The Extended Essay & Authenticating Student Thinking w/ Michele Lackovic

If you don't know how to evaluate AI outputs, they’re no good. Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of IB Unplugged. Today we're talking with Michele Lackovic. You might have heard her name passed around different circles about the extended essays. She is highly versed in extended essay, has helped out with a lot of the resources for the new 2027 guide, and ultimately we got questions.

We were wondering, how can we actually be great supervisors now, when we know the students can generate a plausible research question and outline even a full draft in seconds. So what can we actually do, and how do we stay at the heart of the extended essay? And so that's why we wanted to get Michele on the show.

And that's what we're gonna be talking about today. So Michele's been doing this for a long time and has been able to work with so many educators across the world, during her workshops, and so many students. She's been a coordinator and a supervisor for 25 years. She teaches IB Lit, TOK, I think she said she's also worked in CAS.

I think she's done everything the core has to offer, and it really shows that she really has a deep understanding of the IB education, what students can gain from it, and specifically in the extended essay, I think she has a really inspiring and motivating way and approach of handling the extended essay in the past and the new one coming up now.

So let's get into the episode and bring in Michele. Hi, Michele, welcome to IB Unplugged. We're so glad you're here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Really looking forward to this. Absolutely. Yeah, us as well. I know we're going to be talking a lot about the extended essay and how we kind of approach that now, and in this age where we've got different tools.

But before we do that, let's give our listeners a chance to get to know you a little bit. We got a couple of warm up questions for you. So, I know you've been doing the extended essay for a long time. Do you have an EE topic you remember truly loving as a supervisor? When I was a very young supervisor decades ago, I remember a student who was very STEM oriented and tech oriented, and he ended up doing his extended essay on William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.

And it was a 1980s, just getting into how we get into the plugging in, plugging out, kind of pre internet sort of thing. And he did a fabulous job. And he went on to live and work in the tech world. But even years later he said that was one of his favorite parts of the IB program. And it was one of my favorite essays to supervise because he was just so passionate about it.

Yeah, I love that. I've had that experience, too, couple of times, where I've had somebody who just does a really cool EE topic and then it like, propels them. It's what they end up doing at university or beyond. And I'll see him at like homecoming or alumni events and like, hey, do you remember doing that EE?

And I'm like, yes, I do. It was awesome. That's good to hear. You've also watched both of your children go through the MYP and the DP. Is there anything that surprised you or that really changed in your perspective when you went from being kind of on the teacher and administrator side, to then being on the parent side and wearing that hat?

Yeah, actually that was interesting. So for six years straight, because my children are two years apart, I had my own children go through our MYP and DP program and I tell parents, as prospective parents, when we meet in the big auditorium and they're deciding what program they want their children to go into, that the great thing about the IB program is that your children can have completely different interests, like one of my children went into poli sci and business, and the other is studying right now, electrical engineering, and the IB program prepared them for both.

And it was interesting because the personal project was a really great primer for the extended essay, and I got to see how all of these things sort of combined. And it was really interesting because I got to see how like sort of CAS works after graduation. My daughter works for Teach for America in Boston, works for an inner city school teaching there.

My son, his deep interest in high school was history. So he did a lot of experiential learning. He did his extended essay on history, and then he did a special program where he took a veteran up to DC on a program called Honor Flight, where he took this Vietnam War vet up to, actually there's a whole plane of veterans.

And he was a guardian. And what they did was they took them to all the memorials in DC and honored them. And then he came back. And it's interesting, he's electrical engineering student. And that actually came up in his internship interview. And so he got to connect with one of the interviewers in that way.

And he said I did that and I really liked it, but I didn't realize that it had like applications in the real world for other future things. And I said, yeah, that's the thing about IB is that all of those interests aren't just extra things. They're part of developing you as a whole person. So that's what I got to see with my own children.

