The past summer I’ve been working with Notre Dame’s Institute of Ethics and the Common Good (shoutout to and ) to build some much-needed FREE resources for teachers and professors who want to make their classrooms more dignified spaces.

Dignified.

Not more efficient. Not more responsive to market demands. Not easier.

Dignified.

The resources (many more to come!) apply the DELTA framework, which is comprised of the following five pillars:

Dignity

Embodiment

Love

Transcendence

Agency

If we take these five pillars into consideration, dignified learning is education that takes seriously the kinds of things we are. It resists computational philosophy of mind. It encourages students to be formed into people capable of seeing and serving their neighbors. It draws us up and out of ourselves in recognition of transcendent realities we are too limited to fully grasp. And, finally, it equips young people to form sound judgment—to become practically wise decision makers who can see, seek, grasp, and do what is good.

Of course, all that is no small task. To accomplish it, careful discernment about technology is in order. Sometimes, that discernment leads us to this realization: educational technology doesn’t always make learning dignified. Sometimes limits on technology make learning more dignified. Sometimes silent spaces not optimized for speed and ease are necessary for the cultivation of sound judgment—for a receptivity to what is true, good, and beautiful.

In other words, setting limits and refusing to accept AI as ubiquitous and unqualifiedly good makes you discerning. It doesn’t make you a Luddite. Cheers!

So, in the name of discerned use of technology and AI in classrooms the resources I’m making are mostly analog. They acknowledge that sometimes slow is good. Sometimes quiet is needed. Sometimes messy humans are preferable to bots. Yes, even if their feedback is not quite as polished or perfect.

I’ve taken up the task because things have changed so quickly and many have been running full speed trying to digest the disruption, leaving little time to build thoughtful solutions that reorient classrooms towards the magnificent humanity of those who occupy them. This is why a great number of classrooms are using assessment strategies of a bygone era. “Ten pages due at the end of the semester. And, by the way, AI is not allowed and considered cheating.”

Bringing this back to the title…

Writing with Dignity

The first resource I’m featuring here on Substack is a series of handouts to facilitate formative Scaffolded Writing Workshops in your class (with zero preparation on your part). Thoughtfully made by a human (me!) to encourage student agency.

Scaffolded Writing Workshops: A History

Last Summer, I created a workbook for scaffolded, in class writing called “Drafted.” I also wrote this post on the steps I use in it.

The workshops I’ve created for DELTA are updated and revised versions of this process in response to two pieces of feedback I received. The feedback:

1. Some instructors did not want students to purchase an additional resource. This is because they taught at community colleges where many students are using financial aid for texts, or because they were in high school environments where there was a little too much administrative red tape to get a text approved. That all sounded reasonable to me.

2. Some instructors wanted to use parts of the process but not the whole thing. As a result, they didn’t want to require students to use the whole book if they couldn’t commit to completing all the steps or if their class was not structured to accommodate the amount of in-class writing time needed to complete them all. Also, fair.

As a result, I got to thinking….

If I turned these into handouts that could be easily printed and passed out to students and written in a personal notebook, this would allow folks to adopt what I believe to be a very dignified writing process at a scale not possible with the workbook. Ultimately, dignified writing is what I’m interested in helping facilitate, not the sale of my workbook.

Not only that, but there might be some genuine relief to this massive problem of faculty despair about writing—the endlessly disorienting realization that all the measures you took that semester to curb academic dishonesty, to foster genuine thinking, and encourage students to find their own voice were insufficient. In other words, the temptation for students to offload that hard work outside the classroom is too great and the technology changes at a pace we can simply not keep up with—without overhauling our methods every semester. This puts the onus on instructors to move all the things students have typically done outside class to in-class activities—to accompany students on the writing journey in real time. It’s a heavy lift. And, it requires a lot of time to think through—time many do not have.

Because of my collaboration with DELTA, I had the time. I’m happy to pass on the benefits of that time and space to think it all through to you.

About the Workshops

These new DELTA Writing Workshops are designed for in-class, analog writing and are specifically geared toward thesis-driven, argumentative work. Their purpose is to preserve student agency and the integrity of the traditional term paper. Students are asked to slow down, find their voice, bring their raw thoughts to the page, and mold them over time—a process that is increasingly easy and tempting to outsource without structure and in-person guidance.

download here

The workshops work particularly well when students have one dedicated place to complete them. You can purchase inexpensive notebooks or composition books, or ask students to bring their own. The important thing is that students use the same dedicated notebook throughout the process. It will not work as effectively if entries are dispersed throughout a disorganized multi-subject notebook.

Each workshop should take roughly 30–45 minutes of class time, though you can allow more when time permits. Print off copies so students have the instructions on paper in front of them. I recommend not posting these on CANVAS or whatever LMS you are required to use. Wait until the period begins and pass them out only when you intend to begin the activity. This will mitigate student attempts to circumvent the struggle by popping the instruction/reflection questions into their favorite bot ahead of time.

If students choose their own paper topics, begin with the Discernment Workshop. If you provide a selection of prompts, you can skip that session. With the exception of a couple, these workshops are intentionally modular. You don’t necessarily need to complete them in the order that they appear in the digital download. This is another benefit of this delivery.

Finally, though designed with undergraduates in mind, the structure works equally well in high school and even in graduate seminars. In fact, as I was trying to figure out the proper way to structure the discernment workshop, it looks a lot like how I landed on seminar paper topics (not without a great deal of fumbling around and searching for something novel enough to spend 14 weeks dedicating myself to). The structure of good, thoughtful thesis-driven writing carries across grade levels and even into professional, academic life. The course content will elevate and deepen the subjective experience for more intellectually mature students.

Practice gets them there—to intellectual maturity.

As has put it, “to write well, write a lot.” To help students form and keep their own voice, hold the space for them to “write a lot” on their own.

For future resources…

While I post here on Substack when new things are dropped, you can periodically check the DELTA project’s spanking new website: delta.nd.edu

Webinar in Early Fall

If you decide to use these in your course, it would be awesome to know! Drop a comment here or shoot me a DM or email: lmking2@usf.edu. Because I’ve had a lot of requests for meetings or advice, I will likely plan a webinar during the early fall on this method. Would love to know if anyone in Substack world is interested. I’ll, of course, post more details in the next week or so about how to sign up and participate.

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This summer I’ve not been wanting for projects.

I’ve been consulting with schools on AI policies, finished edits on an article forthcoming in the Journal of Religious Ethics, am revising an R&R, wrote a book chapter for an edited volume, have created a plethora of resources for Notre Dame’s DELTA project, and wrote an little essay for New Polity. And, of course, working on my book, The Virtues and Vices of Learning, which builds out the most thoughtful and extended version of all the things I’ve been thinking about and sharing over the last year or so.

This seems like a ridiculous amount of things. That checks out. I am a bit ridiculous. But, these are not separate projects. Over the last year, without really intending it to be the case, all of these efforts—academic and otherwise—have developed a coherent through-line: human formation in a culture of convenience. While there are different voices for different audiences and frameworks for various types of institutions, all of my work and writing is clarifying what it means to form human beings into the kinds of things that can flourish in our time. There is some translation work to be sure. But, it is one project.

This is an inherently practical consideration. Formation requires doing and practice. It is about the ways lives are ordered and institutions are built and work is done. There are ways to do these things that form the capacities fundamental to a good life and ways to do them that stifle our agency—that is, our ability to seek and carry out what we know to be good. The places where we work, learn, and spend time with friends can encourage the very vices that make genuine learning, intimacy, and good work impossible.

There is one very practical verb I find myself repeating—in conversations, in policies, on panels, and in talks: protect. It is a strong word—one that assumes there is a threat. It is also appropriate one because there is absolutely a threat. The threat seems banal to some. Why is using AI to write an email that bad. Perhaps giving an AI tutor a struggling child with little resources could help? Not alone, perhaps. Not alone. Maybe these things aren’t necessarily “threatening” to human flourishing if considered as solitary solutions to help solve acute problems.

But this is not what is happening. These are not solitary solutions to help solve acute problems. The “solutions” are numerous. They are attempts to “solve” ongoing and chronic problems. The AI encroachment is cumulative. Not one convenience. Not two. AI is inserting itself everywhere. It is a pile-on.

It is a pile-on worth guarding against because we become good humans by doing—by doing and grasping for the goods that give our lives fulfillment: health, community, truth, friendship. Over time—and under the right conditions—our grasping becomes more targeted and successful. We have to become certain kinds of people to enjoy those goods in their fullness. Patient people. Honest people. Humble people. The greatest philosophers and leaders and lovers are all these things. These virtues are dispositions formed over lifetimes. Through the hard, slow process of work and relationship—in our communication with one another, in how we play, how we worship, how we work, and in the very way we come to know what we know.

How is all that operationalized in a school—in a classroom? That is my work, my one big project.

Developmental Processes to Protect

There are, in my view, four developmental processes in need of protection. More specifically, the spaces in which these processes unfold well need protecting.

1. Character development

2. Intellectual development

3. Social development

4. Spiritual development

To be clear, these are not neatly distinguished. Social development is part of character development. Character development is part of intellectual development. But the categories help us think better about conditions. What are the conditions that make each of these things possible? What sort of environment needs to be created such that human development in these areas is most likely? After all, we cannot force it.

Surely for character development we must provide opportunities to serve, where students must set aside their own wants and desires, where fast and easy isn’t glorified and encouraged.

Surely for intellectual development we should provide repeated opportunities to exercise various methods of inquiry—to practice without the temptation of easy shortcuts.

Surely for social development we must preference human presence—a preference supported by a norm of in person interaction and communication that refuses retreat into isolation and navel-gazing.

Surely for spiritual development we need to create spaces of true leisure—spaces of silence not incessantly mediated by pings and dings to be present and receptive to reality.

For each of these areas there is much more to explore and explain. And when I meet with schools and think through their specific needs we dial in on all that, of course. I also plan to lay it out with special care in my book too. But, I hope that even this brief peak into the necessary conditions for human development make cleat that our institutions—our schools and classrooms—are systems that make it more or less likely for students to develop in these ways. The threat to human development—and thus to the human person—is the erosion of the environments through which it is actually possible. So, AI is certainly a threat. Not some intrinsic evil. But, yes, a threat.

In this moment we need to protect the endangered environment.

For many of us in the humanities, discerning how to structure assignments and syllabi amid the current AI disruption has been disorienting and overwhelming. Going back to blue books? Tossing the essay? AI detectors? A laptop ban in class? A phone ban? Maybe you’ve decided to try the scaffolded term paper? These are important questions to answer. I trust you have thought about them extensively. But maybe we take a break from all that for a moment—a moment at the start of class this upcoming Fall.

An Invitation to Learn

This Fall I will not start the semester reviewing AI, academic integrity policies. I’ve realized policies have very little to do with how students actually show up or use AI in my class. Sadly, arguments don’t appear overly compelling either. So, I won’t give my class op-eds to read about de-skilling and outsourcing or outline all the reasons that this will hurt their souls and brains. And, I won’t desperately implore them to care more about the humanities using the comments of CEOs about the kind of workers they want and will hire.

Instead, I will start with an invitation—a literal invitation that will frame the semester and orient it towards it’s proper end. It will not simply be said. I’m going to hand-write each of my students an invitation to learn. They will see their name on an envelope printed with my pen. It will be on Crane & Co. stationary and hopefully signal that I care deeply about ideas and learning and them (and maybe that I’m a little bit crazy).

I know this won’t be enough to inspire everyone to close the Claude tab. However, I know that for some it will be something they remember. And, just maybe, for a couple it will inspire a shift in attention and care significant enough to take the semester a little more seriously—to feel that there is something deeply human about learning that they don’t want to miss.

…even if it is not a class for their major

…even if the texts are dense and hard to understand

…even if there doesn’t seem to be some obvious reward

…even if it’s easier and quicker to skip, fake, and pretend

My Letter

This is what I plan to put in my invitation:

A Call to Action

If you are teaching this semester, I encourage you to start the semester with an invitation to learn. Use this one or modify it. Make your own. You don’t have to write it on thick (and expensive) stationary. I only have 19 students next semester so I can manage it. It might work just the same if you print it out on beautiful paper and sign it, especially if you teach dozens of students.

If you decide to try this, I encourage you to share what you’ve written so we can learn from each other. Please tag me if you do! Use the hashtag #keeplearninghuman so we can track it all.

I do believe higher education needs a reframe. We need to center what is human about learning. Part of that is inspiring our students to do the same. Let's be part of the re-orientation. We can start small with a little note.

Extend the invitation.

#keeplearninghuman

*If you plan to print this instead of write it and want something already beautiful typeset with a minimalist aesthetic, see here.

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Everyone knows you don’t take your phone out in church. No one has to post rules about this anywhere. No one is walking around and waving their fingers at the tweens that can’t keep their eyes off their screens (Okay, maybe their moms once in a while). Though there is no obvious policing, it’s just about the only place I go every week where no one is glued to their devices. There are no laptops or AirPods. No one is rushing to the front of the church to stream the homily for a reel. A few have tried and they have been relentlessly shamed in the comment sections of their Instagram posts.

I suspect the reason for this is that we have this collective understanding: the one hour on Sundays spent in church is sacred to those making the effort to get there. This time spent in this place is distinct and set apart from the banal and ordinary occurrences of our modern lives—what theologians call “the profane.” We want it to be that way. We want a respite from the scrolling and clicking and multitasking of modernity.

However, it is worth thinking about what makes the space feel sacred. In other words, what makes it obvious to the people entering this space that something special is going on—that there is something here we need to protect from the screens, feeds, pings, and rings. I think reflecting on this will bring some interesting clarity about what has gone awry in the university classroom: no one is communicating that something special is going on there. Learning is nothing more than an extension of the profane—a profane space that is increasingly technocratic and utilitarian.

The idea I’m reaching for in this essay is that in this age where our ordinary lives are so saturated with machines that make it difficult to be present for genuine encounter, we need to create learning spaces distinctive enough to feel special—not quite sacred, but most certainly not profane. This was a feature of the very first universities—outgrowths of monasteries set apart from the hustle and bustle of the world. Indeed, we can learn quite a bit about how to recapture this from religion.

