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by Alex McMillan

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This is where I talk with educators about how we bring AI into our schools intentionally. I also record voice-overs of my articles, so you can listen to the whole project while you're walking, commuting, or making coffee. <a href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com?utm_medium=podcast">aienhancedprocesses.com</a>

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June 1, 2026

Transparency in the Process

I’m closing out the school year by slowing down to actually look back and make sense of what happened. It’s a metacognitive act that I, for one, could certainly do more of.In this article, I’m inviting a few guests from the podcast episode “How Did It Actually Go?” (link below) to guest-write an article. Each of them agreed to go a little deeper in writing, reflecting on how process-based learning with AI actually played out in their schools.In this article, Leon Lam reflects on building an AI chatbot for process-based learning and what he’d do differently next time. Reflecting back, what he found is at the center of this piece, so I won’t spoil it. But here’s a takeaway I want to reinforce: he assumed students would follow the process without ever explaining why. A process that remains invisible asks students to comply rather than learn. Adolescents need both to understand why we do something and how it helps them grow.Let’s check in with Leon to hear his thoughts.IntroLeon Lam here, guest posting on Alex’s Substack. This will be an extension of what I discussed on the podcast episode <a target="_blank" href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com/p/how-did-it-actually-go">“How Did It Actually Go</a>?” I want to dive deeper into what I learned building an AI chatbot for process-based learning, and what I would do differently next time.A lot of teachers use custom chatbots in their classrooms. I went a step further and built an entire platform for creating custom chatbots, mostly for analytics and data. I wanted to know whether or not the AI chatbots were making an impact. My hope is that what I learned can help you decide whether to invite an AI tutor into your classroom or to keep it outside.What I BuiltAs mentioned in the podcast episode, my Socratic essay-writing bot coached students through Cambridge AS Economics 12-mark essays. It was structured around stages: question analysis, planning, and paragraph coaching.In my bot, Alex’s Think, Generate, Edit process was built into each stage. Students had to think through the questions the AI gave, craft their own responses, which the AI gave feedback on according to preset criteria, and then they had to edit their work until it matched the criteria. The stages were important because they allowed students to plan first instead of jumping into the writing immediately.What I ObservedI categorized student behavior into three patterns. The first group of students spent hours with the bot. They exchanged hundreds of messages. They followed the bot’s strictly enforced reply format. They complied with it for as long as it took to complete the essay on the platform. It looked like they were fully engaged, but upon deeper digging, I discovered that the chatbot I made was needlessly ruthless, and that the learning could’ve happened much more quickly <a target="_blank" href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com/p/genai-didnt-break-the-project-speed">if I had built in human touchpoints</a> or relaxed the restrictions. Students had reported how cumbersome it was to get the exact answer the AI wanted.The second group of students tried to game it for answers. The bot was designed to ask them questions, so they worked at getting around that. These students weren’t really learning anything. They tried <a target="_blank" href="https://openai.com/index/prompt-injections/">prompt injection</a>, off-topic detours, anything to extract an answer. They mostly failed, but time was wasted on trying to manipulate an AI instead of learning.The third group of students did not engage with it at all. That was just not how they wanted to learn. In the end, the bot was just a chat interface. They wanted a teacher, and I saw their eyes light up when I took back the reins in the classroom.Performance on summative assessments did not change since using the bot, either. Students who did well before continued to do well. Students who struggled before kept struggling. What did change was my ability to see the process. I could zoom in on student artifacts and query the data with an LLM, and that visibility was genuinely useful. So in that way, you might say the bot served as an assessment, which provided data that in many ways reinforced what I already knew about the students.I suspect the issues came from two main reasons:* I did not name the thinking processes out loud with the students. I built it into the bot and assumed they would just follow along. Thinking back, I should have made them aware of the process so they know why I chose to set up the assignment this way. My thinking is that it would help the hacker group and the disengaged group to want to use the bot meaningfully.