Making Things Clearer - Not as Straightforward as it Seems

In the publishing of the book Show Your Work: Teaching Smarter With the Science of Learning, I'm learning a lot about the writing and publishing processes. I'm learning even more about the re-writing process. Two weeks ago, I got back all of my copyedited pages and had to accept or reject them and answer questions.

Copy editors do not play, y'all. The form they sent me said it had had a "medium" amount of editing. Then, each chapter I opened had anywhere between 75 and 175 changes or queries, leaving me to wonder what a heavy amount of editing would look like. Most of the edits were small - removing a space, adding a comma, or changing a capital letter to a lowercase one.  Some were citations I had forgotten to include or changes made to fit their publishing style (the MLA I learned in high school is less useful than I was led to believe).

The edits that made me laugh the most were the ones that asked if I would like to "use the expanded version for clarity." This was the automatic note any time there was an acronym.  For the most part, that makes sense. Jargon isn't accessible to most people, so if you are referencing a study done at the NIH or by the APA, it is obviously better to spell out National Institute of Health and American Psychological Association. It helps people determine the credibility of the source.

But, there are exceptions. When I was asked if I wanted to use the expanded version of SAT, I had to respond that I didn't think it would be clearer if I said Scholastic Aptitude Test as most people walk around with a vision of the SAT easily accessible in their minds and would actually have to take a beat to translate the expanded version back into the acronym for it to make sense to them. So we left that one alone. The same went for an interview I did with a biology teacher in which he talked about a question he asks students about ATP, the energy carrying molecules produced during cellular respiration.  If you remember this from biology at all, you definitely only remember it as ATP. So, when asked if I wanted to use the expanded version for clarity, I had to reply, "No, I think referring to it as adenosine triphosphate will make it less clear, so let's leave that one."

My point is not about publishing or acronyms. It's about making things clear. Our jobs as teachers is to take something that isn't easy to grasp and put it within reach. When a student first looks at the periodic table, it is just a jumble of letters and numbers arranged into a strange shape, but when they leave my 8th grade classroom, they should be able to interpret things like number of protons and number of neutrons from the numbers in the square as well as things like number of energy levels and number of valence electrons from the location on the table. My teaching about the periodic table should make the information clearer.

But much like the publishing discussion, there is often a way that seems right but ultimately is not. Explicit teaching vs. discovery learning gives us as an example of that. The theory behind discovery learning seems logical - students will remember things better if they figure it out themselves. And wouldn't it be lovely if that was how our brains actually worked? But they don't. Asking a student to compare the causes of the French and American revolutions when they haven't learned anything about them yet (but have access to Google) doesn't result in deeper learning about either revolution or the larger concept of revolutionary causes. Our working memories are too limited for that. (I'm not saying you shouldn't have projects or labs; I am a science teacher and had many of both - but it should come after students have learned a concept, not as a replacement for it.)

One of the things that makes teaching hard is that we often can't have one way of doing things. Some material will be clearer if reveal it one step at a time while other material may be clearer if we first show an entire worked example, giving students the broad view before the details. We cannot just choose one method and hope all content will fit that method. 

Even trickier, it is not always immediately evident when you have chosen correctly.  Sometimes, it is immediately obvious if you have chosen incorrectly. I once thought it would be good for my students to see the broad picture of bond types before we began learning about them.  I drew a spectrum on the board with "small electronegativity difference" on one left and "large electronegativity difference" on the right. I then proceeded to place covalent bonds, ionic bonds on the right, and polar covalent bonds in the middle along with their broad definitions and some examples. My students left that day completely overwhelmed and totally lost. The next day, I reassured them that I was going to teach each type individually and not to worry. But my hope that seeing the big picture would help them understand how the pieces fit together was not realized. The next year, I taught each type on its own and used my little spectrum drawing as a review/retrieval tool. "Where would covalent bonds go?" I asked, and they correctly answered that they would be where the electronegativity difference was small.  This way was obviously clearer, but I might not have known that if I hadn't tried it the other way.

So, sometimes, we are dealing with a process of trial and error. Sometimes, you can benefit from another teacher's experience.  And sometimes, you just have to use your best professional judgment and hope to be right. 

Give yourself a break. The best way to make things clear is often not clear itself.

Things (and People) Will Fail - What's Your Plan?

This week, a member at the Y came in talking about how much they had just spent repairing the top floor of their house. In their home, as in many newer constructions, the water heater was in the attic. As dozens of gallons of water flowed over the pan and down the walls of her house, the drywall buckled and the paint swelled, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in damages.

