Keeping Thinking Alive: What the Classroom Still Needs

A reflection on Voices of Change — Day 2

There is a question I keep coming back to, in training rooms, in classrooms, in conversations with colleagues from Salamanca to Jakarta: how do we keep thinking alive when everything around us is designed to do the thinking for us? It is not a new question. But right now, in 2026, it has a sharper edge.

That was the question at the heart of Voices of Change — Day 2, a roundtable organised by The University Grapevine and Pro.Ed Education Solutions, hosted by Robert Stroud, Ph.D. The session — titled Keeping Thinking Alive: Engagement, AI, and the Human Classroom — brought together five panellists from five different countries for ninety minutes of honest, unhurried conversation about where education has been, where it is now, and what it must protect going forward.

I was one of those panellists. And I am still processing what was said.

You can watch the full session here https://youtu.be/umXs0Y8J5pQ?si=lHN256M6USUBZtrL

The conversation

The session moved through three arcs: attention and engagement in today’s classroom; human interaction, effort, and the pressures students carry; and finally, a look ahead to 2050 — what human qualities and classroom rituals are worth fighting to preserve.

My contribution centred on something that I feel strongly about and do not think gets enough space in conversations about AI and education: differentiation in its fullest sense.

Differentiated instruction is not only about ability levels. It is about seeing every learner whole — their cultural identity, their ethnic background, their social history, their language, their right to find themselves reflected in what happens in the classroom. A student from a marginalised community who has learnt, through years of experience, that education was not designed with them in mind — that student’s engagement cannot be solved by a smarter app.

AI adds a new dimension to this: the tools we use are not neutral. They reflect the biases of their training data. Without a teacher who already understands what genuine inclusion requires, AI will systematically centre dominant voices and erase others. The critical question to ask of any AI-generated resource is simple: whose world does this reflect?

A humanistic approach to teaching — one that places the whole person at the centre, before any method or tool — is not a soft add-on to good pedagogy. It is the foundation. And that foundation does not become less necessary in an AI-rich classroom. It becomes more necessary.

The Time Capsule

The session closed with an activity I found genuinely moving: each panellist was asked to leave a specific message for a learner in 2050. Not general advice — a real commitment. Mine:

The panellists

One of the genuine pleasures of this session was the company. Five educators, five continents, one shared conviction:

• Robert Stroud, Ph.D. — Host & Founding Editor, The University Grapevine
• Le Dinh Bao Quoc, Ed.D. — Founder & CEO, Pro.Ed Education Solutions (Vietnam)
• Luis Javier Pentón Herrera, Ph.D. — 2024 TESOL Teacher of the Year, Uniwersytet VIZJA (Poland)
• Prof. Marina Falasca — Teacher educator, STAR Scholars Country Director (Argentina)
• Fajarudin Akbar — Edtech practitioner & IELTA Ambassador (Indonesia)

Different contexts, different pressures, different classrooms — and a remarkably consistent answer to the question of what matters: the human relationship at the centre of teaching and learning is not a feature that AI can replicate or replace. It is the point.

What I am taking away

I am not anti-AI. I am pro-human. I use AI in my work, and I believe that refusing to engage with it does not protect our students — it leaves them without guidance for something they will use regardless.

But I come away from this conversation more convinced than ever that the most important thing a teacher can do in 2026 is protect the spaces that AI cannot enter: the spontaneous exchange, the productive struggle, the moment of genuine recognition between two people. The pause before an answer that is the sound of a mind actually working.

The classroom will change. It already has. But some things are not features of a method — they are conditions of learning itself. And those are worth naming, defending, and passing on.