The Point of Pageantry

My church on Sunday is called Mass—and it starts quite dramatically. There is a grand entrance with the preist. The lectionary is held high above our heads and slow-marched to the altar by a deacon or lector. There is a grand declaration about why we are there, one repeated each time all are gathered together. Everyone present calls to mind how they have fallen short that week and literally beats their chests while uttering a “mea culpa”—my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.

There is a lot of valuable advice here about how to communicate distinctiveness without ever saying “this space is distinctive” (Try not to focus narrowly on centering Catholic guilt). The entrance clearly signals the start of something—a clear shift that serves as a transition from the banal. That book we read from is covered in literal gold paint. It’s larger than the largest textbook you’ll ever see. The size and aesthetic tell all those looking, “this is important.” The framing orients all present in a specific way, bringing awareness to why this time is needed, what it is we are about to do. Everyone stands during all this to signal reverence but also to make people alert. All of this only in the first five minutes. There is a point to the ritual and pageantry—it aims towards purpose.

Contrast this to your classroom. Students move seamlessly from hallways to their seats without missing a TikTok beat. To bring up the assigned reading they simply move the tab on their screen and can shamelessly toggle between Reddit feeds and Plato. Often we signal class is now beginning with a formal announcement to this effect that is coupled with a Powerpoint slide emanating a familiar blue light. Many students even keep one AirPod in to keep the vibes going. What vibes? I don’t know. We ease into discussion tepidly while students are hunched over their phones or slouched in chairs. How is this different from the couch? A casual meeting with an acquaintance one has no interest in getting to know?

We try to reclaim the distinctness of the classroom by trying to declare it so. We write policies, we tell students to focus and put away the devices. We lament, “they simply don’t care.” The reason for this isn’t pure apathy or malice. At least, I don’t think. We can’t make something special by fiat. It needs to feel that way. Maybe when it starts feeling that way no one will have to police phones and moan about the lack of engagement.

How do we make it feel that way?

The classroom should have different norms than the rest of mundane life.

In all transparency, I have not done the best job at this. I’m trying to think about the small ways my classroom needs to change to communicate that learning is a dignified experience and not something to slog through with only one ear open. But this is the most central and foundational aspect of making it feel different. To feel different, it needs to be different from what is experienced outside it. If that means setting aside technology at intentional times, so be it. If that means writing by hand, so be it. If that means reading from the most extravagant version of the text you can find, so be it (I will say there are some wonderfully beautiful copies of books that are surprisingly not cost prohibitive). The goal is for students to feel that learning is an elevated experience. Because it should be.

Focus on the shift.

I don’t know what I’ll be doing to accomplish this in the Fall. Thankfully, I don’t need to publish anything to this effect on my syllabus or make any grand declaration about it ahead of time. I might land on the perfect thing on my commute on the first day. What I do know is that I want to be intentional about encouraging students to shift from the mundane to a place of dignified learning. Maybe that includes a cell-phone ceremony in which everyone turns off their phones at the same time. Maybe it includes starting in silence and slowly taking out their moleskin to write down their reflections. Maybe it’s me just displaying my own copy of the text on a bookstand at the front of the room to focus students as they walk in. Maybe it’s a faint Peter Sandberg song playing for the first two minutes in silence. Maybe it is all of these things. Maybe. It will definitely be something.

The Frame.

This might overlap with the shift but I do feel it’s a distinct enough point to merit separate consideration. We need to make the purpose of learning explicit each time we meet. But here is the catch: it can’t come in the form of a long-winded speech on the purpose of learning and why students should take it seriously. It needs to be a subtle but visceral reminder of what is going on and the frame of mind we need to be in for it actually to go on well. As soon as I figure out what that will look like in my classroom, I’ll share. I haven’t landed on it yet.

In Conclusion

I’m running out of time to finish this. But what I hope you’ll take from this is the following:

Polices don’t create reverence; rituals do.

I won’t be bringing incense to my classroom—though that would be lovely. I will be making it feel different from life outside it.

Recently Jennifer Frey gave a talk at Princeton that had an interesting question in the Q&A—a question quite relevant to this week’s controversial opinion piece in the Chronicle entitled “Why the Pedagogy Experts are Wrong” by Paul Schofield. The essay was on the uselessness of teaching and learning centers. The talk had nothing to do with teaching and learning centers. It wasn’t even about the concept of expertise directly. However, it generated this question: does someone need to be an expert in classics or literature to teach Homer or Dante? Frey’s answer was one that might shock much of the siloed, self-important academy: she said “no.”

Per the usual, Frey is right.

My point in drawing attention to this question—and Frey’s answer—is that Paul Schofield’s argument rests largely on the notion that disciplinary experts do make the best teachers. It seems there are only disciplinary experts in Schofield’s academy. Moreover, philosophers should only ask other philosophers about how to teach. Biologists should only ask other biologists and so on and so forth. He uses this analogy to get the point across:

“no one thinks there’s such a thing as “playing sports” generically. There is just playing football, gymnastics, golf, wrestling, shotput, each with standards of excellence particular to it.”

This leads him to determine: there are no expert teachers. For, this is like “playing sports” generically. I’m sympathetic to this point because I’m a virtue ethicist of the MacIntyrean variety. And, MacIntyre argues quite convincingly that the standards of excellence in any practice are best determined by the experts of respective practices. This, to me, seems intuitive. So, while I will grant this point, I do still believe Schofield is rather misguided in saying “there is very little to be said about good teaching.” This is because teaching sociology is most certianly not the same as practicing it. In this short little response, I’ll attempt to explain why.

Let’s start with this: there are good coaches.

Sure, while each sport does have it’s own particular excellences, there are most certainly what we might call “good coaches.” And, for any of us that have played sports at any level, we know that some good coaches do not necessarily play the sport at present. Sometimes good coaches have never even played the sport at all. This is because being an excellent athlete does not directly translate into excellently teaching someone else how to play. It does not translate into leading well. It does not translate into creating a team culture that performs under pressure. It does not translate into motivating an unmotivated player to show up and put in work. In fact, sometimes the very best athletes are the worst at all these things because they have an unearned talent that did not require work and toil. Sadly, watching egotistic displays of excellence rarely convert admiration into motivation.

If all the above is true, then there are certainly things good coaches have in common. It is not mere technical expertise at their sport. It’s a mix of character, love of the game, and creating an environment where people are willing and wanting to show up and become excellent. Certainly if a coach is all these things being a talented, practiced player doesn’t hurt. It is ideal even. However, it is by no means a sufficient condition. In fact, we might even say there are different excellences in invovled in playing and coaching well.

Now, this analogy is the better one that Schofield’s. It is the better one because we absolutely know this to be true of our disciplinary experts. I once took a statistics course with the most highly cited professor in the psychology department. He fumbled through lazy examples on the board, pointed to pictures in a textbook to a lecture hall of 200 students, and doled out grades according to his mood. Apparently brilliant in his field while being, at once, a horrible teacher. The things that made this particular professor bad are not things that are particular to statistics—aside from the precise explanation of some concept or problem. And, the reasons he failed in doing this well were similarly not particular to psych stats. Maybe he believed he was above teaching. Maybe never experienced a good teacher himself. And, maybe, he never cared to learn what good teaching might look like because he presumed his expertise alone qualified him. It did not.

Since 2009 when I sat in that psych stats lecture hall squinting to see some explanation of standard deviation on a ten-year-old textbook, teaching well has gotten incredibly more complex. Attention spans have dwindled, education has become commodified beyond our wildest dreams, and students bring laptops and phones with them to class equipped with chatbots that can answer their homework problems in seconds. Dealing with the polycrisis of higher education with some integrity is not intuitive or always discipline specific. You can’t ask the tenured professor in your department about how to structure assignments to discourage students from cheating with a technology they refuse to explore, learn about, or use. At a R1 university, sometimes there is no genuine concern about teaching well in your department at all. And so, there is no urgency in redesigning the asynchronous courses to meet the challenges of AI. Nor is there is a care about how to create community in the classroom when the world has become more isolated and lonely. For most, class is one thing standing in the way of the next publication. If students are not up to the task of learning, its on them—or so the argument goes.

So, where does one go to figure such things out if this attitude does not suffice? Could it be…a teaching and learning center?

Yes. And, not because such centers possess generic, one-size-fits-all expertise, but because they take seriously something Schofield seems to deny: that teaching is not reducible to disciplinary mastery. Good teaching—like good coaching—is not merely the transmission of content or technique. It is the formation of attention, the cultivation of judgment, the practice of patience, and the creation of an environment where students can begin to care about truth. And, as it often the case, all of this with many students who have no interest at all in devoting themselves to mastery of the specific practice you represent. Only a miniscule fraction of my students committ themselves to the discipline of philosophy. I have most for one semester.

How to approach all of this is daunting. Approaches can be reflected on, cultivated, and shared in community—communities I believe such centers can provide to those up to the task. It’s where I went in 2023 when trying to figure out what to do with my classes after the release of ChatGPT. It’s where I got funding to brainstorm and think through solutions that resulted in a published paper. My classroom experience has improved tenfold. There were no blankets and community care days involved. In fact, there was not even any talk of “learning science” at all. Perhaps I would be less ignorant of it if there were.

Am I saying that teaching and learning centers get it all right? No. What I am saying is that Schofield got some of his critique wrong.

The real danger is not that we might overestimate the value of pedagogical insight. It’s that we will continue to underestimate it—and in doing so, mistake expertise in a subject for the ability to form minds. Those are not the same thing. As Frey insists, no you don’t need to be an expert in Italian poetry to teach Dante in the Great Books Program at the University of Chicago. A rather unsettling point for some but it is nonetheless true. It is true because good teaching is formative. As AI encroaches on the university and the market, this distinction has never mattered more: knowing all the things does not equate teaching the things well. There is certain character, respect for the dignity of students, and classroom ecology required for all that. Some people have thought about these things a lot. We can learn from them.

This leads me to conclude that while there is no such thing as “playing sports” well in general, there are good coaches. And playing some sport well does not make you one.

You assign students to groups for a discussion or doing a routine think-pair-share. The phones come out. Pictures are taken of the board and uploaded to Claude. People are scribbling answers while looking at their phones or reading off answers from them. No discussion is happening in the “discussion” groups.

If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone.

I don’t need to make an argument about why this is most certainly not good. We know. Whether you are a booster or a knocker of AI in education, everyone does seem to agree that outsourcing thought to AI is a problem. Figuring out how to get it to stop though does merit some exploration. Over the last year or so I’ve seen some success in at least reducing the rates of AI-dependency during my classes (Outside too, but that is another post).

In what follows, I’ll break down an example of an in-class activity with a replicable structure that you can in employ in your classes too. I’ll isolate the main conditions that made it successful in producing the sort of thinking and engagement that made me more hopeful about the future of higher ed. Why? Well, it reminded me that genuine learning is still possible. All is not lost.

Judgement Day

In my critical thinking class we have been using problem-based learning for the entirety of the semester. I gave students a problem statement at the start and they have spent the entire course engaged in group work and employing various critical thinking tools to try and solve it well. The problem is about AI and layoffs. See below:

Their job has been to figure out what is the most practically wise decision after rigorous research, analysis, systems thinking, dialogue, and discussion. As we are now at the end of class, I had student groups share their various judgements in front of their peers.

The instructions were minimal. No PowerPoint was allowed. Notes could not be utilized. Cell-phones were left at their seats. Students needed to prepare to describe their solution on their own. Every member was required to contribute to that description.

After each group shared their judgement, the rest of the class spent two minutes creating critical questions to ask the presenters. Once those two minutes were up, I called upon students to ask their questions. Each student from the presenting group was only allowed to answer once unless everyone had already gone one time--round robin style. Again, they answered without reference to notes, phones, or slides.

After five minutes, I gave each group two recommendations to further refine their solution and they were required to write a short, one paragraph reflection on what needed to change given the collective critical engagement from peers and myself.

It all looks very much like a prospectus defense. Talk out the plan. Let peers and experts find the holes. Review and Refine.

This was the first time I tried something like this and it worked even better than I had envisioned. Students were giving a sincere effort and invested in giving critical feedback to their peers. It was awesome. One student remarked: “This was one of the most useful things I’ve ever done. It felt like legit board meeting.”

The best part? It is very simple. For each group the structure looked like this:

Conditions for Success

There are specific conditions that made all this a success. I’ll name four:

Constraints

I gave students boundaries that made it impossible for them to completely feign competency. They had to speak on this relying on nothing but their own brains in front of thirty classmates. This forced a bit of struggle and perhaps some necessary effort justification to be invested in the activity. The constraints also made it difficult for any one group member to coast on the other’s efforts as so often does happen in groups. Did everyone perform up to snuff? Not everyone. But it was an improvement from two of the four people in a group sitting on their phones while the rest try to go at it alone.

Accountability

Every student was required to write questions for each presenting group (this was turned in for a completion grade). This forced students to listen and interact intentionally with each presentation. In fact, I dare to say it would have required more effort to not listen and make up some question that is fitting enough instead of just tuning in and doing the work.

Pause & Preparation

The two minute pause to collect questions and think about them after each group presented was essential. Questions were not constructed on the fly or reactionary. Most were thoughtful and got to critical questions the group needed to address. Moreover, students actually knew about this topic. Everyone was exploring a solution to the same problem. So, everyone in that room has read multiple pieces of research on this issue, engaged with a number of op-eds, thought through possible feedback loops, etc. That means everyone has something to add and a solution they had already come to believe was best. In other words, their questions were informed ones. They weren’t the fruit of ill-concieved opinions.

Quick Transitions

Because the activity required active listening, reflection, asking questions, etc. Students did not have time to mess around on their phones. Most were writing or waiting to see how the students would hold up to scruitny. That being said, there wasn’t a lot of time to construct a way to get around what was required. We were moving according to a strict schedule, every moment accounted for.

