Our Job Is To Help Students Go From "I have to" To "I get to"

Doubling down on surveillance pedagogy is not going to make it happen

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Photo by Turquo Cabbit on Unsplash

Educational institutions are in trouble right now, but perhaps not exactly for the reasons you might think. To be sure, the crisis at hand has to do with generative AI. But while genAI is the spark that lit the fire, it’s not what built up the pile of kindling ripe to go up in flames. In many ways, any mess we’re in now is a problem of our own creation.

I’ve been thinking and writing about AI and education for several years now, and in that time I’ve had the chance to engage with a number of thoughtful educators, both at my own institution, our neighboring institutions in Claremont, and others across the world. It’s clear that educators are feeling unsettled by the capabilities of generative AI and what it means for our students. Perhaps that’s putting it mildly. Digital technology has always played a part in enabling students to shortcut the worthwhile, hard work of learning. Generative AI puts that on steroids.

But the bigger problem is not about our students. It’s about us. We’re worrying about our students taking shortcuts, but all too often we’ve been taking shortcuts in our own pedagogy, relying much too heavily on the final products of students’ work as a proxy for the things we really care about, namely their learning. With genAI, the connection between process and product in many of our assignments can be all but completely severed.

How to assess learning has always been a central concern in education. We need to be able to gauge how students are doing, not just as a way of summarizing a set of skills that they’ve already built with summative tools like final exams and standardized tests, but also as a way of helping them to do the actual work of learning itself. But assessments are only as good as the link between the thing that’s being measured and the underlying quantity that is supposed to produce it.

You likely all are familiar with the traditional pattern here: Use tests and essays to help us judge what a student knows. If an essay is well researched, clearly organized, and persuasively argued that has historically been a proxy for the kind of thinking that we are trying to get students to do. Perhaps in the past, this was a sufficient way to help students to engage with the hard work of learning. But in my mind, extrinsic motivation has always been a rather weak tool in the educator’s toolbox. In many instances, we leaned so heavily on it because it was the easiest one to implement.

The challenge of our current moment is figuring out how to help students to engage in the hard and friction-filled work of learning in a moment where the temptation of the frictionless life is almost irresistible. The potential to short circuit the learning is ever present, never more than a window away on their computer or a swipe away on their smartphone. These days, you don’t even have to type. You can literally just talk to your AI tool of choice.

To surveil or not to surveil

Faced with this dilemma, I’ve seen many different responses from educators. By and large, the most popular response is to pull levers to exert more control over students. Back to handwritten blue books. All assessments in class. Oral exams. No more take-home essays.

The decision to try—and I do mean try—to lock down assessments ever more tightly by increasing the amount of surveillance is a game of diminishing returns. It puts us at odds with students. We are trying to exert power over them to force them to do something that we want them to do. Ultimately, I see this as a way of desperately trying to continue to put weight on an extrinsically motivated model of education. Instead of focusing on thing things that will help our students to want to engage in the work for its own sake, we are doubling down on the assessment as the major motivation.

With that said, I’m certainly not arguing that we should do away with any sort of guardrails or restrictions altogether. As educators, we have a responsibility to ensure that we are doing our very best to honestly and accurately assess the capabilities of our students, not primarily for the value of our credentials, but for the value of our students. We do them no favors by letting them take shortcuts.

But at the end of the day, the thing we need to do as educators is get students to develop their own love for learning. As my friend Michael James McGinnis often says, we need to get them to do the reframe from “I have to,” to “I get to.”

A guaranteed way to foster an “I have to” attitude

I’m convinced that doubling down on ever more elaborate and controlled environments for our students to do their work is going to foster more of the “I have to” mentality. Students interpret these measures as a signal that this thing is not worth doing the right way for it’s own sake, that we as instructors don’t trust them, or both.

I can already hear the chorus of accusations around my naïveté. How aspirational of me. How foolish. Don’t I know that students will take any chance they can get to get it done and move on with their life to go do something else?

