Thinking With AI: The Student Workshop Series (Complete Release)
Complete lesson plans, interactive artifacts, and a framework that puts students in charge
The response to Thinking with AI has been genuinely energizing. Your engagement with this material, your questions, your pushback, and your enthusiasm for bringing it into real classrooms, is exactly what keeps this work moving forward. Know that I am currently working on an e-book version of Thinking with AI. Be on the look-out for updates over the next couple weeks.
Over the next three weeks I am developing a full suite of workshop materials designed to help bridge the AI literacy gap in your community: student workshops, teacher workshops, and parent/guardian workshops. This edition launches that series with the complete student cycle.
This release includes the full lesson plans for all five sessions of the Thinking With AI student workshop series, along with five interactive student-facing artifacts, one per session, built for direct use in the classroom. The lesson plans are the architecture. The artifacts are the working space where students do the actual building.
The five sessions move in a deliberate sequence.
Session 1 establishes what AI actually does, pattern prediction rather than understanding, and introduces the five principles that anchor the whole series.
Session 2 puts two foundational roles in students’ hands: the Critic, who evaluates AI outputs for accuracy, completeness, and depth, and the Verifier, who checks claims against real sources.
Session 3 introduces the Interlocutor, teaching students to use AI dialogue to develop thinking they already own rather than outsource thinking they have not yet done.
Session 4 adds the Editor, who triages AI feedback on their own drafts, and the Architect, who directs AI by encoding genuine expertise into clear specifications.
Session 5 brings all five roles together on a single task, closes with a structured self-assessment, and asks students to make a concrete commitment about how they will engage with AI going forward.
This process is grounded in Thinking with AI’s 5 Principles for AI Engagement and Instruction:
I want to acknowledge Elizabeth Helfant, Assistant Head and Academic Coordinator at Ravenscroft School in Raleigh, NC, whose work helped bring this material to life in the classroom. Drawing on the framework from Thinking with AI, Elizabeth developed her own original artifacts and is currently leading a 7th grade half-semester course that integrates these materials with NeuroTeach. Her implementation is a serious one, built on careful reading of the underlying ideas and a genuine commitment to doing this work well. It is exactly the kind of educator-led effort this framework was designed to support.
Both the lesson plans and the artifacts rest on the same conviction: AI does not reduce the thinking required for intellectual work. It relocates it. These materials are designed to make sure that thinking lands where it belongs, with students.