* I removed too much of myself from the process. In theory, the assignment should have worked. In practice, my students handed the entire feedback process over to an AI, and the efficiency I was chasing became the flaw. Aimée had named it before I did. <a target="_blank" href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com/p/how-did-it-actually-go">She’d been a guest on the same podcast</a>; when I heard her portion of the episode, <a target="_blank" href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com/p/genai-didnt-break-the-project-speed">her idea of “gates”</a> mapped exactly onto what I’d been considering ever since I put the bot in front of students.What I would do differentlyI do believe that process-based learning is the way to go in the age of AI, but my next iteration of this assignment will definitely be different. Here’s how I will pivot moving forward:I will reinsert myself in the feedback loop. AI should not give feedback on its own, no matter how well it is trained. Giving feedback to students is what builds trust and rapport; that’s the teacher’s job. There’s still a real role for AI, though. An AI can be trained to spot specific writing weaknesses and tag them to feedback I’ve already written, or to extend a comment of mine by pointing to a resource. The condition is that everything passes under my eyes before it reaches the student. The main point is that AI-use should reinforce things that we are learning and want to support in class.I’m going to teach the process out loud. I will explicitly teach my students Think, Generate, Edit, and other processes, or co-create a process with them in class that suits the task. This time, they got a tool that already knew the answer to that question, and they were left to comply with it. However, if I had printed our process on paper and written underneath each step where and how AI was used, and why, my students would have understood the design from the inside and hopefully have been engaged with every step.I’m changing how I grade. Because some students will focus too much on the final output, even if I ask for process artifacts, I won’t accept a finished essay unless the artifacts back it up. The artifacts will be graded, too, but the bulk of the grade for the final product will be awarded only if the final output was the natural product of the process.I’m magnifying authentic, in-person assessment without neglecting AI literacy. I want students to share opinions that are actually theirs, in front of other humans, with their screens closed. That is often uncomfortable for them, and that is the point. My ideal classroom is one that maximizes original thought, critical thinking, and other capacities needed to interact effectively with AI, which I am making a focus outside of the classroom. Students will be instructed to interact with AI without my supervision. This means I will need to teach AI literacy, so my students can remain thoughtful and responsible.I’m still building, but smarter. I built a platform that made students learn through Socratic chatbots, a workflow that’s still new and unproven in their minds, piled on top of everything else they already had to do. So the next iteration starts from what students already do instead of inventing something foreign. I rewrote the entire textbook with AI for accessibility, same flow through the topics, but with simpler, more direct wording. I put MCQs inline for formative checks, and digitized over 3,500 past-paper MCQs organized by topic so students can set up their own mock tests, complete with explanations for the wrong answers. Because I own the platform, I’ll know exactly which topics a class struggled with. So I will keep building my own platform and iterate on the processes students already go through, improving their learning and my teaching at the same time.ConclusionThinking back to my own time in schooling, I don’t remember which teachers had the coolest PowerPoints or used the latest gadgets. I remember the chance to question alongside other students, the jokes, the moments of wonder and care. I miss watching students struggle through the thinking, take pride in what they made, and own their learning. With the changes I’ve shared, that’s the classroom I want to build in this AI-enabled world.Monday Ready ResourcesOne of the most important realizations from this experience is that I need to talk to students along the way about the process or even co-design it with them, as well as teach AI literacy. Here are three ways you can get started with your students to make a process or build AI literacy:1. Go to Alex’s <a target="_blank" href="https://aiep.lovable.app/">AI Enhanced Process generator</a> and take a crack at making your own process on your own or with your class.2. Take Anthropic’s free course on <a target="_blank" href="https://anthropic.skilljar.com/ai-fluency-framework-foundations">AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations</a>. This can also be done on your own or with your students.3. Use my Process-Based AI Use Scale which you can post around the room, or use with students to determine how much AI should be used in each specific step of the process.AI DisclosureI wrote this whole article, and then Claude was consulted on for wording, structure and flow. Some of Claude’s suggestions made it to the final version. Some suggestions inspired other original changes. Ultimately, the words are entirely my own and represent my opinion. Aside from the screenshots of my application, I gave ChatGPT the final version of this article, asked for image suggestions, and asked it to craft the prompt that generated the images you see in the article.Images generated by ChatGPT and Gemini. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">aienhancedprocesses.com</a>

