AI-Enhanced Processes

The Appearance of Knowing

I was chatting with my parents for my 43rd birthday. We talked about life, the news, and, inevitably, AI. I shared a nascent idea I’ve been playing with: the commodification of knowledge. I love the way that sounds. It suggests the things we know can be bought and traded, or at least that we can buy and trade the appearance of knowing them. To me, it’s so much like the idea of buying a book and putting it on your bookshelf, then letting all your guests think you read it as they admire your living room. “Honey, look, Alex has read The Unabridged Encyclopedia of Humanity; I’ve heard it is a real shocker at the end! Since he owns it, he must have memorized and understood the whole thing. It’s only 150 volumes.”

Paying for a personal trainer and watching her work out doesn’t make you fit. Living in Norway doesn’t mean you speak Norwegian. Using AI to summarize a stack of PDFs doesn’t mean you understand them. Access creates an opportunity to learn, but access alone doesn’t mean acquisition of knowledge. The central idea of this article is that teachers create the time, space, and guidance for students to practice self-awareness of their own learning and growth.

AI offers a way to catch up and provide a competitive edge, but it also makes us feel further behind. In the rush to become early adopters of a promising new technology, we risk letting go of the very things we hoped to acquire: skills, knowledge, understanding. And for what? Productivity? Being first? The fear of missing out? We’re so busy trying to keep up that we rarely stop to ask what we’re actually learning.

In this article, I want to ask: if we’re using AI to acquire new skills, knowledge, and abilities, how do we know what we actually learned? My hunch is that we are creating a learned dependence on AI because we never really read the books, learned to code, or to design. I mean, ask anyone today, and they’ll say, “my god, how did we ever live without AI?”

The Good Student Who Follows Instructions

We use AI to speed things up, to summarize books, explain difficult ideas, and produce reports that we don’t truly read, understand, or spend time with. We ask for a summary, then a shorter summary, then the three things we need to know. At each step, we get something faster to consume.

The problem is that students may not recognize what they lose when they rush, and our classroom routines may reinforce those blind spots. If completing the work efficiently gets a good grade and pleases their parents, why would they question whether they have understood it?

Let’s look at it from a student’s perspective. Let’s call him Sam. Sam was asked to produce an essay in two days and submit it to you for your review. You didn’t talk about AI much; you just said to complete it on time and to address the learning objectives. You told him he couldn’t use AI to write the essay, but said little about other uses. Thinking he was in alignment with your expectations, Sam went home and quickly acquired all the relevant literature from a website. He loaded them into Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), read the first 20 lines of a summary report, thinking that he understood the assignment, and quickly wrote the essay out. After all, Sam has other homework, dinner with his family, and will meet his friends before bed for some online gaming, his one social outlet for the day. He went back to school and turned in the assignment, feeling proud and happy that he did the right thing. He did, after all, want to do the right thing and make his teacher and parents proud.

What actually went wrong? To me, it’s busy people rushing through the place where the thinking should have happened: reading the texts, processing what he read, and writing, which he rushed through as a task rather than a form of thinking.

I think it continues to go beyond that, though. It’s also the teacher who left the AI conversation at the surface level of “no writing with AI” rather than addressing the other forms of interacting with it. It was the uninvited guest sitting next to each child whom the teacher did not introduce.

Finally, the environment. I can’t help but also wonder if the teacher reinforced a rushed, transactional classroom. We only have so much time to get through all this content, so there’s no time to think, just act. Or, class time is filled with the things I need to tell you, so do the thinking at home.

The rushed classroom existed before AI, and AI just reveals old problems in many ways, but if schools keep operating that rushed sort of way, we’ll see these problems more and more.

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth

Rozenblit and Keil (2002) called the core problem of this article the illusion of explanatory depth. In their experiments, participants rated how well they understood everyday devices, like a zipper, then tried to write out detailed explanations of how they worked. The attempt to give a detailed explanation exposed gaps to themselves, and their self-assessed ratings dropped. The researchers proposed that the drop in their scores was a sign that people often confuse what they can see and use with what they actually understand.

Here’s a great video from YouTuber Pseudoodle that explains it beautifully. It's worth showing your students too.

In short, familiarity and exposure are not understanding. Explaining, teaching another person, or something similar, can help you notice more accurately your own level of understanding.

The Role of The Teacher

I keep coming back to the teacher’s role in helping students notice what they know. What were you trying to learn? What can you explain now? Where do you still need practice? Those questions give students a reason to pause and look beyond whether the work is finished and to consider its bigger purpose: your growth. The project matters significantly less than your growth. We are not at school to create projects, we are at school to grow into smarter, kinder, thoughtful, creative, analytical, problem-solving people. And when we forget that and focus on the test, the grade, the project, the whatever, AI is going to do it for them.

