AI and the Future of Pedagogy
- Nitin Deckha
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Idea 32 for 2025
I wanted to discuss a new white paper written by British tech philosopher Dr Tom Chatfield. It examines how AI can support educators and students and potentially deepen the process of higher learning in a variety of ways.
As a postsecondary educator myself, I found Chatfield’s exploration of cognitive, instrumental, and importantly social dimensions of learning and his navigation of research and strategies to design and implement assessments through applying AI most interesting.
Here are some highlights, cut-and-pasted from the paper itself, of pedagogical approaches that educators and institutions can take that emphasize a range of valuable human skill development:
1. Help Learners Manage Cognitive Load:
Design environments that help leaners manage mental effort wisely and push back against distraction and noise. In the context of attention-hungry technologies and potentially overwhelming information, finding focus and seeking signals amid noise are vital precursors to learning and self-determination. Technologies like AI are also especially well-equipped to help explain fundamentals.
2. Explicitly Teach Metacognition:
Much like taking control of time and attention, learners need to equip themselves to monitor and adapt their thinking in the face of a rapidly changing world. Metacognitive practices are central to education and the discerning use of technology, both for identifying opportunities and resisting pitfalls; and learning to apply them effectively is predicated as much on emotional as intellectual self-control.
3. Celebrate Social Sense-Making and Intellectual Risk-Taking:
The more capable automated systems become, the more interpersonal skills become a vital human enabler and differentiator. Use techniques like teaching, group problem-solving and collaborative reflection to tap into the affective and intellectual benefits of shared learning. Celebrate curiosity, the honest expression of uncertainty and empathetic reflection. Acknowledge the everyday needs and experiences of students to build guidance, access and trust around technology.
In addition, Chatfield offers three “practical recommendations” for educators in how to integrate AI into their instructional and curriculum design to deepen engagement, thinking, mastery and reflection:
1. Invite Reflective AI Use Within Assignments:
Build tasks that incorporate AI into the learning process, requiring students to explain how they used it, what they learned and what choices they made. Instructors can make the integration of AI itself a focus of learning and assessment by using drafts, logs and prompt records. And they can also lead discussions of where integration is and is not desirable, and why.
2. Co-design Rubrics:
Most students want to be helped to use AI thoughtfully, effectively and legitimately. Support this by allowing learners to play a part in the designing rubrics and protocols, including accounts of how and when AI use is appropriate. Determine when and how AI itself may offer forms of individualized feedback and analysis, and how educators can build on these foundations to offer deeper guidance where it is most needed.
3. Pilot Experimental Spaces and Credit based on Mastery:
Using AI wisely and effectively is inherently an investigative process, many of whose details will be discipline-specific and continue to evolve over time in parallel with technology itself. Conduct meaningful experiments by creating spaces where students and faculty can test new forms of AI-augmented assessment without grade penalties, gaining credit for demonstrating mastery and for exploring fresh forms of learning design, together.
Taken together, Chatfield's pedagogical guidance and practical recommendations reinforce the value of the educator in partnering and integrating AI within their processes of instructional and assessment design, pointing to innovations in co-designing rubrics, individualizing feedback and facilitating a culture of experimentation.
At the same time, Chatfield underscores the continued value and purpose of the educator to craft and instill opportunities to build and hone cognitive and metacognitive abilities and frameworks, and creates immersive moments of learning that highlight curiosity, encourage critical thinking and intellectual mastery, and reinforce the social and emotional dynamics and development through learning.
#AI #human #pedagogy #educator #value #purpose #curiosity #critical #thinking #metacognition #social #emotional #assessment #instruction #design #mastery
