AI is reshaping education, threatening critical thinking through cognitive offloading. Teachers must redesign tasks to embed iterative thinking, from planning and prompting to evaluating and defending, ensuring students engage deeply with AI rather than surrender their thinking to it. The goal is not to restrict AI but to reposition it as a tool that supports but never replaces student thinking.
AI has forced educators to deal with a true paradigm shift in both teaching and student learning. This has led teachers to reconsider the idea that they need to purposefully integrate “thinking” into their tasks, lesson plans, and assignments, fearing that using AI would lead to completely sidestepping the need to have students think critically.
In fact, learners can simply prompt a tool and AI will produce readymade arguments and research. This cognitive offloading is alarming and its negative impact goes beyond breaking the rules of academic integrity that academic institutions work very hard to uphold. Needless to say, students’ ability to argue, debate, reason, and problem solve has not only diminished, but is also becoming a practice of the past. Students are content with their ability to simply ‘parrot’ what AI spouts out, ignoring its hallucinations, bias, and errors.
There is a negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities. This student misuse and in some cases over-use of AI tools makes them vulnerable to its drawbacks (Gerlich, 2025). To address this, teachers need to redesign tasks to embed student thinking as an integral, foundational component of language learning. Moving away from product to process, teachers must require students to think and plan before they prompt AI, critically evaluate its output, re-prompt AI to refine their work, independently produce a written essay or reflection, and defend their choices and the process. This multi-step scenario of iterative thinking and analysis integrates critical thinking into any task, for any skill, and it ensures that thinking is at the center of any AI collaborative task. AI is no longer a replacement for thinking.
This session challenges the growing assumption that integrating AI into teaching and learning is done at the expense of student thinking. The solution is for teachers to design tasks that make it impossible to complete tasks without deep thinking and analysis. The presenter shares practical, classroom-tested tasks for embedding thinking into daily classroom tasks. AI access is not restricted; it is merely repositioned to its correct role as an aid during the human thinking process. Requiring brain dumps before students prompt AI, annotating AI output, fact-checking AI answers, and requiring students to ‘think aloud’ their reasoning are some suggested strategies (Zheng et al., 2025).
Hence, the teacher’s role is pivotal in designing tasks which do not allow students to ‘outsource’ their thinking to AI. Participants will leave the session with a checklist of suggestions for redesigning their existing formative assessments, which can be applied to any subject area or level. The goal is not to restrict AI use but to ensure the classroom remains a space where thinking is of paramount importance. When teachers design tasks with this purpose in mind, AI becomes what it should have always been simply a tool. It should not replace student thinking.
References
- Gerlich, M. (2025). AI tools in society: Impacts on cognitive offloading and the future of critical thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006
- Zheng, L., He, A., Qi, C., Zhang, H., & Gu, X. (2025). Cognitive echo: Enhancing think-aloud protocols with LLM-based simulated students. British Journal of Educational Technology, 56(5), 2019–2042. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13590
Audience Takeaways:
- Moving from product to process is the defining shift teachers must make
- A ready-to-use task redesign checklist for converting existing formative assessments into thinking-centered, AI-integrated activities applicable across subjects and levels
- A multi-step iterative task model, plan, prompt, evaluate, re-prompt, write, defend, ready to adapt for any skill or assignment type
