Understanding Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering involves designing questions or instructions that maximize the effectiveness of AI responses in tools like ChatGPT. This method helps improve AI interactions to suit specific educational objectives, ensuring that responses are both relevant but also pedagogically appropriate.

Key Techniques for Effective Prompt Engineering

• Priming the AI: Start by providing AI with context to generate specific and helpful responses. For example, instead of asking "What are irregular verbs?" you might say, "List irregular verbs commonly used in past tense narratives," to focus the AI’s response on a specific teaching point. 
• Adjusting Response Length and Detail: Specify how detailed or concise you want the AI's response to be. This helps manage classroom time and aligns the AI’s output with your lesson’s depth. For example, "Explain in three sentences why using articles is important in English."
• Guiding Content Style and Complexity: Control the complexity of the language used by the AI to suit your students' proficiency levels. Asking for explanations in simple English or requesting definitions with examples are ways to make AI interactions more accessible.
• Directing the Format: Whether you need a list, a paragraph, or a dialogue, specifying the desired format helps integrate the AI’s output into your lessons. For instance, "Generate a dialogue between two tourists asking for directions."

Applying Prompt Engineering in the Classroom

• Interactive Exercises: Use AI to generate role-play scripts or situational dialogues based on specific prompts, which students can then act out or discuss.
• Writing Assistance: Have students interact with the AI to develop drafts, where the AI acts as a brainstorming partner or first reviewer, offering suggestions for improvement.
• Grammar and Vocabulary Drills: Create prompts that ask the AI to provide practice exercises on targeted grammar points or vocabulary, adapting in complexity based on student responses.

Try it yourself
The best way to get better at prompting is to try tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, Google Gemini, and Claude 3.