A Third Way: Rethinking how we structure school in the age of AI.

A proposal for how we can both protect cognitive resilience and take advantage of the benefits of AI for our students.

Have you noticed how you often do your best thinking when you are in the shower, or on a walk? There is this kind of rarified air where you get lost in your thoughts without the distraction of your next task, or the magnetic pull of your phone or screen.

Lately I have found that the clarity of those thoughts starts to diminish once I move to my computer and start the writing process. A “brilliant” coherent thought that emerged in the shower gets blocked when I face the empty page.

It wasn’t always like this for me. I used to feel that writing provoked deeper thinking and the process of moving from thinking to writing was generative. But that has changed since I started using AI regularly. The ease of asking AI to improve a sentence or help synthesize complex data is like a magnet pulling me away from the possible depth that I can achieve on my own.

This sinking feeling that a part of me is atrophying has made me really uneasy. While I feel more efficient in so much of my work and I am dazzled by the capacity of AI to create new tools that were never possible, I worry about the adverse effects of cognitive offloading, or more worrying, cognitive surrender where we relinquish the deeper critical thinking to a machine. Ezra Klein ruminates about similar concerns in his most recent article where he cites Marshall McLuhan who said “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.”

To combat this seemingly inexorable decline, I have started to carve out space and time that is free from both distraction and the pull of AI. This is what Azeem Azhar describes as “the space where ideas arrive before they’re shaped.” He goes on to say,

“These moments are profoundly personal. They depend on a world model that took decades to build, assembled from every conversation, every argument I’ve lost, every book that changed how I saw something. That specific arrangement of experience and association belongs to no one else and can’t be replicated. I safeguard that lived interiority carefully, because the things worth saying tend to come from it.“

As a school leader, I think about what my own personal journey with AI means for how we should shape experiences at school for students. What happens when young people who do not have a “world model that took decades to build” become dependent on AI? How will they develop the critical capacity to effectively navigate the world and the creativity necessary to construct a hopeful future? In his thought provoking article You Are Not a Function, Brendan McCord asks the question: If the capacities required for non-servile life in an AI world were all formed in a pre-AI world, what happens when that formation stops?

In order to protect “the space where ideas arrive“ for our students, we need to rethink the structure of school. But the question is how?

I propose dividing our time and space in school into tech free and tech rich spaces. The idea here is that every day we cordon off time where our students have tech free classes which build their critical faculties without either the distraction or the cognitive offloading of a device. This time will be dedicated to deep reading, note-taking and discussion in seminar style classrooms with expert teacher facilitation. The device free environment will build cognitive resilience and habits of the mind that will serve students well when they are inevitably immersed in their daily technology. In his recent NYTimes essay There’s A Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate, Cal Newport suggests that “consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness.”

Image Built Using Claude Opus 4.6

On the other side of this equation we should design tech rich spaces where technology is used deliberately to extend and accelerate learning. This is where we see students learning to be active producers rather than consumers of technology; where students build real things for the real world and shape the future. In this space we invite the use and evaluation of AI, and teach students how to unleash its awesome potential and take advantage of personalized learning.

Of course, just dividing up time and space is not enough to reinvent schools for the world that we live in. In the age of AI we need to rethink assessment design by focusing more on process than product and embedding purpose-driven learning throughout.

Yong Zhao reminds us of this in his recent blogpost, “Screens are hurting learning.” But what is worth learning? He pushes us to think about whether we are assessing the right things in schools. He asks, “Are we measuring tool-using humans with yesterday’s yardstick? We are (currently) judging a pilot’s intelligence based on their ability to ride a horse. They may have lost the ‘skill’ of the saddle, but they have gained the ‘intelligence’ of the cockpit.”

Generative AI is what Justin Reich calls an “arrival technology“. That means that as educators we have not had the benefit of planning an implementation strategy, and we know from the recent Brookings Institute study that “at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing generative AI in children’s education overshadow its benefits.” In this context, educators have been left to navigate between “AI enthusiasts” who are often trying to sell their latest wares, and “AI skeptics” who advocate locking systems down and returning to exam blue books and traditional testing.

What I am suggesting here is a third way: Dividing our space and time at school in a way that preserves sustained focus, while as the same time preparing students to thrive in the world as it is and influence the world of tomorrow.

NB: I wrote this piece without any AI assistance or review. That was hard. There were many moments throughout that I felt the pull of Claude or Gemini, knowing that it could help me clarify a phrase or create a transition. Writing this piece was a personal experiment in “protecting the space where ideas arrive” for myself. I only used AI to create the image for the article.

Recent Articles: Below are some readings that have influenced my thinking.

Jenny Anderson recently wrote in The Atlantic about Dylan Kane, a seventh-grade math teacher who removed chromebooks from his classroom. According to Anderson: “Within weeks of ditching the screens, he saw how they had been holding both him and his students back.”

Transcend Education has recently published A Better Path: Designing Learning for the Age of AI. This guide warns of the problems of AI implementation without fundamentally changing our approaches in schools. They sketch out a “preferable path” where “Young people develop the skills, mindsets, and agency they need to thrive in an uncertain future.”

Eric Hudson’s Learning On Purpose Substack is always worth reading. His post In an AI World What’s the Work helps distinguish between learning goals and learning tasks. In the end he says: “If we want students who are motivated and persist through struggle, we should consider how to make the work matter. That begins with giving them a meaningful, goals-aligned role to play and the confidence that they have access to a human who cares about them and who is committed to guiding them along the way.”

Colleen Ferguson’s most recent piece on Substack really hits the mark on the ethical dilemma students face in the age of AI, and the implications for assessment design: If You Could Print Money, Wouldn’t You? She says: “We need to shift the weight of assessment away from the product and onto the process: the incremental, visible, unglamorous work of actually learning something. Not as an add-on. Not as a soft alternative for students who struggle with tests. As the main event.”