This Teacher’s Journal: Blog Post 7 | February 28, 2025
This week, I pushed hard – harder than expected – to challenge assumptions about technology, inquiry, and the very nature of learning. What unfolded revealed to me some deep gaps in search literacy, possibly an over-reliance on hard structuring, and a troubling reluctance by some students to grapple with uncertainty. In an age of ‘truthiness’ and instant answers, how do we ensure students develop the skills – and the will – to question, verify, and think for themselves?
Beyond the Prompt: Teaching Year 9 to Use AI (and Search) with Intent
This past week, I had to push hard – harder than I expected. One class of Year 9 students, tasked with using and critiquing AI as part of their research project, were shown the working strategies of 2 x I Statements and a Verb and the Plus 3 approach, as outlined in my recent blog post. The expectation was that they would engage thoughtfully with AI, but what I observed was a stark divide in how they approached the task.
Three Groups, Three Challenges
I found that I could, generally, observe within my class students in three distinct behavioural categories:
- The Comfortable: The behaviours of these students took to the AI strategies in their stride. They used AI tools to help them in beginning their assigned task, they used the technology for help shape initial research questions, to make sense on unfamiliar language and concepts, and to push their thinking further. They saw AI not as an answer machine, but as a tool to assist their inquiry.
- The Uncomfortable Overthinkers: The behaviours of this group seemed to indicate that they were highly dependent on teacher affirmation, and highly specific – often individual – guidance. The behaviours observed seemed to indicate that some of this group struggled with autonomy / agency in their learning. That they were uncomfortable with engaging / grappling with age-approrpiate ill-defined problems. This group exhibited behaviours such as hesitation, second-guessing, ‘paralysis of analysis’, a need repeated reassurance, and repeated rephrasing of instructions. They were characterised by a reluctance to take appropriate intellectual and academic risks – seemingly some preferred to not attempt than to attempt the unfamiliar without repeated encouragement.
- The Uncomfortable Underthinkers: The behaviours of this group of students seemed to indicate that their engagement with the assignment was purely performative. The behaviour of this group seemed to indicate that that saw the use of AI as a shortcut. Perhaps students showing this behaviour had an expectation that someone (the teacher or a peer?) or something (a generative AI tool?) would ‘do the thinking’ for them. This group seemed to defaulting to an approach to using AI as a replacement for deep thinking rather than using it as a means by which they might reduce their cognitive load. Some behaviours of this group seemed to indicate a disappointment and then a frustration that the tasks required of them the use of their ‘human intelligence’ (HI).
I should note at this point that I believe being intellectually ‘uncomfortable’ – within an academic and socially safe classroom – is not necessarily to be avoided. It can in fact be a strong indication of, motivation for, and precursor to learning.
A Hard but Necessary Push
I spent three of my four lessons working through these challenges. I found that I had to be both demanding and responsive in my teaching. Afterward, I consulted a group of trusted students, asking whether my approach had made sense. Their response? A strong yes – perhaps from members who exhibited a comfort with the task – suggest to me that my observations of overthinking or underthinking have merit.
During this class’ final lesson of the week, I revisited the key points from the previous double lesson. During this lesson, students were again supported with hard and soft scaffolding. Reflection on this last lesson for the week has led me to conclude that many students who seemed ‘uncomfortable’ were
- perhaps highly dependent on teacher direction and
- may lack the ability to work autonomously or grapple with more open-ended problems.
This made me wonder – have they been over-scaffolded in the past years of schooling? Have they been conditioned to believe that learning means completing structured tasks rather than struggling productively?
The Deeper Issue? Search Literacy (or Lack Thereof)
Beyond AI, another issue emerged: basic search literacy.
Many students didn’t know how to effectively use a search engine – whether by Google or by using the integrated SearchCoach tool in Teams. (Interestingly, a variation of this same issue surfaced in my Year 12 class this week. In that class, a number of students admitted they weren’t sure how to use an index of a book.) Perhaps there is a dangerous assumption – held by students, teachers, and society – that everyone just knows how to Google. Perhaps “just Google it” implies a skillset that, in reality, doesn’t exist for all students.
Responding to this issue present a twofold challenge:
- Complacency (a.k.a. ‘Intellectual Arrogance’?): Many students seem to assume they already know how to search, making them resistant to learning better techniques.
- Teaching Constraints: Many teachers also assume students know these skills, and given the time pressures of covering curriculum content (or completing the required assessments), they don’t explicitly teach search literacy when it matters.
What Needs to Change?
This week’s experience reinforced that there’s a lot of work to do in shifting student mindsets:
- From Performativity to Learning: Students need to see learning as more than just completing tasks for a grade.
- From Over-Scaffolding to Autonomy: They need to be comfortable with struggle as an essential part of the learning process.
- From Passive Searching to Strategic Inquiry: Basic search and fact-checking skills need to be explicitly taught within meaningful classroom contexts.
Moving Forward
This experience has reinforced the need for an explicit focus on how we teach students to engage with information – whether AI-generated, web-searched, or book-based. It’s not just about using tools but using them with intent. Next steps? Integrating more structured but flexible inquiry scaffolds, teaching search literacy in the moment, and ensuring that students understand that struggle is not a sign of failure but a sign of learning.
Sadly, I also wonder – do students, families, or even society truly value fact-checking and lateral reading? During a phase of this week’s activities, it became clear that some students struggled to identify commonalities between sources, let alone differences. It’s a small classroom observation, but it hints at something much bigger and far more troubling.
We live in a time where truthiness – Stephen Colbert’s term for things that feel true rather than are true – ‘truthiness’ – has taken deep root, particularly in the swirling disinformation storms of Trump/Musk’s MAGA America.
When a nation’s most powerful figures openly mock expertise, dismiss evidence, and amplify conspiracy theories, what message does that send to young people about the need to be accurate and reliable?
Have we, as educators, assumed too much about how much people care about accuracy and reliability?
Or, even more disturbingly, have we underestimated their willingness to settle for the most convenient or emotionally satisfying answer? This is where history classrooms must step up – not just as places where facts are taught, but where students develop the disposition to question, verify, and take responsibility for the knowledge they consume.
Teaching history can’t just be about the past; it must prepare students for the civic responsibilities of the present and the future.
This is just the beginning.
Disrupted History 