And it's just been great. I see it with other students when they come back and talk to me about with your own kids, it's really kind of cool because it's ongoing. Michele's observation about the personal project highlights the power of continuum wide skill building. As Lance King talked about in our episode on approaches to Learning, students don't automatically acquire self-management or complex research capabilities when they enter the DP.

When schools explicitly align the MYP personal project frameworks with that of the extended essay, students can enter year one already equipped with the project management habits and making independent research feel like a natural progression rather than an overwhelming hurdle and something new. This continuum can really help our students understand what they're taking from the MYP skills and moving into Extended Essay as the next step.

I love that. I love that as much that really focuses in on the core, because as a DP coordinator, when I'm doing the induction to the IB program, and I'm kind of clarifying with students what it's about, you know, I really hype up the core, because I think it is a super valuable thing and I kind of have this, like critical question like, well, if the core is so important, why don't they give it more points?

But I just love that everything you describe there isn't in points. It's so much more valuable. It kind of goes beyond this. It goes into, yeah, as you say, careers that they start to see how CAS kind of carries on beyond their time that the diploma program has extended essay opens all these doors that they wouldn't otherwise see in it.

I just love that, because too frequently I think people just think, well, I just need to know the specific courses, specific subjects, I need to go to university and beyond, that, obviously there's really great ways to see the core stuff going beyond this in much more meaningful ways. Yeah. I mean, if you were saying, okay, I want to study electrical engineering, what should I do? Oh, a history EE. Perfect.

It's not the obvious course that I think a lot of other programs make you go really narrow, but it does have kind of clear benefits to be able to have those different interests and bring them together. Yeah, it just sort of came full circle and his interviewer had experience with that and it gave them some common ground to talk about.

And he worked for an energy company during the summer, and it’s just, things that you don't think that are going to connect when you're in high school all of a sudden connect later on. And I think that's the beauty of the IB program, is that everything is connected. And in theory of knowledge, we talk about how coursework is all connected through that critical thinking and knowledge, and getting back to the extended essay, that's why I always encourage students to do something that you really love, because that that is going to carry you a lot further.

And when you're spending nearly 40 hours of your life over the course of year one and year two, you should be doing something that you care about, rather than checking off a box. So that's the thing the deep research gives you a lot, obviously knowledge, but it also gives you a chance to explore an avenue that you might not be exploring post-secondary.

Or it might deepen something you do post-secondary. So either way, it's a win. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, Michel, you're obviously an expert IB educator and doing this for a long time and especially within the extended essay. And let's dive into that. That's what we want to talk about today. And obviously there's some changes.

We got the new extended essay, curriculum is coming out with the first assessment 2027. And AI has really come on the scene heavily in the last a while. And so we really want to get into a couple segments here unpacking this. And this first one really looking at kind of supervision, the role of supervisor, when we're kind of in this age of like an instant draft.

So I mean, realistically, a student can produce a research question. They can produce an outline using AI. What should or what is changing in terms of the role of the supervisor here? How do we navigate that space with our students? There's always been students who have taken shortcuts, right? There's papers that you can buy online.

There's all sorts of things. But you're right, we live in a world now where there is something where, I'm just going to just ask for a little help here. And then all of a sudden, the question isn't something the student did the hard yards to try to figure out, but it's something that was created for them.

And I think the role of the supervisor isn't so much changing as just being a little bit more deliberate with those discussions with students, because when I sit down with the students, I say, well, what are you interested in? And if they come up with, like , four ready made questions, well, why that question?

And where did that come from? And those discussions, if they kind of say, oh yeah, then you start to have more discussions and say, well let's talk about what you do know. And then it becomes interesting and then you can and so there is some benefit, I think to brainstorming with AI. But I always like to think of it as a do your own thinking first and then turn to AI to help refine your ideas.

Or I like to think about like, how many times have we ever had a discussion as a supervisor with a student and they come to us with nothing? Like absolutely zero and they're like ground zero. I don't know what to do. So there are some yeah, it's definitely it has been my experience at some point. But there are some really great visual mapping tools out there.