As facilitators of this sort of thinking classroom, we might be the ones creating pauses, especially at first as we develop those habits. We as teachers might ask the question, make time for an explanation, and help students notice a gap without treating it as a failure, but rather an opportunity to learn. Over time, we want students to begin asking those questions themselves as self-regulated learners.

Monday-Ready Resources

Let’s use metacognitive questions, structured as Foresight, Oversight, and Hindsight to help guide students to be independent and wise users of AI.

The questions can really take different shapes depending on the age, independence, subject area, culture, and context of your classroom. That being said, I have written a few guiding questions to provoke thinking, intentionality, and deliberate learning as opposed to task-completion and doing-without-thinking. It has been my claim throughout this article that AI can make it seem that we have depth of knowledge when we speed things up and use AI to summarize texts for us. A student who hasn’t developed a level of self-awareness around their actions needs guidance to use a tool as powerful or potentially harmful as AI. Teachers can support this development through metacognition and well thought out questions.

Below I have question banks in the form of text and PDFs that are ready to be presented in class. Let’s go process by process and check out the resources.

Foresight

One of the metacognitive moves I would highly recommend is getting students to plan in advance and consider how they will know if they have met the targets. What things will they see that they were able to accomplish, do, express, or as today’s article has been suggesting, be able to explain. That’s a hard one, but spending a few minutes on it and revisiting it …

It's time to finish up the year with one last podcast episode. I decided that I wanted to have a reflection and talk to people about how process-based learning has been going inside their schools or classrooms. I talked to a range of educators and asked them several different questions, and this episode is a series of highlights from those conversations. So, over these 20 minutes, you're going to hear a series of short recordings in which we look at process-based learning with AI from several angles. Below are notes about each of the guests with links to their websites and social media. Thank you all for contributing to this episode!

Aimée Skidmore | Teaching and Learning Coach | Geneva

Aimée works with experienced teachers who are tired of being the engine in the room. Her focus is student ownership: structures where students start, think, revise, and take responsibility without the teacher carrying it all. She appears twice in this episode. First, she describes what process-based AI use looks like from inside her classroom. In her second segment, she explains how deliberate checkpoint gates changed the outcome of a chatbot-building project.

Aimée offers a six-week Student Ownership Sprint for secondary teachers. She also hosts the International Teacher Staffroom podcast.

LinkedIn | TeachSpark

Aimée wrote a companion piece to go along with this episode. After you listen, make sure to read her more in-depth write up about “gates” below.

Jay Goodman, Ed.D. | PBL Consultant | Canada

Jay has spent nearly two decades designing problem-based learning programs. His Ed.D. focused on PBL program design. He co-developed the Innovation Institute, an award-winning interdisciplinary PBL program in Shanghai.

In this episode, he describes mentor bots: teacher-designed AI personas built around specific domains of expertise. Students identify a knowledge gap, do initial research, and then bring that thinking into a structured conversation with a field-specific model. It solves a real PBL logistics problem without replacing the thinking students need to do first.

LinkedIn | Goodman Learning Partners

Vamshi Mugatha | Director of Technology | American School of Brasilia

Vamshi brings in a leadership perspective as an admin. Vamshi describes a familiar challenge for many schools around the implementation side of a policy. What he realized was that the missing piece was expectations. When teachers weren’t setting them, students were using AI without disclosing it. The gap between the two created tension that the policy alone couldn’t resolve.

LinkedIn

Leon Lam | A-Level Head of Humanities | Beijing National Day School

Leon teaches A-Level economics and leads Humanities at Beijing National Day School. Last year, he vibe-coded a Socratic essay coaching chatbot designed to slow students down and move them through idea generation, outlining, and drafting as distinct stages. He’s candid about what happened. Some students engaged deeply. Others focused entirely on getting the chatbot to advance to the next stage, treating compliance as the goal. He reflects on what he’d do differently next time. His biggest takeaway is that co-designing a process with students can be a powerful way to make the process less performative and more purposeful in supporting their work.

LinkedIn

Leon wrote a companion piece to this podcast episode. Check it out below.

In this episode Joellen Killion joins the podcast and talks about what impactful feedback could look like as a practice as well as what it could look like in the age of AI.

