Opening note
I had a conversation this week that has been bothering me in the right way.
A teacher told me they had used AI to plan an entire lesson in under a minute. They were pleased with themselves. I am not sure they should have been. Not because the tool had done anything wrong. But because sixty seconds was never the hard part.
The hard part is knowing what your students do not yet understand. Knowing which of them will need a different route in. Knowing when a lesson that looks good on paper will fall apart in practice. None of that lives in the prompt.
This week I have been thinking about what it means to rethink the things we assumed we already knew how to do. Planning. Rest. The job itself.
Better Humans, piece three
What I published
The rest ethic piece went up this week. The argument is that most educators have a work ethic and no rest ethic, and that rest is not what most of us have been told it is. Not recovery. Not a reward. Something you are allowed before you earn it.
If that sounds obvious, the piece will probably surprise you. The stress and sleep thread continues next week. Podcast interview and blog to follow.
What I'm reading
Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman. Moving slowly through it, which feels appropriate.
The section I keep returning to is his writing on rest. The rethink he is asking for is not about technique. It is about the assumption underneath. We have made rest instrumental: you sleep so you can perform better, you walk so you can think more clearly, you switch off so you can switch back on with more to give. Burkeman argues that this is not rest. It is maintenance.
What hits hardest is the way he connects this specifically to builders. If you define yourself by what you are making, rest does not just feel unproductive. It feels like a small betrayal. Every hour not building is an hour the thing is not getting built.
What I'm building
A new section of the audit is in development. I am not announcing it yet, but subscribers get the first look.
The existing audit works at the institutional level: policies, governance, strategy. It tells a school where it stands. What it has never done is get into the classroom. This is the rethink: not what a school says about AI, but what is actually happening in rooms.
The new section has five pillars: Teach with AI, Learn with AI, Think with AI, Lead with AI, and Build with AI. The first four are live. The fifth comes later.
Most schools can tell you what their policy says. Very few can tell you what is actually happening in rooms. That is the gap this is designed to close. More soon.
What I'm thinking
For years, the bottleneck in lesson planning was time. AI has, genuinely, addressed that. The execution layer has become cheaper. Faster.
If AI handles the execution, then the teacher’s real work shifts upstream. Into the design layer: knowing what this group of students needs right now, which misconception is doing the most damage, how to sequence a starter that meets four different entry points without losing the room. That is the work that cannot be automated.
If you hand AI a thin brief, you get a functional lesson. If you hand it a rich one, you get something worth teaching. The prompt is not the skill. The thinking behind the prompt is the skill.
The question I have not resolved: if planning is now less about production and more about design, are we training teachers for the job that AI left behind, or for the one it opened up?
One thing worth your time
Think Again, by Adam Grant. Not the whole book, just the opening argument: the most valuable skill is not knowing how to think, but knowing when to stop and rethink what you assumed you already knew.
Grant’s case is that experience is often what makes assumptions invisible. For anyone who has planned lessons for years and is now wondering what AI just changed, the timing is right.
Closing thought
If you work in a school and want to know where your organisation sits on AI and digital literacy, the free DEEP AI Literacy Audit takes fifteen minutes.