Designing for Reach: Seven Levers and the Student Alone with AI

<p>Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can supply the distilled product of reasoning without the thinking, and a moment that matters is one no teacher can see: the student alone at night and stuck, with the machine one tab away. This paper proposes seven course-design levers through which a teacher shapes the environment in which students decide what to do with a machine that answers. None of the levers are new, and none are specific to AI. What the framework adds is the question of Reach, or which lever settings remain in force in that unsupervised moment, where nearly all free choice about AI is exercised. Three classroom configurations illustrate the levers set coherently in pursuit of different aims, and a mapping to Schoenfeld’s Teaching for Robust Understanding dimensions shows the same levers can describe environments for thinking, with or without the machine.</p>