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Students don’t have an attention problem. Lectures have a feedback problem.
This guide shows how to borrow what makes games and apps so hard to put down and point it at learning: teaching in short chunks, using the two-minute pause well, and building the kind of pull that keeps students thinking.
It also looks at B.F. Skinner’s research on reinforcement and what it means for working with AI in the classroom, and it ends with a planner to help you shape your next class.
Latest work
Educators confronting generative AI may have less need of a new theory of learning than of a careful application of an existing one.
STEP (Show, Try, Explain, Prove) is a theory-informed framework for student AI fluency, grounded in the zone of proximal development and scaffolding.
An opinion on artificial intelligence, human creativity, and the psychology of effort.
When a song moves us, does learning who created it change what we hear? This piece looks at why the same melody, poem, or painting can feel different once we know a machine made it, drawing on research on effort, authorship labels, and our beliefs about human creativity.
It closes with what this means for education: when polished work is easy to produce, the thinking and learning behind it matter more, and so does how we assess them.
As artificial intelligence accelerates, a growing number of educators and citizens are pushing back against its adoption, citing the technology’s massive energy consumption as morally indefensible. This editorial challenges that view, arguing that measuring AI solely by its current carbon footprint is a dangerous myopia that ignores its potential to solve the very environmental crises we fear. By examining AI’s critical role in unlocking fusion energy, revolutionizing battery storage, and accelerating life-saving medical breakthroughs, this piece reframes the “energy cost” as a necessary investment in human survival.
It further explores the geopolitical risks of “opting out” and highlights emerging solutions—such as orbital data centers—that promise to decouple high-performance compute from terrestrial resources. Ultimately, this article posits that the true moral failure lies not in using AI, but in refusing to steward its potential for the greater good.
How reflective, goal-focused writing can help students plan their path, and how to build it into a course with care.
This interactive guide is for faculty who want to try self-authoring, a structured writing approach where students reflect on their past, present, and future. Here is what you will find when you open it:
