Three Facets of Learning to Focus Our Choices About AI

Linda C. Hodges, Emerita Director, Faculty Development Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County

Key Statement: Framing our teaching plan around cultivating a sense of belonging, fostering engagement, and providing deliberate practice can focus our choices on if, when, and how to use generative AI.

Keywords: Sense of Belonging, Engagement, Deliberate Practice, Generative AI, Student learning

During the pandemic, I reflected in this blog (Hodges, 2020) on the problem of making choices amid all the options available in the realm of remote instruction (e.g., technologies, modalities). I encouraged us then to go back to basics. Begin with the end in mind by focusing first on our goals for student learning and then using those aims to drive our choices in assessments (what would achieving the goal look like?) and activities (how could we best support students in achieving those goals?). This process is better known as backward design. Once we set our goals, of course, we face a wealth of teaching choices as we plan activities and assessments to achieve them. These decisions can now be further complicated by the ambiguity and angst around the role of generative AI in our teaching.

Whether you’re an AI enthusiast or sceptic, I’d like to offer a way to ground pedagogical planning that capitalizes on our humanity in this technological age and acts as a guide to our daily work with students. Specifically, by considering three key facets of learning—sense of belonging, engagement, and deliberate practice—we can conceptually frame our thinking about our pedagogical choices, clarifying whether AI might be an asset to our endeavors.

Sense of Belonging

Abraham Maslow (1943) included belonging in his hierarchy of the five human needs that drive our motivation, Research continues to highlight the importance of a sense of belonging in fostering student learning. In an academic setting, Terrell Strayhorn (2018) describes sense of belonging as consisting of feelings of social support, connectedness, mattering, and being cared for. Sense of belonging and sense of community often go together, generating a feeling of commitment to the welfare of members of the group. Such support and connection play critical roles in cultivating students’ behavioral and emotional engagement and engendering their motivation.

Engagement

Pinning down exactly what we mean by “engagement” can be difficult. Engagement is a multifaceted construct comprising behavioral (body in the game), emotional (heart in the game), and cognitive (head in the game) elements—and various nuances associated with each. Aspects of engagement are closely related to sense of belonging and to motivation in a bit of chicken-and-egg fashion, with each fueling the other. Both behavioral and emotional engagement connect in complicated ways to cognitive engagement. How deeply students engage cognitively varies, too, and affects their learning. For example, Chi and Wylie (2014) describe how different actions that students use to engage with information and make meaning from it impact their depth of learning. In their research, students’ higher order learning was maximized when they interacted with each other, debating options and co-constructing new knowledge. Thus, engagement and learning are both individual and social experiences.

Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice was first recognized in performance fields such as music (Ericsson et al., 1993). In general, deliberate practice is a thoughtful, scaffolding process in which we start at a student’s current level of mastery, build on their prior knowledge, and provide guidance and feedback in the incremental development of specific disciplinary skills and habits of mind. This kind of progressive, purposeful practice is designed to advance their abilities in our distinct disciplines.

Sample Approaches for Application

Luckily, many of our well-trusted teaching practices address one or more of these three aspects of learning. As instructors, if we recognize these facets as part of our teaching goals and assignment structures, then we can more easily discern when we do and do not want to use generative AI to support our efforts. Asking ourselves two questions is key in this regard:

(1) How can AI augment or enhance our abilities to engender each of these three facets of learning?

(2) How will students perceive our use of AI in relationship to the aspect of learning we are trying to cultivate?

I offer a few general suggestions in the following sections.

Promote Connection 

The tried-and-true activity of learning names (and their correct pronunciations) is one of the most productive steps we can take to instill sense of belonging (Miller, 2024). Combining that practice with thoughtful, respectful attention to students as people and responsiveness to their voices and needs sends a powerful message that we value students. Examples of ways to cultivate connection and sense of worth include: using welcoming language in the syllabus, finding opportunities for students to share their experiences and interests, collecting and acting on feedback on class processes and climate, and encouraging and affirming students’ participation. 

Foster Involvement

Involve students by sharing course and assignment expectations and successful strategies for them to achieve course goals. Doing so builds their trust in us over time, engendering sense of belonging, supporting engagement, and modeling deliberate practice. Some helpful practices include prominently sharing daily/weekly learning objectives with students and providing rubrics to guide their work on assignments and help them gauge their progress. Generating formative activities for students that illustrate our expectations in concrete ways further unwraps expectations for students.

Paired or group work, when carefully planned and structured, build on the social aspects of learning to foster community and support engagement. That said, however, the additional choices and agency inherent in working with others can make students feel vulnerable and sometimes contribute to belonging uncertainty. Cultivating a class climate that supports students’ sense of belonging before implementing group work lays a foundation for success. Then, providing students with clear expectations for the exercise, guidelines for productive interactions, and an exercise with appropriate level of challenge scaffolds their learning in this format.