I’m not unaware of what I’m suggesting. To be sure, by creating this kind of environment I’m opening myself up to the very real possibility that some students will take advantage of me, other students, and at an even more abstract level, the idea of the entire pursuit and goal of education.

But the idea that students might take advantage of me is a hint at the third way here. When a student shortcuts their learning, they’re not only shortchanging themselves, but they’re also fracturing the teacher-student relationship. But when we as instructors turn to surveillance, we are doing the same thing. These decisions signal to students that I don’t trust them. It tells them that I don’t believe they’re really here for the right reasons and that they see the work we are doing as a means to an end.

Relationships are the antidote

As I’ve thought about this in my own teaching, I’ve realized that one of the best ways to avoid the surveillance game is to build relationships with students. It means getting next to them in lab and helping them to debug the issues they’re facing in their software. When I do this, it shows that I value the process and want to help them through it.

It means meeting with them individually or in small groups each week to check in on how it’s going, to look them in the eyes, and to check in about what they are struggling with. This signals that I care about them as individual persons and care about their learning and formation, not just on the skills they’re able to master.

It’s also about making our teaching transparent. This is a big part of the “have to” to “get to” reframe. There’s no need to try to trick our students into learning or to hide the ball from them. It’s much more powerful to directly make a case for the work we are doing and the why behind it. In my classes, I invite my students to directly challenge me on assignments that they feel are busywork. As an instructor, it’s my responsibility to defend all of the things we do in the classroom. I’m not faultless, and I’m happy to nix or revise an assignment if students feel it’s not doing what it’s supposed to. Of course, students may not agree and there will likely always need to be some element of trust to get them to try something even if they don’t buy it, but we need to be able to make a case for the things we are doing and to do our very best to get students to understand and buy into the point of our endeavor together.

To the degree that we implement any sort of guardrails in our classes, they must be motivated by love for our students and a desire to see them formed and shaped in a certain way. They should be designed with the intention of helping our students to be (and become) their best selves and with the goal of helping them to engage with the work ahead of them because it is something that they see as valuable in its own right.

It’s not that our students don’t need guardrails. It’s just that surveillance will not get them from “I have to” to “I get to.”

Got a thought? Leave a comment below.

Reading Recommendations

This week I stumbled across what looks to be a very provocative read: What is Intelligence by Blaise Aguera y Arcas. I’m looking forward to digging into this one.

This essay from Katie Parrott this week was also very good, highlighting the way that getting more efficient rarely means working less. I particularly appreciated this section.

What can we do to combat the overwhelming push and pull of AI compulsion? Ranganathan and Ye propose an “AI practice”—intentional pauses before decisions, batched notifications, protected focus windows, and time carved out for social connection. The optimist in me hopes that organizations will make space for these kinds of cultural changes. The cynic in me is pretty sure that most won’t. When workers voluntarily take on more and produce faster without being asked, that looks like a win from the top floor. It’s only possible to see how much the goalposts have shifted until someone burns out, and by then, the baseline has already changed.

So it falls to us—which means it falls to each other.

The activities that pull me out of the loop are analog and slower-paced—things that work my brain differently than prompts flying at the speed of light. Bible study. Board games. Walking my dog after dinner. These activities have boundaries: A game ends when someone wins, a walk ends when we’ve finished our loop. The AI loop has no built-in stopping point.

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The Book Nook

Those of you who have been reading for a long time know that a lot of my thinking around the power of design thinking and a prototyping mindset has been directly inspired by Dave Evans, Bill Burnett, and their team at the Stanford Life Design Lab. Although I’ve yet to dig in quite yet, I’m really excited for Dave and Bill’s latest book, How to Live a Meaningful Life.

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The Professor Is In

Pretty fun to stumble on this new wall art in the stairs on the way down to the basement in Parsons this week!

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Leisure Line

While some parts of the country are still buried under inches of snow, here in Southern California, it’s baseball season. Having a blast helping to coach #1’s Little League team and having such a good time working with these kids for a few hours each week.

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Still Life

Stopped at Prime Pizza for dinner on the way home from art class last night. Boy, this was a good pie.