Technolandy

Day 142 (of 2025/26) #tEChursdAI look at the idea of leaning in…

Huh? I only knew that for the test. Then I forgot all about it. <— I’ve heard (and said) that too often when recounting long term learning. With Ontario dusting off standardized final exams as their education post-season, it has me wondering about the emphasis of short term recall that these type of tests actually reinforce the value of AND a wonder about if/how the use of AI would impact the same… short vs deep learning…? Recall to complete a quiz/test or learning to re-use a skill/strategy…?

So what if we lean in… because if there is one thing that I have seen again and again in education – if it sounds good on paper, it probably won’t in real life (a discussion point my friends and I started to make with an allusion: just like communism – good on paper, not in practice). 

And I worry when I read more a more online ed seeking nostalgia (that didn’t work then…) and wanting to revert to explicit instruction (good when ‘a’ tool, not ‘the’ tool) on specific standards rather than differentiated instruction. In opposition, when I first started thinking about UDL (Universal Design for Learning) I thought it would not work… similar to some sentiments from educators with BC’s Year 2000 program… until we leaned in and let the technology catch up and see how it worked well with what we were also better understanding about neurologies…

I also reflect that the rapid expansion of #edtech in schools came too fast with the tools, and not enough time letting the adults do some unlearning and new learning. We need to be doing some bigger thinking around AI and #edtech and not pretending that the era of static textbooks, pencils and blue exam books were the apex of education achievement.

Sigh, the good olde days… weren’t.

And maybe we need some more experiments. Letting students lean in here and there and cheat… err, I mean leverage their growing collaborative relationship with Augmented Intelligence (still think I like this AI definition better…) and see what happens. Short term recall makes for good test results that focus on valuing it, but the long term knowledge has irregularly … “lasted”… and I wonder if students leaning in and collaborating (and being taught/coached how this collaboration on learning and completing tasks and creating content in this manner) is any worse than focusing on short term recall. 

What if the real risk isn’t that students will lean in… but that we won’t? Will that further alienate the environment we call school from relevance to real/lived life?

Because leaning in doesn’t mean abandoning rigor. It means relocating it.

Away from the fragile shelf of short-term recall and into something with a longer half-life: curiosity, transfer, discernment, creation.

Tests can measure what sticks for a moment.

But leaning in asks a different question entirely: what echoes?

And maybe that’s where this all lands…

When students can “know it for the test” and forget it by the weekend, then the system isn’t being cheated. It’s being mirrored.

Unless short term recall isn’t a side effect but the feature that “we” really want (I don’t) 

So perhaps the invitation isn’t to double down on recall, or to romanticize a past that never quite worked the way we remember.

Perhaps it’s to design for a future where learning is less about what you can hold in your head… and more about what you can do when you don’t have to hold it alone.

Lean in to the mess.

Lean in to the tools.

Lean in to the uncertainty of what learning looks like when it’s shared between human and machine.

Because if we’re honest…

The question was never “Will they use AI?”

It’s “Will we teach them how to think with it?”

And that might be the kind of learning that actually lasts.