Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
—T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Teachers know all so well the unredeemable quality of time. It’s in short supply. Time constrains and fixes us in place. It bounds us to efficiencies and production that blur the world and can kick the legs out from underneath us. But, it’s not as if we’re powerless, subject to the vagaries of time. We learn to live with it. As social studies teachers we tie time down with the stories of the past fixed in the present and pointed to our future. We are, all of us, designers of time. When we teach, we gather what we know about the past, face the present with our students, and set in motion a future we will never fully see. In inquiry-based teaching, this time-work becomes especially poignant. We ask students to explore questions that stretch backward and forward at once—questions that compel them to sit with complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty.
So in this moment in time, with a conviction that inquiry design is time well spent, I’ve begun a new project – one that sits at the intersection of past pedagogical commitments and future technological possibilities. I am calling it IDM AI. This work represents an effort to imagine how generative AI, and specifically a custom-built chatbot, might support teachers in the act of designing inquiry.
With 10 years of experience, I’ve had the unique advantage of working with IDM as a co-creator with Kathy and SG. I’m a staunch believer, an apostate of all things lecture, and perhaps a bit of an inquiry provocateur. Like many history teachers, my early career was shaped by a love of content and the conviction that, with enough suave and emotion, I could inspire students to share my passion—as if simply listening to me would transform them. But with equal doses of introspection and humility, I evolved into an inquiry teacher. I also bring to this project my background in technology, often unbounded and utopian. Technology as a cure-all for schooling, or perhaps just a respite for those eager to live in the future, was my touchstone. Yet as we see the world, I’ve tempered my techno-utopianism (just a bit) to let the humans catch up. And now, along comes AI…
These are the pasts that bring me to this work. I’m focused now on using AI technology to make better what we do with IDM. It’s not a project about automation. It is not about replacing teachers or flattening the intellectual labor of curriculum design. Instead, it is about scaffolding and structure, curiosity and conversation. It is about exploring how a tool—an AI trained tool, can help us engage in what I am calling deep inquiry design. I’m asking, how can we help teachers stay with their ideas long enough to transform them.
The tool I envision will accompany teachers through the 10 steps of the Inquiry Design Model (IDM). These steps—from identifying a compelling question to developing formative and summative tasks—offer a clear pathway for inquiry, but not a linear one. Designing inquiry is never a checklist. It is recursive, dialogic, and deeply human. So, my question is how can we design an AI tool that helps teachers through the swervy, intellectual, and messy work of designing an inquiry.
I aim to hang onto and even extend the rigor and richness of inquiry design as positioned in this quick-pace age of AI. But, I do not come to this work with definitive answers. Rather, I come with questions: What might it mean to externalize our thinking into a machine that is a thought partner, trained to listen and prompt, but not presume? Can we preserve the open-endedness of human inquiry design in a machine discourse? And how might we build an AI that reflects a dialogic ethos—one that sees knowledge not as something to be delivered, but something to be co-constructed?
As I begin, I am drawn to Eliot’s meditation on time. Designing inquiry, like teaching itself, is a temporal act. It is shaped by what we’ve known, what we know now, and what we hope students might come to know. This chatbot project, then, is not just a technical endeavor. It is a philosophical one. It is about how we think in this moment in time, how we are learning new ways to learn, and how we might use new tools to wonder about inquiry design together.