The logic of putting it there has always eluded me, and it was a deal breaker when I was looking for my house. You water heater WILL fail. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when. It needs to be in a place where damage can be minimized. There needs to be a plan for failure. And the pan is only a good plan if you catch it right away, which is unlikely if it is in the attic.

On Wednesday of this week, the Verizon network was down for over 8 hours. For many, this was a simple inconvenience, with the phone screen saying SOS for most of the day. For a few, it may have meant an inability to call for emergency services or run their business properly. But the issue I found the most interesting was experienced by some people whose cars were apparently tied to the Verizon network. Several Y members who owned Teslas were left unable to start their car. Having your car paired with your phone seems convenient until a failure occurs. Then, it is important to have a manual work-around (and I honestly have a hard time believing one doesn't exist).

The same is true of students. They will fail. It's not a matter of if, but when. 

I don't mean that every student will experience a failing grade, although some will. Failure means something different to everyone. But they will fail in some way, and it will vary among different students. There are students for whom a D is no big deal, but they feel morose if they lose a basketball game. There are students for whom a C+ is a slap in the face. I even had a student once who stood in my classroom screaming, "I failed. I failed!" if she made anything below a 96%. While she obviously had deeper issues that would interest a team of Viennese specialists, I had to be prepared to deal with fallout whenever I put in a grade. Otherwise, I would lose all of my class time to the inevitable melt down.

So, teachers, here's my advice. Put some thought now into how you will handle failure with your students. You can't possibly anticipate everything, but there are some pretty common ones you can expect. Do you teach juniors and seniors? Some will not get into their first choice college, and at least a couple won't even make it into their safety school. They are going to be understandably sad; but you can't turn your class into a therapy session. What will you do?  Do you teach freshmen? The homecoming dance may be their first experience of rejection from a romantic interest. You might remember how devastating that is. How do you plan to keep it from derailing everything you have planned for your students that day? 

The bad news is there is no way to avoid this. Students will fail at something. And, to be honest, that is a good and healthy thing. You want them to experience failure and learn coping skills when the stakes are low. Kids build resilience for adulthood by taking acceptable risks and learning to bounce back when things go sideways. 

The good news is that you are not the sole source of help for them. You have have resources. As you make a plan, think through which members of your school community might be helpful. You might have a great relationship with that child's parents and make a quick call. You might have a school counselor who can help. Your special needs teachers can teach you some tricks. Most schools have some "Barbara Howard" type teacher that just has the touch for calming kids down. Think about those resources as you anticipate the issues you might encounter with students. 

You will handle different situations and different students in different ways, of course. Just don't let the fact that failure happens take you by surprise. If you do, you will react rather than act, and you won't react in the most effective ways (which will then make a vicious circle because you will feel like you have failed. 

Can Prior Knowledge Interfere with New Learning?

This is not one of those posts where I ask a rhetorical question and then answer it. I won't be wrapping this one up with advice to teachers.  I am genuinely just musing here based on something I noticed last week that caused curiosity.

In my part of education land, we talk a lot about connecting new learning to prior knowledge. Out knowledge base is our already existing schema, and new learning finds a place to fit within it.  As Daniel Willingham tells us, we can only learn in relationship to what we already know. Prior knowledge enhances reading comprehension and problem solving; you can only think critically about things you know well.  This is all well established and backed by solid education research.  

Here's what I'm wondering, can new learning and old learning interfere with each other? In particular, I am thinking of things with a high degree of similarity. 

Let me explain what got me started thinking about this.

I attend a liturgical church. If you aren't familiar with that, it involves a fair amount of congregational participation during the service - prayers we say together, call and response, and recitation of the creed and the Lord's prayer - stuff like that, individual churches will vary). 

While all of it is printed in the bulletin, making it easy to read along, I decided that I wanted to memorize the things that are consistent every week. This includes, in my church, the: 

• Collect for Purity (easy to learn with a little retrieval practice)
• Lord's Prayer (I've known that one since I was in kindergarten)
• Confession of Sin (a little more retrieval - got it)
• Doxology (been singing that most of my life - check) 
• Nicene Creed (aye, there's the rub)

So, the Nicene Creed is the one that got me thinking about this.  I grew up reciting the Apostle's Creed, which is a lot shorter. But I don't think the length of the Nicene Creed made it difficult; I think it was that there are some similarities to the Apostles' Creed. Where they were similar, my brain wanted to race straight through the one I knew better.

