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Let’s start by taking a look at what the first pillar of an AI-resistant assessment looks like, and that first of the five pillars is presence. In the absolute simplest terms, functionally speaking, given what modern technology can do, the only way you can guarantee that a student actually did the work they supposedly did is if they actually did it in front of you. In the short term, things like videos showing them doing the work might still seem viable, but even those are

Let’s take a look at the second pillar of AI-resistant assessment: Production. When we talk about production in the context of the Five Pillars of AI-Resistant Academics, we must be clear about what we mean. Production is the thing itself. It is the academic artifact, action, or performance that the student ultimately brings forward to demonstrate their learning. Presence is being there for it. Personalization is what they bring of themselves into it. Permutation is the shift

Taking a brief break from the series on the pillars of AI-resistant assessment, I wanted to make a quick segue into an observation I recently had and ask whether anyone else has been noticing the same thing. Recently we had a teacher workday, and I was going through and grading my students’ latest writing project. The assignment was to write a poem with the focus of the prompt being “Home is where the heart is.” In short, students had to write a poem about the place that feel

When we talk about personalization as being one of the core elements of AI-resistant academics, what we functionally mean is this: can I hear the student’s voice? No matter what you teach, your students come from a wide variety of backgrounds, home lives, cultures, personal preferences, and individual lived experiences. All of these help shape them into the kind of person they are today. It is literally what makes them them and what makes you you. It is not surprising, then,

Building off of the ideas talked about in my article about how narrow student worlds have become and why their bedroom has essentially become their all room—where they eat, where they socialize, their entire world reduced to a few feet—I have continued to think on this over the last several weeks and began to realize that this might be partly responsible for something else I have noticed in my students over the last few years: a fear of the real. That might seem strange to so

I was thinking back earlier to the professional development that actually inspired my most recent book on how to build AI-resistant academics. What was interesting was that it was not the intention of the presenter for us to be thinking about AI at all. The whole purpose of this PD was to show teachers in various different occupations at the school—math teachers, social studies teachers, ELA teachers—how we could integrate the arts. The whole professional development was lite

Traditionally, when we think about grading, most of the time teachers think of the finished project, the finished work, not the notes or the unformed ideas but the polished version that we can hang up on the walls, send over to parents, and the thing which we will show our admin and coaches when they ask for samples of our students’ work. However, while that gets a lot of attention, not necessarily unjustifiably, I realized that that is actually far less important now, especi

Over the past several months I have been writing about what I call AI-resistant assessments, not assessments that ban AI, not assessments that pretend AI does not exist, but assessments that still require a student to think, to participate, to create, and to demonstrate learning in ways that are very difficult for artificial intelligence to replace or fake. The goal is not to fight technology, but to design learning environments where the human mind is still required to do th

Just because someone is a bad colleague does not mean that they do not still have things that you can learn from. One of the most important lessons in my life is that even if someone is hateful, they oftentimes still do have something they can teach you, whether directly or indirectly. Now, while we would all like to believe that teachers can work together in harmony and be kind together, supporting each other in the way that we are always trying to tell our students, anybody

Well, the answer is not to simply throw the baby out with the bathwater. AI exists. It is here to stay. It is obviously counterproductive to try to bring education back to the pre-technological era and assume that students are going to do everything handwritten with research books they got from the library. Besides, as I expound upon in my book, Beyond Traditional Teaching, Second Edition, AI is in a lot more places than people think it is anyway, and the number of places whe

It will come as absolutely no surprise to most educators that our education system has not changed in any truly fundamental way for roughly the last 150 years. One could probably make the case that, structurally speaking, it has not changed in a meaningful way for even longer than that. But just stop for a moment and think about how much everything else has changed in that same span of time—technology, transportation, medicine, communication, manufacturing—nearly every sector

I touched on this in my previous article when I discussed how one of the major improvements of digitizing the screener was no longer having to slog through the interpretation of student handwriting. I thought that point deserved more exploration, because while I am going to be talking about this topic specifically, it is possible that teachers might find similar examples here or in other assessment areas that are simply part of life as an educator. The overarching question is

One of the biggest peeves of almost every professional educator is the feeling that we are wasting time—especially when that time feels like nothing more than busy work. Some assessments feel as though they exist simply because there is a minimum number we are required to administer. And while, in theory, each of them collects valuable information, raw data by itself is functionally useless until someone has the time and capacity to actually analyze it. You might have dozens

While teaching is filled with amazing perks—being able to see your students grow, watching students use strategies you have taught them to find success, seeing them mature into avid learners, and of course enjoying the simple fun that comes from working in a highly engaging environment filled with young people—one thing teachers the world over, and myself personally, almost universally find tedious is the myriad of mandatory (and quasi-mandatory) assessments. You know the one