How Alcuin began

I taught ELA and humanities for fifteen years, mostly in middle school. For about ten of those years, I also taught high school and college students. I earned my Master of Arts in English while I was teaching. Reading, writing, and curriculum filled my working days.

When my students began using AI, I worried about what they would stop learning. Some knew the tools better than I did. I needed to understand the technology before deciding how students should use it.

So I started learning.

Using it myself

I began using AI to prepare lessons, build materials, and work through questions in my writing. I found useful help, but I also learned how much checking a confident answer could require.

I also had to ask what I wanted from each task. Sometimes I needed a usable document. Sometimes the act of writing was how I worked out what I thought. The same tool could help in one case and get in the way in the other.

Once, when I was stuck on the ending of a piece, I asked an AI to finish it. It declined and suggested that writing the ending was work I needed to do myself. I stopped to consider that. In this case, it was true: I had not yet decided what I meant. I wrote the ending.

That distinction matters in a classroom. I homeschool my seventh-grade son, so I encounter it in ordinary lessons as well as in conversations with teachers. Help can make an assignment accessible. It can also do the very thing the assignment was meant to teach.

Going back after the workshop

I have attended enough professional development to know that the difficult part often comes later. A presentation ends, the school week resumes, and teachers have to work out how to use what they heard.

That is why Alcuin combines training with continuing support. We plan with school leadership, then work with teachers on the lessons and questions in front of them.

A planning period is already full. Coaching has to justify the time it takes. We use that time to work on the teacher's own preparation, with the tools available at the school.

The name

Alcuin takes its name from Alcuin of York, a teacher and scholar at Charlemagne's court. His work in education is the reason I chose the name.