A Living Voice, image produced by ChatGTP.
“Doctorate degrees should not be rewarded primarily on the text of a dissertation, as they are now, but more on a rigorous in-person defense. Students should regularly show professors they can speak fluently about their work.”
The above quote is from a New York Times article interviewing mathematician, Dr. Terence Tao. The quote references a recent draft report from a summit on PhD Math Education in the Age of AI, published on Dr. Tao’s personal blog site.
This recommendation applies beyond the mathematics Ph.D. dissertation process. During this new era of AI, I think this is key to education more broadly and it gets at something I’ve been experimenting with at the high school level this semester. I wrote about this idea in a previous post. At that time, it was a practice I was considering as I prepared to return to classroom teaching this year. I’ve now implemented it in two different contexts and I like the effect so far. I’ve been calling it a “process viva voce.”
The Viva Voce
Viva voce is a latin term that directly translates as “with living voice.” It’s a term that is sometimes used in academia for an oral defense, such as what is common for thesis or dissertation defenses. I recently did one of these as part of the requirements for my Doctor of Education (Ed.D.). In Ed.D. programs, the dissertation task of often called a “capstone,” and thus my “viva voce” was formally called a “capstone defense.” After submitting my capstone research project to my committee, I had to orally defend it; I had to first present my research to my committee, and then respond to questions from the committee members. The purpose was to ensure that I could intelligently engage in an academic discussion of my research. Could I demonstrate a deep understanding of the literature, my research methodology and process, my findings, and the implications of my findings?
Those familiar with the IB Diploma Program will also know that a viva voce is the final step of students’ Extended Essay. Each student has to do a short oral defense of their essay research with their Extended Essay supervisor. In this era where educators are wrestling with the implications of AI, I like the implications of the term “viva voce;” it’s a process of discussing one’s own ideas and one’s learning process “with one’s own living voice.”
A Process Viva Voce in my Classroom
While the viva voce is usually an oral defense conducted at the end of research, the “process viva voce” that I’ve been experimenting with is a little different; it involves having students orally discuss their developing ideas throughout the process of their research or independent project work. I think this is actually what the math education summit referenced by the NYT article at the top is getting at. In this era or AI in education, an oral defense at the end of a long research process is maybe not sufficient; now more than ever, it’s important for teachers to get students talking about their ideas and their work throughout a research or project process. I’ve been using the process viva voce when students are working on a sustained project or assessment that extends beyond a single class-period. During the classes of that project or assessment cycle, I set aside no more than ten minutes, I select two or three students to come to the front of the classroom, briefly summarize what they’re working on, and respond to a few questions. I literally use a random name generator in front of the students to show them that they’re being selected by chance. Because of time restraints, I don’t necessarily have time for every student in the class to participate in a process viva voce during a given project or assessment cycle, but by selecting two or three students at random each class, like with random sampling, every student knows they have a equal chance of being selected.
I’ve been working on creating a culture around the process viva voce. I emphasize with the students that the goal is to develop a class ethos of sharing our ideas and discussing our thinking. The goal is not to be a “gotch ya” moment. I’m not seeking to publicly shame students about their AI use; rather, it’s about creating the expectation in the classroom that students must always be at the ready to talk about their ideas. In this way, the philosophy is similar to that of question “cold calling” during a class (a practice that I also use regularly). Students can have incomplete and still developing ideas. There’s no shame in that; it’s part of learning. However, students are not allowed to hide from the expectation that the classroom is a space where we develop our own understandings and share those developing understandings.
Part of developing this culture is to keep the process viva voce pretty causal. Students are not expected to have polished presentations; nor are they required to have fully developed ideas. Rather, they’re expected to be able to talk about their thinking at that moment. They are welcome to say things like, “Well, I’m not completely certain yet, but here’s what I’ve got so far.” I usually have the two or three students sit side-by-side in chairs at the front of the room in the style of a panel discussion. They find this comforting so that they’re not totally on the hot seat in front of their classmates all alone. I ask each selected student to give a thirty second summary of where they are in their project or assessment process. I then follow up with a couple of questions for each of them. I then open it up to the class for a question or two. We keep the whole procedure moving so that it takes no more than ten minutes in a given class. Sometimes I’ll finish with a few tips on ideas each student might want to consider as they proceed. We give the students a round of applause for their bravery, and we move on with the class. If a particular student was completely ill-prepared to talk about their ideas, rather than shame them in front of the class, I wait and have a brief one-on-one conversation with them later. So far, the process viva voce has been well-received by my students.
Holding Students Accountable for Their Ideas
The process viva voce seeks to address a few concerns. Of course teachers are concerned about the authenticity of student work given the availability of AI tools that can do a lot of the work for them. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of the purpose of the process viva voce is to add a layer of accountability, helping me, as the teacher, to gage the degree to which students are able to articulate their thinking apart from an AI tool. The fact that students know that they can be called upon to talk about their ideas during class keeps them on their toes. Again, this is not unlike the philosophy of question cold calling.
