FIFTEEN MINUTES · NO PREP

Eleven conversations with no comfortable answer

Short scenarios where the right answer is not obvious — and where the disagreement in your department is real rather than about technology. One card is a conversation. Use them when you have fifteen minutes at the end of a meeting and want the room to say what it actually thinks.

HOW TO RUN ONE

One card, not four

Read it aloud. Four cards is a workshop nobody agreed to attend; one card is a conversation people will finish.

Sixty seconds of silence

Everyone writes before anyone speaks. Without it, the first confident voice sets the answer and the room converges — you learn what your most vocal person thinks and nothing else.

You go last, or not at all

If the person running the meeting answers first, everyone now knows what the acceptable answer is.

Pick one you can’t answer

If you choose a card because it makes a point you want made, your department will smell it, and you will get performances instead of positions. No resolution required.

THE CARDS

THE SAME GRADE

Two juniors earn the same essay grade. One wrote it across four evenings. The other used AI exactly as the syllabus permits, finished in ninety minutes, and defends the argument as well as the first student in conversation. Same grade? What did the grade measure?

THE ACCOMMODATION

A student with a documented accommodation uses speech-to-text and AI organizational support. Her process looks nearly identical to a classmate’s, which you have prohibited. Different rule? State the basis. Would you say it to the other student?

Run this one with Kristi in the room or not at all.

FORTY COMMENTS

You write forty narrative comments in a weekend. AI drafts each from your notes; you revise every one. A parent asks whether the comment about her son was written by a person. What do you say?

THE RECOMMENDATION

You use AI to draft a senior’s recommendation letter. The admissions office uses AI to summarize it. Has anything been lost? Whose loss?

BY THE RULES

A student uses AI in a way your syllabus explicitly permits, does not mention it, earns an A. A colleague calls it cheating. Who is right? If she should have disclosed, where does your syllabus say so?

THE BETTER READER

A student reads the novel with a chatbot beside her, asking about every passage she does not follow, and arrives at seminar with the strongest reading in the room. Something has been lost. Name it specifically. If you cannot, sit with that.

EIGHTY PERCENT

You are eighty percent sure. There is no proof. The student denies it. What do you do? Answer as a sequence of actions, including who else you tell and when.

TWO ROOMS

One teacher on your level prohibits AI. Another permits it. Same course, same transcript line, same GPA. Is that a problem? What kind?

THE PAID TIER

One student’s family pays for the better model. Another’s does not. The gap is real. Does your assignment now advantage wealth in a new way? Did it already?

TWO PERCENT AND THIRTY

You find AI use on homework worth two percent. Same student, same behaviour, on a final worth thirty. Same response? If not, what were you protecting the first time?

THREE YEARS ON

Your department bans it. Students use it anyway and stop asking questions about it. They graduate. What did they learn here about using it well, and from whom?

One pairing worth running together

Forty Comments, then The Recommendation, in that order. Together they open the asymmetry students already see — restriction downward while adults use the tools upward. There is a good answer available: someone who has already done the learning uses these tools from a different position than someone doing it for the first time. But it has to be said out loud rather than assumed, because students will ask.

These are not a lesson with a hidden answer key. If your department lands somewhere I would not have, that is the exercise working. Nothing here gets reported anywhere, and nothing leaves your room unless you decide to send it.

One card. Sixty seconds of silence. You go last. That is the whole method — and it is the fastest honest read you will get on what your department actually thinks.

Jason Beyer · Educational Technology · Regis Jesuit High School · A.M.D.G.

HelpDesk@regisjesuit.com · 303.269.8080 · LAST VERIFIED — AUGUST 2026