DROPS

20 July 2026

FORMAT

Asynchronous

POSITION

05 / 05

SERIES

AI + Practice

01

THE CURRENT

What discussion usually looks like by week six.

You designed a great Socratic seminar. The five strong students sat at the inner circle, the rest of the class watched, and the conversation was thoughtful. You felt good about it, until you graded the participation rubric and realized you had assessed the same five kids that always get assessed for discussion. The other twenty performed their attendance, and you did not know what any of them had thought.

By week six, "discussion" in your classroom has quietly become the rotation of voices that were always going to volunteer.

The work this workshop addresses is designing discussion structures that ask every student to do the thinking, not just the five who like to talk.

02

THE REFRAME

Discussion as the structure that makes the thinking happen.

When discussion works, every student in the room is doing cognitive work, even the ones not speaking. The deliverable is a discussion architecture where the structure of the conversation requires thinking from everyone, not just airtime from a few. The teacher's pedagogy decides what kind of thinking the discussion is building toward.

AI's default failure on discussion is generating discussion questions. Fluent prompts, plausible, often well-phrased, and almost always structured for the same five kids to answer. The questions are not the architecture.

What AI can do with your pedagogy underneath is help design the architecture itself, the structure of who thinks about what, in what order, with what evidence, in response to what. The design happens with your knowledge of your students in the lead. AI handles the structural calculus that would otherwise eat the planning period.

03

BY AUGUST

What you walk into the year with.

You have a discussion architecture that asks every student in the room to think. You know what kinds of cognitive work each discussion structure is doing, what variation across discussion types fits your texts, and how the pattern of discussion design across the year is teaching students to think in conversation with other readers.

You also have an AI that knows your discussion pedagogy. Not a generic question generator. An assistant that knows what kind of thinking you want the discussion to build, what your texts ask of student readers, and what structural variation fits your classroom. The articulation work you did in the workshop becomes context the AI carries every time you sit down to plan a discussion.

04

INSIDE

The design work and what supports it.

You get audio that works through the pedagogy underneath discussion, where most discussion systems break down, and the reframe the rest of the workshop builds on. A structured prompt set walks you through the design work, with each prompt scaffolding a stage of the system you are building. Walkthroughs show how the pieces come together so you can see the design moves in action. You also build tools along the way that hold the architecture of your design and let you see whether the system is doing the teaching work you designed it to do.

The workshop does not stop at the drop. As you start implementing and questions come up, you send them my way, and I answer them in audio form on a private podcast feed that goes only to workshop buyers. The feed stays in your library alongside the rest of the kit.

Part of the workshop is teaching you to get AI output you actually want to use. That happens by helping your AI understand what you value about discussion, including your pedagogy, your standards, and the way you think about this practice. The AI then functions as a specialized assistant for this work rather than a generic one. The same articulation work transfers to any other practice you want to train AI for after this workshop.

You will work across Gemini, NotebookLM, and Claude or ChatGPT, with a curated research base underneath the design work.

05

FOR MEMBERS

Take the discussion work further into the year.

Inside Teaching for Today, the discussion work extends past the workshop into your year-long workflow. Membership infrastructure tracks what kinds of thinking each student has been asked to do in discussion across the year, where the architecture surfaces some voices and not others, and where the design might need adjustment. The same infrastructure runs the student-facing communication that helps each student see the kind of thinker they are becoming in discussion.

06

TAKE IT

Take this workshop, or take it inside a bundle.

This workshop runs $49 on its own. If you are thinking about more than one, the bundle options on the series page give a per-workshop discount that grows the further you go. The System Pair runs $89. The Responsive Trio runs $129. The full five-workshop series runs $199.

07

WHO IT IS FOR

This workshop was built for and by English teachers. The discussion design assumes the work students do involves discussing literature, argument, evidence, interpretation, and that the thinking you want them doing in discussion is the kind of thinking that grows readers.

A serious second-year English teacher belongs here. A veteran biology teacher does not.