DROPS

29 June 2026

FORMAT

Asynchronous

POSITION

02 / 05

SERIES

AI + Practice

01

THE CURRENT

What re-reading usually does to your week.

Test season hits and you spend a week reviewing the units already taught. Students re-read passages, re-watch videos, redo old worksheets. They report feeling prepared. The test arrives, and the kids who paid attention the first time do well, and the kids who did not, do not learn from the review.

Whatever was supposed to stick across the semester did not have any practice sticking. Familiarity reads as knowing, which is why re-reading feels productive while building so little.

The work this workshop addresses is designing the retrieval architecture that makes the learning stick the first time, not the review that pretends it stuck the tenth.

02

THE REFRAME

Retrieval as the rhythm of reading itself.

When retrieval works, it functions as a reading instrument. Students keep coming back to the analytical moves they were taught, across texts, across months, across the year, and the act of bringing the work back to mind sharpens their reading. The deliverable is the rhythm: which moves get retrieved when, attached to what reading, in what mode. The teacher's pedagogy decides what is worth keeping retrievable. AI sits underneath, holding the year-long architecture and helping calibrate the cadence.

AI's default failure here is generating review quizzes. Fluent question stems, plausible distractors, no pedagogy about what the questions are doing. Hand the kids a generic quiz and you have outsourced the part that was supposed to be teaching them to read for what matters.

AI's useful role is the operational map. It holds the architecture, which retrieval moments happen when, what each one is meant to reinforce, and how the pattern across the year matches the analytical work you have been building. The design happens with your pedagogy in the lead. AI handles the cadence calculus you would otherwise lose to the to-do list.

03

BY AUGUST

What you walk into the year with.

You have a retrieval architecture that runs across the year. You know what students should be able to bring back, when, attached to what reading. The retrieval moments are designed into how you teach reading, not bolted onto test prep at the end.

You also have an AI that knows your retrieval pedagogy. Not a generic quiz generator. An assistant that knows what your students are being taught to retrieve and why: the analytical moves, the conceptual through-lines, the across-text patterns you are building. The articulation work you did in the workshop becomes context the AI carries every time you sit down to plan a new retrieval moment.

04

INSIDE

The design work and what supports it.

You get audio that works through the pedagogy underneath retrieval, where most retrieval 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 retrieval, 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 retrieval work further into the year.

Inside Teaching for Today, the retrieval work extends past the workshop into your year-long workflow. Membership infrastructure tracks what each student has been asked to retrieve, how they did, and where the recall pattern is fragile. The same infrastructure runs the student-facing communication that keeps the retrieval rhythm going past the moment you set it.

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 retrieval design assumes the content students should retrieve includes analytical moves, conceptual through-lines across texts, and the kind of evidence-handling that makes English work English work. It does not assume the content is facts about books.

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