For example:  The Apostle's Creed begins, "I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord." The Nicene creed takes a little more time with the Father before moving on to the Son, so it begins, "We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God . . ." 

So, I did my retrieval practice work, and I had it down reasonably well.  By reasonably well, I mean I was slightly halting as I thought about whether the next line is "eternally begotten of the Father" or "of one being with the Father." But, I knew it well enough to say in a group without looking down to check the bulletin.

That is, until last week. On the final week every month, we use a different liturgy, known as a Morning Prayers service. That one uses the Apostles' Creed, the one I know so well I could probably rattle it off if you shook me awake in the morning and asked me to say it. Last week, the first week of the month, when we started the Nicene Creed, I completely fumbled it. 

So, my musing is this. Did one week of reverting back to the well known creed interfere with my ability to retrieve the one I know less well?  Will this change once I know it better? Is my already existing schema preventing attachment because they are too similar and trying to occupy the same cognitive space? Is there research on this, or is it too weirdly specific for an adequate experiment? 

So help me, Daniel Willingham, I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but I am going to spend some time this week retrieving the Nicene Creed so I don't feel so lost again this Sunday.

Positively Realistic

I fought the dryer, and the dryer won. I'm gutted. I really believed I could repair the broken belt. I found a YouTube video, and everything worked exactly like his until I got to putting the belt around the pulley.  I fought and and fought. I cut my thumb and had a massive bruise on one forearm and the other shoulder. I tried it with mom pressing on a crowbar to get the wheel into position. I tried tipping the machine on its back for easier access to the parts, but that just made it more difficult because the belt placement was no longer benefitted by gravity but rather falling behind the drum because of gravity. Tipping it over also meant that I had disconnected it from the vent, and you have to be a master yogi to fold yourself over to attach that and then climb out overtop of the dryer. (Note to the people who make these: Why do they need to be two inches from the floor? And can the tube be about six inches longer?) Anyway, after trying for weeks and using different methods, my mom stopped me while I was trapped in the space between the dryer and the wall and said, "Will you let us buy you a dryer." I said yes, but I hate that what should have been a $20 job became a replacement. I don't like admitting defeat. 

But, at some point, we all have to admit defeat. We have to recognize that there are things we cannot do. In spite of the messaging we got from children's television in the 80s and the proliferation of athletic clothing with Philippians 4:13 printed on it, we have limitations. It's part of our design as human beings. There are certain attributes that belong only to God. Omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence and the like are not something we can achieve. We tried at the tower of Babel, and we seem to be trying again with AI, but no matter how far we advance technologically, we will remain limited.

Why am I talking about this on an education blog?  Well, partly because I needed to work through the hit to my pride from not being able to repair the dryer, but more importantly, we need to be realistic with students.

People who enter the education field tend to be idealistic. And, in an effort to support kids and their dreams, we get even more idealistic with them. That seems loving, but there reaches a point where it isn't. When we support things that cannot happen, we set kids up for disappointment and failure. There's a commercial on television where kids are asked what they want to be when they grow up. Most say doctors or lawyers, but one sweet little girls says she wants to be a unicorn. Now, she's about 4 in this commercial, so I think playing along with the understanding that it is make-believe is totally fine. But, as she gets older, telling her "if you can dream it, youe can be it" is not. 

It's totally fine to have dreams that are long shots. I'm not saying to crush the dreams of a kid whose ambition it to be a professional athlete. There are people who achieve that goal, and they were all at one point, children with a dream. I am saying that it is good to encourage that child to have a back up plan because the percentage of talented athletes that become professionals is small, and some of them sustain career ending injuries. People with back up plans are resilient. People without back up plans often wander aimlessly for years. 

My childhood dream was to pilot the space shuttle. I paid attention in math and science; I went to Space Camp; I somehow got my hands on an application for the Air Force Academy and started filling it out in the 4th grade. When I was 13, it became clear that this was not going to happen. First, I was taller than NASA's heigh limit (yes, at 13). Second, I have both eyesight and equilibrium issues.  While the eyesight could have been corrected, the balance and the height were insurmountable problems. Well meaning adults in my life told me not to give up on this dream. Some said, "You'll be so good that they'll change the height rules for you." Apparently, they didn't understand the constrictive nature of spacecraft. Several went as far as to say that God would not let me want something this much if it weren't His plan for me (Now, that's dangerous counsel if ever I heard it). Thankfully, I had other, more realistic, adults around me that said, "Well, you obviously love science. What kinds of jobs might allow you to use that?" I kicked around veterinary medicine, pharmaceuticals, and physical therapy until I walked into Mr. Barbara's physics class and decided I basically wanted to be him, a person who made people love subjects most were afraid of. After 25 years of science teaching, I achieved a lot of things, but my favorite was always when a kid came into the meet and greet saying that they didn't like science leave at the end of the year excited to learn more science.

