Tag: EduDucTape

Listeners to the Educational Duct Tape podcast have heard me talk about our family’s Roomba—Mr. Belvedere—before. I’m a little obsessed. My kids know I jokingly call him my favorite child. Every few days, I stage a mini production: picking up stray socks and dog toys, flipping chairs onto tables, all to prep the optimal vacuuming performance. A couple of hours later, I peer into that little dustbin and marvel at how much dirt Mr. Belvedere has collected. “Good job, buddy,” I often say. Then I grin at my wife and declare, “I vacuumed the bedrooms today!” She rolls her eyes—because, of course, the robot did the work. But here’s the thing: the goal was never for me to vacuum. The goal was clean floors, and we’ve got clean floors. Mission accomplished.

Can a Forklift Get Stronger?

This reminds me of a story that I heard from educator Dave Stuart Jr. He shared a metaphor about strength training that went something like this:

Let’s say I want to get really buff. So I bring a forklift to the gym, load weights onto it, and use the forklift to raise and lower them.

The audience leaned forward, waiting for the punchline. The point isn’t to lift weights—the point is to get stronger. If your goal was lifting weights, well, a forklift can do the job. But if the goal is strength, using a forklift is a mistake.

AI as Our Vacuum: Cleaning Up Comprehension

Stuart was really talking about AI, which brings me to an article by Rick Wormeli called With A.I., Let’s Keep Students’ Learning Paramount (AMLE). It’s a fantastic piece, but one paragraph totally stumped me. I read it, I reread it, I squinted, and still felt lost. So I did what any 21st-century educator would do: I pasted it into ChatGPT and asked, “What’s Wormeli trying to say here?” The AI broke it down, answered my follow-ups, and—boom—I got it. My goal was understanding, and AI helped me clean up my comprehension just like Mr. Belvedere cleans up dirt.

If I’d asked AI to just summarize the entire article, I would have missed Wormeli’s nuance, his humor, and the chance to wrestle with his ideas. My goal wasn’t “finish the article”; my goal was to get better at supporting educators in an AI-rich world. And using AI for that paragraph helped me with that.

The goal wasn’t the completion of a task–reading an article–the goal was to get better at something: supporting educators. 

The goal wasn’t task completion. The goal was growth.

My goal was mastery, not just checking a box.

 

When Task Completion Becomes the Goal

In my 14 years in the classroom full-time, I graded the way most teachers grade. Much of my grading was based on whether students turned something in. Surprise, surprise—when turning in the work becomes the goal, students find the easiest path to that goal:

• Copy a classmate’s work
• Remix an old project
• Ask AI to do it for them

This is cause-and-effect. If you reward the act of turning in work, that’s often all you’ll get. But when we center growth—when we say, “The goal isn’t lifting weights; it’s getting stronger”—everything changes. Students approach tasks differently if they know the point is learning, not just doing.

Academic Cosplay: Dressing Up Without the Deep Work

In the article, Wormeli borrows the term academic cosplay (think costume play) to describe going through the motions of learning without really learning. He’s not talking about dressing like Miss Frizzle or Mr. Feeny—he’s talking about students who do the work without doing any actual thinking. But he’s also talking about students who:

• Submit AI-written essays as their own
• Copy answers on worksheets without understanding
• Use Google to get the answers for their assignments

I’ll admit it—guilty as charged. Back in high school (1996!), I rewrote online history articles for extra credit. In 2005, my math students were copying each others’ homework. In 2013, in my STEM Class, Scratch projects got a quick “remix” and a few tweaks. Those are all academic cosplay. The goal was checking the box, not thinking.

When we make the goal the completion of a task—turning in the homework, submitting the project, checking the box—we shouldn’t be surprised when students find the fastest path to that goal.

 

Performance vs. Mastery Goals

There’s solid research that backs up this notion. Much of the research shows that performance goals (completing tasks, earning grades) push some kids toward shortcuts—AI included—while mastery goals (getting stronger, understanding deeply) lead to genuine effort and higher motivation. It’s like choosing between:

Lifting weights and building muscle,

Reading an article and gaining insight.

Mastery goals—getting stronger—yield different results than performance goals. When the goal is real learning, students (and teachers) often engage differently, even in an age of TikTok-length attention spans.

 

Don’t Rob Learners of Challenge

Now, listen—some of the brain science in Wormeli’s article made my eyes glaze over. That’s actually where I needed to paste a paragraph into ChatGPT. But there was one line that jumped out at me. Wormeli said, 

In fact, [middle school students] are unusually open to learning challenges and creativity, functionally ‘craving’ robust, active engagement with the world, and yes, with topics we teach in middle school.

There’s our invitation. They crave challenge, both cognitively and creatively. Even when they don’t show it, even middle schoolers’ brains crave challenging thinking

Some of you are raising your hand and saying “Not the middle schoolers I teach!” and I get it, the apathy struggle is real. Most of my classroom years were with 8th graders. In some cases, no matter how much we do, it’s nearly impossible to motivate a handful of our students.  

But if we don’t try, it’s inevitable that they’ll outsource their thinking to AI. So what do we try?

• Focus on growth and learning.
• Focus on mastery and mastery oriented goals.
• Give learners some autonomy and choice.
• Help learners see that we’re trying to help them get stronger, not just lift the weights up and down.

 

Real-Talk: Best Practice May Not Always be Feasible

As much as I loved Wormeli’s article, he does make some idealistic assertions—like suggesting that teachers not use AI at all for feedback or grading. In a perfect world, sure. But teachers are human, and time is limited. If the alternative is “do less meaningful feedback” or “skip differentiation,” AI might be the better move.

The Bigger Picture

AI is a powerful tool, like Mr. Belvedere on our living-room floor. Sometimes it does the job better than we can. Sometimes it robs us of the growth we truly want. Every time you assign work or lean on AI, ask yourself: Is AI letting us dress up as learners (or educators), or is it helping us learn more deeply (or educate more effectively)?

Whether you’re a veteran educator or just starting out, keep that forklift metaphor in mind. If the goal is lifting, you might as well use a forklift. If the goal is gaining strength, then a forklift keeps you from meeting that goal.

👉 Ready to rethink your goals? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Let’s keep learning paramount!

Want to see this in action? Watch the video.