One is called Research Rabbit. The other is called Connected Papers. There's something called Litmaps. And what they do is the student will put a URL or their topic in, and then they'll get a visual map of all the different papers that are out there. And students might need to go to JSTOR, or might need to go through their librarian who, by the way, our librarians are our rockstars.

I know, right? Just life savers. Come on. If the students aren't utilizing their media specialist or their librarians, then I think that they're missing a part of the EE that can really help them. But going through and sitting down and they might look at some, bring some of these sources and then that's a great starting point for that discussion to happen.

So I've had, during webinars on AI and education, some seasoned educators say, well, if they're getting these literature maps then they're not doing the research themselves and they're not finding sources on their own. I'm like, well, that's what supervisors can help them do. It's a starting point. So rather than an end point, I like to see that maybe the resources we have through AI are a great starting point where those human discussions still happen, but they don't happen from ground zero.

No, as you're saying this, I was reading your Substack article about the note cards and that was a good nostalgic throwback of like, laying out your essays with the note cards and the sources and things like that. So I'm wondering if you could talk people through your kind of way of working with the students as a supervisor, because I think that you did some really interesting distinctions about kind of where you give feedback and at what stages, and it all feels really intentional.

So I was wondering if you could kind of walk through that. Yeah. So, everything that I designed, I kind of think of sort of, I’m very R&D in my thinking and I do a lot of experimentation with everything. Sorry, I don't know what R&D means. What is that? Research and development. Oh, okay. Thank you. Yeah, I'm kind of like, I like to throw things around and break them and figure out what's going on I mean, even when we were reading a play. One of the things that we did was we looked at allusions in the play and animated them with AI, but that was after we did a lot of intentional analysis and so forth.

So when I sit down with students for the EE and I think about that supervisory process, I have more discussions. And I think the biggest difference now is my gold standard for so many years, because I'm a literature teacher by nature, is to write the right kinds of marginal comments, not copious notes, but just the right questions at the right time.

Because we're allowed to give written feedback on one draft. And we're allowed to do that all through the IB. So, last year when I was doing some theory of knowledge work, I did the same thing on like, actually I was doing that for the proposal stage and I was going to be out. So I wrote like more notes than I normally do.

And then when their drafts came out, I was like, oh, why do these sounds so smooth and not in the students voice? And they had taken my comments and uploaded those to a large language model. And so I'm like, oh, this is on me. I've given them a recipe for how to improve their papers. And that's when my gold standard, all of a sudden, became sort of obsolete in the age of AI.

Not that we shouldn't write questions in the margins, but my questions now are very brief, intentional and to the point. And then the further discussion lives in a face to face conversations. So when the students come and talk to me, I have that back and forth and that iterative back and forth is actually become more helpful.

It's saved me time at home. And writing all of this and you can think about it if you're doing all the writing in the margins, who's learning, you are not the students. So I have built in a little bit more time to have those discussions. So before I might map out like 15, 20 minutes for a student. Now, I'll map out a good 30, 40 minutes to have that fuller discussion with students.

And I do that all across the board with the HL essay in IB literature with the prescribed titles. Yeah. Everything. And so people think, well, how do you do this? How do you fit in? Well literature, just small, shorter works or whatnot. But with the extended essay, we are supposed to work with the students for 3 to 5 hours.

That's really plenty of time to have those intentional discussions. What I love about what you're talking about here, Michel, is you could see how having that iterative conversation, that sort of back and forth as you just described, really helps the student identify their own specific passions and then helps them really understand a little bit more about drawing that passion out.

It really does come to the root of the word education to educe. Let me pull out the best here because, you know, I was laughing when you mentioned they kind of come to you with these questions they've got like four prepared research questions. You're like, where is that from? I get all the time with biology because it's just like, oh, I really, really am interested in this enzyme and how it works and goes, what's that all about?

