Thinking With Machines:
A note about how these teaching reflections are made
I have a collection of old teaching ideas.
Some are half-finished. Some are notes about something I noticed in a classroom. Some are activities I tried years ago and still wonder about.
This blog is an experiment in what happens when I bring some of those things back to life with the help of AI.
I don't ask a model to write an article for me.
I start with something I've actually thought, noticed or done. I give it to a model and see what happens.
Sometimes it misunderstands me. Sometimes it spots a pattern I hadn't noticed. Sometimes it produces something polished that isn't quite mine. Sometimes another model sees the same material differently.
I argue with it.
I cut things. I add things back. I move things around.
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Eventually, something emerges that I recognise as my thinking — perhaps clearer than it was when I started, but not necessarily simpler.
Two ideas help me make sense of this.
The first is cognitive pluralism: the idea that different ways of thinking don't have to converge on a single correct answer. I find the differences useful. A second perspective can reveal something precisely because it isn't my perspective.
The second is the extended-mind idea: the possibility that thinking can involve things beyond the individual brain. A notebook can become part of thinking. So can a conversation, a classroom, a colleague — or, in my case, an interaction with an LLM.
The important thing is that the tool doesn't replace the experience.
The teaching experience comes first.
The AI gives me somewhere to put it, push against it, look at it from another angle, and sometimes discover what I was thinking before I had the words for it.
So that's what you'll find here.
Not AI-generated teaching content, and not quite traditional reflective writing either.
More like a teacher thinking out loud, with a few other minds in the room.
