Using AI in Education (And the Human Skills Machines Can’t Replace!)

Last week, my son started kindergarten—a moment that feels both exciting and surreal. It’s been 35 years since I walked into my own kindergarten classroom, and the world has changed in ways no one could have imagined. Back then, smartphones, AI, and online learning lived in the realm of science fiction. Now, they’re rewriting how we live, work, and learn. As a parent and educator, I can’t help but question what his journey in education will prepare him for. Twenty years from now, what jobs will even exist? How do we know which skills our kids will actually need?

While AI is transforming the way we think and learn, it cannot replace the essential human skills that fuel meaningful connection and ethical decision-making. Nowhere is this more apparent than in solutionary projects, which ask students to deeply understand real problems in their schools and communities and to engage the world directly to solve them in ways that do the most good and least harm to people, animals, and the environment. 

The Solutionary Framework Builds Uniquely Human Skills

The Solutionary Framework is more than just a project-based learning model—it’s a purpose-driven, student-led approach to education that empowers young people to become changemakers in their schools and communities. Through this hands-on process, students learn to:

• Identify authentic, real-world problems that matter to them
• Research root and systemic causes and engage meaningfully with stakeholders
• Design ethical, sustainable, and impactful solutions
• Take informed, purposeful action to implement those solutions

What does this look like in practice? Students all over the world are using the Solutionary Framework to take meaningful action on issues they care about in their schools and communities. 

• During their solutionary project, one group of 4th graders took a deep dive into the impact of single-use plastics on the coastal habitats near their school. They worked with their school’s administration, lunch staff, and school board to successfully eliminate single-use plastics in the school.

• A group of 7th-grade student-athletes wondered why more of their peers weren’t participating in club sports outside of school. After analyzing their own survey data, the students found that the cost of sports equipment was a barrier to participation for many who otherwise would want to play. They organized a used sports equipment drive to connect unwanted gear with those who could use it.

• A team of 10th graders reflected on a recent mental health crisis that had affected one of their peers. They felt that the school staff hadn’t responded well to the situation and began interviewing teachers about their training around teen mental health. They discovered that only two teachers in the building had been trained in how to handle mental health crises. So, they partnered with a local organization that agreed to come into the school to provide free professional development to the entire staff around responding to mental health situations that arise.

What AI Can’t Do: Replace Enduring Human Skills

In under 30 seconds, ChatGPT can write a five-paragraph essay on the theme of alienation in The Catcher in the Rye. Platforms like QANDA and Photomath can instantly provide step-by-step solutions to complex math problems scanned by a smartphone. Tasks that once required hours of deep thinking and productive struggle—things I wrestled with as an 8th grader—can now be completed effortlessly with the tap of a screen.

Can we really blame kids for wanting to “cheat” their way around assignments that feel like hoops they have to  jump through? Isn’t knowing how to efficiently use available tools a skill in its own right? This is where solutionary projects come in. Because these projects are grounded in real-world, meaningful engagement with problems in students’ schools and communities, they can’t be faked or bypassed. While AI can write an essay or solve a math problem, it can’t walk into a school board meeting and persuasively advocate for increased funding to support teen mental health. It can’t organize a “senior citizen prom” to combat isolation among rural older adults. It can’t collaborate with a school’s food services director to establish “Meatless Mondays” on the weekly lunch menu (These are all real actions taken by students in recent solutionary projects.)

Solutionary projects require students to develop and apply enduring human skills like:

These are uniquely human capacities. AI can support them, but it can’t replace them. And in a world increasingly shaped by technology, it’s these very skills that will remain irreplaceable.

What AI Can Do: Supercharge Solutionary Learning

When we give young people the chance to drive their own learning—and empower them to tackle real-world issues they care about—we open the door to deep, authentic skill-building. One high school teacher told me his students had never worked so hard to draft, edit, and revise their writing as they did when collaboratively crafting a proposal to the town manager. Their goal? To advocate for a larger portion of marijuana dispensary tax revenue to fund drug education for youth. “No essay I could have ever assigned would have made them work this hard,” he said. “They wanted it to sound professional and persuasive—because they truly cared about the issue, and they wanted it to change.”

AI Tools to Deepen Student Learning

Phase 1: IDENTIFY

In the Identify phase of the Solutionary Framework, students choose a problem in their school or community that they want to address. To do this effectively, they need a grounded, local understanding of the issue—and some students may also need exposure to a range of challenges before discovering what they care most about.

