Notes from Kevin O’Neill (Bullock, 2025). A key element of that is finding the tension between support and challenge. How do you fine tune how to support students, what kinds of prompts and when to let them flounder a bit. How far down a garden path you should let students towards an incorrect solution before you interrupt them?

Watch students carefully as they solve problems and identify when they are not on a path to one of the potentially correct solutions to the problem and then drop some subtle hints or flag errors and say “Hey, you want to think about that again?”. Hints are available when you needed them, signal that you weren’t on a path to a correct solution, Different from telling the student whether they got the right answer after you sweated through a problem. Ensure that students did the practice because practice is necessary to develop a skill. But to make the practice as pleasant as possible and not squander time in unproductive efforts. A key element of that is finding the tension between support and challenge, because there is an inherent unpleasantness to learning. I recall the saying that learning is not supposed to be fun, learning should be engaging not fun.

I listened to the podcast (Petrovia, 2024) and read Prof. Rupert Wegerif (Wegerif, 2023) and the class notes are excellent so I read them in the classroom. I can come back later and make notes here, if needed.

References

Bullock, S.M. (2025, July 8). A Conversation about Learning Sciences & AI with Prof. K O’Neill [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v2IpR3O3Ng

Petrovia, K.(Host). (2024, March 20). Importance of Dialogue with AI and Learning Technologies  (Prof. Rupert Wegerif, Cambridge University)  [Audio podcast episode]. https://www.theartandscienceoflearning.com/e101-jan-present/105-importance-of-dialogue-with-ai-and-learning-technologies-nbspprof-rupert-wegerif

Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (2023). Technology and Expanding Dialogic Space. In The Theory of Educational Technology (Chapter 8, pp. 130-154). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003198499-8