May 24, 2026

"Gates" to Pause Processes

IntroI’m closing out the school year by slowing down to actually look back and make sense of what happened. It’s a metacognitive act that I, for one, could certainly do more of. Over the next few weeks, I’m inviting a few guests from the podcast episode “How Did It Actually Go?” to guest-write an article. Each of them agreed to go a little deeper in writing, reflecting on how process-based learning with AI actually played out in their schools. Writing is both output and thinking. Writing is the actual process of figuring out what you believe. I’ve found this idea to be true on this Substack, and I think my guests have too. There’s a depth in that kind of deliberate slowing down that I haven’t always experienced with AI-generated text. Personally, I can’t help but wonder whether that reflective habit is at risk. The world is moving fast, and every week there’s a new exciting model. Deliberate slowing could look inefficient in that context and anti-zeitgeisty.With that, I want to thank Aimée Skidmore for this week’s post, which sits at the center of this discussion. Aimée teaches Grade 12 in Geneva and thinks hard about when GenAI is in the room, how we can maintain student agency and effortful thinking, as they are prone to wanting to move too fast in the name of completion. To get students to deliberately slow down, she created something that she calls gates that serve as pauses, or deliberate moments in a thought process, where students have to show what they are actually thinking before they earn the right to move on. The idea came from the game Dungeons and Dragons, which tells you something about how Aimée thinks. She’s practical, a little playful, and genuinely curious about the tension between structure and ownership in a classroom where AI can skip the messy middle entirely.In this piece, she walks through two iterations of the same project, what she noticed between them, and the questions she’s still thinking about. The Monday-Ready resource at the end is concrete and immediately usable, with a checklist of things we can do with gates in a process.Make sure to follow Aimée on Substack. Enjoy!From AiméeWhen students use GenAI, the worry is that they’ll outsource the final product. But the bigger risk is that they outsource the messy middle: the testing, rejecting, revising, deciding, and explaining.So many of us avoid this issue by designing around GenAI. And I used to spend a lot of time wrangling with how to do this with some of my lessons and projects. Now, I spend less time doing that and more time engineering moments where students have to show what they are thinking before they move on.My Grade 12 students were working in pairs to build a chatbot to help another student practice a certain habit of mind, like persistence or thinking flexibly. I wanted them to work through a Design Thinking process of empathy, define, ideate, prototype, test. Some of these steps involved getting support from GenAI, and some were not. I wanted them to be balanced in their use of tech.Alex McMillan’s <a target="_blank" href="https://AIEP.lovable.app/">AI Enhanced Process Generator</a> was a key tool in helping me decide and communicate on which steps students might use AI to help and where I wanted them to work on their own. Full product scrolling screenshot below.At first glance, it could have looked like a dream GenAI project. Students were using AI, building something for a real purpose. They seemed to be in the flow and moving quickly. Maybe a little too quickly.I started noticing that students were at their computers, starting to build the chatbots, pretty early on. Some were even submitting the link to their final product in one class period. I felt a little panic and then decided to walk around and ask how things were going. What I found was disappointing: I couldn’t get to every student, there were some who couldn’t answer my questions about their process, and there were some who didn’t accept my suggestions to slow down and have another look at the first steps.So I went back to the drawing board to rethink the approach and rebuild it for the next cohort. How could I get them to slow down and go through all the steps of design thinking? I was trying to find out how I could get them to hand in a ‘rough draft’, like we do with essay writing, but I was more interested in checking their process than their product. I didn’t really care so much about whether the chatbot was 100% functional. It was only one small piece of the project rubric.Iterating with GatesOn my second iteration of this project, I decided to add some proficiency checkpoints: a pause and check that students have to take before they move to the next stage of the work. I called them gates because I had this image of a DnD player facing an important decision where they need to slow down, check equipment and consult with their party before going through.Here are the two I built:Here’s what happened:The pace slowed. Students appeared to be more thoughtful in their choices. They had to sit through the struggle and check their own work before asking me.The talk changed. I was able to have short conversations with each student when they called me over to sign off. Over time, our talk became less about me checking their work and more about “Tell me where you are now.” “What do you like about this tool so far?”Students started explaining choices. “What led you to that decision?” I was able to redirect them when I saw they were not thinking deeply enough and ask them some questions that made my coach’s heart flutter. “What was challenging here for you? And what else?”They noticed problems earlier. Before they handed it in, they were able to make improvements because they could see those changes would make the final product