Curiosity

One thing fueling the energy in the room is that I noticed students were interested in the solutions others had devised because they already had a solution they were invested in. In other words, curiousity was higher and directly proportionate to their engagement with the question. As a result, they wanted to see if other students had answers to their questions. Maybe they were also questions they struggled with in devising their own solutions. That curiousity is something that I couldn’t have generated if they were given that same problem the same day. It had been brewing along with their investment over the duration of the course. Had I done that same activity week 2, I don’t think it would have had the same impact. This is just my anecdotal presumption. I admittedly have no empirical research to back this up.

Grading

I said little to nothing about how this would be graded. In another life I would have considered this a failure. I now see it as an intentional pedagogy. I’ve found that when students start thinking in terms of grades they become more conscious about the possibility of failure. This causes undue anxiety and also a temptation to cheat. There was no rubric. I gave little instruction about when needed to be included in their quick, 5 minutes presentations. “Tell me about your solution and include the things you think everyone needs to know to determine if it’s a good one.” That is all I said. In fact, no one got a grade for their 5-minute presentation. But nearly everyone showed up to do it. Nearly everyone was prepared.

Some Possibilities

This doesn’t have to work exactly how I’ve laid it out, so long as the conditions for success are met, I think it can be adapted to your needs and learning outcomes. Here are a few variations:

• Though I used one problem throughout the course, you can still create these same conditions if you focused on one every few weeks. It need not be a semester-long ordeal. Just long enough to build buy-in and to delve into some of the research on whatever it is.

• This does not have to be used only for problem based learning. It could be employed in courses that use case method. It could be a philosophical problem. It could focus on an ethical dilemma or an interpretive issue within a text. Again, what is key is that students are working on the same problem. If they are trying to solve different ones they will not know enough to ask intellgient questions and the whole thing falls flat.

• Not all groups need to go during one class. It might work if you have units or modules and groups are randomly selected to present on a pressing question/case/problem from the reading for that unit. This is something I may try next semester. My only worry is the lack of buy in that sustained engagement over time creates.

How’d it go?

I hope that if you decide to employ something similar in your class, that you’ll share the outcome in the comments section. If you’ve modified your approach or tried something slightly different with success, let my subscribers know! We are all in this together. Most importantly, if you think this was useful, share with someone who might also be able to implement the strategy.

Of all the promises AI boosters tout in defense of its integration into education, the one I hear most is this: AI will allow students to have personalized learning—giving students the opportunity to study what they want, at their own pace, and with careful attunement from an ever-patient non-human guide (whether that be an LLM or humanoid bot). This even made it into the First Lady’s widely criticized speech on the necessity for American children to welcome humanoid teachers branded as “Plato”:

“Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient, and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deep critical thinking and independent reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytic skills and problem solving and adapt in real time to a student’s pace, prior knowledge and even emotional state.”

While I want to say there is absolutely nothing worthy of merit in these few lines, that would be wrong. There is a great benefit in giving students some level of personalized learning. This is why the wealthy have always hired personal tutors, why we encourage students to attend office hours, and why we give feedback on student work. It is important to know where individual students are and help them move further along. As class sizes have grown and teacher paychecks have stagnated, we know the bandwidth to provide such individuated attention has been dwindling. And, if you have been following this Substack at all, you also know that I don’t think AI is the best solution to this problem (that is another essay).

All of this is to say: the benefits of personalized learning seem largely uncontested, leaving many sympathetic to the utopian promises of EdTech elites and the natural end of personalized learning—which looks something like a student completing highly curated lessons alone in front of a screen, all in the name of efficiency. In what follows, I would like to contest not personalized learning itself, but its maximization—by defending its counterweight: shared curricula in shared classrooms.

The problem is not personalization as such, but what happens when it becomes the governing principle of education. When everything bends to preference, pace, and personal comfort, the conditions required for intellectual and moral formation begin to erode.

The Personalized Ideal

A sixteen-year-old begins the school day reclined on a couch, iPad in hand. She opens a lesson on To Kill a Mockingbird with her AI tutor—the large language model is designed to know her intimately. It has been learning and adapting to her preferences, motivational patterns, and anxieties since her high school journey began. It affirms her in precisely the way she needs, challenges her just enough to keep her engaged but never distressed, and seamlessly adapts the lesson to her evolving moods and capabilities. Two hours will pass without her looking up from her screen.

This isn’t science fiction; it’s already here. Alpha Schools, a growing network of private academies powered by AI, are selling such a vision. Their admissions marketing promises less classroom time, fewer lectures, and more attention to life skills, social-emotional learning, and project-based discovery. Every child follows their own path, at their own pace, guided not by a teacher but by AI and an assigned “guide.”

To many, this may sound like the realization of everything traditional education failed to offer. You don’t need to worry about your child being the last one to learn their times tables. No one will suffer public shame from stumbling over a line of King Lear while reading aloud. No single class schedule or standardized test to dread. Students move through material at the pace their curiosity will carry them. When they’re ready to be assessed, they are. No need to cram for a Monday exam—unless they want to. The overall, underlying message is simple: tailored to you is better for you. Personalization is good without qualification.

But is it?

What kind of person is formed when all instruction and lessons bend to their preference? When nothing is required at an inconvenient pace? Is friction—confusion, boredom, even frustration—merely a pedagogical flaw, or might it be formative? These educational models raise deep concerns: What kind of human being is being shaped in an environment that minimizes resistance and maximizes ease? We may be educating toward skill-based competence, but is it at the cost of character? Perhaps.

Shared Formation and the Classroom

Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us that education is a process of initiation into a tradition—an intellectual and moral inheritance that requires submission to ideals and standards beyond the self. Practical reason, he argues, is unintelligible outside of this context. It is oriented by narrative. It is directed toward an ultimate end. It depends upon community.

This community is the landscape for practical wisdom to be exercised. It is through participation in it that we learn how to live rightly in relation to others, striving toward values that stretch and hone our human potential into something actual. Communities of tradition temper our desire for narcissistic indulgence. These traditions constrain us, yes—but in doing so, they also form us. They act as containers for virtue precisely because to move within them one cannot indulge every preference.

Preference yields to virtue.

Let’s consider how this plays out in a real classroom. American Literature begins with a ritual: students bow their heads and recite the Prayer of St. Francis. It’s not everyone’s favorite prayer; there are days it feels tired. But it gently reorients the room—toward peace, toward listening, toward forgiveness. These become the backdrop for discussion. They set a tone for saintly striving.

Instead of picking their own book based on preference or level, every student is assigned The Pearl by John Steinbeck. They read it together—sometimes in class, sometimes at home. A few are fascinated. Others struggle, bored to tears. But the shared experience gives them something real to work with. They talk about familial responsibility, moral agency, and the tension between aspiration and corruption. They draw on the same characters, debate their choices, and challenge each other’s interpretations. These aren’t abstract concepts. They’re grounded in a story they all read together. They share a common reference point.

No one gets to opt out.

And that’s not a pedagogical flaw.

Students may have different lives—different personal stories, some they might never dare to tell—but they all share this one, even if they didn’t particularly like it.

These seemingly banal experiences of a traditional classroom—beginning a lesson with a class ritual and requiring all students to read the same text together—are not about maximizing any one student’s learning potential. They are about something else entirely: exercises in humility, perseverance, temperance, delayed gratification, and attention.

As Simone Weil bluntly puts it, “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.” Most school tasks have no other interest than this. It is not to understand them or to remember them, but to develop attention.

We don’t cultivate these parts of ourselves—or shared experiences and insights—when lessons are curated entirely around our preferences and pace. The form of the educational enterprise shouldn’t reinforce such navel-gazing. And if it does, we can expect it to produce navel-gazers.

The limits that Alpha Schools promise to remove—boredom, frustration, slow mastery—are some of the very things that make education positively formative. To eliminate all constraints on the will is not to liberate the student, but to abandon her to self-reference.

Oddly enough, this kind of self-referential formation does not even bode well for the more modest success these models promise. Both human flourishing and basic competence depend upon recognition of a difficult reality: it isn’t all about you. Consumerism may train us to resist this truth, but education ought to insist on it.

In other words, there are virtues to the moral tempo shared learning demands.

Don’t forget it.

Whenever I make some comment about AI technology in the classroom, people are quick to remind me the following (paraphrasing): “books are also a form of technology. And the printing press—which made books available en masse to people with little education or status—changed the way humans think. In fact, some argue it changed the very nature of cognition itself.”

Both of these claims can be true. In fact, I think they are. However, neither point justifies a less critical approach to using conversational, generative AI in education. Pointing out similarities between two technologies is not a valid rebuttal. Philosophers would call this a false equivalence—treating two very different things as if they were the same simply because they share some feature.

The example I often give in my critical thinking classes is this:

Rats are living things.

Humans are living things.

If it is wrong to kill a human, it must also be wrong to kill a rat because they are both living things.

Ya. No.

While it may be the case that killing a rat is wrong, it is not wrong because rats and humans are morally indistinguishable. They are different kinds of living beings with different capacities and moral status. Two things can share a property without belonging to the same moral or conceptual category.

The same move is happening in the “printing press” argument I often hear about generative AI.

It goes something like this:

Technology has always mediated human cognition. Take, for example, the printing press. The availability of books radically changed the way people think. AI is simply another stage in the evolution of human cognition, similar to the one introduced by the printing press. Therefore, we should not view this change as worse. It is simply different.

But this argument only works if the printing press and conversational generative AI really belong in the same category—if there is little that meaningfully distinguishes the two.

However, there are major things that distinguish the two. Things that make generative AI worthy of further investigation before wholesale adopting it across the board, particularly in the realm of education. Perhaps the ways these technologies differ can help us understand what is potentially threatening about the way cognition is mediated through our exchanges with sophisticated, anthropomorphized chatbots.

Here are a few differences between the technological shift introduced by the printing press and the one introduced by generative AI.

1. Books Require Extended Effort to Engage

When the printing press made texts available to the masses, it placed profound ideas in the hands of ordinary people. But access is not understanding.

In order to engage with a serious text, there are certain basic cognitive abilities required—attention, literacy, and comprehension. But beyond these fundamental capacities there are also intellectual virtues required to work through a demanding book at all, never mind to be shaped by it.

It takes time to read Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration or Dante’s Inferno. The ability to sit with something difficult is called patience. The ability to persist through something intellectually demanding is called stamina or resilience. These examples highlight something crucially different about books and conversational AI. In a printed text, the struggle is built into the medium itself, and so human cognition is trained through that struggle.

This is one reason reading has long been considered so formative for the young. It disciplines attention. It strengthens focus. It cultivates patience and intellectual endurance in ways that stories received passively through a screen—or arguments generated instantly through a chatbot—simply do not.

We can’t say the same about generative AI. One reason it is not simply a neutral tool that mediates cognition is that many of the tools students are being encouraged to use are designed to facilitate the opposite experience—quick answers, little friction, and ease.

2. Books Are Authored Artifacts

When I read a book, I receive the thoughts or creations of another human being from within a tradition of inquiry—at least this was the presumption prior to 2023. When reading a serious work, I can ask questions like:

• Who influenced this author?

• What assumptions shape their thinking?

• What intellectual tradition are they working within?

• How did their experiences shape the ideas I am encountering?

In other words, I encounter an author with a story. Reading is a human-to-human exchange mediated through text. Indeed, the printing press made it possible for individual thinkers to exert enormous influence long after their deaths. Wild! Hundreds of years after Aristotle delivered his lectures on ethics, I can still read them. I can literally encounter Aristotle’s attempt to understand human flourishing and try to grasp what he meant by eudaimonia.

This is not what happens when I interact with a chatbot.

Conversational AI does not present the considered arguments of a particular thinker. It generates responses from statistical patterns across enormous datasets. The result is not the reasoning of any identifiable author but a synthetic output whose intellectual lineage is largely opaque.

We cannot clearly identify the tradition or reasoning process that produced what we are receiving. Instead, the fragments of countless texts are effectively thrown together in the blender of the model. And because the origin of these ideas is obscured, the output can take on a misleading air of objectivity. It can appear as if the words emerged from some neutral or transcendent source beyond our embodied and human limitations.

But they did not.

3. Books Are Static, Not Generative

There is another important difference: books are stable intellectual artifacts. In the form we receive them, they are fixed. They do not change in response to us—our preferences or demands. The words on the page remain the same each time we encounter them, though we may encounter those words differently as we grow in our knowledge and understanding of them.

Because of this stability we can analyze them carefully. We can underline passages. Annotate arguments. Revisit earlier sections. Trace how premises connect to conclusions. Compare our interpretation with others. A book presents an argument that we can evaluate as a whole.

In contrast, conversational AI does not present an argument to be analyzed or a story to inhabit. It generates text in response to the user.

Each prompt produces a new output. The content is shaped by the questions we ask, the parameters we provide, and the direction the conversation takes. The result is not a stable object of analysis but a constantly shifting stream of generated language.

This also blurs an important intellectual boundary. When reading a book, it is clear what belongs to the author and what belongs to me as the reader. My developing ideas may be influenced by the text, but the distinction between the two remains intelligible.

In an interaction with generative AI, that boundary becomes much harder to see. The output is partially shaped by the user’s own prompts and assumptions. The lines between our thinking and the system’s generated responses can easily blur.

The clarity and analytical distance that comes from engaging another human mind through a stable text becomes much more difficult to maintain. And this is important to maintain for the sake of human agency. Of course, texts intend to influence their readers. But the distinction between what I am reading and my own thoughts allows me to exercise agency over how the text is received. The blurrier that line becomes, the more Inception-like the interaction starts to seem—the more susceptible to covert and subtle influence users are.

Clear Distinctions, Clear Thinking

Hopefully the above has made it obvious that while both books and generative AI are technologies, they are quite different kinds of technologies. Being clear about the distinctions allows us to think clearly about the implications of how these very different tools impact cognition differently.

Perhaps it is the case that chronic use of low-effort tools that provide fast, easy answers with little expertise trains us to be impatient in ways that thwart good human judgment. Maybe it is the case that critically engaging with information is more difficult when we are not able to clearly identify the origins of the information with which we engage. And finally, maybe the generative nature of artifical “co-intelligence” makes human agency more difficult to maintain.

