Dan Meyer Was Right Before It Was Cool
Distractions are everywhere, student centered design rises above the noise
Reading time:
5 minutes
While the education world spirals over AI, Dan Meyer (dy/dan) hasn’t blinked. For 15+ years, he’s hammered at the same question:
Are students learning?
Not clicking. Not consuming. Actually thinking—puzzling, questioning, revising. It’s easy to lose that thread amid new tools, policies, and dashboards. Dan’s reminder still cuts through:
What matters is what the student is doing, and whether the task makes them and their peers take interest and think.
When students engage with something they cannot help but think about, the room shifts. You feel it: murmurs of argument, minds together, heads working, a classroom buzzing.
Who sets that up? Not an algorithm. Not a mandate. A teacher. Culture‑builder, task designer, real‑time adjuster. No script or sensor can do that work for 30 very different humans. So bet on teachers.
This Teacher Appreciation Week is a good time for us all to spotlight the people and places doing it well. Borrow shamelessly! Here are some frameworks and models for getting started.
- Visible Thinking – for explicitly surfacing student thinking
- Building Thinking Classrooms – get students reasoning together
- Project-Based Learning/HTH – making work feel real and relevant
- 3-Act Math – lessons that begin with curiosity and land in meaning
Frameworks aren’t magic, but in your thoughtful hands, they do spark magic.
Try this tomorrow: Pick one upcoming activity and ask, “Where will my students not be able to help themselves but to stop, think and do, out loud or on paper?” If you can’t find that moment, redesign the task until you can.
Because no matter what tech shows up next… the rapture ain’t nigh. The future still runs from the teachers in the room, through to the students’ thinking. And that’s always been true.