The Engaging Teacher

A shift is happening in how we understand evidence of learning. This piece explores why—and what it requires of us as designers.

The Work Has Stopped Proving the Thinking

And once you notice it, it’s difficult to unsee.

Sometimes the work looks better than the thinking ever was.

When the Artifact Made Sense

For a long time, we treated student work as evidence of thinking. In many ways, that assumption made sense. When producing the work required sustained effort—drafting, revising, organizing, articulating—it was reasonable to infer that thinking had taken place. The artifact stood in for the process. For a time, it was a workable proxy.

But proxies are only as reliable as the conditions that support them.

And those conditions have changed.

What Changed (and Why It Matters)

Students can now generate, simulate, and assemble work that resembles thinking—often fluently, often convincingly—without engaging deeply with the ideas behind it. Not always. But often enough to matter. And at scale.

So something subtle, but significant, has shifted. Suddenly, something feels off.

The answer is there. The reasoning is harder to find.

We’ve all felt it—even if we couldn’t quite name it.

This Isn’t New—But It Is Different

This isn’t because educators ignored thinking before—we’ve been chasing it for years. Rubrics tried to name it. Reflections tried to capture it. Office hours tried to surface it. Educators have long worked to make thinking visible—through drafts, reflections, conferences, annotations, and process-based assessment.

But these efforts were often layered around the artifact—periodic, interpretive, and sometimes indirect.

What has changed is not the existence of these practices, but the conditions under which they operate.

The gap between artifact and reasoning has widened. At the same time, the limitations of the artifact have become harder to ignore.

And so, the reliability of student work as a proxy for thinking has diminished, requiring more intentional design for visible reasoning.

The proxy didn’t disappear. It just got exposed.

The Question Needs to Change

Which means we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Not: Can we detect AI?

But:

Where is the student’s thinking made visible?

Where did they make a meaningful choice?
What did they prioritize—and what did they leave behind?
How did they respond when something didn’t work?
What alternatives did they consider—and why?

These are not new questions.

But they are newly urgent.

This Is Not a Policing Problem

This moment is often framed as a threat to academic integrity or rigor.

It’s tempting to treat this as a policing problem.

It may be more accurate to understand it as a stress test of our assessment systems.

Because if the artifact can be produced without the thinking, then the artifact alone can no longer serve as sufficient evidence of learning.

Designing for Visibility

And that realization, while uncomfortable, is also clarifying.

It invites us to design more intentionally for visibility—not only at the end of learning, but before, during, and after. To treat judgment, decision-making, and revision not as hidden processes, but as central outcomes. To move, more deliberately, toward metacognitive, judgment-centered learning.

Some of this work is already underway. Across classrooms and course designs, we see growing efforts to structure for visible thinking—not just in what students produce, but in how they decide, revise, and reflect. Small frameworks that ask students to surface their selection, intent, generation, negotiation, analysis, and learning—or to compare, explain, challenge, and defend their thinking—begin to shift the focus from product to process.

Not as add-ons, but as design principles.

What This Requires of Us

Visibility is no longer optional. It’s structural.

Because if the work no longer proves the thinking, then our assignments need to.

Judgment-Centered Design Resources

Several practical tools and examples—including SIGNAL and judgment-centered assignment templates—are available throughout this site for those looking to implement these ideas.

Want to try this in your own course?

Use the prompts below to quickly redesign an existing assignment:

• What options will students compare before deciding?
• What decision will they need to justify?
• Where will they explain their reasoning?
• Where will they evaluate strengths or limitations?
• Where will they reflect on how their thinking changed?

Even adding one or two of these elements can shift an assignment from product-focused to thinking-visible.

Download Signal Assignment Starter Kit

A lightweight set of prompts for making student thinking visible during the learning process—before, during, and after the work

Download The DECIDE Framework Assignment Design Tool

A practical design guide for building assignments that surface student judgment, decision-making, and reasoning—not just final products.

Download The DECIDE Framework Worked Example

A complete example showing how a traditional assignment can be redesigned to make student thinking visible at each stage of the task.

Continue Exploring

See also: The SIGNAL Framework: Designing for Visible Thinking in the AI Era

See also: Judgment Centered Design- Applied use of DECIDE

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Originally published March 2026

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