How Should Teachers Use AI Without Killing Critical Thinking?

AI makes students faster. The harder question is whether it's making them better thinkers, and Hunter Hickman, district AI implementation leader at Rensselaer Central Schools in Indiana, is one of the few educators actually building systems to answer that.

Hunter is part of the Indiana Department of Education advisory group designing the state's first tiered AI certification for teachers. He ran the 9-12 Khanmigo rollout at his school with a 92% student activation rate. In this conversation, he and Jason unpack where the "AI is cheating" debate has gone quiet and what's replaced it: cognitive offloading, the difference between augmentation and automation, and why rewarding the final product over the learning process is the thing that's actually broken.

Key topics covered:

• Indiana's tiered AI teacher certification program and what makes it different from typical micro-credentials
• Cognitive offloading: where the line is between speeding up work and eroding your own thinking
• Why AI is not like a calculator (and why that analogy keeps causing problems in schools)
• How a 415-student rural district used NotebookLM to keep students in the learning loop
• What it means to be an AI power user with zero computer science background
• Khanmigo vs. general LLM fluency: why ed-tech tools alone aren't enough
• The case for assessing student process, not just the final product
• Anthropic vs. OpenAI in the classroom, and the social media regulation conversation

Hunter also shares how leaning into AI as a teacher opened doors he didn't see coming: speaking at state conferences, serving on the IDOE advisory committee, and launching Hickman Consulting LLC.

About Hunter Hickman: Secondary English educator, district AI implementation leader, and founder of Hickman Consulting LLC. Based in Northwest Indiana. Completing an M.S. in English Education at Indiana Wesleyan University with research on generative AI feedback loops and student writing autonomy.Website: https://www.hickmanconsultingai.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunter-hickman-m-s-2b501383/

Work with Jason:

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