I'm not advocating for pessimism. I'm not suggesting that negativity is best. I'm advocating for realism with a positive tone.  When a student shares their dream, you can be positive and say "What's your plan for making that happen?" As they tell you their plan, you can layer in nuances and back up plans without being a dream crusher. If a student has come to the realization that they can't be the thing they thought they could, be sympathetic. "I know how hard it must be to realize that, but you have a purpose. What did you love about . . .? How might you still have a job that utilizes that part?"  

Whether a glass is half empty or half full doesn't depend on your mindset. It depends on what direction you are pouring the water. If you are drinking from it, the last thing you did was remove water, so you made it half empty. If you are pouring water into it, the last thing you did was add water, so you made it half full.  Helping kids pour water back into their cup after a setback doesn't happen by being blindly positive. But it can happen by helping them find an achievable dream that still incorporates their "why" from their prior goals. It's both realistic and positive.

I don't believe in resolutions, but since it is January, let's make one. Let's resolve to be positively realistic with students.

Range of Healthy Balance

When I was a kid, my parents told me that there was no such thing as a job description. "Whatever your boss asks you to do," they said, "that's your job description for that day. You should always be the best employee they have." Now, listen, they weren't advocating standing for abuse or doing things that made you feel morally compromised. They were just saying that you should always do your best to contribute to whatever team you were on and never to say, "That's not my job; someone else should do it."

Fast forward a few decades, and I find myself doing something rare - muting a phrase on Twitter because I couldn't believe educators were part of it. That phrase was "quiet quitting." For those of you who don't spend a lot of time on social media, let me explain what it means. Quiet quitting means doing exactly what you are contracted to do and not one iota more. That means no sponsoring a club unless it is specifically in your contract. It means no chaperoning dances or field trips. It means no staying after school to help tutor a struggling student. It means you come to school at your contracted time, teach your contracted classes, and go home at the end of your contracted day. It means you don't do any of the things that make you a teacher besides the actual act of teaching class. 

Do I understand why this happened? Of course I do. There are absolutely schools and districts who take advantage of their staff, working them to their breaking point and then just replacing them when they do. I'm not suggesting that anyone put up with that. But this is a coward's way out. Even the name implies that you know what you are doing is the equivalent of not doing your job at all.  Meanwhile, there is an attempt to make it sound virtuous - like you are protecting everyone in the future. In reality, the jobs you are refusing to do still have to get done, and someone will do them.  All you have accomplished is shifting responsibilities from your plate to theirs.

You absolutely need to set healthy boundaries about what time you are willing to answer e-mails and how many extracurricular activities you are willing to commit to. Of course, it is important that you have a life outside of school, so if you are grading until 9PM, something is wrong with someone's expectations. If you are going home at the end of the day and dissolving into a useless puddle, you are working too hard. Please don't think that because I am against one end of the spectrum that I am in favor of the other end.

What I am advocating for is an acceptable range - one where we model excellence to our students without compromising our own health. Because it is a range, there may be days or weeks that lean more heavily towards work - exam preparation week, for example. And there may be days when you have to say, "I'm showing a high quality science video because I couldn't finish grading yesterday afternoon and need the class time to do it today." In a range of healthy balance, you might sponsor a club, but you might limit how many times a month it meets. 

Quiet quitting is anything but quiet. It is about stamping your foot and throwing a tantrum to demand you be paid for anything outside of your contract hours, as though every item, duty, and meeting could be made a line in your contract. It's about going online to brag about how little you are doing and how the system won't keep you down.  A person with healthy balance takes a PTO day when they need some rest; a quiet quitter takes every single one just because they can and will squeeze the last one in during exam review if they have to. 

The quiet quitter isn't virtuous. They aren't making the system better. A person who wants to change things goes through a process, petitions their leaders, has difficult conversations. A person who goes on social media isn't getting something done; they are getting attention.  It's raising slacktivism to another level.

