Few questions divide educators more sharply than whether students should use AI to write. Ban it, and you ignore a tool your students will use in nearly every job they eventually hold.
Permit it without guidance, and you risk graduating students who never learned to think on the page.
A pair of professors at High Point University has been working through a third path, one that treats AI not as a shortcut to the finished product, but as a scaffold for the thinking that produces it.
At HPU’s “AI For Extraordinary Education” summit on May 5, Dr. Matthew Brophy, associate professor of philosophy, and Dr. Justin Cook, assistant professor of English and director of the HPU Writing Center, led a session devoted to exactly this problem.
Their framework offers educators and students a practical answer to a question most institutions are still avoiding.
Use AI to Practice, Not to Skip the Work
Brophy and Cook’s session sat within a broader set of summit topics that included deliberate practice, argument stress-testing, assignment redesign, authorship, accessibility and responsible AI.
Several of those ideas translate directly into classroom technique. “Deliberate practice” means using AI to drill a skill, asking it to generate practice problems or to critique a thesis statement repeatedly, rather than to produce a deliverable.
“Argument stress-testing” means feeding the AI your own reasoning and asking it to find the holes, so you strengthen the argument before a reader ever sees it.
In each case, the student is still doing the cognitive work. The AI is simply a sparring partner. That is the opposite of the most common misuse, pasting a prompt, copying the output and submitting it, which skips the practice entirely and leaves the student no stronger than before.
Redesign the Assignment, Not Just the Rules
A crucial piece of the framework places responsibility on faculty, not only students. “Assignment redesign” was one of the session themes for a reason: an assignment that can be completed in full by a chatbot is an assignment problem, not just a student problem.
The fix is to design work that requires the steps AI cannot fake, such as in-class reasoning, drafts that show their evolution, reflections on choices made, and oral defense of a position.
This is why HPU framed the whole summit around teaching faculty rather than policing students. With 25 faculty members leading 19 sessions, the day was built to give educators concrete strategies for structuring courses so that AI enhances learning instead of replacing it.
As Brophy put it, “The summit showed how AI can strengthen learning rather than outsource it.”
Keep Ethics and Authorship in the Foreground
The framework refuses to treat AI use as ethically neutral. Sessions on authorship and responsible AI pushed faculty to help students think about what it means to claim a piece of writing as their own.
For students, the practical upshot is a habit of transparency: be able to explain what you used AI for and what you did yourself.
That emphasis also prepares students for the workplace, where being able to articulate one’s AI experience to an employer is becoming a real asset.
High Point University faculty have partnered with the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning specifically to help students describe their AI skills clearly, an authorship question with a career payoff.
Why the Framework Travels
What makes the Brophy and Cook approach useful beyond HPU is that none of it depends on a particular app or model.
The principles apply as well today as they will in the future.
The deeper argument running underneath the framework is the one Brophy returned to repeatedly: AI makes human life skills more vital than ever.
Critical thinking, ethical judgment and creativity are exactly what good AI-assisted writing requires.
Used as a scaffold, the tool can help students build those capacities. Used as a substitute, it quietly erodes them. The choice, as the High Point University professors frame it, is one every classroom now has to make on purpose.