A HARVEST KERNEL WORKING SESSION
The Visible Draft Map
Bring one writing assignment you already teach. In about 25 minutes you will leave holding a stage by stage AI map for it, the record students hand in with the essay, a process line for your rubric, and a paragraph you can paste into the assignment sheet today. You do the thinking. Nothing here writes it for you.
Why this exists. A Virginia Tech team recorded every request 77 college students made to ChatGPT while writing an essay, in a study published in the Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference. Asking for the essay itself, or a portion of it, was the most common type of request. Students who used ChatGPT to plan or to review still reported a sense of ownership comparable to students who never used it. In a later classroom deployment, Virginia Tech reports, students who were told their AI use would be recorded and visible to their instructor asked the AI to write the essay significantly less often. This session builds that visibility into one of your assignments, by hand.
SEED
Pick the assignment and name the skill
Choose one writing assignment you will grade this term. Then name the one skill it exists to build. Not the topic, the skill. Forming an argument, synthesizing sources, writing for a specific reader. Every decision below depends on this answer, because the help that costs the most learning is the help that does the skill for the student.
SPROUT
Mark each kind of help: open, open with a record, or closed
The study sorted every student request into four kinds of help. Go through them in order. For each one, write open, open with a record, or closed, then one line on why, tied to the skill you named. Students follow a rule better when they can see the reason for it.
GROW
Design the record and the rubric line
Every open with a record needs a record. Keep it small enough that students will actually do it. A link to the chat or a pasted transcript, plus three sentences: what I asked, what I kept, what I changed. Then write one rubric line for the process, worth enough to matter and not so much that it becomes the assignment.
HARVEST
Write the paragraph, then build the map
One paragraph for the assignment sheet. Name the skill, say which kinds of AI help are open, which need a record and which are closed, describe the record, and say that you will read it. Plain enough that a first year student understands it on the first read, and in their hands before they start writing.
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When one assignment is not the problem
The Assessment Builder builds assignments, rubrics and tagged question banks grounded in your Course Record: your course, your outcomes, your policies and your voice, planted once and used by every tool in the toolkit. Put the map you wrote here into your Course Record and every assignment and rubric you build from it carries the same rules and the same process line. Do the first one by hand anyway. Then you will know exactly what the map has to say.