Teachers, as you return from break, you get to a bit of a reset. You can set new boundaries with your students, administrators, families, and yourself. Recognize every week is not going to be the same and every person is not going to be the same.  Find your balance range - not someone else's. 

The "Easy" Teacher and the Paradox of Motivation and Anxiety

Every Thursday, I receive an email newsletter from Peps McCrae, called "Evidence Snacks." If you aren't enrolled, go do it now. They are short, and they are fantastic.  The one a week ago was about motivation, a complex subject that benefits all teachers and students.  There's a part that has stuck with me because it's a bit of a paradox. As a physics enthusiast, I love a good paradox. Here's the summary. If you are familiar with Growth Mindset, it will sound familiar.  If a student engages in a task and is successful, they will motivated only if they "attribute their success to their own effort, ability, and approach."  If they attribute that success to anything external (the test was easy, the teacher likes me, or luck), they have no reason to feel more motivated because those factors are not within their control. I know you aren't seeing the paradox yet because it wasn't in the email; it was in my mind. His newsletter was about motivation, and this post is largely going to be about anxiety, but the two are related, so let me walk you through my thought process. Teachers and schools are currently dealing with an anxiety crisis in students. If you look at the data on reported anxiety levels, it remains pretty flat up until 2012-2015, depending on age group, when it makes an upward shift. The graph then increases in slope in 2020 due largely to pandemic concerns.  What happened in the time between those years? The smart phone became ubiquitous.  It was invented earlier, but for a while, it was only in the hands of wealthier adults, mostly businessmen (remember calling the Blackberry a "crackberry" and people wondering whether President Obama would be allowed to use his?). Around 2012, we started putting them in the hands of 16 year olds so they could call their parents if they were in a car accident or had an emergency. Each year after that, the age started getting lower and lower and the anxiety in younger kids (sadly, not shown in this graph) started climbing. Schools can't really address the source of the problem (24/7 access to social media and constant distraction) because we don't control when students are given these things. We can make rules restricting their usage at the school, but that is only minimally helpful to the anxiety problem if they are on them the rest of the hours of the day and losing sleep as a result.  So, we look for other ways to reduce their anxiety - things we can control at school.   Maybe if we didn't give them homework, they would have some down time, so school start setting stricter limits on the assignments teachers can give. Does it help? No. They have test anxiety because they didn't properly prepare for it with deliberate practice.  Also, they don't tend to use their down time as down time. They either schedule something else or hop on their phone, exacerbating the problem. Maybe we include breathing exercises in PE. It certainly doesn't hurt, but it's effects are rather temporary. It doesn't result in much meaningful reduction of anxiety after the few minutes they have done it. Feel free to do it, but don't expect massive results. Maybe we should make the tests easier, so they feel more successful. Here's where Peps' newsletter came to my mind and created a paradox. (Oooh, if it ever becomes a thing, we have to call it the Peps Paradox.) Making it easier will make them less motivated, especially if they know we have made it easier.  The best way to deal with anxiety isn't breathing exercises (again, I'm not saying not to do them); it isn't to have lots of free time (anxiety lives in our heads and we tend to ruminate on it when we aren't doing other things); it isn't even a trip to the spa (nice, but temporary help at best).   The best way to deal with anxiety is to reflect on the success you have had overcoming difficult things. It reminds you that you are stronger than you feel you are. When you have one of those weeks where it seems like there is a test in every class, reminding yourself that it didn't kill you trains your brain to fear it less the next time. It helps to reflect on what made you successful - you studied with good techniques, you spaced out your study time over several days instead of cramming. You paid attention in class instead of playing games on your computer. If, according to the studies cited in Peps' newsletter, a student attributes their success on a test to the test being easy, they will not feel good about their success, and they will have no ability to reflect on their strength. Thus, motivation will not be increased and anxiety will not be decreased.  Teachers, don't misread me.  I am not saying to go out and overwhelm the working memories of students in the name of rigor. I am not telling you to be mean to them.  I am saying that, if you believe lowering your standards will help them with their motivation or their anxiety, it will not. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can help by being an "easy" teacher. Continue to hold the same standards you did before, but then walk students through the process of reflecting on the fact that they CAN and DID do hard things.

