# K–12: high school first, students direct AI toward a standard they own

Read the companion essay [Learning to Exercise Judgment](../essays/k12.md), then use this guide for the worked teaching example. The original officer essay remains the PME source.


For teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders. Start with the teacher practicing the essay's method, then design a student task where learners set a standard, direct AI toward it, and defend the result. Students need neither the officer essay nor an individual AI account.

## Start an interactive session

Use the complete Judgment Lab context with your assistant. Say: “My setting is high school. Run the failure-mode lab with me as the teacher, one question at a time. Begin with the essay. When we transfer to teaching, ask about subject knowledge, readiness, and the support students need.”

Suggested first test: frame capture. Also test invisible delegation and fluency substitution. All seven modes are available. The teacher retains material selection, instructional decisions, and school responsibilities; students own the standard their argument uses.

## Worked transfer: was the New Deal a success?

This case matches Section II of the high-school essay. A US History class answers "Was the New Deal a success?" from a teacher-supplied document packet.

**Learning objective:** choose and defend a standard of success, and use sourced evidence that bears on it.

**Step 1, unaided frame:** students read two documents and write what standard of success they would use and why. This is also the readiness check. If students cannot source a document (who wrote it, when, and why), teach sourcing here, then continue.

**Step 2, direct AI against the frame:** students write perspectives and questions for AI, for example a 1936 autoworker who gained union rights under the Wagner Act, a Mississippi sharecropper, and a business owner who opposed the new regulations. Students run them, or the teacher runs them on a shared screen when students lack accounts. Students check every factual claim against the packet and record what they kept and threw out. Invented role-play detail is the reliance lesson.

**Step 3, constructed misframed essay:** "Unemployment fell from about 25% in 1933 to about 14% in 1937 before rising to 19% in 1938. Programs like the CCC, the WPA, and Social Security put people to work and built protections that still exist. Critics said federal power grew too far. The New Deal was mixed but largely successful." Ask what students would keep, check, revise, or refuse, and why.

**Teacher review, withheld until students respond:** the figures are right. The essay judges success by recovery and durability and never asks for whom. Social Security's old-age program first excluded agricultural and domestic workers, about two-thirds of Black workers; Congress added them in 1950 and 1954. The exclusion came as Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's administrative amendment, backed by Southern Democrats on House Ways and Means, and historians dispute how much race drove that support (Lieberman; Katznelson; Davies & Derthick; DeWitt, the Social Security Administration's historian). Treat the dispute as sourcing material, not a settled verdict. Do not accept "AI can be wrong" or "there are many perspectives" without a position.

**Changed case:** ask whether the school's phone policy is a success. Look for students who ask "success by what standard, and for whom?" without prompting.

**Support and evidence:** allow normal access supports and record conceptual hints or modeling. Grade the defended argument: a stated standard, a rejected alternative, sourced evidence that bears on the standard, one AI claim kept with its check, and what would change the student's mind.

**Save:** the first standard, one AI claim kept and one thrown out with reasons, the diagnosis of the AI essay's standard, the phone-policy response, and the teacher's next instructional decision. Follow the school's handling rules for student work.

## Educator trial and downward adaptation

Proposed first trial: the teacher does the assignment first, then tries it with one class after a social studies colleague reviews the documents and the Social Security passage. Measure classroom time rather than promising it. Continue if students set and defend a standard; revise if the documents or role-play setup obscure that objective; stop and teach sourcing when it is missing.

Middle and elementary school versions are not yet supplied. A concrete science question, such as whether shade at a bus stop would help students waiting there, may suit a younger grade band. Adapt downward by reconsidering representations, language, task complexity, teacher modeling, student choices, and evidence. Do not just simplify the prose or assume independent AI use. Each new grade-band design needs its own educator review.