Centaur ELT: Wellbeing

Not long ago, teachers used to think that wellbeing was all about going to the pub on a Friday night and getting smashed.

I know because I was one of those teachers.

Until, one day, I woke up and found I couldn’t even get out of bed. And it wasn’t because I was hungover—it was because of major depression.

All this happened during COVID, while I was struggling to keep our small language school running in Thailand and feeling cut off, with no way home.

Something had to give.

Ever since then, I've started to prioritize my mental health. I've got a variety of tools in my mental health toolkit now. I make sure to exercise, eat well, and keep up with my friends and family for social support.

But one activity I could never get to stick was journaling, or more specifically, gratitude journaling. I get all the benefits  — it's supposed to help with sleep, boost happiness, and improve mental health

But I find it sooo hard to be grateful...  I even bought a beautiful, handcrafted gratitude journal and the habit still didn't stick.  

That is, until I tried gratitude journalling with an AI therapist.

Centaur ELT: Wellbeing

This series is an extension of my deep dive article, AI: The State of Play in Language Teaching in 2024.

If you want to find out more about the AI terms I use below including Large Language Models — and no I don't mean plus-sized models who like to study languages —then the article is definitely for you.

In my research for the article above, Ethan Mollick advised you to spend at least ten hours using AI in your day-to-day tasks. He says:

Just use it and see where it takes you.

So, that's what I'm doing.

For the rest of the year, I'm immersing myself in the 'jagged frontier' of ELT.  I hope my observations help you figure out when AI can enhance your teaching and when you might want to steer clear of it.

Each article in the series will include:

1. An overview of the topic.
2. Prompt crafting.
3. A live demo of the prompt in action and,
4. My reflections on the experience.

In this post , I'm going to share with you a prompt to help you create a gratitude journaling habit.

Wellbeing and the TEFL Industry

Let’s start with wellbeing in the TEFL industry or the lack there of it. Wellbeing became a buzz word in IATEFL a few conferences ago. This was on the back of many teachers facing burnout due to increased hours, casualization of the workforce, and low wages.

Rather than tackling these issues, conference organizers added in  some free meditation sessions instead. They seemed to think that teachers meditating on how they will pay their mortgages with the peanuts on offer would some how help.

Setting this aside, prioritizing wellbeing CAN help us become happier and more effective teachers.

As therapists are expensive why not try a free AI therapist? Possibly because the tool will sell all your data to our tech bro overlords.

Once again setting this caveat aside, let's look at a prompt that can help you create a gratitude journalling habit

Gratitude Journaling Prompt

In writing the prompt I used common prompting tips found online (Master the Perfect ChatGPT Prompt Formula gives a good overview).

I then ran my prompt through ChatGPT  asking for feedback on how to improve my prompt.

Please give feedback on how to improve my prompt. Any changes put in brackets and bold after the original sentence.

This allowed me to polish the prompt a bit further and get better results.

For this experiment I decided to use Pi Ai over ChatGPT. I made this decision because it's   known to have a more conversational and emotionally intelligent responses. It can feel like at times that you are talking to a friend rather than a machine. I felt this matched with my  goal of receiving gratitude journalling guidance.  

The Prompt

Persona: Act like a therapist experienced in having conversations with their clients about how to be grateful.

Context: I'm a 48-year-old English Language Teacher looking to create a gratitude journaling habit. I have ten minutes to do this every morning.

Task + Format: Each day, I will share with you three things I'm grateful for. In this practice session, I'm going to talk to you about teaching. I want you to listen and help me have deep insights into the things I'm grateful for.  Ask follow-up questions that encourage reflection on how these aspects of teaching enrich my life or challenge me to grow. At the end of the session, please produce a summary of what we talked about, including insights gained and some action points.

Tone: Use clear and concise language. Speak in an empathetic and compassionate way and be non-judgmental. Also, be encouraging and motivational.  Ensure that the language remains accessible and free of jargon to maintain a focus on personal reflection.

Confirmation: Do you understand?  If anything is unclear or if you have suggestions on how this session could be more beneficial for me, please share them.

Prompt in Action

Reflections

From a language perspective intonation and word stress have gone forward leaps and bounds in AI. I remember doing a YouTube video over a year ago noting that computer generated voices still couldn't convey the nuances of intonation.

Well guess what? They can now!

Your cloned voice is coming to a channel near you  —  probably used by a hacker to trick your mum in an online scam.

Also, it's ability to recognise my voice, comprehend what I was saying and reply without mistakes was quite remarkable.  It was very positive in its responses... maybe too positive? It was good at paraphrasing and presenting my ideas back to me too.

On the negative side, the conversation was a bit clunky as I needed to press a button to notify the AI that I'd fininished what I wanted to say. Maybe in the future I could build out the prompt to overcome this problem with a verbal cue for the AI to respond.

So, would I use AI as a sounding board again for my gratitude journalling?

Yes.

I already have and I will continue to do so.

It keeps things more interesting and little gems pop up in our interactions from time to time. Such as when I commented on being grateful about the smell of rain in the morning and Pi shared the Greek word of 'petrichor' with me.

Also, Pi with it's more human like responses could be useful as a conversation partner for students.

But that's for a future Centaur ELT.