Six brain-based principles for teaching and learning with artificial intelligence.
It can profoundly strengthen learning or undermine it.
Generative AI has the potential to powerfully amplify learning, or, if we aren’t prepared to shape the way it enters our schools, to rapidly erode it.
It arrived in our classrooms faster than anyone could reasonably prepare for, and the choices we make now will echo through an entire generation of learners. AI Ready Schools draws on decades of research on how people learn to show that the answers have been in front of us all along. The tools are new, but the way people learn is not, and the science of learning offers a clear roadmap for when AI helps students learn and when it gets in the way.
For teachers, principals, and district leaders ready to trade panic for purpose, and to build schools where AI deepens learning instead of diluting it.
Teaching has long been called the most sacred profession because it’s the one that makes all the others possible. It’s fitting, then, that the framework spells the same word: SACRED.
The brain determines whether it is safe before it decides anything else. Without safety, higher-order thinking is physiologically unavailable.
Nearly every consumer AI product utilizes a chat window as its primary interface, mirroring the same kind of interface we use when interacting with friends and family. The safety signals only accumulate from there: it addresses you by name, it remembers what you talked about last week, it apologizes when you express displeasure, and it never makes you feel stupid for asking a question that you probably should have known the answer to. It’s optimized to make you feel safe, regardless of whether or not it actually is.
AI can lower specific barriers to learning for specific students. It can pose and answer questions without judgment. It can provide a safe space for rehearsing a performance or a difficult conversation, and can offer feedback prior to higher stakes human interactions.
The most useful way I have found to think about AI in schools is as an amplifier. It takes whatever is already happening and turns up the volume, in both directions, all at once.
AI can help us create learning environments that are safer, more welcoming, and more human than anything we have been able to offer before. But it can also do precisely the opposite.
It can be the catalyst for the most personalized classroom in human history, or the least.
Flip through a few moments from the book. Then get the Introduction and all of Chapter One in your inbox so you can start reading immediately.
See what teachers, coaches, principals, and superintendents are saying about the book.
“I’ve read a dozen books on AI in education and this is the first one that didn’t feel outdated by the time I finished it. It’s anchored in how kids actually learn, which doesn’t change every six months.”
“Finally, a book that doesn’t make me choose between banning AI and surrendering to it. The SACRED lens gave my whole department a shared vocabulary in a single meeting.”
“The chapter on Retrieval alone changed how I assign practice. I rebuilt my weekly warm-ups the Sunday after I read it.”
“As a principal, I needed something I could hand to teachers that was practical and credible. This is it. The DOs and DON’Ts at the end of every chapter are gold.”
“Readable, research-backed, and refreshingly honest about what we don’t know yet. I underlined half the book.”
“The “amplifier” idea reframed our entire district conversation. We stopped arguing about tools and started talking about learning.”
“I built my first custom AI tutor using the exact system prompt in this book. My students are asking better questions and getting fewer answers handed to them.”
“Every page connects the neuroscience to something I can actually do on Monday. That is rare.”
“Our PLC used the reading-group guide for eight weeks. Best professional learning we’ve done in years, and it cost us the price of a paperback.”
“He explains the amygdala hijack and the attention filter better than my grad courses did, and then shows exactly how chatbots exploit both.”
“I was ready to be preached at. Instead I got a clear-eyed, generous, deeply practical book that treats teachers like professionals.”
“The Five-Column Protocol surfaced gaps in our homework policy we’d been ignoring for a decade. Uncomfortable, and exactly what we needed.”
“Required reading for anyone writing an AI policy. It’s the first thing I’ve read that puts the learning science ahead of the vendor pitch.”
“I teach fourth grade and assumed this would be a high-school book. It isn’t. Safety and Connection apply to my nine-year-olds more than anyone.”
“Rigorous without being dense. I finished it on a flight and had a plan for my first faculty meeting before we landed.”
“Gave a copy to every member of my leadership team. We say “SACRED” in meetings now like it has always been part of our vocabulary.”
Download every tool from the book, as well as handouts that explain the framework in plain language. Each one is ready to print and share. Get all twelve PDFs in your inbox for free.
Print them, project them, drop them in a PLC agenda, or forward the email to a colleague.
The SACRED Framework for Teaching and Learning. The foundation for everything in AI Ready Schools.
Pizza, Pedagogy, and the Brain was published in May 2022, six months before the public launch of ChatGPT. It unpacks the brain-based learning science that drives teaching and learning, organized around an easy-to-remember framework. Written for educators who want to understand the why underneath their most effective practices so they can make better decisions by design.
Let’s talk about the science of learning in the age of AI.
Grateful to have shared the stage at:
EdTech Week
Keynotes, workshops, virtual sessions, and longer partnerships for schools, districts, and conferences.