But then you get the chance to, like, dive into it in more detail and you start to pull out some that works for them. And so what I love about what you're describing here is just using that conversation to help the student deepen what they think and what they're really interested in. And I like the cautionary idea of AI and how to be using that.

I know you've shared some things in a Substack with regard to like the guided pathway of AI and how you can use that to have better questions. And I guess, as such an experienced educator, somebody who's so far into IBEN and workshops and examining and that sort of stuff, when you're talking with people in these workshops, what do you notice most people are really kind of getting wrong, and what are the easiest wins that we could be doing to make sure we get it right?

Well, I think that most coordinators, IB coordinators are exhausted right now. Because what happens invariably Can you speak to that, John? I feel so awake. Yeah. Because we could talk all day about like, what's supposed to happen, these perfect conversations. But at the end of the day you might have the handful of students, or maybe more than a handful, where the voice isn't theirs, the work isn't theirs.

And then what do you do? And then you ask, well, where does it go wrong? I think it goes wrong in the policing. Because, in my experience, students, well, some students cut corners, because they just don't want to do the work. But when the students cut corners, they cut corners when they have four things to do the next day.

And they only have a certain amount of hours. They cut corners when there's no one to ask. And it's 11:00 at night. They cut corners when they procrastinate. Their lives are busy. They have a lot of extracurriculars. They have a lot of difficult classes. So, I think that one of the things to do that once something does go wrong and you notice that isn't in the student's voice.

I have students actually jot down some notes about their own paper off grid. And it's not a test. It's just like, well, talk to me about what is happening in this paper right now. Talk to me about what your main claims are, and just write it down for about 15 minutes, and then you're going to bring that up to me and we'll have a discussion.

And then I'll look at that next to their draft, and if the voice is completely different, or they can't speak to anything that's in their paper, that gives me a lot of data. We need to rethink exactly how we are going to go from here. Because I had a student last year and she was doing a paper on dance, and she'd been dancing since she was like three.

She knew everything about it. And our early conversations were fantastic. And then when she got to the draft stage, I mean, it looked like a postgraduate student could have written. I'm like, what happened here? And she had some theories that she couldn't speak to. And then I'm like, well, you can tell me what this word means.

She couldn't. I'm like, what happened to the notes that we were looking at earlier? And she said, oh, well, I didn't feel polished enough or good enough. I felt like this would be better to do it this way. And I said, no, no, that was better. I said, I’ve been scoring extended essays for IB for like over a decade.

You're supposed to sound like a 17 year old. You're not supposed to sound, you're supposed to be doing the work on your own. So I said, what happened to the other draft? She goes, I got rid of that. I'm like, let's get back to that. Let's toss this. And then we took it back. And then we had those real conversations.

And so that's part of my voice protocol. And that's a part of an interim reflection where they write things down and then clarifying conference and then we can't get to the evidence of ownership until they have that clarifying conference. And then from there she had to go back and integrate things she really didn't know about.

And she wrote a fantastic paper. She said it felt like it was choreographing a dance when she wrote. And she trusted her voice at that point. And it was so edifying for, I think both of us, that she was able to do that. And I think where schools get it wrong is they see we need to punish this, because the student cheated and they know they cheated, and they know they cut the corners and the students know they get do more.

So when a student has corners, I'm like, let's just talk about this. I know what you did. you know what you did. And some of them were like, how do that this is AI? And so we have detection programs and all of that. But some of those detection programs are wrong. I had a Venezuelan student who wrote in a very patterned way, but she owned every word of that.

And some of her other teachers were questioning things, but like, this was all her. She was definitely writing this work, and it was similar work that she done for me, and she started to cry, she said. I started to doubt that anything that I wrote was authentic was going to be called into question. So the detection programs can be wrong, and particularly for students whose first language is not what they're writing in.

Right? She's writing in English, but her first language isn’t English. And so somehow the detection patterns come out of false positives in a lot of cases like that. So in the discussion told me everything I needed to know. And then some kids are really good at humanizing their language and so forth and passing by the detectors and they're super techie, but then they can't speak to their paper.

