How Should Teachers Use AI Without Killing Critical Thinking?

About this episode

Hunter Hickman discusses the implications of AI in education and how it affects critical thinking among students.

AI makes students faster. The harder question is whether it's making them better thinkers, and Hunter Hickman, district AI implementation leader at Rensselaer Central Schools in Indiana, is one of the few educators actually building systems to answer that. Hunter is part of the Indiana Department of Education advisory group designing the state's first tiered AI certification for teachers. He ran the 9-12 Khanmigo rollout at his school with a 92% student activation rate. In this conversation, he and Jason unpack where the "AI is cheating" debate has gone quiet and what's replaced it: cognitive offloading, the difference between augmentation and automation, and why rewarding the final product over the learning process is the thing that's actually broken. Key topics covered : Indiana's tiered AI teacher certification program and what makes it different from typical micro-credentials Cognitive offloading: where the line is between speeding up work and eroding your own thinking Why AI is not like a calculator (and why that analogy keeps causing problems in schools) How a 415-student rural district used NotebookLM to keep students in the learning loop What it means to be an…

People in this episode

Host: Jason

Guest: Hunter Hickman

Topics covered

• AI in education
• cognitive offloading
• teacher certification
• student assessment
• ed-tech tools
• AI implementation

Keywords

• AI
• education
• critical thinking
• teacher certification
• cognitive offloading
• Khanmigo
• NotebookLM
• student assessment
• ed-tech

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Rensselaer Central Schools, Indiana Department of Education, Anthropic, OpenAI

Products: Khanmigo, NotebookLM

Places: Indiana

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