With AI, students now have access to a technology that can do substantial portions of the intellectual work teachers and schools ask them to do.

In 2026, this is not news. Educators have been wrestling with this reality for at least the last three school years.

Teachers know that students can generate essays, ask AI to summarize readings and solve problems, and even create an entire presentation for a class project. And it’s important to understand that AI can do the planning and reasoning that results in these products. For students, there are extraordinary possibilities for improving the quality of their work. The risk is that they stop doing the thinking and don’t build the skills the assignments were intended for.

We’re all now grappling with an important question: as AI becomes increasingly capable of doing cognitive work for students, what intellectual work do we still need students to own?

I expect this will become one of the defining educational questions of the next decade.

A human-centered school is not anti-AI.

As I will make clear over and over in the posts of this publication, the appropriate educational response to our new AI-shaped world is NOT to “protect” students from AI. Our young people today will live and work in a world saturated with it. Graduates should become exceptionally capable of using AI while in school, extending what they can “know,” create, investigate, and accomplish.

And teachers should use AI where it makes their work better. They should experiment. Teachers should learn the best ways to let students age-appropriately collaborate with increasingly capable AI-equipped devices.

But there is an important distinction between students using AI to extend their human capabilities and allowing it to replace the human capacities we are trying to develop in students.

Education is about becoming powerful.

If a student uses AI to identify possible weaknesses in an argument and then decides whether the criticism is valid, AI may be strengthening the student’s thinking.

But if the student asks AI to decide what the argument should be, construct it, defend it, and then polish the prose, that student has not improved their ability to think, they’ve offloaded the cognitive part of the assignment an undermined the assignment’s educational purpose.

In the case of writing assignments, we writers know that writing teaches us to organize ideas, wrestle with ambiguity, discover what we think, make distinctions, anticipate objections, and communicate with precision. We ask students to read and write about difficult texts because sustained attention, interpretation, and encounters with ideas unlike their own can change the way they understand the world. It would be a shame if those human capacities are not developed in our students.

When we are at our best as educators, we ask students to struggle because that struggle leads to important learning. AI creates a challenge because while it is potentially very empowering, it is also extraordinarily good at removing struggle.

Schools will need to get good at providing learning experiences that help students to use AI appropriately while maintaining the struggle that leads to powerful learning.

Student agency is now more important than ever.

The more powerful AI becomes, the more persuaded I am that our central educational goal should be developing students’ agency.

Agency means knowing what I want, understanding why I want it, examining whether it is worthy, and retaining ownership of the judgments that guide my actions.

Human ownership of thinking is going to be especially important in an AI-shaped world. As people are increasingly surrounded by systems willing to do their work for them, the temptation will be to allow the technology to do their thinking. There is a possibility that it will become normal to surrender small pieces of judgment because doing so is easy and usually works.

For we educators, the profound educational question is:

How do we prepare students to use AI’s extraordinary power without gradually surrendering ownership of their own thinking?

This is a much more important question than “how can we stop students from using ChatGPT?” (the question I hear most often from teachers at schools).

Much thinking in an AI-shaped world must remain human.

Schools need to think through, and develop, better answers to questions about which cognitive work can be productively delegated and which should remain with the learners. A good guiding question for those conversations might be:

What thinking must remain human because the act of thinking itself forms essential human capacities?

Schools will find that the answer will not be identical across ages, disciplines, or learning goals. There won’t be universal rules that fit across a K-12 school.

For this reason, I expect attempts to create one AI policy will likely fail. Instead, schools need to foster conversations among teachers about what human capacities should be built in each learning experience, and how AI can help or should be excluded. These are important questions about the purpose and outcomes of school, and about the pedagogical approaches we choose to employ to achieve those goals.

Three questions schools should be asking

I have found three questions especially useful in conversations with educators and school leaders:

What should students become capable of doing with AI?

What should they remain capable of doing without AI?

What relationships, experiences, and forms of productive struggle become more valuable as AI becomes more capable?

These three questions lead quickly into curriculum, assessment, academic integrity, faculty practice, strategy, and institutional governance.

When considered and discussed earnestly, those questions lead us to think more clearly about the human work of school. They help us identify the slippery slope of allowing AI to automate, accelerate, and produce where students should be doing the thinking and production work.

Likewise, those questions can lead us into conversations of what teachers should stop doing in their practice, and what approaches they should be using instead.

Schools must remain human institutions

Policy-makers have long sought ways to solve the efficiency problems of school, and many will see AI efficiencies in the corporate world as promising for schools. Yet schools’ value has always depended partly on things that are inefficient by design: discussion, disagreement, practice, revision, relationships, reflection, mentorship, community, and yes, the slow development of good judgment. AI can make much of that easier, but it can’t yet replace many of the human qualities and human activities that make the best schools great.

As AI becomes increasingly more capable, schools need to become more intentional about creating experiences in which students exercise judgment, encounter difficulty, take intellectual responsibility, listen to other people, defend ideas, revise beliefs, and discover what they themselves think.

To be clear, AI should change education (it already has). The challenge to us as educators and school leaders is to make sure that as we redesign education we remain clear about what we are trying to develop in the human students entrusted to us. We do not yet know exactly what AI will be capable of three, five, or ten years from now, but we now know enough to continue to ask this important question:

Who do we want our students to become?

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Stay in the conversation:

I’ll be writing regularly about AI in education, student agency, academic integrity, curriculum, assessment, school leadership, and governance as schools work through these questions. Hover ver the link at the bottom right of this window to subscribe to receive new posts when they are published.

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How I wrote this:

I develop the ideas for my posts on my own, with my human brain, and I craft a thesis and key points for every post all by myself. I use various Al tools to review and revise some of my prose and to test certain ideas, much like a human editor might, yet the content of each post comes from my brain. Like I’m recommending schools ask of their students, I use a writing process that preserves my thinking, my agency, while using AI to improve the output.

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Mike Gwaltney is Vice President of Consulting and Learning, and a Senior Consultant at Independent School Management (ISM). He is a long-time independent school educator and former Head of School. He has been at the forefront of academic technology since the early 2000s and is widely considered the “OG” of blended and online learning in independent schools. He holds a Masters in Educational Technology, and writes about student agency, teaching and learning, and leadership and governance of AI in independent schools.