stronger. The project became less about “my chatbot works” and more about “my chatbot is designed for a real learner.”This felt like a real win. The gates did what I hoped they would do. They slowed the project down in the right places. They made the process more visible and gave students a reason to explain their choices before rushing ahead.And this is the part I’m still thinking about. I feel a tension here about how much of the process I should define for them.When I create something, I do not move through the work in a straight line. I start in one place, jump to building, get stuck, jump somewhere else, come back, revise, test, rethink, and slowly find my way through. That movement feels natural to me now, but it took years to build. Students are still learning what that kind of process feels like.So the questions I’m sitting with now are: how do we give students enough structure to support their thinking, without turning the process into another set of steps they simply complete for us? How do I avoid a heavy process that will lead to more paperwork and overfunctioning for me?Because if I build too many gates, or if every gate depends on my approval, I risk creating the very thing I’m trying to move away from: students waiting for me to tell them if they are doing it right, if they are allowed to continue.So, the next version of this project might have students deciding where the gates go. It might involve more student self-checks, more peer testing, and more room for students to say, “This is what we tried. This is what we changed. This is why we’re moving forward.”And probably more modeling from me, too. Not modeling the perfect process, but showing what it looks like to get stuck, change direction, reject an idea, return to an earlier version, and keep working. That feels important because students do not learn ownership by being dropped into total freedom. They learn it by practicing responsibility within a structure that helps them keep going.The gate is not the point. The pause is the point. And what students do inside that pause is where the learning lives. That, to me, is one of the real design challenges with GenAI in the classroom. Yes, the tool can make the work move quickly. My job is to help students slow down enough to notice what they are doing, make real choices, and stay awake inside the process.Monday-Ready ResourcesResource #1 - Checklist when Using GatesSeparate the gate from the grade. If students associate checkpoints with judgment, they’ll perform readiness rather than demonstrate it. Frame the gate as a conversation. “Walk me through your thinking” lands differently than “let me check your work.”Unpack the steps before students take them. When you introduce a process, explain why each stage exists. Human psychology is consistent on this: we do not expend effort on things that feel arbitrary. If students understand why the empathy phase comes before the prototype phase, they’re more likely to take it seriously.Use a student-facing checklist, then release some gates over time.Before students call you over, they should be able to say yes to two or three concrete criteria. This shifts the first layer of accountability to them and changes what the teacher conversation is actually for. Over time, some gates can become peer-checked or self-certified. Early on, every checkpoint might involve the teacher. Once students show they understand the process, they can take on more of the checking themselves. This builds toward ownership without dropping them into total freedom before they’re ready. You can see how I built this into Step 5. Test on the Project Worksheet. (link below)Create a process journal and build in feedback before moving on. Ask students to document their thinking at each stage before they call you over. The journal becomes evidence of the work, not just the product. A peer can respond first; the teacher becomes the second reader. You will see how I did this through a Project Worksheet. (link below)Practice the process more than once. Research on habit formation and classroom routines suggests it takes roughly three iterations before a process becomes something students internalize and implement with any real fidelity. The first run is orientation. The second is where it starts to click. The third is where it becomes routine.Go public with stuck moments. Model a process where you make a wrong choice, back up, and explain why you changed direction. Do this more than once. If the only process students ever see is the polished version, the messy middle feels like a mistake instead of a sign the work is actually happening.Resource #2 - Printable ChecklistHere’s a PDF you can print out, along with look-fors, for using a gate in your processes with students.AI DisclosureChatGPT was used to help me code some pieces for the Teacher and Student Project Brief. It also helped check the project for safeguarding issues, and gave the idea to have students think about and build in guardrails. I used it to generate the Project Rubric.Image of the gate created with ChatGPT to represent the idea of a gate: a pause where students make their thinking visible before moving on.Elements of the article leveraged AI as a supporter of language clarity, not idea generation. All conceptual content of this article was created either by Aimée or Alex, or both in partnership.The Project LinksCheck out the project here referenced in the article.* TEACHER version - <a target="_blank" href="https://buildhomassistantteacher.netlify.app/">https://buildhomassistantteacher.netlify.app/</a>* STUDENT version - <a target="_blank" href="https://buildhomassistantstudent.netlify.app/">https://buildhomassistantstudent.netlify.app/</a> This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">aienhancedprocesses.com</a>

