Critical Thinking

Building Cards from Sources. Give students 2–3 articles on one of the topics — job displacement, autonomous weapons, surveillance, AI personhood — and have them produce 5 cards. They choose the tags, select the passages, decide what to underline. This forces them to read the full articles and make judgment calls about what matters.

Card vs. Card. Pair students up. One has cards arguing AI job displacement will be catastrophic; the other has cards arguing new jobs will emerge. They have to respond to each other’s specific evidence, not just assert opinions. This teaches that disagreement lives in the evidence, not in volume.

Find the Weak Card. Give students a set of 10 cards on a topic where 2–3 have weak sources, outdated citations, or tags that overstate what the evidence actually says. Students have to identify which cards they’d cut from their file and explain why. This builds source evaluation skills without a lecture on “media literacy.”

Tag Rewriting. Provide cards with the body and citation but no tag. Students write their own. Then compare — did different students read the same passage and frame the argument differently? This surfaces how framing shapes persuasion even when the evidence is identical.

Build the File. Assign a topic — say, mass surveillance and AI — and have students build a 15-card file over two weeks. They need cards on both sides. At the end, they write a one-page assessment of which side has stronger evidence and why. The constraint of finding evidence for both sides prevents the assignment from becoming a book report that confirms what they already believe.

The Missing Question. Give students your list of ignored topics (job loss, surveillance, autonomous weapons, AI rights, schools ignoring the new world). Have them pick one, build 5 cards, and then write a one-paragraph argument for why their school’s curriculum should address it. This turns the meta-argument from your article into something students own.

Update the Card. Give students a card from 2023 and ask them to find a more recent source that either strengthens, weakens, or overtakes the original evidence. This teaches that evidence has a shelf life — especially in AI, where six months can be a lifetime.

The Oral Drill. Students pick their three strongest cards on a topic and deliver them aloud in 90 seconds — reading only the tag and underlined portions. Listeners have to identify the core claim from what was read. This builds both public speaking and listening comprehension under pressure.

Coburn says that natural intelligence is a good place to start in combatting the artificial version. “You have to be able to put what you’re looking at through a critical thinking process, ask questions, and find the source and firsthand information about what you're trying to understand,” she says.

“It's really important for educators and students alike that those information literacy and critical thinking skills that you have are all the more important now,” agrees Nemeroff.

Both Coburn and Nemeroff suggest that librarians, media specialists, and those at your school who teach media literacy need to be on the front lines in the battle against AI slop.

Students who've learned dialogic engagement with AI behave completely differently. They ask follow-up questions during class discussions. They can explain their reasoning when challenged. They challenge each other's arguments using evidence they personally evaluated. They identify limitations in their own conclusions. They want to keep investigating beyond the assignment requirements.

The difference is how they used it.

This means approaching every AI interaction as a sustained interrogation. Instead of "write an analysis of symbolism in The Great Gatsby," students must "generate an AI analysis first, then critique what it missed with their own interpretations of the symbolism. “What assumptions does the AI make in its interpretation and how could it be wrong?" “What would a 20th-century historian say about this approach?” “Can you see these themes present in The Great Gatsby in your own life?”

Using AI effectively should still take considerable time as you interrogate, correct, and modify outputs. You're engaging in what feels like human dialogue, a back-and-forth dance where you bring expertise and the AI brings information processing.