AI in the classroom is no longer a Friday curiosity. By the spring of 2026, most teachers in most schools have access to a chat model and a brief from somewhere upstairs to do something with it. The question is no longer whether to use AI. The question is what use looks like when it works. Place a stack of AI lessons on the PICRAT grid this week and the answer is sobering: most of them sit in the bottom-left corner. Passive Replace. AI does the work, students consume the output. The lesson would teach roughly the same thing without any of it.
That is not because the teachers are wrong about AI. It is because the path of least resistance with a chat model is to ask it for a paragraph and put the paragraph on a slide. There is one move that breaks the drift. It is small, it is repeatable and it works on almost any AI lesson you have already planned.
Why most AI lessons drift to PR
A teacher with thirty minutes on a Tuesday evening and an AI tab open will reach for what AI is best at: producing fluent text quickly. Generate a summary. Generate an explanation. Generate a worksheet. Generate a quiz. The output gets pasted into the lesson and the lesson is built around that output. Students arrive. Students read. Students answer the closed question at the end. Done.
What just happened is that the AI did the cognitive work and the student watched. The technology has not changed what the lesson asks of the student; it has just changed who produced the text on the slide. On the activity axis of PICRAT, that is Passive. On the technology axis, the AI replaced a textbook paragraph or a teacher-written summary. Replace. PR. The most common AI lesson in classrooms right now is the one where the AI is doing what the teacher used to do, and the student is doing exactly what they always did.
It is worth saying that the alternative is not to ask AI for a better paragraph. The alternative is to ask a different question of the AI. Tools like Generate exist for exactly this reason: pick a subject and an age range and you get a 3x3 matrix of nine lesson ideas, one per PICRAT cell, with the cognitive load on the student instead of on the screen. That is a different kind of help than "write me a slide."
Three AI lessons in PR
Three patterns that appear most often when I look at lessons in our schools. Each one is well-meaning. Each one is PR. Same shape every time.
Year 8 history, the Industrial Revolution. The teacher pastes a long primary-source extract into ChatGPT and asks for a five-bullet summary. The summary goes on a slide. Students copy it into their books.
Year 9 biology, mitosis. The teacher prompts an AI for a one-paragraph explanation of the four stages. The paragraph goes on a slide. The class reads it together. Three multiple-choice questions at the end.
Year 6 maths, fractions. The teacher uses an AI to spit out a ten-question worksheet on adding fractions with unlike denominators. Students complete the worksheet in silence. The teacher uses the same AI to mark it.
The student in each of these lessons read what the AI wrote, answered a closed question, and went home. The AI was the source of the lesson's content. The student was the audience.
The one move
The shift sounds small in a sentence and is large in a classroom.
Stop using AI to give students answers. Use AI to give students something to argue with.
The AI becomes a draft, not the answer. Generate the summary, then ask the students to find what is wrong with it. Generate the explanation, then ask the students to write a better one. Generate the worksheet, then ask the students to spot the question that has no answer. The student's task moves from read what AI made to fix, judge, sharpen or argue with what AI made. That is no longer Passive. That is Interactive.
The pedagogy under it is older than AI. Students learn more by critiquing a model answer than by reading one. They learn more by spotting an error than by repeating a correct fact. AI is unusually good at producing the right shape of artefact for this kind of work, at speed, in volume, and tuned to the year group. The teacher who treats the AI output as the final word writes a PR lesson. The teacher who treats it as a draft writes an IA lesson.
The same three lessons, lifted
Here are the same three lessons rewritten with the move applied. Same time budget, same AI tool, same content domain. The only thing that changes is what the student does with the AI output.
Year 8 history. The AI summary still goes on the slide, but with the original primary source on the desk in front of every pair. The pair's job: highlight one piece of evidence from the source that the AI summary missed and one piece it got slightly wrong, and rewrite the bullet that needs work. Five minutes. They post their rewritten bullet to the board.
Year 9 biology. The teacher generates two AI explanations of mitosis, one accurate and one with a deliberate error introduced by tightening the prompt. Pairs are told one is wrong and have to find the error, justify their choice, and write a corrected sentence. The closing slide shows the original prompts so students see what produced each one.
Year 6 maths. Each table gets the AI-generated worksheet, but with a brief: one of the ten questions is impossible, two are too easy and one has more than one valid answer. Tables work in pairs to flag which is which and explain why, then trade their flagged sheet with another table to check.
None of these lessons takes longer to plan. The AI did most of the heavy lifting. The work the teacher does is the same work she would have done anyway: pick a topic, choose a question. The shift is in what the student is asked to do with what the AI produced.
A note on Creative Transform
You can write Creative Transform AI lessons. A Year 10 group designing a chatbot that explains a Shakespeare scene to a Year 7 audience, iterating on its prompts, and presenting it to the younger class is firmly in CT. So is a Year 12 economics group using AI to model alternative budget assumptions and writing a position paper that defends one. Both are good lessons. Both take longer, manage harder, and go wrong more often. CT is worth the cost when the output of the lesson is genuinely a new artefact and the AI is one of several instruments the student is wielding. For most weeks, in most classrooms, the useful nudge is the one above: from PR into IA. Stay there until the move feels routine, then think about reaching higher.
What to do tomorrow
Take the AI lesson you most recently taught or are about to teach. Write down, in one sentence, what your students did with the AI output. If the sentence is "they read it" or "they copied it" or "they answered a question about it", you are in PR. The fix is to add a sentence that begins with a verb of judgement: criticise, fix, rank, improve, defend, refute, rewrite. Whatever the next lesson is, the AI part of it earns its keep when the student is the editor of what the AI produced, not the audience for it.
If you want to test where a draft sits, drop it into Analyse. It walks you through a guided decision tree about your lesson and helps you place it on the grid yourself. The first time most teachers do this with an AI lesson they thought was Interactive, the answer surprises them. That surprise is the point.
Andy Perryer is the global head of digital learning at a group of international schools and the creator of PICRAT Suite. The PICRAT framework was developed by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West in their 2020 paper in the CITE Journal.