May 17, 2026

How Did It Actually Go?

It's time to finish up the year with one last podcast episode. I decided that I wanted to have a reflection and talk to people about how process-based learning has been going inside their schools or classrooms. I talked to a range of educators and asked them several different questions, and this episode is a series of highlights from those conversations. So, over these 20 minutes, you're going to hear a series of short recordings in which we look at process-based learning with AI from several angles. Below are notes about each of the guests with links to their websites and social media. Thank you all for contributing to this episode!Aimée Skidmore | Teaching and Learning Coach | GenevaAimée works with experienced teachers who are tired of being the engine in the room. Her focus is student ownership: structures where students start, think, revise, and take responsibility without the teacher carrying it all. She appears twice in this episode. First, she describes what process-based AI use looks like from inside her classroom. In her second segment, she explains how deliberate checkpoint gates changed the outcome of a chatbot-building project.Aimée offers a six-week Student Ownership Sprint for secondary teachers. She also hosts the International Teacher Staffroom podcast.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/aimeeskidmoreeducator/">LinkedIn</a> | <a target="_blank" href="https://teachspark.mykajabi.com/Sprint2026">TeachSpark</a>Jay Goodman, Ed.D. | PBL Consultant | CanadaJay has spent nearly two decades designing problem-based learning programs. His Ed.D. focused on PBL program design. He co-developed the Innovation Institute, an award-winning interdisciplinary PBL program in Shanghai.In this episode, he describes mentor bots: teacher-designed AI personas built around specific domains of expertise. Students identify a knowledge gap, do initial research, and then bring that thinking into a structured conversation with a field-specific model. It solves a real PBL logistics problem without replacing the thinking students need to do first.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-goodman-edd/">LinkedIn</a> | <a target="_blank" href="https://www.goodmanlearning.com">Goodman Learning Partners</a>Vamshi Mugatha | Director of Technology | American School of BrasiliaVamshi brings in a leadership perspective as an admin. Vamshi describes a familiar challenge for many schools around the implementation side of a policy. What he realized was that the missing piece was expectations. When teachers weren’t setting them, students were using AI without disclosing it. The gap between the two created tension that the policy alone couldn’t resolve.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/vamshi-mugatha/">LinkedIn</a>Leon Lam | A-Level Head of Humanities | Beijing National Day SchoolLeon teaches A-Level economics and leads Humanities at Beijing National Day School. Last year, he vibe-coded a Socratic essay coaching chatbot designed to slow students down and move them through idea generation, outlining, and drafting as distinct stages. He’s candid about what happened. Some students engaged deeply. Others focused entirely on getting the chatbot to advance to the next stage, treating compliance as the goal. He reflects on what he’d do differently next time. His biggest takeaway is that co-designing a process with students can be a powerful way to make the process less performative and more purposeful in supporting their work. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonlam/">LinkedIn</a> This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">aienhancedprocesses.com</a>

17 total episodes available

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What is EdTech Lens?: This is where I talk with educators about how we bring AI into our schools intentionally. I also record voice-overs of my articles, so you can listen to the whole project while you're walking, commuting, or making coffee. <a href="https://aienhancedprocesses.com?utm_medium=podcast">aienhancedprocesses.com</a>
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