All of this is especially true for the young who are learning patience, how to think critically, and how to develop their own voices and ideas. For these reasons we can conclude that generative AI is not a neutral tool but one that might prime users toward certain intellectual vices that books were simply not structured to encourage.

Indeed, we can ask how tools shape human cognition. We can also ask if we like those changes. And, if we don’t like those changes we can prudently limit how we choose to integrate those tools in our lives. Seems reasonable.

This is not to say we should never engage. But we should not be so fooled to engage without serious caution and take the proper measures to ensure that patience, critical thinking, and human agency are not lost along the way. We can start here:

AI is simply not just a new technology that shapes cognition like the printing press.

The two most common arguments I hear about integrating AI into the classroom go something like this:

1. Not teaching students how to use AI may leave them at a disadvantage in the future job market. Companies are expecting their entry-level employees to know how to leverage it. As a result, we have a responsibility to teach it.

2. AI is not going anywhere. Students are already using it. We can’t teach as though they aren’t.

It might be the case that AI proficiency is needed in the future of work. It might also be the case that our students will use both agentic and generative AI daily. In this essay I’ll grant both of these points. Even so, I will argue that some classrooms in our universities should remain free of AI integration.

In fact, the two arguments above make it all the more important to preserve some AI-free spaces. Universities should intentionally protect places where students can practice organic thought—free from the constant influence of the technologies that increasingly mediate the rest of their lives. In what follows I’ll make a case for why—a case that has absolutely nothing to do with cheating.

1. We should mitigate AI co-dependency

Knowing how to use a tool is different from using it for everything. It can be the case that a student needs to learn proficiency with a tool to perform certain tasks. This does not mean the tool must be integrated into all, most, or even a majority of their academic work.

Advocates who push for that are not pushing for deeper learning. They are pushing—often unintentionally—for systematic AI co-dependency.

What does that entail?

It entails fostering an environment where students become so wedded to AI tools (either through intentional integration or simple negligence) that they immediately reach for their phones to think through something with Claude or ChatGPT.

Sadly, this is already the case for many of our students.

Discussion questions in small groups? Students are reaching for their phones, snapping a picture of the prompt, and feeding it into their favorite LLM before even attempting to read the questions themselves.

Problem with a friend? Run it by AI.

Difficult email? Run it by AI.

Social media caption? Run it by AI.

These are the little tasks that make up our lives. If we give all of this away, we slowly give away our capacity for judgment because we are no longer capable of sitting with the discomfort that comes with a small roadblock or a moment of unclarity.

Indeed, these small acts of deliberation are precisely the kinds of experiences that cultivate and sustain our virtue. Yes—virtue. The practical wisdom needed to make good decisions requires practice: reasoning through situations, exercising moral imagination, and discerning how principles apply in concrete circumstances. If students outsource the early stages of reasoning to AI, they never build the mental muscles required for judgment.

None of these capacities can develop if we continually outsource opportunities to brainstorm, to wrestle with the unique context a situation calls for, or to discern how a principle ought to be applied. AI will be called upon for all of it if we aren’t careful about enforcing some limits.

Many of us lived decades before such temptations existed. But the teenagers and twenty-somethings in my classroom did not. A large portion of their formative years included the COVID slump and outsourcing their homework assignments to AI before their teachers and principals could catch their breath.

We owe it to our students to let them know:

You can think through hard things. You can form your own thoughts. You don’t need an immediate answer. You don’t need a polished answer. The only thing you need is your answer.

How do we give that message weight? How do we back it up? We give them the space to do it. We show them they can. We don’t simply tell students to think for themselves and then send them home where their agency is effective thwarted—to an enviroment where everything nudges them to outsource that thinking.

In other words, our classrooms should be spaces that help students resist the co-dependency that big tech desperately hopes they develop.

2. Classrooms should be retreats for slowness

Think about the conditions that allowed for your deepest insights.

Quiet. Good company. Distractions at bay. A crackling fire. Faint classical music in the background. The carefully chosen words of a brilliant thinker printed on a page before you. Am I right?

Wait—it didn’t include a TV blasting? It didn’t include a frantic dash before some deadline? It didn’t include the latest tweet from an influencer? It didn’t include the blatant sycophancy of your favorite chatbot?

I’m shocked.

We already know the conditions under which our souls come alive with curiosity and intrigue. When something beautiful strikes us. When we realize that our questions are not merely ours but Ours—shared with generations of thinkers before us. When we have the time and the space to question, reflect, and stop—just to stop—and listen.

Learning has an ecology. Certain environments nurture attention, curiosity, and intellectual courage. Others erode them. If students should be afforded one place where they can stop, question, and reflect, it should be the university. We should give them four years of intentionally crafted time for stopping and thinking.

The university should be the place where questions come alive because students have the space to pursue them. Where they spend afternoons in conversation teasing out ideas. Where they stop the clicking and scrolling and beeping, listen to words spoken by other humans, and respond with words of their own.

It is a beautiful thought, is it not? Even better, it’s not impossible. This thought can become incarnate. The classroom can be these things—if we insist on it. (Maybe not the crackling fire, though I’d settle for a window.) We can set the tone. We can frame the space for dignified learning.

Why does this require resisting the integration of AI into every learning activity?

Because AI encourages the exact opposite moral tempo. It is the natural extension of our convenience culture: learning is not valued as a search for truth but as a process judged by outputs. It must be measured. It must be quantified. It must produce—preferably immediately. LLMs, for example, promise faster production. AI tutors promise frictionless learning and efficient measurement of each learner’s precise needs to their learning gaps can be closed ever more quickly. They offer the allure of intellectual progress without the discomfort that genuine inquiry often requires.

And little friction is precisely what modern people have come to equate with the good life.

It is not.

And, dare I ask, why are we even rushing?

3. We should teach and model critical engagement with AI

Last I checked, critical thinking is the skill of all skills universities claim to cultivate. Critical thinking means asking good questions. Demanding compelling reasons. Challenging weak evidence. Exercising sound judgment.

Perhaps some faculty are pushing back against universal AI integration because they are…

drum roll

…critically thinking about it.

Some very reasonable questions are being asked:

1. Does AI support actually deepen learning?

2. Are students strong enough to resist outsourcing their thinking outside the classroom?

3. Is it wise to integrate AI into every cognitive task when the creators of these tools have powerful incentives to maximize dependency?

4. Are university courses only about preparing students for jobs anyway?

These strike me as important questions.

The answers might very well be yes, yes, yes, and no. Reasonable people can disagree here. Like all questions worth asking in a university, these deserve rigorous debate. But debate requires spaces where the technology itself is not already taken for granted—spaces where it is not merely accepted as normative.

AI-free classrooms keep these questions alive in real tangible ways. They model something increasingly rare in a technological culture: the willingness to pause, to question, and to critically examine the tools that promise to solve our problems. Maybe there are some false promises that some powerful people can greatly benefit from if blindly accepted as probable and sincere.

Case Closed

An AI-free classroom is not a rejection of technology. Their existence shouldn’t be reduced to obsessions about policing students or being in control. It need not be any of these things as I’ve shown above.

Though AI may shape the future of work, it does not merit our total surrender. We should remain committed to forming human beings who are capable of thinking without it—people who don’t need AI to write their texts to friends, solve their math problems, or write their stories.

Moreover, we want to form people who can question the designs that are sold as necessary, the motives that are sold as genuine, and the structures that are sold as inevitable and beyond our control. They are not always necessary, not always genuine, and most certainly not inevitable. These are critical questions.

AI-free classrooms help our students step back and see such questions more clearly. Maybe, just maybe, they will have the courage to do something about their answers.

Over the past few years, a handful of arguments about AI in education have been repeated so often that they now function as slogans. I encounter them in meetings, in conversation with colleagues, and across the ever-expanding suite of social media platforms I find myself on. They are tidy, rhetorically appealing, and often delivered with great confidence. They are also, in my view, deeply mistaken. What follows is my attempt to explain why.

I’m taking up this task not because I enjoy some good intellectual sparring (though I do). Instead, I think understanding why AI is different from some of the technologies that came before it is crucial for protecting what is human and worthwhile about education in the first place. A careful critique of these rhetorical defenses can help us see why we ought to be very cautious about the place we give AI in the classroom.

Though I have the following list in quotes, I want to be clear that I am not pulling from specific individuals and calling them out here. That would be poor taste. These claims are paraphrased and have occurred so often in popular discourse that I am sure you have seen and likely recognize them. They are aggregates—drawn from dozens of conversations and posts.

“AI is just a new technology like the calculator”

AI and calculators do share something in common: both handle cognitive tasks that teachers—at the time of their release—believed were intellectually compromising. The teachers pictured here below protesting the use of calculators are not irrational though.

Students were, in fact, impacted by the introduction of the calculator, particularly where oversight at home was lax. The practice of basic arithmetic outside the classroom declined. Those teachers had, and still have, a point. If we allow students to rely on calculators in assessments and homework, they will not develop the resilience, patience, or skill required to perform those calculations on their own. And, we do want them to cultivate these things.

For example, I recently asked students in my critical thinking course to complete a long division problem. It took most of them over ten minutes to figure out—if they did at all. I suspect that was not always the norm for most 19-year-olds at university. When I asked the class why they unanimously agreed: they lacked the patience to sit with the difficulty for something hard they they had not practiced in over a decade.

So, the concern of math teachers in the 1970s, I think, was not that the world would be irrevocably doomed. It was that we lost something important if chronically outsourcing arithmetic. That is a rather indisputable point unless one believes learning math is useless if AI can perform calculations (which it cannot reliably do anyway). We should not point at those protesting math teachers and laugh. Nor should we laugh at professors who still use blue books and analog exams as if they will be proven wrong like the silly math teachers in the 70s. Both had and have good reasons to be concerned.

All of that aside though, AI and the calculator are not equivalent. They differ in significant ways:

Access. Students in the 1970s were not carrying calculators in their pockets throughout all their daily activities. The ease and ubiquity of AI access dramatically increases its impact. And unlike calculators, AI’s range of application extends far beyond arithmetic.

Scope. AI is not limited in the way calculators are. Its potential uses are far-reaching and, from where I stand, nearly limitless. Offloading a specific mathematical operation is one thing. Having the capacity to offload nearly any intellectual task is another entirely. The restraint required to limit such use is immense. Restriction was built into the calculator. It is not built into AI.

Correctness. Calculators are correct unless malfunctioning. We can assume the output is accurate. They do not hallucinate. AI does. It can generate confident falsehoods with remarkable fluency. That difference matters.

“If your assignments are meaningful enough, students will not use AI to cheat.”

This is a beautiful sentiment that I so wish was not just a sentiment. It is often offered in the spirit of avoiding over-policing students for their AI use or misuse. The idea is that if you are concerned about students using AI, then work on making your assignments more meaningful and you won’t have to worry as much.

While not entirely wrong, this argument misses several important points.

First, people cheat even on things that are meaningful to them. People have affairs even when they love their spouses. Artists trace drawings despite taking pride in their own ability. Scientists falsify data on career-defining projects. There are many reasons students take shortcuts—even when they care about the assignment. They may lack time, confidence, or discipline. They may be overwhelmed or afraid of failure. Cheating can feel like insurance against that fear.

Second, it is neither possible nor desirable to make every assignment personally meaningful for every student. Nor is that the task of education. Some courses—logic, introductory composition, foundational mathematics—must focus on skill-building and fundamentals before students move to more complex intellectual work. Not every student will find truth tables personally meaningful.

Tasks can be objectively meaningful while carrying no subjective sense of meaning for the person engaging in them.

So, when this argument to “make assignments more meaningful” is invoked to reduce cheating, it is often gesturing towards subjective meaning—how someone experiences the assignment and whether they value it enough to do it themselves.

Consider a student motivated to attend law school and become an environmental lawyer. They enroll in an introductory philosophy course requiring basic logic. Logic is objectively relevant to legal reasoning. Yet the student may be struggling with illness, relational difficulty, exhaustion, or competing demands. The temptation to cheat may arise for reasons unrelated to whether the assignment is “meaningful.”

The perceived meaning of a task is only one variable in a much larger motivational equation.

“Students are only cheating themselves if they use AI in their work.”

This claim often appears as a way to avoid confronting academic integrity in the age of AI. It is not entirely false. Cheaters do cheat themselves.

But they also waste their instructors’ time. They erode the integrity of academic work. And, when cheating becomes widespread enough that no one can reliably distinguish genuine learning from generated output, something deeper is compromised. This is because a degree is meant to signify that significant learning occurred in a particular domain. It signifies this to others. When students cheat, those others are also deceived.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, this whole credentialing business is a existential crisis in education that we are currently working out. Perhaps it was never about credentialing in the first place?

But there is an adjacent problem. It is not good to design courses where it is easy to cheat one’s way to an A. Not only because cheating is wrong (though it is), but because we do not want universities to become bullshit factories—places where students become adept at pretending and faking competence becuase of the way the whole system is structured. That seems like a direct assault on the value of truth, which institutions of higher education are purportedly meant to protect, no?

So then, all of this is to say that a good institutional should trouble itself with academic integrity.

“Your subject is obsolete if AI can complete the work in it.”

No. A class is not reducible to its outputs. The paper is not what makes the class worth taking. A class is also not reducible to outcomes listed in a syllabus—”students will learn to X, Y, and Z about 1, 2, and 3.” Education is not merely the production of outputs or outcomes. It is a formative practice.

Hard intellectual work forms character.

Courses shape patience, resilience, and humility. Repeated exposure to difficult material in a setting where you are accountable for engaging it changes you. This is good.

I remember confronting Aristotle’s Physics for the first time and thinking, “What even is this? How am I so ill-equipped to grasp what is going on here?” That experience did not make me want to outsource the task. It made me want to become the sort of person who could understand it. Not everyone will respond that way. But enough will to make it worth it.

And beyond formation, there is scaffolded skill building. Attention enables reading comprehension. Reading comprehension enables understanding. Understanding precedes critique. These steps matter even if AI can do some of the steps.

Putting all of this together, it makes no difference whether AI can do a task or not. The question of whether it is still an important thing for students to learn transcends that possiblity.

