If you’re like most faculty, you’re worried about AI—specifically, how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Bing Chat will affect your students’ learning. For example, one colleague said she was concerned that “students will lose their unique voices.” Another added: “I want to hear their original thoughts. I want them to be able to make and support their arguments.” Others have shared stories about students parroting unsourced, mis-sourced, or biased information from LLMs—and even copying their entire assignments from ChatGPT. When students outsource their work to LLMs, faculty warn, “they won’t learn to develop their own communication skills.” 

College and university teachers have a valid concern that students who use LLMs to help them write presentations or essays might not develop the critical thinking and communication skills they need to be successful professionals and informed citizens. Now that LLMs are quick, cheap, and easy for most students to access, we need a pedagogy that will ensure students still learn those fundamental skills. Say hello to process-oriented pedagogy. 

Process-Oriented Pedagogy and New Technologies 

Some faculty—especially those in mathematics education—may already be familiar with process-oriented pedagogy. Process-oriented pedagogy asks students to demonstrate the step-by-step reasoning they used to achieve an outcome. Rather than just giving an answer, students show how they figured it out. Colloquially, math teachers call it “showing your work.”  

Process-oriented pedagogy became common in mathematics instruction in response to a technological challenge not unlike the one we’re facing today. When handheld calculators became widely available, educators worried that students would use the machines as a substitute for critical thinking and consequently lose core mathematical skills. Even with the help of a calculator, students still needed to learn quantitative reasoning: the ability to analyze real-world problems, apply concepts to solve those problems, and critically evaluate possible solutions. 

Today, the same is true for communicative reasoning. With or without AI, students still need to be able to analyze their writing or speaking situation, including their audience, context, purpose, and standpoint. They need to be able to apply communication concepts to respond and adapt to the real-world writing or speaking situations they encounter. And they need to be able to critically evaluate different possible responses, which includes assessing the reliability of evidence and identifying bias. 

Rather than replacing critical thinking, technologies like calculators and LLMs underscore just how irreplaceable critical thinking skills are. Just as calculators led math teachers to focus on the process of quantitative reasoning, LLMs can likewise inspire us to cultivate our students’ communicative reasoning skills by using process-oriented pedagogy. 

Best Practices for Process-Oriented Pedagogy 

Of course, students “show their work” in different ways in different fields of study. In an algebra class, students might show the steps they took to solve an equation. In a creative writing class, students might workshop a series of drafts of a poem. In our own field of speech communication, instructors incorporate a wide variety of process-oriented activities and assignments that help students develop their presentations, including topic proposals, audience analysis, annotated bibliographies, preliminary outlines, peer feedback, and practice speeches.  

Thinking about these examples, you might realize that you’ve already been using many process-oriented projects and exercises in your own courses. By asking your students to explain their reasoning process, you’re already well on your way toward ensuring that your students are developing their own communicative reasoning skills, rather than uncritically cutting and pasting from ChatGPT. 

Process-oriented pedagogy works best when you’re scaffolding exercises and providing formative feedback. Scaffolding exercises are learning activities that build one step on the next to walk your students through the process of developing their assignments. This step-by-step scaffolding allows your students to learn from formative feedback, at each stage of the process, that helps them incrementally improve their work along the way. For example, to prepare for an informative presentation, students could complete and receive feedback on a series of scaffolded exercises: 

1. First, a Strengths Inventory Worksheet to help them start reflecting on the experiences, knowledge, values, and identities that give them a unique standpoint as a speaker 
2. Second, an Audience Analysis Worksheet to guide them through the process of gathering and interpreting information about their audience’s attitudes, values, and behavior 
3. Next, a Finding Your Topic Worksheet to identify an exigence where their passions and knowledge as a speaker meet their audience’s needs and interests 
4. Then, an Evidence Wishlist Worksheet to help them find demonstrative, testimonial, and statistical evidence relevant to their audience and topic 
5. Finally, a Mind Mapping Activity to help them start organizing the evidence they’ve gathered into a presentation outline.  

Rather than assessing only the final presentation or essay, a progressive sequence of in-class activities, short homework assignments, or structured peer feedback opportunities will help your students develop their projects step by step over the course of the semester. If you’d like to see more examples of scaffolding process-oriented activities and assignments, check out our “Try This” Exercises and Sample Syllabus Outlines in the Instructors’ Resources for Contemporary Public Speaking. 

Benefits of Process-Oriented Pedagogy 

The more you can incorporate process-oriented pedagogy into your courses, the less you’ll worry about your students asking AI to complete their coursework for them. You’ll be able to see your students go through the communicative reasoning process, analyzing their writing or speaking situation and applying communication principles to respond and adapt to that situation. Then, by providing feedback to their peers and receiving formative feedback from you, they’ll also learn to critically evaluate how well they’re implementing those communication principles at every step in the development of their assignments. 

In addition to fulfilling the prime directive of improving your students’ communicative reasoning skills, process-oriented pedagogy has many benefits: 

• Helps students achieve learning outcomes with forward-looking, low-stakes feedback on their progress 
• Allows educators to pinpoint learning challenges early on and support struggling students 
• Helps faculty build rapport with students, improving teaching evaluations and reducing grade complaints 
• Reduces academic dishonesty—whether AI-assisted or old-fashioned plagiarism—by increasing accountability and distributing students’ workload over time 
• Increases equity by making elements of the “hidden curriculum” more explicit 

LLMs don’t pose any problem that you can’t solve by actively engaging your students in the process of communicative reasoning. And that’s likely something you’re probably already doing in your classes, even if you weren’t approaching it systematically or calling it process-oriented pedagogy. Process-oriented pedagogy is more than a solution to the challenges of AI; it’s also good teaching practice.