# High school workbench guide

Read [Learning to Exercise Judgment](https://judgmentlab.net/?audience=k12#k12-essay), the full companion edition for this setting. Its text is included in the matching site-generated Design context. Use the original officer essay for comparisons with PME.


Status: Proposed high-school adaptation — awaiting teacher trials and classroom evidence. Younger-grade adaptations remain pending.

Students direct AI toward a question they own, check it against sources, and defend the standard they chose.

## Readiness and responsibility

For the history example, check that students can source a document: who wrote it, when, and why. Check this in the unaided first step, teach sourcing there when it is missing, then continue. Offer spoken, written, visual, or other accessible ways to explain. For a different subject, agree its prerequisites and response options with the teacher first.

Students own the standard their argument uses and the claims in it. Teachers own the documents, the prompt, and grading; schools own tool access, privacy, and safeguarding. Student AI accounts are not assumed; students can write the prompts and checks for the teacher to run.

## Worked teaching example

### Was the New Deal a success?

This is an authored design example built on real, cited sources; the AI output is constructed for practice, not a captured model response or a classroom result. Offer it as an optional starting point; the educator may supply a different task.

A US History class answers "Was the New Deal a success?" from a teacher-supplied document packet. The constructed AI essay accurately reports unemployment of about 25% in 1933, 14% in 1937, and 19% in 1938, credits lasting programs such as Social Security, and concludes that the New Deal was mixed but largely successful. Its frame 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; historians dispute how much race drove the exclusion.

### Interactive sequence

1. Before AI enters, ask students to read two documents and write what standard of success they would use and why. Then have students direct AI to speak as assigned perspectives, such as a 1936 autoworker, a sharecropper, and a business owner, check each claim against the packet, and record which claims they kept.
2. Ask one question at a time and wait. Show the constructed misframed answer after the learner's own frame and AI-directing step; let the educator accept, check, revise, or refuse with reasons. Provide assistance when requested and record it.
3. Ask whether the school's phone policy is a success. Look for students who ask "success by what standard, and for whom?" without prompting.
4. Save the student's first standard, one AI claim kept and how it was checked, one thrown out, the diagnosis of the AI essay's standard, the phone-policy response, and the teacher's next instructional step.

## Reference matrix

These are proposed practices for this setting. Choose by learning objective and task readiness. The six phases are a design lens, not a validated developmental sequence; later phases are not automatically better.

| Practice | Learner | Educator | Institution |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Ask | State a standard of success before asking AI anything. | Supply the prompt and documents; leave the standard open. | Set age-appropriate access; no individual AI account is assumed. |
| Understand | Source the documents: who wrote each, when, and why. | Teach sourcing inside the first step when it is missing. | Provide accessible materials and ordinary learning supports. |
| Produce | Write perspectives and questions for AI; check each claim against the packet. | Model one perspective and one check on a shared screen first. | Define permitted assistance; teacher-run AI is sufficient. |
| Judge | Name the standard hidden in the AI essay and defend a revised argument. | Grade the defended argument, not the verdict. | Support evidence of reasoning, not automatic AI scores. |
| Codify | With guidance, write a short check: success by what standard, and for whom? | Test the check on the phone-policy case. | Share teacher-reviewed examples, including cases where the model was right. |
| Supervise | Optionally run a teacher-led evaluator loop with several assigned perspectives. | Retain control of tool actions; stop to teach when sourcing is missing. | Adults retain permissions, safeguarding, and institutional decisions. |

## Evidence needed before broader use

Teachers first do the assignment themselves, then try it with one class after a social studies colleague reviews the documents and the Social Security passage. A colleague who teaches the same course reviews a handful of responses. Track which step revealed reasoning the essay alone did not, and preparation and review time.

Record the setting, subject, task, participants’ roles, support, observed evidence, reviewer disagreement, and limits. Evidence from one audience does not validate another. A software check or an educator rehearsal does not establish student learning.

Keep the essay, claims, and source spine as the original argument and evidence. These examples are teaching proposals derived from the shared method; they add no claim of demonstrated effectiveness. Jev remains a separate evaluation workstream.