t just make characters do whatever you want. One rule for this assignment is that it still has to be realistic to the setting and characters that William Golding originally created.
Then We Make it Harder
Once students understand how the activity works, I start increasing the difficulty. The scenes get longer, their writing requirement gets longer, too. And the changes become more significant. People die in this novel. Those are tough choices for the characters to live with. What happens if they didn’t make the choice that way and did it a different way instead?
Now, I’ve got students thinking about character motivation, conflict, foreshadowing, cause & effect and plot development without me having to turn class into a list of literary terms. They’re just trying to figure out what could happen.
Why I love this as an AI-Resistant Assignment
Obviously, I know that nothing is really AI-Proof but if I give my students a prompt like: “Explain how Golding develops the theme of savagery and choices in Lord of the Flies, they’re absolutely going to use AI.”
But if I ask students to “rewrite this scene, but change one choice that a character made. Then make the rest of the scene unfold realistically.”
AI suddenly becomes a lot harder to use. The student isn’t just producing words, they’re making a series of decisions based on the characters and the themes in the story. Their decisions are based on their understanding of the original text. Could a student still use AI? Of course. But they’d have to write the heck out of the prompt… and if they can accomplish all that in a way that gets the AI-generated work past me, they might actually know the book better than I do. And, honestly, I’m ok with that. Ha!
Underneath this entire writing assignment is some serious reading work. In order to do this assignment well, they have to understand what really happened in the text, what was behind the characters’ motivations, how one event affects another and how each of the conflicts develops. They have to understand the original story before they can successfully change it. That’s why I think this works so well. And it is kind of fun!
What do you think of this idea?
I would love to get some feedback from you in the comments. Let me know what you think. Would you try something like this? What other novels could it work for?
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