“AI frees up teachers to be more present for the human side of teaching.”

The phrasing of this claim reveals its weakness. The intellectual and relational dimensions of teaching are intertwined. One does not flourish without the other.

Learning goes better when I know my students because I understand why they are struggling. I gain that understanding by engaging directly with their work. Reading their writing tells me how the class is going. It allows me to course correct while the semester is still unfolding.

Practical wisdom in teaching depends on this knowledge.

As a college professor, some of my classes have TAs and some do not. The difference is palpable. When my TA is not present in class—which is always the case due to campus distance—students respond differently to feedback. They are more hostile when they do not receive full marks. Why? They do not know the grader. The grader does not know them. Grading feels technical rather than relational.

When grading becomes technical rather than relational, something essential is lost. Teaching is not merely evaluation. It is an exercise of judgment in relationship to human beings that are trying to learn.

Assessment design, grading, lecturing, and relationship-building are not separable tasks. They are parts of a larger holistic activity we call teaching. What we outsource—and to what degree—shapes that activity as a whole. Perhaps some might call this idealistic. It is. As a virtue ethicist I’m perfectly comfortable using the ideal to make deicisons about what we should and should not be doing.

Does this mean nothing should ever be outsourced? No. But we should be honest that outsourcing is never neutral. It changes the practice itself.

The deeper question is not whether AI is useful, here to stay, or will be required for jobs in the future. All of the above might be true. But none of that is relevant to the deeper, more fundamental question education ought to concern itself with: what kind of human beings we are trying to form? Are the practices we adopt in our classrooms mindful of that question?

Dismissing concerns about AI use in the classroom with the above rhetoric minmizies the importance of that telos. It should not.

Last week I traveled up to Notre Dame to discuss the dignity of learning with 60 really awesome people invested in thinking through what it means to respect human dignigty in the classroom during our AI era. I’m thankful that I was able to deliver some opening remarks to start the conversation, which I’ve decided to share here below.

You can read more here about the DELTA network (which hosted the event) and the great work of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good here.

Delivered February 3rd, 2026 in South Bend, IN

Every semester, in the first week of class, I ask my students one question: “Why are you here?” Over the ten or so years I’ve been teaching in higher education, politics have shifted, new technologies have emerged, and the trending cut of jeans has changed (I’m very much a fan of the baggy wide-leg thing going on right now)—but their answers have stayed remarkably consistent: to get a degree so I can get a job. Or, as one of my students said a few weeks ago with very big tech-bro energy: “I WANT A BOAT.”

Our students are in our classrooms—or so they may have come to believe—to consume content, to produce a degree, so they can become bigger, better consumers. Consumption. Production. Consumption.

This is what I call a thin anthropology: the idea that human beings are fundamentally consumers and producers; that our value lies in what we can produce and in the quality and quantity of what we can consume. And, alas, it is the anthropology that has been shaping the educational ethos for quite some time. Emerging technologies have only exacerbated it: faster consumption, faster production. Why wouldn’t that seem like an unqualified good—if that’s what human beings are?

No wonder the classroom has become increasingly commodified and utilitarian. Maybe all of this is because we have forgotten what we are.

So our task, if we want to dignify learning, must begin by boldly and unapologetically declaring what we are. Only then can we develop a real alternative to the consumption/production model that dominates our schools, universities, and classrooms.

I would be remiss to give a talk about education here at Notre Dame—especially for the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good—without reference to the late Alasdair MacIntyre, who, riffing on Aristotle and Aquinas, defines us human beings as dependent, rational animals.

To some, that may sound anticlimactic. But it is not in the least. To say we are dependent means we are fundamentally social. We can only thrive and flourish in community. To say we are rational means we can respond to reasons—we can ask not only what we want, but what is worth wanting. And to say we are animals means we are finite and embodied. Creatures that have limits. This, of course, means: we are not gods.

These undeniable realities are consequential. If we are fundamentally social, we need to learn how to live well with others: to be just in our actions and honest in our words; to practice patience in the face of uncomfortable slowness and difficulty. If we are rational—ordered toward truth, beauty, and goodness—we need courage to pursue and defend them, and practical wisdom to act in accordance with them. And if we are animals—finite, embodied, limited—we need temperance to restrain our passions, and humility to live with the sometimes painful awareness that we do not have the time or capacity to do everything. That we must rest.

These capacities—practical wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, humility, honesty, patience—are what philosophers call virtues. They are the excellences of human beings. Without them, we can’t flourish as human beings.

And here is the thing: they have to be taught. We are not born with such virtues. Just think back to the little hellion you were in the sixth grade and you’ll get your evidence of this. They are acquired, often painstakingly.

Our classrooms are always cultivating these excellences—or cultivating their opposites. Virtues are learned by doing, not by hearing. Forming honesty in the classroom isn’t just telling a student to be honest; it’s creating the conditions in which they can tell the truth—again, and again, and again. So they get accustomed to truth-telling. So disposed to do it in the right way that they are still inclined to do it when they are afraid or rushed or ashamed. Or when someone they love doesn’t want them to say it.

Bringing this all together, a formative humanistic education allows young people to become more human—to hone those excellences that make life go well for the kinds of things we are—dependent, rational animals. And to do that we must create conditions that allow students to practice the virtues they don’t yet have. The virtues they will need when giving an employee an annual performance review and when they try to soothe a screaming toddler on a plane—as many of you may know, this is surely the ultimate test of patience.

However, practice is just part of the story. In fact, practice is mere performance if it isn’t rightly motivated. Otherwise, it just appears virtuous without actually being so. At some point practice has to start being for the right reasons. The right reason, as Meghan Sullivan would have it (and I think she is right), is love. Love for truth, for neighbor, for the first things.

Sadly, this is not simply born in repetition. It must be awakened. This awakening happens, as Pope Benedict explains in Deus Caritas Est, through encounter. Love begets love. It is born in the recognition that you are worthy of someone’s time and attention.

Let me make this concrete, because I never imagined I would be giving a talk like this at a place like Notre Dame. I’m a first-generation college student. My dad worked maintenance at an apartment complex, and my mom cleaned other people’s houses on weekends to put me through Catholic school.

At that school I had a saint for a principal who knew my name and my story. And there we made many friends. I babysat for a single mother, [deleted name for privacy], after school got out. Her daughter was in my little sister’s class. She later, and anonymously, paid my tuition for all four years of high school.

At that high school the advancement director, Sue, sat with me and coached me when I had an interview for a prestigious academic scholarship to USF, where I now work. She told me how to enunciate my words and fold my hands in my lap and keep my feet on the ground as I spoke—things I still remind myself of each time I walk into some big meeting or interview.

And I got that scholarship, generously funded by a couple, Brad and Terry, who believed that potential needed close mentorship and attention to become actual—which is exactly what I received.

And while I was there at USF, I didn’t even take a philosophy course until my junior year, when I took Christian Ethics with Thomas Williams. He was an excellent professor who so carefully planned his lectures for all twelve of us in his class. After taking years of courses in giant lecture halls where no one knew my name, that class made me feel seen by someone I respected and admired—someone who thought I was occasionally insightful and who gave handwritten notes on my papers.

I share these examples because of what they communicated to me: that I was worthy.

And it was these encounters—the gift of attention that procured a sense of worthiness, given again and again—that made my becoming feel possible. It was communicated in the sacrifice of my parents. The investment of [deleted name for privacy] and the Holcombes. The mentorship Sue gave me along with my advisors at the USF Honors College. And Thomas’s handwritten scribbles on my essays.

But love alone is not enough, just as structure alone is not enough. Without structure, love collapses into sentiment or zeal. It cannot shape a will, or build courage, or cultivate honesty. And without love, structure becomes a mechanism for compliance. It trains students to perform virtue rather than become virtuous. A real education requires both: the scaffolding that yields discipline and the love that gives purpose and motivates. One without the other deforms. Together they dignify learning. Together they make possible the promise of human excellence.

Putting all this together, we might say: dignified learning is respectful of our very true and very real metaphysical biology—that we are dependent, rational animals. Fundamentally dependent on community, fundamentally drawn to truth, fundamentally in need of real limits and rest. We need that thick anthropology to sustain a thick philosophy of education.

And that thick anthropology isn’t about production and consumption. It is about who our students are and who they are becoming.

And our work as educators is to give the structure that makes such becoming possible—building the scaffolding for real excellence as dependent, rational animals.

But it also tells a young person again and again:
You are worthy of my time.
You are worthy of my attention.
You are worthy of being taught.

That is the dignity of learning.
It is up to all of us to make it so dignified.

Notre Dame as Teacher

I just finished The Hunchback of Notre Dame with my book club, Well-Read Mom. The theme this year is “The Teacher.” They know how to pick them. There is so much to learn from Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and the cathedral. What I didn’t expect was what it would help me understand about AI…

Hugo’s architectural imagery and the reverence with which he describes Notre Dame is unmatched. You get the sense that he believes the cathedral is the closest thing to an actual incarnation of the Platonic Form of beauty. And he may be right. He is sharing his love for this great beauty at a time when he fears it will be forgotten and displaced in the hearts of Parisians. His book is a reminder: the world turns. Notre Dame does not. Do not forget her—and what she can still teach us. Indeed, she is still teaching us. Here is the lesson.

What Speed Promised—and Destroyed

One would think that as machines made it possible to drastically shorten the time it takes to move from the idea of a building to the building itself, we would have more beautiful structures. More Notre Dames. Foundations that once took years now take months. What once required armies of skilled laborers, careful coordination, and long seasons of waiting can now be accomplished with a small crew, heavy machinery, prefabricated parts, and precise calculation. Stone can be cut elsewhere and shipped in. The modern builder faces fewer limits, fewer interruptions, and fewer forced pauses. And yet, it is precisely those pauses that once made room for deliberation, revision, and care.

Surely this kind of speed would free time for the human details that make buildings grand.

However, the opposite is now true. Our grandest, most captivating structures are not built in our present (unless one counts Trump Tower among the grandest. I, for one, would not). They are relics. The shortening of time from idea to concrete creation has resulted in the explosion of slipshod functionalism and brute ugliness. Mini-malls. Condos stretching toward the sky, built of stucco and rectangular plainness. The churches built in Florida during the 1970s (this is my own personal gripe). Because we can build so fast, we think less about what we ought to build. There is no longer the same forced waiting and effort that cultivates craft—time to bring in sculptors, to gush over detail. All of that which requires patience is now treated as an obstacle to output and impediment to our use.

Patience Formation

When we must be patient, something more beautiful emerges. Notre Dame is the testament. Nothing else is built quite so perfectly for our bodies and our souls as a cathedral. Vaulted ceilings where voices echo into infinity. Windows that draw our attention—strategically and reverently—to where meaning is made. An altar centered and exalted, where bread and wine become the body and blood of God. Catechesis is in the columns. Salvation history etched into the walls. It is nearly impossible not to feel elevated and oriented—even for those who lack faith. That is precisely the point.

Contrast this with the shallow satiation of walking through a Walmart, urging our distention and distracted consumption. Contrast it with the classroom made of unmasked concrete block, no windows, a fallen projector hanging from the wall. Yes, industry has allowed us to prop up more buildings, faster. More buildings that make us feel a lot less human.

AI and the Collapse of Craft

Just as patience is a necessary condition for beautiful architecture, it is also a condition for beautiful words—for generating and receiving grand, otherworldly ideas. There is a cheap promise that the speed AI allows will leave time for the human things. But this is the same mistake we made with construction and architecture Without patience AI will simply give us more Walmart essays and prefab understanding. It already has. This is because speed does not, in fact, allow more beautiful things to be made. Instead, it tempts us to rush what ought to be savored, to ignore details that deserve reverence, to push forward what should not yet have begun.

What Hugo helps us see is that beauty does not emerge accidentally, and it does not survive acceleration. It requires patience, restraint, and a willingness to wait—sometimes longer than a single lifetime—for something worthy to take shape. The great works and cathedrals we inherit were not optimized for output; they were cultivated under conditions that demanded uncomfortable slowness. They are the fruit of patience.

This leads me to wonder…

Who, at present, is carefully building a cathedral? (not counting the Sa Grada de Familia.)

Who can we expect to write the next Great Book? Where would they develop the patience for such a thing?

In this AI era—in a culture of convenience—our task as educators is not to do and build more and more quickly but to protect the conditions under which beautiful things can still be built and written—conditions under which patience can be formed.

Be still and wait.

In 2004–2005 I had a nun (with a habit) for freshman English. We diagramed sentences—literally broke them apart and analyzed them every day. We rigorously studied how to form topic sentences and construct paragraphs. We wrote and rewrote thesis statements and mastered the five-paragraph essay, then practiced biographical writing, then went on to research papers. By the time I was 14 I had been taught how to write a thesis statement and could successfully do so. In fact, I’m almost certain I could do this quite well in middle school too, though I don’t have an excellent recollection of what our middle school curriculum entailed (I do remember writing a compare-and-contrast paper on China and India’s trade economy).

However, it is increasingly the case that students enter my classroom unfamiliar with what a thesis statement even is—never mind writing a solid one.

All of this is to say, when I teach philosophy, I have to teach a little writing too. To write a philosophy paper, you have to construct a thesis—you need to know what it is you are arguing for and how you plan to argue for it. It’s a necessary part of clear thinking (I think). That is the point of these next parts in my scaffolded term paper. In what follows I’ll explain how I have students do both. Technically, these are parts 3 and 4, respectively (at least that is how it appears in my own Drafted Workbook). I decided to lump them together because, quite frankly, I didn’t want to write two separate posts.

The Thesis Statement

You might not think writing one sentence could be all that hard. But, it is. To show this, I spend about thirty or so minutes in class helping them perfect the one they will use in their term papers. The first step is simple: I have them write a thesis cold turkey—that is, with no explanation from me about what a good one entails or what it ought to look like. This takes about five minutes of sitting and thinking, looking at the prompt they have chosen to write on for the semester.

