EduCon 2026Teaching Towards What Lasts in the Age of AI
Our students are dabbling or completely immersing themselves in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and whatever platform comes next, or our schools provide them with. But these platforms will change, disappear, become outmoded - if we anchor our teaching to platforms, we’ll always be playing catch-up, and our students will be learning how to drive an App, not how to live with AI. The real work is preparing students to navigate a world where large language models are not too far from ubiquity, without losing their judgment, creativity, or agency along the way, but with a new set of skills and thinking habits that no previous generation has had the opportunity or need to cultivate.
This conversation invites us to ask: what is worth teaching about AI that won’t be obsolete when the next version drops? How do we help students build durable habits of mind: questioning what a model generates, spotting its blind spots, and using AI not as an answer machine but as a thought partner, editor, or agent. Just as importantly, we’ll consider how AI can offload the repetitive and tedious tasks that often create the friction that serves as a barrier to learning, without robbing students of the productive struggle that defines real learning.
Again, our goal isn’t fluency with today’s platforms. It’s something bigger: equipping learners with the literacies and dispositions to learn intentionally with AI for the long haul, no matter what the interface or platform landscape looks like.
Conversational Practice
We'll start with a brief framing to set context, but most of the time will be spent in conversation in small working groups, organized by ages taught. Participants will first reflect on their own experiences with students and AI platforms to date, and surface what positive practices and habits have emerged (one norm we'll establish is we're looking for what positive student/personal habits we've seen developing with AI tools, to see if we can develop into something that might be enduring rather than focus on the pitfalls and annoyances).
Next, we'll remix into small groups of folx that teach or work with many ages, to compare perspectives and surface the habits and dispositions they think will matter most in the long run, and how we might nurture those in a vertical progression of touchpoints. We’ll use case studies to spark discussion: moments where AI shows up in student work, play, or learning process in positive ways, and from these ask what lasting skills those moments could teach if approached with intention.
Finally, the group will build a shared artifact of “AI literacies that last” as a shareable online asset, capturing ideas and tensions in plain language that educators can take back to their schools. We’ll end by gathering a round of takeaways, ensuring everyone leaves with both concrete ideas and open questions worth pursuing, and an opportunity for everyone to find an accountability partner if they wish to experiment with anything from this conversation in their current school year.
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