Focusing on Process Over Product
In addition to it’s accountability purpose, there are two other important goals for the process viva voce. First, it shifts the project or assessment emphasis away from the final product towards the process. An emphasis on the final product has long been a problem with project-based learning or project-based assessment. The focus has tended to be on the final grade for the project, and that final grade has largely been based on the final product that the student submits. AI has completely upended the usefulness of a final product for assessing student learning. Given the capacities of the AI tools available, it is nearly impossible to AI-proof a project or assessment task that focuses only on the final submitted product. Today’s AI tools can create beautiful products that involve little or no student-thinking. If the goal of a project is for students to develop or demonstrate their own skills and understanding, merely focusing on student-created final products is no longer an option. In the language of assessment, independent student projects now have a validity problem; we can’t say for certain that the products measure the students’ knowledge, understanding, or skill, which is what we intend for them to measure.
Challenging the “Illusion of Learning” Problem
A second important goal of the process viva voce is the way that it helps to cue students to the meta-cognitive level of their learning. It can help students recognize the distinction between using AI as a support tool for their own thinking versus using AI to do the thinking for them. I’ve come to realize that many students don’t recognize their own lack of understanding. This is not a new problem. It’s similar to the classic situation of students studying for a test by reading over their notes, mistaking familiarity as deep understanding, only to realize how little they know when they can’t answer the questions on a test (as a colleague recently reminded me, this is sometimes referred to as “the illusion of learning” problem). While there are a few of my students who use AI tools explicitly to cheat, most believe they’re just using it as a support tool. As they engage with the tool, they’re unaware of how much of the hard cognitive work the AI tool is doing for them and the consequences of that for their own understanding. With the assistance of the AI tool, their thinking feels easy, and they mistake that ease for competence. They gain a surface level familiarity with the ideas, and naively take that familiarity to indicate deep level understanding. It’s not until they’re asked to discuss the ideas independent of the AI tool that they suddenly realize the weakness of their own grasp of them.
The awareness that their teacher may put them at the front of the room and ask them to explain the ideas seems to prompt in my students the meta-cognitive step where they ask themselves, “Do I understand this enough to talk about it in front of my classmates?” For some, the meta-cognitive moment comes when they hear my questions to other classmates at the front of the room. They then pause and think, “Could I have answered that question about what I’m working on?”
Examples of When I’ve Used the Process Viva Voce
I’ve now used the process viva voce for two project-based assessments in two different classes. One was for a relatively small-scale assessment in my Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class; the other has been for the much larger-scale Internal Assessment (IA) for my IB Psychology class.
At the end of our first unit in TOK recently, we had students do a small version of the TOK Exhibition assessment. Our small version required students to choose an artifact that was personally meaningful to them, connect that artifact to a Knowledge Question (KQ), and prepare a 3 minute, video-recorded reflection where they discussed the artifact, the KQ, and the concepts of the unit. Students worked on the assessment, outlining and planning, over the course of two class blocks, and then submitted on the third. At the start of each of those class blocks, I randomly selected three students to do a process viva voce at the front of the room. They had to talk about their artifact, why they chose it, how it related to their chosen KQ, and what they were thinking about the KQ in light of the concepts of our unit.
My year 2 IB Psychology students are currently in the midst of working on their IA, which, for psychology, requires that they develop a research proposal for a real-world, psychology-related topic. The IA is a project that students work-on over the course of about five weeks, and during that time, at the start of nearly every class, I’ve randomly selected 3 students, which means that some of the students have been selected more than once. I give them 30 seconds to quickly tell us their topic and the research method they’ve selected. I then ask each student a couple of questions related to their understanding of the literature, their sampling method, their data collection instrument, their study design, etc. In both of these examples, my students have responded well, they’ve accepted it as a routine, and, I believe, it’s contributed to the learning and the culture of the class, while also keeping my students more honest about their work.
Shifting the Focus Regarding AI-Use in my Classroom
The process viva voce shifts the focus about students using AI. If a student can sit in front of my classroom and intelligently talk about their ideas in their own “living voice,” I care less if they used AI as a tool when they were working with those ideas. I’m not anti-AI in my classroom; it can be a legitimately helpful learning tool. What I’m against is students circumventing their learning by using AI to do the hard cognitive work for them.
Some Final Thoughts on Student Writing Voice
In the midst of experimenting with the process viva voce, I’ve also been thinking about student writing voice. I’ve found myself in several conversations with students, telling them that I need to “hear” their voice when I read their work. Unfortunately, AI embedded in word processing tools, such as Grammerly or MS Copilot, has blurred the line for many students between a spelling and grammar tool, and an AI chat-bot that writes or re-writes large portions of their text for them. Students often argue that they used an AI tool simply to re-write what they were already saying, but better. In the meantime, however, their voice is lost. The writing they submit no longer reflects their vocabulary and their syntax. It no longer represents their articulation of their ideas.
I’ve only begun to ponder the implications of this issue, but I’m starting to think that if a text no longer reflects a student’s articulation of their ideas, then that text is moving dangerously in the direction of no longer being their ideas. Can you say an idea is yours if you can’t communicate it? Isn’t it a similar problem if you claim that an idea is yours, but it’s communicated in words that aren’t yours?
Writing voice is not an easy concept for students. Admittedly, students at the high school level are still figuring out their voice, they’re also still figuring out their own ideas. Furthermore, one’s writing voice is often not exactly the same as one’s spoken voice, and writing voice changes depending of the genre of the writing. Writing voice is also hard to define; it’s just one of those things— you know it when you see it. Despite these qualifiers, the process viva voce has, at minimum, given me a reference point when reminding them: “Remember when you sat at the front of the room and, with your ‘living voice,’ explained these ideas? I want to hear that voice in your writing.”