⁠Joellen's Book on Feedback (link)⁠

About Joellen

Joellen Killion champions educator learning as the primary pathway to student success. She serves school systems, schools, regional, state, and national agencies within the U.S. and abroad as a consultant and learning facilitator. She is senior advisor to Learning Forward and formerly was its deputy executive director. Joellen leads, facilitates, and contributes to a number of initiatives related to examining the link among curriculum; leadership; quality instruction; professional development; and student learning. She has over 30 years of experience in curriculum development and implementation and planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of professional learning at the school, system, state, national, and international level. She was the recipient of the Don Deshler Leadership Award and the Adams County District 12 Merit Award. She serves on the advisory board for the Association for the Advancement of Instructional Coaching in International Schools and is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal on Mentoring and Coaching in Education.

Joellen is a frequent contributor to education publications. Her books include What Works in the Middle; What Works in the Elementary Grades;, and What Works in the High School; Teachers Who Learn Kids Who Achieve: A Look at Model Professional Development; Assessing Impact: Evaluating Professional Learning, 3rd edition; Collaborative Professional Learning Teams in School and Beyond: A Tool Kit for New Jersey Educators; Taking the Lead: New Roles for Teacher and School-based Coaches; The Learning Educator: A New Era in Professional Learning; Becoming a Learning School; Coaching Matters; The Feedback Process: Transforming Feedback for Professional Learning.; and Elevate School-based Professional Learning. She authored and co-authored numerous papers, articles, reports, and workbooks such as PDK’s EDge, The Changing Face of Professional Development; A Systemic Approach to Elevating Teacher Leadership; and resources associated with the Transforming Professional Learning for Common Core Implementation initiative. She serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education. Her particular interests are collaborative learning teams, coaching educator success, evaluation and program audits, standards for professional learning, policy to support professional learning, and comprehensive planning and implementation of high-quality, standards-based, results-focused professional learning.

In this four-part episode, Alex has an interview with five different guests who share their insights on using AI to meaningfully help students to write. Key ideas that emerge: grading chats can be fun and insightful, writing is a form of thinking, process and product are important, it's possible to write with AI and still know your content, and much more. Below are the details about this episode's guests:

Mike Kentz is an award-winning educator and former journalist with 15 years' experience across teaching and news media. He is a TEDx Speaker and the founder of AI Literacy Partners, a professional development and curriculum design firm that aims to build AI literacy in educators and students through high-quality instructional materials. His work in AI and Education has been featured in The Harvard AI Pedagogy Project, EdSurge, The Writing Across the Curriculum Repository from Colorado State University, The Wall Street Journal, and more. He lives in Morristown, New Jersey, with his wife, son, dog, and cat.

With over 27 years dedicated to advancing educational excellence, Eileen Heller serves as an Education Consultant for Professional Learning at ESU #3, supporting 18 diverse school districts across Omaha’s metro communities. Her career journey—from sixth-grade classroom teacher to technology specialist, instructional facilitator, and instructional technology trainer for Omaha Public Schools, as well as adjunct instructor for multiple higher education institutions—has equipped her with a deep understanding of how to design and sustain impactful systems of professional learning. Her varied experience has led her to focus on building effective professional learning systems. She is committed to supporting educators’ growth through collaboration and encouraging self-directed solutions that improve student outcomes.

Chase Heller is beginning his freshman year of high school and enjoys staying actively involved in both his school and community. He serves on the student council and volunteers whenever possible. Passionate about athletics, Chase runs cross country and plays soccer, consistently working to improve his fitness and teamwork. In his free time, he enjoys walking his dog Lucky, swimming, playing with his brother McKennon, and spending time with friends and family.

Amelia King is the Director of Digital Transformation at one of the UK’s leading independent schools, where she helps educators navigate new technologies without losing sight of deep learning and student wellbeing. With a Master’s in Smart EdTech and Co-Creativity, she has researched how students think when using AI, sharing her findings at international conferences and through her widely read newsletter for educators. Amelia mentors colleagues worldwide, teaches her “Thinking with AI” course, and speaks regularly about the need to blend artificial and human intelligence in education. Known for translating academic research into practical classroom strategies, she is passionate about ensuring that technology lifts attainment, deepens learning, and protects the well-being of both students and teachers. Learn more about her work at amelia-king.com.

Andrew Easton is an education speaker, author, and consultant specializing in personalized learning, artificial intelligence in education, and learner engagement strategies. He serves as the Digital Learning Coordinator for Nebraska’s Educational Service Unit Coordinating Council, supporting schools across the state with innovative technology integration. A former classroom teacher with more than a decade of experience, Andrew has delivered over 50 conference presentations and 125 professional development sessions for educators across the U.S. and Canada. He is the author of Empowered to Choose: A Practical Guide to Personalized Learning and the host of The Good Life EDU Podcast, where he explores the latest ideas shaping the future of teaching and learning.

