By Patrick McDowall, a member of the Courageous Group

I have invited members of the Courageous Minority group to write about their experiences. Here is the first one.

This September I will be teaching Grade 3, and my possible entry point into the Courageous Minority project comes from something that has been bothering me for quite a while: the way we ask children to show us what they know.

In school, we tend to rely heavily on writing. We teach something, and then at some point we ask students to write about it, answer questions on a worksheet, or complete some kind of test. We look at what they produce and make a judgment about what they understand.

But especially with young children, I am not convinced that writing always gives us a very good picture.

A Grade 3 student may understand an idea quite well but still struggle with spelling, handwriting, sentence construction, stamina, or simply getting their thoughts onto a page. Sometimes the written response may tell us as much about the child’s ability to write as it does about their understanding of science or social studies.

That has led me to wonder what would happen if we gave children another way to show us their thinking.

My idea is quite simple.

After we have spent some time learning about a topic in science or social studies, I would have students complete a short written response about what they understand. Later, I would give them an opportunity to respond to essentially the same question through a conversation with a teacher-designed AI chatbot.

The chatbot would not be there to give them answers or teach the material again. Its role would be to keep the conversation going.

If a child gives a short answer, it might ask, “Why do you think that?” If the child explains something, it might ask for an example. It could ask them to explain the idea another way or apply it to a slightly different situation.

The goal would be to draw out the child’s thinking.

I would then be able to put the two demonstrations beside each other: what did I see in the written response, and what became visible through conversation?

The more I have thought about this, though, the more interested I have become in the role of orality itself.

Young children spend a huge amount of their lives thinking and communicating through speech, and yet school gradually pushes more and more of their intellectual life onto paper. I want to know what happens when we create a space where a child can simply explain an idea, be asked about it, reconsider it, make a connection, and keep talking.

Perhaps a child writes two sentences about a topic but, when somebody asks the right follow-up questions, reveals a much richer understanding.

Perhaps the opposite happens. A child may produce a good written response but struggle to explain what they actually mean.

Both would tell me something useful.

I am also hoping to repeat these kinds of conversations a few times during the school year rather than treating this as a single comparison. That gives me another question to watch.

Does anything change?

Do students become better at explaining their thinking? Do they begin giving reasons or examples without needing as much prompting? Do they become more comfortable saying that they are unsure? Do they make connections more readily, reconsider an answer, or explain why they have changed their minds?

I don’t know whether any of that will happen. But having a series of conversations across the year might allow me to see whether the way children express their understanding begins to develop as they become more familiar with this kind of dialogue.

There is one other part of the conversation that I am particularly interested in.

At some point near the end, I would like the chatbot to stop asking all the questions.

It might simply ask:

“What are you still wondering about?”

Or:

“Is there anything about this that you would like to know more about?”

I am genuinely curious about what Grade 3 students will do with that.

Maybe a lot of them will initially say, “Nothing,” or “I don’t know.” That would not surprise me.

But I want to see whether that changes. Does a child eventually ask why a certain animal behaves the way it does? Does something we learned about plants remind them of something growing in their backyard? Does a discussion about communities lead them somewhere completely different from where I expected?

The curriculum is still providing the starting point. I am working inside a conventional public school classroom, and I am not pretending that this project suddenly turns it into a completely self-directed learning environment. But there may be a small opening here where the child’s own questions, experiences, and interests can begin to enter the conversation.

I am trying to keep the project modest. I am not beginning with the claim that AI conversations will make children better thinkers, or that writing and tests should disappear. I am also not interested in having AI grade students.

For now, I want to start with a straightforward question:

What can I see when I allow a young child to demonstrate understanding through conversation that I might not have seen through writing alone?

Then I want to keep watching.

If, by the end of the year, some of these children are not only explaining what they know more clearly but are also beginning to say, “I wonder why…” or “What would happen if…?”, that would be something I would want to understand much better.

Author bio: Patrick McDowall is a Grade 3 teacher at Elizabeth Finch School in Edmonton, Canada. His path to teaching included work as a journalist in South Africa and as an archaeologist in northern British Columbia. Those experiences contributed to a longstanding interest in how people communicate, interpret evidence, and make sense of the world. He holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia, a postgraduate diploma in journalism from Rhodes University, and a post-baccalaureate Bachelor of Education from Vancouver Island University. As part of Yong Zhao’s Courageous Minority initiative, he is exploring how AI-mediated conversation might offer younger students a richer way to demonstrate what they understand.