When students can instantly generate essays and solve problem sets with AI, what do traditional assignments still tell us?
Not much.
We’ve entered a new era of education—one where old signals for understanding no longer match what students actually know or how they learn. It’s not just a cheating crisis, it’s a clarity crisis.
Teachers are under pressure to evaluate deeper thinking, foster real collaboration, and personalize support, all while facing growing class sizes and fewer resources.
Students feel the disconnect, too. High-schooler William Liang wrote in EdSource that AI isn’t a shortcut born of laziness, it’s a response to schoolwork that can feel disconnected from real thinking and learning.
And he’s right: too often, our education systems are designed around how we hope students behave, not how they actually do.
Even the best-personalized AI can’t bridge the deeper gap: motivation. As Thomas Arnett of the Christensen Institute writes,
“AI can personalize learning. It can’t make students care.”
Recognition, status, and belonging don’t come from devices. They come from people. That’s because human attention is finite and that limitation drives meaning. Students work hardest when they know someone is truly listening. Without that sense of being seen, even the most adaptive tools fall flat.
We’ve seen this play out before. Social media promised connection and community, but instead left many adolescents feeling more anxious and alone—a trend explored in depth by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation. If we’re not careful, AI risks repeating the same pattern in education.
What Real Learning Still Looks Like
Over the past few months, we’ve spoken with dozens of teachers, learning scientists, and school leaders.
One truth keeps surfacing: the most meaningful learning doesn’t happen in isolation, it happens through conversation.
Even research from MIT Media Lab’s Your Brain on ChatGPT project suggests that when students lean too heavily on AI, they become less cognitively active than when they think for themselves.
Real learning is messy and social. It emerges in small-group discussions where students build on each other’s ideas, wrestle with uncertainty, and explain their reasoning aloud. These moments show us where thinking is breaking down and where it’s starting to take shape. They reveal who’s energized, who’s confused, and who’s quietly slipping through the cracks.
And as the Hechinger Report reminds us, relational intelligence—the ability to collaborate, build trust, and connect—isn’t a soft skill. It’s a survival skill for the age of AI.
But in busy classrooms, teachers can’t be everywhere at once. The most valuable learning often happens just out of earshot.
That’s the gap we’re working to close.
Introducing ClassWaves
Today, I’m thrilled to share what we’ve been building: ClassWaves, a new AI-powered tool that helps teachers see and support student thinking as it happens.
It listens to small-group discussions and surfaces insights aligned to your learning goals so you can:
Catch misconceptions early
Spot which groups are off track
See how students are reasoning and collaborating
Personalize support without isolating learners
It’s screen-free for students, privacy-first by design, and built to save teachers time.
No student logins. No recordings. FERPA-safe from day one.
But it’s more than a dashboard.
It helps teachers connect conversation to curriculum goals, identify trends over time, and reduce the invisible labor of evaluating student thinking. These insights can support more personalized, adaptive instruction without adding more to a teacher’s plate.
One teacher put it simply: strong group work means every student plays a meaningful role. ClassWaves supports this kind of engagement with suggested prompts, role ideas, and structures that help drive deeper learning through dialogue.
Join the ClassWaves Founding Cohort
Early sign-ups will receive:
Free access through the pilot and into the school year, with optional subscriptions available later for individuals or districts
Recognition as a contributing educator in our founding cohort
The chance to help shape the future of the product based on your real classroom needs
Please share with any teachers or school leaders in your network.
Let’s build this together.