And I'm like, well, I can't authenticate something you can't speak to. So I think the discussions even the playing field, because it's not about catching cheaters, it's about authenticating real work and that's what we're in the business of, is the learning. Yeah. It's also about what stage, like by the time it gets to one of these authenticating services, it's too late.

The kids already decided that they needed to take the shortcuts, where if you're, and it's just about trying to get away with it or not, but having the conversation beforehand is the why. It's understanding is it because they're completely overloaded and they don't have the time to do it? Is it because, I think I've been hearing a lot more of students just feeling like there is no way that I could possibly write this essay as good as chat, so why would I even bother.

What's the point, If then later on in my career, I'm just going to have to use it and blah, blah, blah. And so having the conversations about the why and then actually seeing the value of the conversations with you, I think makes a big difference, because then they see the purpose of writing it themselves, as opposed to just getting caught at the end.

And then I think students are going to be a lot more proud of their own work anyway, as opposed to something that they might generate the other way. And, actually I was looking at this just a little bit ago because we were talking about academic integrity and sharing that with students, but also our teachers and kind of recognizing we've touched on them like the three more often reasons that students will choose to be dishonest is they're completely overwhelmed, as you said, or they haven't manage their time too well.

Or maybe as educators, we put too many deadlines all in one spot, that sort of thing, to they feel like this, I have to, this is my only option, I have to be successful, and I don't trust my voice. Or third, like, it's just kind of, it's accepted in the community like, nobody really gets called out on this thing, So you just kind of do it. It's okay by all the peers.

But what I'm really impressed with what you spoke to there, Michele, is how much it's about drawing out the student voice. And obviously when you say that the sort of voice piece, I think it's the verbalizing ownership in the continuous exchanges, right? Yes. Very good. Verbalize ownership and continuous exchange, very good.

Which is cool. So and this is a cool framework, but I actually love the acronym, because what we constantly come down to is like, what makes it that a student doesn't want to trust their own voice? What makes it where they feel like, I have to use this AI because it's better than what I can provide. And that to me really dips into kind of an identity piece and identity formation of this young person that, as you've described, the extended essay can really bring out, like it can help to bring out more of the academic in a young person than they thought they had.

It can bring out more of their passions more of their interests than they thought they had. So I just love that what you commented on, it’s not about policing, it's about helping them find their own voice. And I just think that's a really powerful message that we could take right away from what you're talking about here.

Well, and I think also, it's not just about because people say, well, to get students future ready and the students in the future are not going to be using writing in the exact same way as they do right now, or they did even 3, 4 or 5 years ago. But I still see many things about the EE that make students future ready.

I follow a lot of people who in the AI world, particularly in the post-secondary and a person I follow is Ethan Mollick. He's wonderful. He runs an AI lab at the Wharton School in the US, but he also teaches MBA students. And one of the things that you have to do as an MBA student is you have to create startups and things like that.

And something that used to take many months, his students were able to do it with AI in four days. But, in his article that he wrote earlier this year, he called AI a management superpower. And he said his students were able to create these startups in four days, not because they were good at AI, but because they knew how to scope problems.

They knew how to think outside the box. And they also had expertise in their field. So what is the EE do? It's a long term project. One of the counselors that I talked to at global conferences say that IB students are sort of set apart because they rarely do have students who do such a long term project, where they have to reach out to supervisors, where they have many steps along the way.

I mean, that's real world project based learning that we do, and it's getting them ready to scope problems, figure things out. These are all approaches to teaching and learning skills, where they have to think, they have to collaborate. They have to really gain knowledge. And if you think about what Ethan Mollick was saying also about having expertise, what are they doing when they do a deep dive into research, they're gaining that expertise.