Develop Disciplinary Skills and Habits of Mind

Depending on the level of course we’re teaching, not all our students may have developed effective habits for learning. Students can find it difficult to engage if they are frequently frustrated in their attempts to meet our expectations, which can lead them to feel belonging uncertainty. Helping students learn how to learn in our field is one aspect of deliberate practice. We can model effective practice, demonstrating how we approach solving a problem or undertaking a reading. We can also assign readings or videos that describe research-based study practices and ask former successful students to share effective strategies with their peers. Importantly, we need to communicate to students that these are wise choices, ones that help them develop expertise, and are not remedial work.

Nothing succeeds like success—students’ sense of accomplishment breeds sense of belonging and engenders engagement and motivation, while providing deliberate practice. Thus, giving students formative opportunities to build skills and experience success without undue penalties addresses multiple facets of a positive learning path. Sequencing such activities intentionally and encouraging students to reflect on their setbacks and progress as they go along can stimulate students’ metacognition and promote their abilities to self-regulate, supporting their deliberate practice. For example, we can implement retrieval activities such as polling questions during class and require reflections or wrappers on key assignments or exams, asking students what they struggled with, what they learned, and what they would do differently next time.

Weighing the Role of AI

As you consider whether generative AI could help you foster sense of belonging with your students, think about how such an approach resonates with the purpose of this goal. Generative AI can certainly help you generate welcoming activities, but suppose you are considering using a chatbot to respond to queries. This approach is efficient, but how well does it support your goal of forging personal connections with students? And how will students perceive your offloading these kinds of interactions to the bot? If you do use this tool, be open with students about your reasons, explaining your choices. For example, you may choose to use AI to answer students’ routine questions related to the syllabus (cultivating their agency) but maintain personal responses when addressing student concerns and career questions (exemplifying support).

In thinking about engaging students and cultivating their deliberate practice, generative AI seems an obvious aid for creating activities that focus on course learning objectives and disciplinary skills, whether for individual use or class activities. What is equally important, however, is to show students how to use generative AI to stimulate their own engagement and provide deliberate practice. As we all know, many students will use AI for quick answers when they face deadlines, encounter challenges, or experience boredom. Teaching students how to use AI to provoke thought, stimulate reflection, and guide practice, rather than act as an answer generator, provides them with a tool for growth. For example, Josh Thorpe (2025) suggests telling students to ask the tool to ask them to do stuff. Similarly, think about involving pairs or groups of students in comparing and critiquing AI-generated products, engaging them in applying disciplinary criteria and evaluating options. In these cases, we are showing students how AI can provide an extension to their work with us, the important work of developing disciplinary skills and habits of mind (deliberate practice). What seems essential in this instance, of course, is that students realize that by doing so we are intentionally providing them with another tool to build their skills, demonstrating our faith in them, and not seemingly offloading our responsibilities.

Conclusion

Regardless of the technologies available to support our work, teaching remains a human, social activity. Once we have determined our course learning goals for students, framing our daily teaching choices on fostering sense of belonging, engagement, and deliberate practice can focus our choices about AI. Doing so also allows us to decide on whether and how we and our students can use generative AI constructively to develop disciplinary skills and habits of mind.

Discussion Questions

1. What barriers to sense of belonging do your students typically face in your courses (e.g., lack of role models, inadequate prior knowledge)? How do you (can you) lower such barriers and support more students? How do you see the role of generative AI in this work?

2. What kinds of activities typically engage your students most and in what way? What characteristics do these activities have in common? How could generative AI play a role in fostering student engagement?

3. How do you promote deliberate practice in your classes? How has generative AI supported or handicapped your efforts?

References

 

Chi, M. T., & Wylie, R. (2014). The ICAP framework: Linking cognitive engagement to active learning outcomes. Educational psychologist, 49(4), 219–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.965823

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. Th., & Tesch-Rӧmer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.

Hodges, L. C. (2020, July 23). The challenge of choices when teaching during COVID-19. The Scholarly Teacher. https://www.scholarlyteacher.com/post/the-challenge-of-choices-when-teaching-during-covid-19

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346

Miller, M. (2024). A teacher’s guide to learning student names: Why you should, why it’s hard, how you can. University of Oklahoma Press.

Strayhorn, T. L. (2018). College students' sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students. Routledge.

Thorpe, J. (2025, January 9). AI’s not a genie in a lamp: It’s a space to think. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/teaching/2025/01/09/better-approach-teaching-about-ai-opinion

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