Here is a post I wrote on my LinkedIn profile regarding Punya Mishra’s ‘Who ordered that?’ I would love your thoughts and feedback and hopefully we can create an awesome soundboard of ideas 
Before We Plug It In—Let’s Talk About the Mindset Holding the Cord
I read Punya Mishra’s piece with both a nod and a pause. Yes, we should be cautious. But let’s be clear—caution does not mean fear, and hesitation does not have to mean rejection.
The call to embed AI into every corner of education—every classroom, every rubric, every contest—feels more like compliance than conviction. It’s one thing to integrate a tool. It’s another to do it without ever discussing the mindset of those entrusted to use it with children.
We can’t just hand over generative AI to a system still tangled in “sit-and-get” methods and expect magic. If we don’t first confront the why behind how we teach—if we don’t hold fierce conversations about our beliefs about learners, knowledge, and growth—then we’re not integrating a technology; we’re just layering it over broken foundations.
AI has the power to become an advocate in education, if we choose to see it that way. It can offload the tasks that dull our brilliance and free us up for the human parts of learning: dialogue, reflection, relationship, and feedback that matters. It can open doors for students to iterate rapidly, to test and refine their thinking without fear of failure or subjective feedback, to move beyond “what’s the right answer?” into “what could this become?”
But that won’t happen unless we stop treating AI as a savior or a threat—and start treating it as a catalyst.
We need to name the elephant in the room: we’re mandating AI before we’ve trained mindsets. Before we’ve even agreed on what learning should feel like in this new era. Before we’ve stopped pretending that 45-minute periods and compliance checklists foster deep learning.
What if, instead of focusing on AI-readiness, we focused on human-readiness to use AI wisely?
What if we positioned AI not as a replacement for thinking—but as a springboard back into it?
What if we taught students how to use it not just to complete assignments, but to interrogate ideas, generate perspectives, and design solutions we haven’t imagined yet?
We don’t need to reject AI. But we desperately need to rethink the system it’s being dropped into.
Because if we don’t change our mindset, it won’t matter what tool we hand our students. It’ll still be business as usual—with better grammar.
Drop your thoughts in the comments.
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