So, if you don't know how to evaluate AI outputs, they’re no good. One of the most interesting challenges emerging in schools is that AI is not simply creating an academic integrity problem. It's also creating a confidence problem. Research from self-determination theory suggests that students are more motivated when they experience competency, autonomy, and meaningful ownership over their learning.

When students begin to believe that an AI system can always write better than they can, that sense of competence can be completely undermined. Educational researchers have also found that students are more likely to engage deeply with challenging work when they believe their ideas matter, and when they feel their personal voice is valued.

If students see themselves primarily as editors of machine generated text, rather than thinkers and authors, there's a risk they then disengage from the very intellectual work that learning is supposed to develop. So what Michele is describing through her supervision model is really a process of rebuilding academic confidence.

The conversation then becomes less about producing polished prose, and more about helping students recognize that their perspective, experiences, and intellectual curiosity are genuinely valuable. So what are we doing with the EE? Is it superfluous now to just have it? No. Absolutely not. We need it now more than ever, because we need students to still develop that expertise.

And this is one project that's able to do it. I've heard a lot of people say, oh, we have to have everything under supervision. We can't have any long projects. We have to just whatever they do, they do in class. And I'm one of those people who now, like, has students take out paper. But I still very much believe in the extended essay and the process of the extended essay, because it helps students gain expertise, not just in a field that they already know about a little bit from their IB subjects, but it helps them go out on their own.

And I'm going to tap into Tim's, you just had somebody on your show about curiosity, and I believe he was a science teacher, right? Yeah. And he talked about curiosity and how important that is. I mean, that is the human side of all of this. And I think in all of the AI parts. And Clara Hawking talked about human flourishing.

We can't forget about the human flourishing. And I think the EE is one of those places where students get to showcase that, in a way that they aren't able to do in the shorter assignments, and then the small paper ones and twos, where you're just doing something in an hour and 45 minutes. When you're spending 40 hours over the course of two contact years, you're developing things that are well beyond just the scope of this one paper.

You're developing skills that are going to make them future ready for the long haul. And these are employable skills. So I don't know, I really believe in this. And so I think I'm pretty excited about the changes in the EE. There's a new interdisciplinary pathway. I don't know if you're aware of that, but we always had the World Studies EE, but that was scoped with very specific fields in mind.

Now, students can, I can remember telling a student who loved science fiction, and he wanted to write about the science part of science fiction. And like, I love that idea, but you can't do it because there's no, it doesn't fit the parameters of the literature and science. You can't mix those. Well, now you can.

So IB wasn't trying to torture us, with giving us all of this extra flexibility, it was trying to like open pathways for students to be able to make these, they were already making these connections on their own, but now they have permission to actually write an EE on that, which I think is really cool.

What's interesting here is that research on AI consistently points to the same conclusion, AI works best when it's paired with human expertise. Ethan Mollick and others have argued that the people who benefit most from AI aren't necessarily those who know the tools best, but those who have enough subject knowledge to evaluate what the AI produces.

That's why projects like the extended essay still matter. They're not just teaching students how to write a paper. They're teaching students how to think deeply about a problem, evaluate evidence, and develop expertise. Those are exactly the skills that become more valuable in an AI rich world. No, definitely.

I mean, I think there's so much that the IB's doing right now to, kind of, really champion the interdisciplinary learning. And I think that the EE is probably not going anywhere. And I think that there's a lot of conversations around just fears of essay writing. And how do I teach students to write essays?

I can't trust them. Like you said, I can't trust them to do it at home. They have to do it in person. And I think that you have a really great perspective on kind of why it matters, but also how to get the students to understand why it matters, and pulling all of that together. So no, I think it's great.

Well, and you were just touching on obviously the new EE guide and it's going to be coming out here for 2027. And I know that you've contributed to writing some of these and books and all this stuff for people as well. I know there's a few big structural changes and that sort of stuff that are going in there, but I actually want to get into this piece you were just talking about with the AI guidance, because we know that it's woven throughout the guide, rather than just sort of tucked in as like an academic integrity piece at the side.

