Disrupted History

HISTORY ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

All Posts

  • From Levels to Learning: Rethinking AI Assessment in History Departments

    How do we meaningfully design assessment of and for learning when the presence of AI tools fundamentally changes the game? Earlier this term, I was invited to present to a group of school curriculum leaders who are preparing to reimagine assessment for the 2026 school year. The timing is both exciting and daunting. These leaders… Read more

  • On Bubbles and Burners: Teaching for Cognitive Friction in the Age of AI

    We’re entering a moment in education where the learning process itself is up for renegotiation. With generative AI now accessible to every student with a keypad, the temptation is real: skip the hard part, avoid the struggle, bypass the friction. Tools like Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude are fluent, persuasive, and increasingly responsive — so, the… Read more

  • Healing History: A Student’s Phrase and the Purpose of Difficult Pasts

    A student’s wisdom from within our class yarning circle “History isn’t just about what happened. It’s about what we do with it.” We talk a lot about AI in education right now – and yes, I use it in my planning, research, and even in drafting reflections like this one. But for all its convenience… Read more

  • The Strawman Problem: What the binaries of the EI vs Inquiry Debate Get Wrong

    There’s something brittle about education’s recurrent discourse around Explicit Instruction (EI) and Inquiry. For all the energy it generates, the debate feels stale – locked in false binaries and riddled with misrepresentations. Lately, I’ve been returning to the work of Sweller, Dreyfus, and especially John Dewey, trying to find a more honest, rigorous way forward.… Read more

  • History ‘on the run’: How AI is Becoming a Study Companion in Surprising Ways

    Offering interactive Vietnam War mind maps through study guides to personalised audio and video summaries, Google’s NotebookLM is reshaping how my History students study – even on the move. In this post, I reflect on what happened when I introduced it to Year 12 Modern History, and how one Year 9 student showed me how… Read more

  • Quick Post: Not Cheating – Learning

    How are students really using AI in the classroom? This thoughtful and candid episode from the AI in Education podcast flips the script – handing the mic to the learners themselves. Featuring a group of articulate and reflective students from my classroom, the episode dives into the grey zones of AI use in schooling –… Read more

© 2025 Vince Wall