After students have something written down, I give a short mini lesson on what a thesis statement should look like. I give a few criteria:

It should be clear.
If someone reads it and is not sure what you are arguing, it needs work. Opacity does not correlate with brilliance. Though, we like to imagine this is the case because it saves us from the difficult task of clear communication.

It should be specific.
“I’ll argue that Plato is wrong about truth.”
Not going to cut it. Tell me why? Tell me how?

It should be concise.
A thesis statement is a statement. Not two paragraphs.

It should have an angle.
There are a lot of ways we can argue euthanasia is wrong. You can’t tackle them all reasonably in five or six pages. Pick an angle. Own it. Focus on it. This, of course, ties into the specificity bit.

After the Mini Lesson

At this point students have two things: (1) a first attempt at writing a thesis and (2) some criteria that makes a thesis good.

Now I have them exchange for peer review. Their goal is to assess the thesis of their partner using these specific criteria. They exchange in class, provide written feedback, and then try again. Everyone rewrites their thesis statement. There is no case in which the first attempts are perfect.

Now, it’s worth noting that students are not generally practiced at giving thorough feedback. Some don’t have the evaluative tools or motivation to read a peer’s work and critically assess it. Indeed, this is what I sometimes find when I read the feedback. A good number give something tangible for their partner to improve. A surprising amount do not. This exercise is just as much for the reviewers as it is for the writers.

I mention this because I’ve seen arguments claiming some version of this: “Peer review is useless because students never get good feedback from their peers.” To this I say, never is a strong word. It is most certainly not NEVER. Secondly, how do you suppose this state of affairs improves if we never ask them to conduct peer review? The answer is: it will not. So, on with it.

All together, this whole activity takes roughly 30 minutes of class time to complete.

The Argument Map

Now, once students have a clear, concise, specific thesis statement, I have them begin mapping out how they plan to argue it. Over the years, I used to ask students to write outlines. And what I realized is no one had ever been asked to write an outline before. So, what I thought was a straightforward task ended up being very confusing—and including lots of unnecessary detail and random facts that weren’t doing any argumentative work. Then I started making templates and those created a sort of rigidity and anxious attachment to the exact number of bullets listed in each heading. I had to do away with it. I’ve replaced the whole outline with an argument map. Students must provide a clear demonstration of how they plan to defend their thesis, identify particular premises to this end, and the evidence they will use to support those premises.

I provide students with an infographic I’ve designed that allows them to fill all this in easily. That infographic shows that premises must progress. One should follow from the previous premise. They are statements that hang together. Of course, this does require a bit of explanation as to what a premise is (again, most students in my undergraduate courses have had zero introduction to basic informal logic), and what sort of evidence is appropriate to use as support of a premise.

I find most students are most accustomed to the five-paragraph essay in which each one of the body paragraphs covers a TOPIC. A topic is not a premise. A topic is just a subject: “Euthanasia,” “Plato,” “social media,” “free will.” But a premise is a reason—a statement that, if true, actually supports your conclusion. “This paragraph is about Plato” tells me nothing. “Plato’s view collapses because it assumes X, and X is false” is a premise. Topics organize content. Premises build arguments. A philosophy paper is not a tour of the topic. It’s a chain of reasons.

Since I do this in class, it provides excellent opportunities for me to encounter the struggle students are having putting together a coherent argument in real time. At this moment, many realize that the position they wanted to defend might be indefensible. Or they realize maybe they don’t have evidence for their premises and need to figure out if they can be supported. It forces recognition of these gaps instead of powering forward and bullshitting something that is vague enough to pass. I can help them work through this in person, ask questions to help surface clarity, and give pep talks when appropriate.

BONUS: I also find that this is where real ownership of the argument starts to take place. This is where students start becoming very committed to their papers. It might have something to do with what psychologists call effort justification—we care about things more when they take more effort. I’ll take it.

Because this exercise takes a bit longer (roughly 45 minutes) I typically leave off peer review. I do give them personal feedback on this portion because it is the most consequential to the overall success of their paper.

Altogether, this part takes about 45 minutes.

The why…

It’s worth noting how much of all this can be easily bypassed through outsourcing to AI if students were doing this outside class. Even if scaffolded, doing these discrete parts from home creates an environment where the struggle is invisible to me and non-existent to the student. In terms of visibility, I don’t see where the student gets lost. They don’t see where they start substituting words for reasons. In class, I can catch the exact moment thinking turns foggy and help them clear it. That’s not just “better pedagogy.” It’s the difference between practicing reasoning with students and asking them to produce a document.

Coming…

The next part of my scaffolded term paper is where I have students consider objections and counter-objections. I’ll link that here once I’ve written about it.

You can find the first two parts here below:

Share Lily Abadal

Over the past year I’ve come to the following realizations about my classroom:

1. Slide decks (however minimal) engender passivity.

2. Students feel special when they get something to hold that looks polished and curated.

3. I need to be dedicating time during class for students to exercise cognitive and inter-personal skills. Outside of class all bets are off with access to AI.

All of this got me thinking about how, exactly, I do all that—ditch PowerPoints, make students feel special, and do real-time cognitive exercises that are not exclusively Socratic in nature—in one hour and fifteen minutes.

This proved especially challenging because I scaffold a term paper over the course of the semester (this is quite time-consuming), still wanted time to lecture, and have small groups that I want students to use for discussion regularly. All of this felt like a lot to choreograph.

So this semester I’m doing the thing.

I’m making a handout for each lesson that structures the flow of a class—front and back, one page, 8.5 x 11. I’m calling it the Meta-Zine Method: a paper-based “cognitive choreography” that moves students through recall, annotation, reflection, discussion, and synthesis in real time, alongside my instruction.

The point is to facilitate understanding, engagement, and repeated cognitive exercises alongside my students. The bonus: this feels extremely bespoke and curated. But here is the thing: they take about twenty minutes to put together. Now that I have the components down, they are coming together even faster. I’m just using a very minimalist MS Word design: a nice serif, lots of white space. It is obviously intentional though.

Why this clicked for me

Last September some things started coming together.

I had just traveled up to The College of William & Mary for a philosophy conference/workshop. I was scheduled to present the next day and up late preparing what we philosophers prepare for philosophy conferences: a handout. (I brought my toddler with me, and finding time to do this proved much more difficult than I anticipated!)

The point of the handout is to make a difficult philosophical argument intelligible to an audience that typically has less than an hour (often less than 30 minutes!) to digest it all. Let me tell you: there is an art to these things. They pull important quotes, outline premises, include questions and tensions that have yet to be answered. They also serve as the perfect place to scribble notes, jot down my own thoughts about the talk, formulate my own questions for Q&A, etc.

Moreover, the handout is an intellectual artifact that captures my interaction with an idea presented by a colleague. In fact, I typically save my favorite ones—the ones that generated some new paper idea or question I planned to revisit later. They help me capture thoughts.

Interestingly, most people who prepare handouts for their talks also ditch the PowerPoint. Why? Because you truly do not need both. It often is the case that the handout does a much better job.

Then it occurred to me as I was up at 2am finishing my handout: Why don’t I make these for my classes?

Instead of outlining a talk, it would structure the flow of a class. Students would move through a series of cognitive activities that live on the paper—paper where they can practice recall of the big ideas from the previous lesson, revisit and annotate important passages from the reading, reflect on their annotations, dive more deeply into pointed questions in groups, follow the flow of a mini-lecture and capture the major points, synthesize, summarize, and…keep.

I sat on this idea for a bit and became even more convinced that this is the way after experimenting with pieces. I printed out shorter readings or excerpts from the assigned reading and annotated them in class. I started having students do short written reflections before engaging in small group discussion. Each of these little pieces were slight improvements. The handout would tie it all together and make class time feel more intentional.

As I started thinking more and more about the sorts of cognitive abilities many students were likely outsourcing to AI, I zoned in on the precise skills I wanted them practicing—not once, but with each lesson:

• Formative recall (for strengthening memory)

• Brainstorming (for generative creativity)

• Reflection (for metacognition)

• Discussion and dialogue (to practice socio-emotional and analytical skills with other humans)

• Annotation (for attention and close reading, meaning-making)

• Revision and refinement (for humility)

• Synthesis (for…synthesis)

And they are doing this with each lesson. It isn’t one assignment. That is where we see gains—not just interesting insights. And, the repetition builds the strength to perform well on the larger, summative tasks. Or at least that’s my working thesis, because it seems rather obvious.

The Meta-Zine Method (front/back, one page)

Below is my outlined Meta-Zine Method and a bit about how I think through what ought to go in each section.

1. Recall

This is simple. Take the single most important idea from the previous lesson and ask them to write it out in their own words.

For instance, my big idea from the first week of classes was Aristotle’s conception of happiness. Turns out only half the class remembered this. And this little recall activity allowed them to recognize that on their own—and make sure they have it down.

So under this header I put: “What is Aristotle’s conception of happiness? How does it differ from modernity’s conception of happiness?”

2. Annotation

Locate a paragraph or two from the assigned reading that introduces a key concept or thesis. Do not make this an entire page. It should be maximum, 1/2 a page. If they are sitting and reading for over ten minutes it is too long. Theoretically, they already did the reading (I have other methods for ensuring this) prior to class.

You can be precise here and ask them to look for particular things if it suits you:

1. What is the most important word in this excerpt? Why?

2. What is the most important phrase? Why?

3. What is the claim being made—and what is assumed?

3. Reflection

You can simply leave white space here under the heading for a free-form reflection or make it more pointed if you want to pre-empt thinking about something in particular. I am leaning toward the first for now.

4. Discussion

This is where I ask students to discuss collectively in small groups. I have all my classes divided in groups, so this transitions really easily. I wrote about how I do this, you can see it in last week’s post.

The ideal number of questions here is 3–4. I am making the first 2–3 related to the excerpt. The last question pulls them outside it to the larger text. This serves as a great segue to the mini-lecture or activity.

5. Mini-Lecture or Activity

As I see it there are two ways to cover the content from the reading:

1. Give a mini-lecture, or

2. Have students try to reconstruct the main ideas from the reading on their own and then correct their answers.

I am using both. Depending on the nature of the content—and how much inspirational lift students collectively need—I’ll switch between the two. There may be time to do both, even.

If you plan to lecture at all, this next component of your Meta-Zine should have some bolded concepts and space for them to fill in notes.

If you go the activity route this could be a chart they fill out, a spectrum, a Venn diagram, an argument map, etc. You can get creative here. I will be uploading some examples of my own handouts for people to get ideas via the subscriber chat. I enjoy trying to come up with new things and am excited to share what I come up with.

One concrete example (so you can picture it):
For an Aristotle day, the “activity” box might be a simple two-column chart: Aristotle’s happiness (eudaimonia) vs. modern happiness, with space to list features, assumptions, and likely consequences of each.

6. Synthesis

Bring this all together with one question. I think I’m going to focus on setting this up for an intentional mic-drop sort of moment at the end. This is mostly because I’m horrible at this right now and feel my classes kind of end with a, “OK that is it, see ya!” I want them to walk out thinking…

What I’m noticing already

Several students have emailed me saying something to this tune in the first week: “Your teaching style is so engaging. The handouts have me thinking constantly all class.” One asked me to talk about critical thinking to his fraternity because how I’m teaching is “really important.” These compliments are much more common at the end of class when grades are coming due—but not so much at the beginning. I’ll take that as a sign that I’m headed in the right direction.

And because PowerPoint is not up and I’m not using tech myself, I have found my students are increasingly not returning to their own devices as much. They are working through the zine. We are moving through it together—and there is stuff to do. Things to think about.

If you try something like this (or already do), I’d love to hear what you include in your “synthesis” question—and what you’ve found actually keeps students mentally present for the final five minutes.

Cheers!

This might be a familiar scene: A lecture hall full of students. Heads down slumped over their iPhones. Thumbs moving. Scant conversation. It is surely what I see when I enter my classroom for the first time each semester.

Particularly since COVID disrupted social norms in higher education, students are finding the university particularly lonely—crowded but lonely. As one of my Intro to Ethics students put it last semester, “I rarely get to know anyone in my classes.” In my ten years of teaching in the university, I’ve noticed this too. It has become increasingly quiet in that short few minutes before class starts.

This might be because my campus brings quite a few commuter students who are interested in getting in and out. This sometimes encourages the belief that school is divorced from one’s social world and context. Maybe it really is the post-COVID malaise and incoming freshmen just didn’t get the same socialization they did years ago. Maybe it’s that the classrooms are cold and have fluorescent lighting and feel like a doctor’s office more than a comfortable living room where a good conversation is about to unfold. It most definitely has something to do with how easy it is to opt out of social anxiety and discomfort with the quick flick of your thumb.

But even if we understand how we got here, the harder question remains: how do we help students find each other again?

I really haven’t heard much about is how we help facilitate connection—or better, intellectual community and friendship—between students. Not assigning a one-off partner for peer review or a group for a project. That isn’t what I’m talking about here. I want to build a structure that increases the likelihood they will make a friend. That they will walk away from class having bonded with someone on the same academic journey at the same time. Perhaps this someone is a person they are excited to see and talk to about the ideas in the readings. Or maybe it is just someone they go get lunch with after class. Even the latter would be a win.

If I can play some small part in helping a 19-year-old feel part of a community, I gladly will. Friendship, after all, matters for more than just emotional comfort. As Aristotle put it, “Without friends no one would choose to live, even if they had all the other goods.” Friendship adds value, stability, and even courage to one’s life—qualities that matter profoundly in a learning environment.

And students feel this intuitively. One wrote in her end-of-semester reflection, “I really liked having our groups. I made new friends, learned new things, and it definitely helped me learn.” Another said, “Discussing these topics with my peers was a highlight of my week. I enjoyed our companionship and their help.” These are not comments about mastering content. They are comments about belonging—the very thing so many students quietly admit they lack.

So for the rest of this short essay, I won’t spend any more time trying to convince you that it would be a good thing for your students to become friends with each other. This seems rather obvious and intuitive. Instead, I’ll share how I try to do this in my classroom in the hopes that you might too. It’s a small lift with a great reward.