Perplexity.ai can support this exploration by helping students uncover local issues through guided inquiry. Unlike the free version of ChatGPT, Perplexity provides source citations, allowing students to evaluate the credibility of original materials, create accurate citations, and dive deeper into their research. Teachers can model how to follow the “information trail” Perplexity offers, encouraging students to explore rather than simply consume AI-generated answers.

Another helpful tool at this stage is Khanmigo’s “Real-World Context Generator.” Teachers can input a broad curriculum-aligned topic—like “water quality” or “civil rights”—and receive ideas for how those issues might show up in students’ daily lives. This tool can be a useful jumping-off point for helping students scale down big, abstract topics into specific, local challenges they can explore and begin working on.

Phase 2: INVESTIGATE 

During the Investigate phase, students dive deeply into the issue they’ve chosen, working to understand why the problem exists, what systems or structures perpetuate it, and what’s at its root. They also explore how others have addressed similar challenges in different schools or communities.

A helpful tool at this stage is Elicit.org. Students can type in a research question and receive clear, concise summaries of academic findings pulled from dozens of credible sources. Unlike shallow or scattered Google searches, Elicit helps students engage with high-quality, accessible research. It also supports equity in collaborative groups: by presenting abstracts in student-friendly language, it helps bridge reading level differences, making research more inclusive and effective.

But research in this phase shouldn’t be limited to online tools. Teachers should guide students to connect with real stakeholders—those who may be harmed by the issue, as well as those who may benefit from the current system. These conversations expose students to diverse and often conflicting perspectives.

Students can use Otter.ai, a free AI-powered transcription tool that converts spoken interviews into written transcripts in real time. It’s a simple but powerful way to capture and analyze conversations with community members or experts. Teachers can then guide students in reviewing transcripts to identify key themes, extract meaningful quotes, and compare perspectives. One powerful activity: ask students to analyze transcripts for unexpected common ground between stakeholders who may, at first glance, seem to disagree.

Phase 3: INNOVATE 

In Phase 3, Innovate, students are tasked with identifying leverage points (places in the system that would allow them to make a meaningful change). They then brainstorm possible solutions and choose one that would do the most good and least harm to people, animals, and the environment. Mural can help students in this phase by giving them a visual space to map root and systemic causes, brainstorm solutions, and plan for implementation. The collaborative features could allow teams to organize ideas and evaluate potential impacts in a shared workspace, which could help make complex problem-solving more accessible and interactive. 

Phase 4: IMPLEMENT

In the final phase, students draw on everything they’ve learned by taking meaningful action. Digital design tools like Canva and presentation tools like Gamma can help students craft materials for awareness campaigns, proposals, and presentations. Students can use Canva to design infographics, flyers, and social outreach pieces that target a particular audience and include a call to action. Gamma helps students organize their ideas into fully editable slide decks—helpful when students are presenting to public officials, school administrators or others in decision-making or leadership positions. Teachers can amplify student thinking by having students develop the same core message twice—once as a Canva flyer aimed at peers, for example, and again as a Gamma-generated presentation for community leaders—then reflect on how message structure, audience expectations, and design choices could shift to make the message most compelling.

To ensure AI helps deepen and not bypass student thinking, students could keep a brief “AI Use Log”. They could list and rate the tools they use, explain how AI supported their understanding, and describe how final decisions were made by the group—not the tool.

Educating the Whole Human

Our role as educators isn’t to keep pace with AI—it’s to cultivate the deeply human qualities that no machine can replicate: concern, compassion, curiosity, and commitment to taking meaningful action in the world. 

AI tools are just that—tools. They can support learning, spark questions, and expand what’s possible in the classroom, and they should be used in service of developing curious, compassionate citizens in a global society. The real catalysts for change are young people who care deeply, think boldly, and act with empathy and courage.

If we want to raise a generation prepared not just to survive technological change, but also to shape it, then we need learning that’s deeply human, purpose-driven, and action-oriented. That’s what solutionary learning is all about.

Curious about how you can help students build the human skills AI can’t replicate? Learn more about our Solutionary Micro-Credential Course to learn how to guide young people in tackling real-world problems while using technology thoughtfully to enhance—not replace—their learning.