Welcome to Prompt & Response: AI and education news worth thinking about. Join 2,000+ readers by subscribing below:
In this edition
Singapore school wins by giving teachers permission to experiment with AI
NJ student built an AI tool to counter AI cheating
Stanford study reports 84% of teachers use one chatbot for everything
Writing professor makes the case for ‘struggle’ before AI
Singapore school wins by giving teachers permission to experiment with AI
Singapore’s Ministry of Education recently published a fascinating look inside Temasek Junior College and how its teachers are embracing AI. The secret isn’t the tools. It’s the culture. Instead of rolling out expensive software, TJC’s leadership created structured opportunities for teachers to experiment with AI, share what they learned, and build on each other’s discoveries. A Language Arts teacher built a chatbot called PEELuminator that sparred with students on their essay arguments, freeing her up to focus on higher-order feedback. A physics teacher figured out how to build interactive simulations by describing what he wanted to AI, then shared his prompting methods with economics teachers, who were soon building supply-and-demand curve simulations the same way. The culture spread to students too, who started Hack Club, a student group that runs AI prompting and coding workshops.
Sponsored by Legend.org -- The AI assistant built for the world’s best teachers. Personalized insights, longitudinal student analytics, and visibility into what to focus on next.
NJ student built an AI tool to counter AI cheating
Last week, a New Jersey-based 10th grader named Aryan Saksena won a national AI entrepreneurship competition at Stevens Institute of Technology. His entry: GradeLift, a rubric-aligned revision coach that gives students structured feedback on their essays without writing a single word for them. He built it from scratch without any prior coding background. This story is interesting on multiple levels. A student used AI to build a tool that combats other students using AI to cheat. And in doing so, he demonstrated exactly what using these tools well actually looks like: building something, not outsourcing your thinking.
Stanford study reports 84% of teachers use one chatbot for everything
A research brief published this week by Stanford's SCALE Initiative analyzed 150,000 de-identified prompts on SchoolAI from over 4,000 teachers. One interesting finding: among teachers who used more than one chat thread, 84% stuck to a single general-purpose chatbot rather than reaching for specialized tools like the Essay Grading Assistant or Research Assistant. Worth noting that the study is just on SchoolAI, a general, multi-purpose AI platform, so this likely understates how specialized "one-job" tools perform in the wild. That said, it makes sense. A general chatbot bends to whatever you need, and that flexibility is hard to beat. But my bet is specialized tools will have their moment. When a tool is purpose-built for one job, it can go deeper: better context, better outputs, better workflow. The specialized tools just have to earn it. Not by slapping an "AI lesson planning" label on a form, but by being genuinely 5x better at that one thing.
Writing professor makes the case for ‘struggle’ before AI
A piece published in The Conversation by Babson College writing professor Kristi Girdharry makes a simple but underappreciated argument: students can't develop good judgment about AI until they know what their own thinking feels like without it. She cites a late 2024 study in the British Journal of Educational Technology that found students who used AI for essays saw short-term score improvements but no actual knowledge gains. They also grew more reliant on the tool over time, losing the ability to monitor their own thinking and stay meaningfully engaged in the work. Her classroom response is a comparison exercise: students write an assignment with AI and without it, then put both versions side-by-side and explain what changed. The goal isn't to steer students away from AI. It's to build enough self-awareness that they can actually evaluate it: where it speeds things up without costing anything, and where leaning on it means skipping the thinking that was the whole point. That kind of discernment, she argues, only develops if students have spent real time in the ‘struggle’ first.
Thanks for reading. If you come across a story worth covering or something interesting happening in your school, reply and let me know to be featured in the next one!
- Matt