Learning Pods

This is my friendship strategy. I put my students in pods. Quite simply, pods are small groups that students are assigned to throughout the duration of the course. I assign the groups. And I do so intentionally. If two best friends are taking my class and end up in a pod together, they tend to isolate themselves from the group. I know this because I do this exact thing with my own best friend—at academic conferences and dinners out with larger groups. It’s not bad per se. We enjoy each other and, as C.S. Lewis explains, “secede” from the mass. Likewise, I’m sure my students enjoy their friends too. But I do want everyone to be starting from ground zero here. I think it’s only fair everyone feels equally awkward.

On the first day of class I spend a lot of time setting these up for success. A lot of time as in about half the class. I post everyone’s groups on the projector, then move the entire seating chart around so students sit next to their pods every day. This sounds much more complicated than it is. I basically just do a lot of pointing: “Group 1, front right. Group 2, front middle.” Don’t overly complicate this. They will go back to the seats the next class with very little prodding.

I encourage pods to exchange contact information and give them fifteen minutes to learn each other’s names and begin with a few introductory questions.

In the past, I had students name their groups. This gets very silly if people get into it. Sometimes they do. Other times, they look at me like I am death. Those looks have disincentivized me from continuing this practice. If you are less of a people pleaser, it can be fun.

I also give them a small task: to choose the reading they want to prepare a Socratic Seminar for. This requires agreement. I randomly pick a group to go first (with a random number generator) and pick their first choice. The winning group gets some shared pride. The others get to commiserate and re-strategize together. It is fun and gets them building rapport quickly.

Ritualize the Pods

People should talk with and consult their pods every day. Do you do “think-pair-share”? Make it “pod talk” instead. Do you do random peer review on Canvas? Make those reviews within the context of their pods. Maybe bring them in person?

I also have students work on a low-stakes collaborative task: they develop discussion questions for a Socratic Seminar they will collectively chair. [An aside: I’ll be honest: I don’t ever find these Socratic Seminars to be all that good in terms of content or scaffolded questioning. However—the students love them. Somehow we always end up laughing.]

The important thing about the task is that it is the right level of hard—enough effort to matter, not enough to become angry if someone doesn’t come through. If it is a very high stakes group project it kills the pod energy. If it is meaningless, it decreases investment and people feel they can easily opt out.

Anyway, the point is: make the pods part of every class meeting and give them something meaningful to work towards together.

What Pods Make Possible

When students talk with the same group consistently, something subtle shifts: conversation becomes easier, intellectual risks feel safer, and the room feels less anonymous. As one student wrote, “Working with the same people all semester helped build connections. I started feeling comfortable with them, which was a big deal to me.” That comfort becomes a foundation for intellecutual courage. Hands go up more often. I presume they take more risks in discussion and, overall, class discussions are more lively and fruitful.

Pods will not fix every loneliness students carry. But they create a simple, repeatable architecture for belonging. They are a place where students can land, talk, laugh, and learn together. They feel more connected to the class and material.

In fact, by the end of the semester that scene I mentioned at the start no longer exists. I have to quiet students down before we begin class. That noise is the signal that it worked. And, I’m quite happy to hear it.

In a post last week, I detailed the first step of my in-class, scaffolded term paper. This week I’m detailing the second: the Problem Statement.

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To my knowledge, I don’t think I’ve seen other scaffolded writing processes include such a step. So, let me first explain why I do—and what it’s all about.

A problem statement requires students to think more deeply about the question or problem they are trying to solve, rather than racing off to develop a response or answer. This is part of slowing down our thinking. It helps answer questions like:

• What assumptions are at the heart of the question?

• What are the trade-offs in answering one way or the other?

• How have other intelligent people attempted to answer it?

• Are there dimensions or facets of this problem that have yet to be explored?

• What do I need to carefully define to gain clarity?

That is a lot of depth. So how do we go about teaching students how to write a page or so that synthesizes it?

Give Examples

It is helpful the week before to show students what good examples of problem statements look like. Most well-written journal articles in the humanities do this quite well. They often open with a brief history of a debate, explain why it’s an important debate, and identify the key theoretical or textual issues at stake.

Note: this is not quite the same as a literature review. The aim with those is coverage. who has said what, and how those views relate to one another. What I’m talking about here with a problem statement is situating a question. This is what I’m going for in philosophy. I don’t know if this is what you are going for in your course.

That being said…

Find a particularly good example in your discipline and either:

1. Print it out and have students annotate it. In class.
   Not the whole article—just the introduction. Ask them to identify specific features you want to emphasize.

2. Put it on the projector.
   Have students read it and review it together with guided questions.

In the past, I’ve used an example from something I’ve personally written in an academic journal. It builds credibility by showing students that I’m doing the very thing I’m trying to teach them how to do.

The Pre-Work

To do this well, I encourage students to spend time at home reflecting on the questions above. I ask them to sketch out some initial reactions and responses.

I also make sure they know they’ll need to do some digging—reading through secondary literature, and so on. Those same questions can also serve as guides in their reading. I’m explicit that some of what they read will not be relevant. That’s okay. It’s part of the process.

An optional suggestion: maybe encourage them to go on a walk and think this through—to sit on some park bench somewhere and kick around their ideas. I know it’s radical: but maybe even leave their phone at the house while doing so? Play with the thoughts, delight in the ideas and how they interact. It really can be pleasurable!

On the In-Class Writing Day

Like all of these in-class analog exercises: make yourself available. Canvas the room. Encourage students to bring annotated resources they can reference in addition to the ones they annotated from the previous step.

I avoid encouraging notes only because I don’t want anyone to come in with a pre-written problem statement and bypass the struggle. If you frame it this way—rather than as an anti-cheating measure—I’ve found students are much more receptive.

I typically give students 30–45 minutes for this portion. You can do the example exercise during the first half of class, if you want, and reserve the second half for the actual in-class writing.

The Elephant in the Classroom

You might be asking (or be asked): why is it important that students do this the harder way? They could much more easily upload a handful of academic articles into their LLM of choice, ask for a synthesis, and get on with their lives. I suppose they could.

But the point of these analog slow-thinking exercises is for students to stretch their own cognitive muscles. The goal is not producing a pristine synthesis. It’s learning how to synthesize at all.

Being able to synthesize information is a fundamental human skill. If we can’t do it ourselves, we can’t judge whether something else, like AI, has done it well. Is it oversimplifying? Is it over-emphasizing one side of the issue? Is something missing?

Students must:

1. Be reading the literature, and

2. Have the ability to synthesize what they read in order to answer these questions.

That’s the skill component.

The other advantage is formative. It helps students come to realize:

• This is a complex problem.

• A good answer requires nuance.

• There is a lot I still don’t understand.

As they attempt to create their own synthesis, they begin to see what isn’t quite fitting, what they don’t yet get, and where there are gaps that still need to be filled. This is all extraordinarily humbling.

Feedback

If you choose to give individualized feedback on these problem statements it can be quite time consuming. I’ve done this for previous semesters and I’ll admit, the lift is heavy. Telling students whether their article is a go is much easier (Pt. 1). This requires much for careful reading and surfacing what’s missing.

However, there is another way that actually might be more beneficial pedagogically and less time consuming. Here is the suggestion:

1. Have students turn in their problem statements.

2. Take note of the most common issues

3. Begin the following class by identifying these in a straightforward, comprehensible way to the class as a whole. I would number them and make the explanations short.

4. Have students evaluate their own work. Does their problem statement need any correction in these areas? Where? What might fix it?

5. This can be accomplished through annotation or in the form of a written reflection. In my Drafted Workbook, I include pages for this after each section.

In the next step, I ask students to develop a thesis statement. I’m finding this is increasingly difficult for students to do in the last five years. I think we know why.

I need a job.

Employers hire people with college degrees.

I must get a college degree.

This is the practical syllogism that leads most students into our classrooms. This is not news to anyone. It is often something lamented by humanities professors and capitalized upon by business schools. It names a familiar tension about the purpose of the university: learning for learning’s sake versus learning as a means to some end—as leverage for gainful employment.

This essay is an attempt to soften that tension by offering an alternative end for higher education: serving the common good.

That vision presumes two things at once.

First, that we need good, virtuous people, and that our schools should aim to form them. Good people seek truth for its own sake.

Second, that good and virtuous people should also be equipped with the right kinds of skills to get jobs, develop their communities, and lift up others.

At present, there are only a handful of institutions that manage to hold these aims together. They tend to serve very specific kinds of students—those who come from learned homes and wide networks of success and wealth. I don’t think that should be the case.

So, how do we marry job preparation and formation through the liberal arts without undermining either? Before answering that question, it’s worth saying why—if we care about the common good—they must be married. I’ll explain this by way of example.

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Why Wanting a Job Is Not a Moral Failure

I don’t have a conventional background for someone with a PhD in philosophy. I was a first-generation college student. My mom taught preschool and cleaned houses on weekends. My dad worked maintenance at an apartment complex.

I was privileged to attend private schools as a scholarship student, but I didn’t even realize philosophy was a formal discipline until my junior year of college. You can imagine my mother’s horror when her firstborn came home declaring she wanted to study religion, psychology, and philosophy. She had been hoping I would become an eye doctor.

This wasn’t because she didn’t value these things. We’re a large Catholic family; life moved to the rhythm of the liturgical calendar. It was because she didn’t want me to struggle financially. She wanted me to enjoy a peace—financial security—that she herself had never known.

This is something a lot of humanities professors struggle to understand, especially if they’ve never had to worry about it personally. I’ll admit that even with my background, I’ve sometimes fallen into pejorative condemnations of students who seem to “only care about getting a job.” And I was wrong in making such condemnations. Especially now. People need to eat. They should be able to build a 401k after going to graduate school. I think that is fair.

The reality is that studying philosophy, literature, and the classics is an immense privilege. There is a reason these were numbered among the liberal arts—for the free man. Those who can afford to declare majors in these fields often have the networks or financial security to make it sensible. I was—and still am—not very sensible in this regard. They aren’t building from scratch. They aren’t standing alone on their degree and sound character.

It’s also worth mentioning that at the most elite institutions there is an informal curriculum. One where students are introduced to the social circles and sorts of necessitates that make big ideas funded realities. Students learn, often without realizing it, how to talk to people who make decisions—donors, trustees, partners at firms, directors of foundations. They are gently ushered into rooms where internships, fellowships, and first jobs are decided over appetizers rather than application portals. And, as a result, the bifurcation between a job and a formation is less pronounced.

Why the Liberal Arts Still Matter

Here is another truth that remains stubbornly intact: there is no better program for character formation than studying the liberal arts in community.

Socratic discussion.

Shared dialogue on big ideas.

Wrestling with arguments and stories in ways that shape not only what we think, but how we judge, decide, and love.

Learning how to work through difficult texts and arguments and communicate them clearly through writing.

It is no coincidence that nearly every university requires at least some exposure to these subjects and practices. We truly need this stuff. But the way we currently structure general education all but guarantees that this formative potential goes unrealized because it is fragmented and slipshod in most universities and colleges. To really reap the benefits, it requires “majoring” in one of these humanistic disciplines.

Why Gen Ed Fails at Formation

1. General education courses become obstacles, not opportunities

If you have ever taught pre-med students or business majors at a large state school, you feel this immediately. The courses that should be doing the heavy lifting of formation are sidelined by high-stakes major requirements.

If a student fails calculus, they are out of biomedical science. So, Plato’s Republic in Intro to Philosophy naturally moves to the back burner. Instead of providing space for formation, general education courses become boxes to check—obstacles to clear.

2. Form matters, not just content

These courses fail not only because of what is taught, but because of how they are structured. A scattered assortment of general education requirements guarantees that most are taken alongside demanding, discipline-specific courses. Students sign up for whatever fits their schedule or whichever professor is rumored to be easiest.

The result is often a transcript stitched together from unrelated courses—world religions here, introductory sociology there, a special topics course in Victorian literature—frequently taught through excerpts rather than sustained engagement with whole books.

With no through-line and no shared conversation, students lack the context needed to connect ideas or integrate them meaningfully. Under these conditions, character formation is nearly impossible.

3. The bookish are stranded inside the academy

Meanwhile, liberal arts majors gain the privilege of studying what they love and developing habits well suited to academic life. But there are very few academic jobs—especially for students trained at state schools.

Despite egalitarian rhetoric, academia prioritizes prestige. Almost every time.

Teaching at the primary or secondary level is often suggested as an alternative, but it requires a distinct set of skills that many liberal arts students have not been trained for. Managing a classroom of thirty middle-schoolers is not the same as facilitating a seminar discussion on Nietzsche.

Students without networks into think tanks or legacy media are thus funneled into disciplines with poor job prospects—or released into the market without preparation.

The Real Dichotomy We’ve Created

Taking all of this together, the problem is not that students want jobs, nor that the liberal arts aim at formation. The problem is that we have organized higher education around a false dichotomy:

• Job preparation without formation, producing technically competent but morally thin professionals.

• Formation without job preparation, accessible primarily to those with financial security or elite networks.

This bifurcation ensures poorly formed technocrats on one side and ever-shrinking humanities programs on the other—especially outside Ivy League and adjacent institutions. Many of those who chart either path face unnecessary precarity.

So long as this structure remains intact, attempts to reconcile job readiness and liberal education will continue to fail.

If universities are meant to serve the common good, then job preparation and formation through the liberal arts cannot be treated as competing goods, one practical, the other ornamental. They must serve the same mission.

It’s a False Dichotomy

Job preparation and formation can serve the same mission. Good people can also have practical skills that equip them to lead and build the future. This is the most reasonable path toward realizing the common good.

We can move in this direction by:

• Delaying narrow specialization.
  The first years of college should not be about locking students into tiny niches. They should be about learning to see clearly, judge well, and care about the right things.

• Building a strong, simple core curriculum.
  Not a chaotic menu of boxes to check, but a core based on the greatest books and big ideas—chronologically sequenced and thematically connected. It’s the same. For everyone.

• Diving deep, not skimming wide.
  Think trimesters. One book per module. Four modules per term. Analog reading. Time and space for soul-searching and orientation, rather than racing through excerpts. Exploring Aristotle’s Politics with a philosopher, a historian, a political scientist.

