The challenge: Guiding complex creative tasks and promoting critical thinking

A key challenge identified for English teachers is guiding students through complex creative writing tasks, such as monologues, while simultaneously promoting critical thinking and independent idea generation. The challenge can lie in offering structured, yet flexible, guidance that nurtures creativity and independent thought, rather than just providing solutions.

The cechat solution: The Witchy Wordsmith Agent

To address this intricate challenge,  Joseph Shorter, Head of Curriculum - English, Languages and Digital Pedagogy in the Diocese of Toowoomba developed a specialised cechat agent named The Witchy Wordsmith. This AI agent is designed to support Year 7 students who are working on preparing a short four-minute monologue based on an event or character from William Shakespeare's 'Macbeth'. 

The workflow for using The Witchy Wordsmith agent is structured to encourage creative development and critical thinking:

• Student initiates with ideas: A student begins by sharing their initial thoughts and feelings related to their monologue.

• Socratic dialogue and prompting: Acting as a virtual teaching assistant, the agent engages the student in a process of socratic dialogue. It does not give direct answers but poses open-ended questions to guide their thinking. 

• Focus on literary devices and structure: The Witchy Wordsmith assists students in brainstorming ideas for their monologue, specifically focusing on incorporating literary devices such as metaphor, simile, and imagery.

• Guided improvement, not rewriting: The agent is explicitly designed not to rewrite the user's work. Instead, it provides short suggestions for improvement or sentence starters only and encourages the user to develop their own creative responses.

• Maintaining an age-appropriate and engaging tone: The agent maintains an accessible and enthusiastic tone suitable for a user of this age (twelve years old). Responses are kept short, with no more than one paragraph, to avoid overloading the student's thinking.

The development of such agents benefits from the co-construction of agents by teachers, which enhances understanding of key elements for success in assessment tasks and allows for the refinement of prompts through a staged iterative approach.

Impact and benefits

The implementation of The Witchy Wordsmith agent yields several significant benefits,

• Enhanced personalised learning: The agent provides subject-specific and syllabus-informed support tailored to the student's current stage of creative development. Its socratic method ensures that the learning is adaptive and responsive to the student's individual needs and ideas, fostering genuine comprehension rather than rote learning.

• Fosters critical thinking and creativity: By posing guiding questions and resisting the urge to provide direct answers, the agent may empower students to think critically, brainstorm independently, and develop their own creative solutions.

• Reduces cognitive load and stress: The agent's design, with its short, conversational responses and focus on one or two suggestions at a time, helps to reduce student overload and stress.

• Consistency and quality of feedback: The agent provides consistent, structured, and constructive feedback that supports students in receiving high-quality guidance in their creative writing process.

• Teacher support and collaborative design: The process of developing such agents highlights the benefits of teachers collaborating to create tools that address specific pedagogical challenges, thereby enhancing teaching practices.

The Witchy Wordsmith agent is an example of how cechat can provide engaging, subject-specific assistance that supports student learning and creativity by offering tailored, actionable feedback. This reinforces CEnet’s ongoing journey with Catholic schools to discover new and exciting ways to support learning and teaching.