AI Isn’t Inevitable
The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching
Generative AI may be unavoidable in education, but that does not mean faculty have to surrender their agency or hand their teaching over to automation.
A practical guide for instructors who want to embrace AI, set firm boundaries, or find a path between the two. The book moves in the order a course does: planning and designing, teaching, and adapting as AI changes. It focuses on learning outcomes and includes examples of AI-aware assignments, activities, assessments, and course policies.
Our students see this, even if they don’t use AI. They absorb the noise around them and have to wrestle with what AI means. Talk to them. Let them know they have value, and that there is more to life than the efficiency of machine intelligence.
Marc Watkins, What Happens When Students Stop Believing Their Work Matters, Rhetorica, April 2026
About
Balancing curiosity with skepticism
Marc Watkins is the founding director of the Mississippi AI Institute, which studies how generative AI is changing teaching and learning. He is the coauthor of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching (W. W. Norton, 2026) with Annette Vee and Derek Bruff.
He has worked with universities, K-12 schools and districts, accreditors, and companies around the world on faculty development, AI governance, and duty-of-care approaches to AI in education. Navigating AI calls for practical, responsible approaches: for some that means resisting uncritical adoption, and for others it means engaging with AI on purpose and with care.
From Rhetorica on Substack
Rhetorica
Navigating how AI impacts education, culture, and society. Weekly essays read by more than 8,000 subscribers.
Latest essay October 11, 2026
Discernment in the Age of Agents
Agentic AI can now log in, read, and complete coursework on a student’s behalf. This essay asks what discernment looks like when the machine can act for you, and why teaching students to decide when not to delegate is the skill that matters most.
September 20, 2026
What Happens When Grading Costs Almost Nothing?
Ultra cheap machine intelligence arrives
September 13, 2026
When AI Developers Regulate Themselves
Safety and AI regulation should include present harms, not just future ones
August 30, 2026
College Students Get Free Premium AI . . . Again
Keynotes and sessions
Speaking
Keynotes, campus visits, and virtual sessions on AI-aware teaching, AI literacy, and what higher education is for.
Recent
October 15, 2026
Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching Faculty Book Club
UNLV Teaching and Learning Commons, virtual
Faculty book club on the guide, timed with the AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference.
September 25, 2026
AI-Aware Education: Teaching with Confidence in the Age of AI
Keynote, The Future of Teaching conference, Iona University, New Rochelle, NY
More than 200 educators attended the Gabelli Center for Teaching and Learning’s second annual conference.
July 6 to August 2, 2026
Perusall Engage Book Event: The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching
Author-facilitated communal reading, Perusall, virtual
A four-week reading of the book with all three authors.
June 23, 2026
The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching: Live from Perusall Exchange 2026
With Eric Mazur, Annette Vee, and Derek Bruff
What AI-aware teaching means, making student thinking visible, and shifting assessment from artifacts to performance.
Watch
The Grove Lab
Agentic builds
Custom classroom apps built with agentic AI and shared openly. Each one started as a teaching problem, was built in conversation with a coding agent, and ships with its own AI disclosure. Most come from the Context Is All You Need catalog and are sorted into six Grove Lab pathways.
Stand-alone learning app
Pause Before You Prompt
An interactive reflection that asks students to explore critical sources, choose the questions that matter, and export their reasoning before using AI.
Stand-alone learning app
Sentence Sound Lab
A visual and audio lab to help students understand sentence length and pacing in writing.
Stand-alone learning app
Focused Reading Lab
A close reading tool for online students.