• Helping students discern the problems they want to solve.
  Instead of obsessing over “What major should I pick?”, we should be asking, “What kinds of problems do you want to give your life to?” Students would take discernment seminars to this end exploring this question in depth.

• Guiding them into interdisciplinary pathways.
  Once students can name the problems they care about, we can help them pursue pathways in scientific inquiry, communal development, artistic expression, or business and economic growth that genuinely address those problems.

• Training them in concrete, impact-oriented skills.
  Through experiential and project-based learning, they can learn to write op-eds on live issues, create pitch decks, fundraise, run meetings, hold listening sessions, conduct feasibility studies, and more. Students would be equipped to build businesses, build movements, and shape public discourse—not just work for corporations.

In other words, we can stop forcing students to choose between being employable and being formed. It just takes a more intentional structure. I call it the “developmental model” of higher education. The best kind of job preparation is the kind that trains them to build institutions, communities, and companies ordered toward the common good. That, at least, is a vision of higher education still worth fighting for.

In a recent post, I outlined the general order of operations I use in my in-class, handwritten, scaffolded term paper process. As promised, I’ll now do a deep dive into each component of that process, beginning with research and culminating in a digital download for paid subscribers that makes this easy to implement in your own classroom.

1. Framing the Research Process

Before each part of the scaffolded process, I take time in class to frame what we are doing. I explain the justification for the task and the role it plays in the larger project. I also anticipate many of my students’ objections and address them early. Here is how I frame the research portion.

It’s complicated.

The questions and problems I’ve placed before you are genuinely hard. Many very smart people have been debating these issues for years. You will see this firsthand as you sift through the literature and attempt to identify sources that are genuinely relevant to your question.

It’s hard.

Research takes time. You will almost certainly read some articles that turn out to be only marginally helpful for your specific purposes. This is normal. Expect it. That said, the more precise your search is at the outset, the more likely it is that your queries will yield useful results.

It’s relevant.

Learning how to think well involves learning what deserves your attention. This task requires you to connect a philosophical question to an intellectual artifact produced by someone else. Is this author actually participating in the debate you are studying? Why or why not? What clues signal this? These are transferable skills, especially in a world increasingly saturated with poor-quality information.

2. Direction

A. In-Class Tutorial Using the Online Library

If you assign students any research task, you need to show them how to use the tools that make good research possible. I do this in two stages.

First, I demonstrate why an LLM is insufficient for this task. I ask it to generate a bibliography on a given topic and then have students look up the sources themselves to see whether they actually exist. This is done live, in class. At one point, nearly all of the sources were fabricated. Later, it was closer to fifty-fifty. Today, the results are somewhat more reliable—but hallucinations still occur consistently. This demonstration is an eye-opener for students.

Second, I show students how to use the university’s online library system. This turns out to be much easier than tracking down the articles an LLM produces (even the real ones), which are often paywalled. Most students have never been taught how to use these tools and default instead to Google searches or their preferred LLM. In a class of roughly forty-five students, usually only five to ten raise their hands when I ask who knows how to use the library database. I spend about fifteen to twenty minutes walking them through it.

B. Instructions

Students are instructed to find one relevant article, print it out, and bring it to class. It must be an academic, peer-reviewed article. Before class, they are required to read it and annotate it by hand—underlining the main thesis, marking insightful passages, and writing questions in the margins.

There is almost always an adjustment period for this first step. I typically run a “fake” test round: I tell students to bring a printed article on a day when I do not actually plan to have them annotate in class. A significant number do not bring one. The more grade-conscious students do bring theirs and express concern. I use this moment to address both groups.

I hold firm boundaries here. Students cannot participate in the in-class writing if they do not bring the printed article. I encourage them to print it several days in advance. I also take this opportunity to share my own terrible relationship with printers: they never work. I encourage students to adopt this assumption as well. Printing will be inconvenient. It will sometimes fail. They still need to do it ahead of time.

I also explain that articles can be useful in many different ways, not all of which will be obvious at first glance.

C. In Class

When students arrive with their annotated articles, I take about five minutes to explain the activity. I ask them to write responses to the following prompts:

• Summary: What is this article about?

• Relevance: Why do you think this article will be useful for your paper?

What do they write in/on?

First, students can order my Drafted workbook, where the steps are laid out sequentially and space is provided for each stage. This keeps everything in one place and provides the rationale for each step. By the end, students have a single coherent artifact that documents their writing process. This option has worked extremely well for me.

Second, students can use a dedicated notebook. However, notebooks often contain hundreds of pages, which makes it easier for students to pre-write or otherwise circumvent the process. They are also cumbersome to collect, grade, and transport.

Third, instructors can use the digital download attached below. This works best as part of a binder system, where students preserve each component for later reference. This option is cheaper for students but more labor-intensive for instructors—especially adjuncts without easy access to a printer. I do not have a printer in my building. When I’ve tried to use the one I have access to, sometimes it is broken or behind a locked door. This practical frustration is part of what motivated me to create the workbook.

What do I do during class?

This is important. I make myself available. Students have many questions. I circulate and address them in real time. Sometimes students worry that an article will not work, and I explain why it might still be valuable. Sometimes they have brought a non-academic source, which gives me the opportunity to explain why it is unreliable. This creates meaningful one-on-one interactions that do not require office hours or rushed conversations between classes—and many students take advantage of that.

3. Suggestions and Practical Tips

1. Establish clear boundaries.
   If a student misses class for reasons unrelated to health, they cannot make up the assignment, nor can they complete it at home. I state this early and reinforce it often. Establishing a consistent rhythm—such as writing every other Thursday—makes this easier for students to remember. I tell them plainly: if you plan to miss for something fun, make sure it isn’t on a Thursday.

2. Limit the number of annotations.
   I require two annotated articles total, with two in-class writing sessions. I previously assigned more, and it was too much. Two is sufficient to build attention and discipline without overwhelming students.

3. Grade for completion.
   If a student selects the wrong type of article, they must try again. If they choose a legitimate academic article that turns out not to be as useful as expected, they explain why in their annotation.

4. Require integration into the final paper.
   Students must integrate two peer-reviewed scholarly sources into their final paper. These can be the two articles they annotated. They may cite additional sources, but they are not required to.

What Comes Next: Writing the Problem Statement

In the next post, I’ll turn to the step that gives this research its direction: writing a problem statement. This is where students move from gathering material to owning a question, and where many papers either gain clarity—or quietly fall apart.

Below, you’ll find the digital download for the Research activity for those who want to adopt a binder system or use this as a standalone exercise outside a full, term paper sequence.

I’m happy to talk in the chat with folks about specific considerations for their class or potential modifications!

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Have you lost the thread?

It’s hard to figure out where to draw the line: when is generative AI use and outsourcing permissible and when does it sacrifice something human—or everything human?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot because most of the work in the official AI ethics discourse (the kind of stuff that lives in peer-reviewed journals) is overwhelmingly distant from the murkiness of mundane life. And, this is what I’ve been reading.

It’s about governance and policy and organizational implementation.

It’s about bias and transparency.

It’s about what institutions should do with it or how engineers should design it.

These are all very important things to consider. Yes.

But it doesn’t address whether or when it’s okay to use AI to write your wedding vows or if a small, struggling school should use it to write Facebook posts or give feedback on teacher unit plans.

There are a lot of ordinary people who want to know when it’s okay to use ChatGPT and Claude in their jobs and in their personal lives—a lot of people with very little guidance. While the answers seemed obvious at first, they have gotten more complicated as AI becomes more ubiquitous and its capabilities more diverse. Many feel like they have lost the thread.

So, I’ve been wanting to think this through. Not to develop some definite rules (I’m no Kantian), but to figure out how we should practically reason through the zone of justified delegation and integration in our daily lives.

There is probably five or six important dimensions worth of separate treatment and consideration. This essay tackles the first and perhaps the easiest of them to think through: Does some particular use of AI erode my ability to be excellent at some practice? Put another way, this reflection addresses the right use of chatbots or analogous LLM tools within the context of practices—that is, domains in which we seek to develop genuine expertise.

Practices, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre defines them, are not technocratic skills. They are coherent groupings of skills, ordered toward some end—like health, truth, or justice—and governed by standards that define excellence. One does not merely perform a practice; one is formed by it. And, expertise of this kind is holistic. It can’t be deconstructed. It’s not one skill alone. It’s not a multitude serving the god of efficiency. It’s all of them and they all serve the same end.

Distinguishing Skills

Every practice or discipline includes certain skills that are essential to it—skills without which no one could reasonably claim excellence. No one can claim to be an excellent journalist without the ability to evaluate sources, conduct interviews, and exercise narrative judgment about what is newsworthy and why. No one can claim to be an excellent physician without diagnostic reasoning and clinical judgment—the ability to interpret symptoms, weigh evidence, and decide on a course of treatment under conditions of uncertainty.

These are core skills.

You may already see where this is going, but it becomes clearer once we distinguish these from a second category of skills that support our disciplines without defining them: peripheral (or secondary) skills.

Peripheral skills are additive. They are helpful, sometimes even important, but they are not constitutive of expertise. Someone could be quite bad at them and still be excellent in the practice itself. Does a gardener need to be good at landscape design or visual symmetry? It may enhance a garden’s appearance, but one can be an excellent gardener without that refined aesthetic sense. Does a writer need to know how to type? No. A writer could compose entirely by hand and still be brilliant. Typing is useful, but it is not what makes one a writer.

My first claim, then, is this: we should be cautious about using AI for core skills in our chosen practices and far more liberal in using it for peripheral ones. But this is only the beginning of the analysis.

Outsourcing and Reshaping

When it comes to AI, there are different ways we can use it. We can outsource tasks to it—handing over tasks. We can also use it in ways that reshape a task without fully handing it over.

Consider how different it feels to write a sentence by hand, to type it on a word processor, and to produce it through an iterative exchange with an AI tool. In each case, different cognitive and affective processes are involved. Attention is directed differently. Responsibility is distributed differently. The task itself is subtly altered.

Outsourcing the tasks needed to build core skills is, again, unadvisable. If a philosopher routinely asks AI to develop arguments, generate objections, or structure papers from vague prompts, something has gone wrong. That kind of activity belongs to the heart of the practice. However, it may not be problematic to use AI as part of an iterative process—to clarify a claim, surface ambiguities, or test whether a point is being expressed clearly—provided that this use does not eliminate or replace a core skill altogether.

What this looks like will always be highly context-dependent, and it is ultimately up to practitioners within each discipline to discern. But one thing is clear: if a tool reshapes a task so thoroughly that a core skill effectively disappears, then the practice itself has been compromised.

Take philosophy again. Part of doing philosophy involves genuine dialogue with other people. This dialogical element is not incidental; it is central to the practice’s virtue-forming character. There may be something faintly Socratic about sparring with an AI, but if this becomes the primary or exclusive form of dialogue, especially in a classroom, the practice is diminished in a serious way. The goods internal to philosophical inquiry simply cannot be realized without interpersonal engagement.

The Maintenance and the Creation of Expertise

Maintaining expertise is not the same as building it. Losing one hundred pounds is very different from keeping that weight off. Each requires temperance, but the demands change with context. In the early stages, the discipline required is far greater.

The same is true of expertise. Novices are far more vulnerable to over-outsourcing. When confidence is low and the terrain is unfamiliar, the temptation to hand off difficult cognitive work is strong. As someone becomes more secure in their abilities, that temptation weakens—but it never disappears entirely.

This is why maintaining expertise in a world saturated with AI tools is a fundamentally different problem from building expertise with those tools present from the beginning. It is not merely a matter of showing students or novices what responsible use looks like in theory. The ability to remain within those guardrails—without drifting into dependency—presupposes a level of formation that novices simply do not yet possess. At the same time, though maintaining expertise still does require practice.

In college I use to longboard—it’s like skateboarding but with, you guessed it, a longer board. I live in Florida and thought this was cool. I like to think it was kind of cool and I was pretty good at it, actually. The kind of good where I could fly down parking garages without dying.

Now, I haven’t longboarded in over a decade. And, if I tried to hop back on and fly down a parking garage I can almost guarantee I would die and also make onlookers laugh at my sheer ineptitude.

The point? You have to do the things experts do to be an expert, to maintain expertise.

The Who and the When (to Outsource and Iterate)

There are very few core skills—so few that I struggle to name any—for which it is genuinely good or permissible for experts to outsource the work entirely. But the number of things acceptable to outsource for novices is almost certainly zero.

There may be ways of integrating AI into tasks involving core skills that reshape those tasks without destroying them—ways that preserve friction, judgment, and responsibility. But even these uses require careful scaffolding. We can rehearse skills without friction. We cannot exercise skills without it.

And for novices, friction is not a problem, it is the point.

Efficiency is not the goal at this stage. What matters is repetition, stamina, and the slow development of an eye for what is salient. It is learning what to attend to, what to resist, and when to persist. These capacities cannot be downloaded. They must be cultivated. Well, for humans anyway. In case you needed the reminder: we are humans.

A Caveat, or two

Now, not everyone can be an expert at everything. I cannot be an expert philosopher and a lawyer and an engineer. So perhaps, for me, it might be permissible to have ChatGPT tell me the kinds of things I want to include in a contract before I hire a lawyer at $400/hr. I’m not trying to gain expertise in law. It’s not my thing. If it were, maybe I should think again.

However, there are some things—like making good practical judgements—that we should all strive to be excellent at doing. Many of the seemingly pointless tasks we force students to complete in the classroom are part of this formation of excellence. Reading a book seems to be essential for understanding it; understanding it seems to be essential for analyzing it; analyzing it seems to be essential for making a judgement about its value or cultural significance. That whole scaffolded process helps us practice the analytical reasoning skills needed to live well. And, all of that allows us to exercise prudence in our work and practices, too.

This first dimension gives us at least one clear place to begin: AI use is justified only where it does not erode our ability to become—or remain—excellent at the practices that we have committed ourselves to.

I’ll introduce the other dimensions I’m thinking through in the coming weeks. I think that is where things start getting much messier. They are also under-explored and in need of so much nuance—nuance I hope I can help provide.