Professional Judgment - Don't Trade It In

I sat in a conference with a parent who was known to be particularly difficult. You know the type, the one who challenges everything the teacher does, knows she is right, and sees no nuance. She had a copy of my most recent test and was challenging questions that I had gone over in class after the tests were graded because if I had, in her words "felt the need to reteach it, you must know you didn't teach it well the first time." While I think that would be a valid practice, it wasn't why I went over frequently missed questions. I went over frequently missed questions because I wanted to students to engage in a little metacognition. I asked questions like "Why did you think the answer was B?" and explained the misconception that might have led to that choice and explaining the thinking that led to the correct answer.

She said that I should throw out any question missed by a large number of students, so I explained my process.  When I ran the tests through the scantron (which she also didn't like that I used), it told me how many students missed each question (one of the reasons I continued to use that type of test). If a question exceeded a certain number, I went to the question and the key and asked myself several questions.

1. Was the key marked correctly?  We do make mistakes, and if I marked the key incorrectly, I will immediately give everyone credit for that question.
2. Did I actually teach that this year?  Experienced teachers do pull up their old tests and edit them rather than creating new ones each time, and sometimes, changes to the calendar or interruptions to the routine mean I could have skipped something in class but forgotten to remove it from the test.  I would obviously throw that question out for everyone.
3. Was the question and answer list fairly worded? It doesn't happen very often, but every once in a while, I would be making the key for a test and think, "Was I half asleep when I wrote this question?  It doesn't make sense."  When that happened, everyone got credit for that one too.

If the answer to all of these questions was yes, then the question remained no matter how many of them got it wrong. This mom stopped me at the word remained and said, "Well, I imagine the students would have a different perspective than you do on that."  Of course they would. They were in the 8th grade, and I had been teaching for 15 years; we had a different perspective on EVERYTHING. It's their job to complain and pushback on anything they don't like, and it is my job to understand that what they want and what they need are two different things.  

I said to her, "I know they do, but I'm not going to trade 15 years of professional judgment built by experience to middle schoolers." That mom didn't speak to me for 3 months. (Oh, by the way, at some point during all of this, the dad popped up and said, "She didn't miss this question anyway, so we should probably move on." AARGH!)

In the age of populism, this problem has only increased. In the same way everyone was an armchair epidemiologist in 2020, everyone who reads an education blog is ready to challenge curriculum. They will sit across from someone with a PhD in curriculum design and say, "but this website says this book is better." We all (and I am including myself) decide we are qualified to counter arguments if we have done an hour of internet research. A man I encountered at the gym recently told me that he "know more than most doctors" because he read "five very long books" on nutrition and cancer.  He was saying this to a woman who has been seeing doctors at Johns Hopkins, Duke, and MD Anderson - three of the best cancer treatment institutions on the planet, but he thought he was qualified to overrule their judgment.

And now, as it always seems to these days, AI enters the discussion. Teachers everywhere are being asked to sacrifice their judgment to a machine.  

• Is the machine an expert on their subject? No. It's been fed a lot of websites.
• Does the machine know anything about their students? No. 
• Has the machine given an exam before? Of course not.
• Is the machine trained using only high quality sources? No. It is trained on every source - good, bad, and ugly. Right and wrong. Every source on the scale of credible to nutjob is represented in equal measure.

A friend of mine did an experiment with one of the AI platforms last week.  She put in her midterm exam and asked it how long it would take students to complete. She doesn't need to ask it this. She has given nearly the same exam (tweaked for the reasons discussed early) for several years, and she knows that the first student will turn it in somewhere around the 65 minutes mark and the last last student will finish it just before the 90 minute allotment is up). The AI told her it would take 90 to 120 minutes for students to complete it. The next day, she fed the exact same test into the same program and asked it the same question, and it said it would take an hour. 

Is this a hallucination (the cutsie name we give for when AI lies by making up crap that doesn't exist)?  No, it just doesn't know. And that would be fine if it just said so, but it won't. 

I'm not saying you should never seek out the wisdom of another mind, but it should be a mind that is at least as wise as yours. 

Students don't qualify; they simply don't know what they don't know.  A student once told me that the biology teacher next door to me was "asking questions that didn't need to be asked." I said, "I'm sorry, but your are a high school freshman; you aren't qualified to make that judgment. You don't know what needs to be asked." AI doesn't qualify either.  It is the digital equivalent of your worst friend - the one who thinks they know everything, never admits when they don't, and just guesses.  Think about that friend; do you go to them for advice?  Of course you don't; you know you have better judgment than that friend.

Teachers, trust yourself.  Seek advice from those whose judgment you trust. Incorporate their input into your thinking.  But don't trade in your professional judgment to anyone or anything with less wisdom than you.