In this episode, I have three chats with different international educators who are working with AI and assessment in different contexts. My previous episode on assessment was one of my more popular, so I thought it was time to come back and see where we were at in terms of thinking that might be developing or getting more refined. It’s been a year since we recorded the last episode. Wow, time flies!

Let’s take a look at the details of what you can expect and the folks joining me in order of appearance in the show.

Emily J. Thomas is an educator, educational consultant, and entrepreneur who supports international schools in strengthening curricular development, coherence, and a clear vision for teaching and learning. She has spent over a decade in IB international schools as an MYP/DP English language and literature teacher and, most recently, served as an MYP Coordinator; she’s also an IB Educator Network workshop leader and a DP Literature examiner, and works as a literacy strategist with Erin Kent Consulting (EKC). Alongside her work in schools, Emily founded Playground Pedagogy (“playful minds, serious learning”) and leads yoga-focused work through Teaching Matters Yoga and Drift Yoga in Bangkok, and she writes the weekly Substack Elsewhere, Examined.

In this conversation, Emily reframes assessment as an opportunity to extend learning; a way to “tune in” to what learners have actually acquired, not a checkbox to end a unit. She unpacks why formative vs. summative terminology can create anxiety and mixed signals for students and argues for schoolwide clarity, including shared definitions, consistent language, and policies that treat formative evidence as meaningful rather than “worthless.” Turning to AI, Emily’s message is “process first”: the best response is doing the fundamentals well with simple, standardized task sheets and clear expectations (including what AI use is appropriate) that teachers and students see consistently across classes. She closes with empathy for educators navigating this moment and a call for leaders to “steer the ship” with clarity so teachers can feel calm and supported.

Timothy Cook is an educator and the founder of Connected Classroom, exploring how AI shapes student cognition and learning. He currently teaches third grade at the American Community School in Amman and writes Psychology Today’s “Algorithmic Mind” column, where he examines the intersection of education, AI, and human cognition, especially the risks of dependency and what schools can do to protect critical thinking, creativity, and moral development.

In this conversation, Tim argues that writing still matters more than ever because it’s fundamentally a process of thinking: the focus, word choice, revision, and self-argument that helps students clarify what they actually believe (and that AI can’t authentically replicate). He introduces the idea of “jagged edges” that include the human, lived, imperfect uniqueness that gets flattened when AI produces the same “academically average” response to predictable prompts. From there, he makes a practical case for “AI-proofing” assessment by redesigning tasks around community, identity, and design: prompts where students must apply content in locally grounded ways (and where AI can still be used as a tool without replacing the thinking).

Nick Soentgerath is a Technology Learning Coach at Yokohama International School (Japan), where he supports teachers and students in designing practical, future-focused learning with a strong emphasis on ethical, responsible, and safe use of AI.

In our conversation, Nick brings a practical, classroom-grounded lens to what assessment can be when it’s less about “gotcha” grading and more about clarity, feedback, and growth. Helping schools move from measuring learning to actually improving it. He also presents at international conferences and works with educators on assessment practices that are more authentic, equitable, and aligned with the skills students need beyond school. In the episode, Nick and I discuss the upcoming conference at his school. Find out more here: www.AIFE.community.

In this episode of The EdTech Lens, Alex explores one of the most powerful ideas in learning: metacognition. Inspired by Amelia King’s recent book, Thinking with AI, and the rising need to understand how AI intersects with thinking, this episode looks closely at how learners plan, monitor, and make sense of their thinking before, during, and after learning. To do that, Alex speaks with four educators whose combined experience stretches across continents, disciplines, and decades.

The conversation begins with Ochan Kusuma-Powell, an internationally respected educator, consultant, Cognitive Coaching trainer, and author whose career has helped shape how schools understand learning, thinking, and inclusion. With experience in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Malaysia, she brings a global perspective to how students learn and how teachers can help them think about their own thinking. A founding member of the original Design Team behind Next Frontier Inclusion and co-founder of Education Across Frontiers, Ochan has influenced schools worldwide through her books and her ability to blend research, storytelling, and practical strategy. In this episode, she shares a crystalline view of metacognition as holding your thinking in the palm of your hand and examining it from many angles, and she describes how she uses AI as a thought partner while writing a new book.

