Katharyn Havens teaches essay writing by training students to connect unrelated ideas, using AI as a thinking partner rather than a shortcut. Her golden rule: AI can improve the work, but students must track where it helped and keep ownership of their ideas and language.
Am I right? AI is going to know all the facts. So what I'm teaching these kids is connection. What unrelated things, events, ideas can they see a thread through and put them together and come up with something new? That is the point of this essay writing. It is not to show me that they know the parts of speech. I actually don't care if they know those parts of speech. Because through writing that will come. They will get better as I help them edit and as they use AI as a writing partner. I will link this document below. This is a, a sort of guide. It's using AI as your writing partner. And this is in all of their notebooks. We refer back to it because it tells them, first of all, the golden rule. AI should help you think better and write better, but the ideas and words should be yours. So we always need to know where we started. I will sometimes ask them, "Is this essay still yours?" After we've done all of our edits and gotten some help from AI. We need to still be able to claim what parts were ours, where did the AI help, and how did we continue to evolve our thinking, not just outsource it to AI.
Re-invent Education Through Re-purposing What Works, Agile Learning, the World is a Classroom
