🚦 Beyond “Yes AI” and “No AI”: Teaching Students to Partner With AI
Welcome to the 2026–27 school year!
With another school year underway and AI continuing to reshape the way we teach and learn, it might be time to retire one of our favorite AI debates: How do we stop students from using AI?
Of course, we still need to talk about academic integrity. Of course, there are times when AI should absolutely be off the table. And of course, students can use AI to do work they should be doing themselves.
But if our AI conversations stop there, we're missing the bigger opportunity.
From “Using AI” to “Applying AI”
Dr. Elizabeth Radday and Matt Mervis recently wrote an excellent piece for ASCD called Sparking Curiosity with Applied Intelligence, and they offer a distinction that I think is worth bringing into our classrooms:
💡 Using AI isn't the same as applying AI.
Using AI might mean asking it to write an essay, summarize a reading, or solve a problem. Applying AI looks different.
It means starting with a real problem, bringing human curiosity and judgment to the table, and using AI as a partner to help explore, analyze, create, test, and refine a solution.
Radday and Mervis call this applied intelligence — the synergy of human and artificial intelligence to solve problems and create things that neither could accomplish alone.
That's the AI experience we want for our students.
🐱 Let's Stop Playing Cat and Mouse 🐭
For the past few years, we've often found ourselves in a frustrating cycle:
Teacher: “Don't use AI.”
Student: Uses AI.
Teacher: “How can I tell if they used AI?” Uses AI tool to maybe detect AI?
Student: Figures out how to make the AI-generated work look less AI-generated.
Rinse. Repeat.
Radday and Mervis describe this as a “cat and mouse” game, and it's hard to argue with the description.
Meanwhile, students are encountering AI everywhere outside our classrooms — and the workforce they're entering is changing because of it.
The question isn't whether students will use AI. Because, they will (they are! - Common Sense).
The question is whether we'll teach them how to use it well.
What Does an AI Partnership Actually Look Like?
It looks a lot like learning.
A student has a question.
AI helps them generate possibilities.
The student evaluates those ideas.
AI helps analyze a mountain of information.
The student decides what matters.
AI creates a first draft or prototype.
The student critiques it, revises it, and makes it better.
AI gets something wrong.
The student catches it.
The human stays in the driver's seat.
That's a very different experience from handing an assignment to a chatbot and turning in whatever comes back.
And it puts the emphasis back where it belongs: curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, judgment, communication, and problem-solving.
So What Changes in Our Classrooms?
Maybe it's time to look at some of our assignments and ask a slightly different question.
Instead of:
“Can AI do this assignment?”
ask:
“What could a student do with AI that they couldn't do as effectively without it?”
Could AI help students analyze patterns across hundreds of historical documents? Could it help a student prototype an app to solve a problem in their community? Could it serve as a brainstorming partner, tutor, critic, or research assistant — while the student remains responsible for the thinking? Could students actually build with AI rather than simply consume what AI produces?
It doesn't mean lowering the bar of our assessments and classwork. When AI is thoughtfully integrated with your pedagogical expertise and experience, we can actually raise the bar.
The Skills We Still Need to Teach
If we can teach students to partner effectively with AI, it may actually give us more opportunities to teach the human skills they need as they head into a workforce unlike any we've known.
Students still need to know things.
They still need to read carefully.
They still need to recognize bad information.
They still need to ask good questions.
They still need to make decisions.
They still need to explain and defend their thinking.
And they need to know when the smartest thing to do is not use AI at all.
As the Associated Press recently reported, schools across the country are beginning to move toward this broader definition of AI literacy — one that includes understanding AI's limitations, questioning its outputs, protecting privacy, and knowing when not to use it. (apnews.com)
That's a much richer goal than simply teaching students how to avoid getting caught.
One More Thing…
If you're looking for people who are thinking deeply about all of this, go listen to ChatEDU.
Elizabeth Radday and Matt Mervis host what I will confidently declare the best podcast in the biz for AI and education. Their conversations are practical, thoughtful, often hilarious, and refreshingly focused on what this technology actually means for teaching and learning.
And this recent ASCD article is a great place to start.
🔗 Sparking Curiosity with Applied Intelligence
🎧 ChatEDU: The AI & Education Podcast
As we head into 2026–27, let's keep having the hard conversations about cheating, assessment, privacy, bias, and responsible use. But let's also make room for a bigger question:
What happens when we stop asking students, “How can we keep you from using AI?” and start asking, “How can we teach you to apply AI to meaningful problems while keeping you in the driver’s seat?”
🤝 That's the conversation I'm excited to have this year! It's not exactly a watercooler conversation, but I'm excited to dig into it as we launch this new school year.