Next, Alex is joined by Ty Urquhart, Middle School counselor at Shanghai American School Puxi. Ty brings a social emotional lens to the conversation, offering insight into how teens develop self-awareness, self-management, and decision-making skills during a time of rapid cognitive change. He discusses why teens crave independence, why pausing before acting is so challenging, and why shifting from right versus wrong to helpful versus harmful leads to more productive conversations about AI, digital behavior, and wellbeing. Ty also describes AI as the mirror rather than the villain, reminding us that the goal for students is not avoidance of technology but conscious, intentional use of it.

The episode closes with Victoria Hoult and Rachel Kalish from Korea International School, Jeju. Victoria is an experienced instructional coach, curriculum coordinator, and educational leader whose career includes New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Korea. Now serving as Director of Teaching and Learning, she leads with relationships, clarity, and an unwavering commitment to building a school culture where all voices feel valued.

Rachel, who holds an MA in Educational Leadership, is the school’s Curriculum and Instruction Coach and has worked in Guatemala, California, Dubai, and Korea. As an innovative and collaborative educational leader, she is dedicated to enhancing student learning by prioritizing relevance and engagement. Her expertise includes implementing effective instructional strategies, aligning curriculum with educational standards, and fostering teamwork among educators. By leveraging data driven insights in collaboration with all stakeholders, she works to improve student outcomes academically and socially, ensuring that every learner reaches their full potential. Together, Victoria and Rachel share practical insights from coaching teachers, guiding schoolwide reflection, and helping students develop the habits needed for sustained, independent learning. Their reflections on how metacognition shows up in teacher practice and how AI might support deeper thinking bring the conversation to a thoughtful and grounded close.

In today's episode Alex interviews three incredible educators on a panel. We chat about a hot topic in the education world at the moment-- AI and assessment. The team discusses their personal and professional backgrounds, roles, and expertise in relation to AI and assessment, with a focus on the need for a shift from traditional teaching methods to more student-centered approaches. They also critiqued external standardized tests and emphasized the importance of developing durable skills that are transferable and relevant in the modern world. The conversation ended with plans for future communication and collaboration, including the possibility of a follow-up session and the inclusion of a creative writing project in the podcast.

Jennifer DeLashmutt has over 25 years of teaching and leadership experience in the United States and Asia. For the last ten years, she has served as an elementary principal and PK-12 Director of Curriculum and Professional Learning in Hong Kong ( HKIS) and Bangkok (ISB). Her background in curriculum, instructional practices, and assessment spans both primary and secondary years. She is devoted to ensuring that all learners are empowered members of their learning communities and they feel safe and valued. Jennifer is a design thinking leader who is future driven and diligently stays curious! She is an educational consultant with Novak Education. In our episode she mentions:

• ⁠Katie Novak and Catlin Tucker - Embracing AI⁠

• ⁠LUDIA Chatbot on Poe⁠

Dr. Shannon Doak is an Edtech and Innovation Leader. Speaker, Author, Lucky Father and husband, #AI Enthusiast, #PoeCreator #CoffeeLover, and #HomeBarista | He is currently the Director of Technology at Nanjing International School. Some helpful links from Shannon are:

• ⁠This is the book by Dr Sonny Magana⁠

• ⁠This Grade School Offers AI-Only Classes, No Teachers Involved⁠

• ⁠How a new Arizona school will use AI to teach students in 2-hour models⁠

Walk into many schools today and you'll find a system as outdated as a sundial at NASA - not because educators aren't innovating, but because the system itself needs reimagining. John Nash partners with school leaders to close the gap between where education is and where it needs to be. John doesn’t treat school transformation like making microwave popcorn - push a button and pray. John’s approach is more like brewing the perfect cup of coffee: methodical, intentional, and guaranteed to wake people up. Drawing from 30 years in the trenches of education reform, he shows school leaders how to use design thinking to fundamentally rethink how schools work. As founding director of the University of Kentucky's Laboratory on Design Thinking, he helps transform traditional institutions into dynamic learning environments where students drive their own education. His approach on design thinking and generative AI has caught the attention of everyone from the U.S. State Department, to district superintendents, to international schools. His book "Design Thinking in Schools" (Harvard Education Press) gives leaders a tested blueprint for turning bold ideas into meaningful change.

In today's episode, I sit down with three incredible educators: Amelia King, Vera Cubero, and Dr. Shannon Doak. We explore the idea of whether or not AI is a support or a hindrance to one's creativity.

You can all three of my guests on Linked In.

Finally, at the end of the episode, I share a song that I made as a collaboration with AI: I uploaded a finished song, remade it for several hours, and then mixed/looped/edited the output. I hope you enjoy the episode!