Can you talk us through that a little bit more? How do we have this sort of AI guidance woven in throughout the whole process of the EE, and how can we use that better? So it's interesting. The academic integrity guide, not simply the EE guide, but the academic Integrity guide, was updated in February of 2026.

And interestingly enough, there was a lot more guidance about AI. AI is no longer really siloed in appendix six. For those of you who've been watching this carefully in early 2023, IB basically said, we're not going to ban AI. It's the wrong way to deal with innovation. So they created a very helpful appendix six, about what AI is, the use, the misuse, that sort of thing.

So what they did later on is, and this is a process, I mean, AI changes, the world is changing. I mean, not just in education, but AI is changing really, in the workplace and in everything. So, of course IB is updating. They have design principles now. They have all sorts of things. But in the Academic Integrity Guide, one of the things I thought that was interesting is they're being much more deliberate about, this does need to be, obviously, your work.

Things need to be cited. But, one thing that I think a lot of people miss is when students will point to, or a teacher will point to, well, IB says that grammar checkers are fine, it's mentioned in appendix six. Well, they added one word into this and it says non generative grammar checkers are okay.

So what does that mean? Well Grammarly is a generative grammar checker. Quillbot, all of those things. So, when they added the word non generative, that basically means when you're using something that's going to completely change your language, then that's not okay. So, what do you use instead? Well if you go to Word and you just sort of have it changing the letter, or it's adding a word in, that's fine.

But you can't go into Grammarly, because those programs have become so I don't want to say invasive, but it's a lot of people have it on their email now. I ended up taking it off my email because I'm like, that's not what I want to say at all, you know? But it's one thing to use those things for your emails, another to use it for your EE, because it literally changes the content, because it's changing the words.

So, what does it mean for AI? That's just in terms of the actual ownership. In terms of what does it mean along the way? I think one of the most underutilized pieces in the extended essay is called the RRS. It's the research reflection space. And that is a place that students can park their ideas. It can be digital or non digital.

If you use one of the platforms like ManageBac, or even if you don't, you could even just put it on a a Google Doc or something like that. But it's a place where students can record all of their information. And we tell our students anything that you've done with AI throughout your thing, or even anything that you've done for your paper, oh, these are really good articles that I want to come back to.

I'm going to just put those in there. So it works kind of like the learner portfolio in the IB lit class. It works like the personal project has a space like, similar to that. So IB has these spaces that are already set up for students to sort of track what they're doing. And they're not just authentication tools, but they're like living records of what the students processes.

And I think, when you talk about what does AI use look like along the way, some students might not remember three months down the road. Oh, I actually queried a chat bot for x, y, z, but if they put it in the research reflection space, then there is a record of that that the school knows about. It can be referred back to if there's ever a question about integrity, and it can be cited.

It’s kind of common sense, right? That you just kind of, cite your journey. And this is not a new thing. How many times have we ever read a paper where it has so many sources in it that come from somewhere else? You're like, where's the students voice? It just sounds like they've cobbled together a bunch of different scholars, and the scholars are over eclipsing the voice of the writer.

That's been a problem for decades. Now we've got AI eclipsing everything. But this is not a new problem. We just need to get back to that discussion about. And that's why one of the reasons why IB has changed, or I think IB, I don't even know if this reason, but I've noticed that the assessment criteria differentiates analysis from evaluation.

Right? So what is the difference between analysis. So criterion C is about that line of inquiry and the analysis. So always going back to the research question and analyzing along the way. But with that evaluative piece in criterion D and discussion piece is something you do along the way. So you might not be a top researcher in biology or whatnot, but how you decide to organize your ideas, what you are thinking about those ideas, how you decide one researcher against another and where you land and all of that, all of that is very evaluative, and all of that is you.

And that is where the critical thinking is, and that is where research development really comes along. So I think, I'm really glad that they separated that, because it used to all be in criterion C critical thinking. And now that that's divide it out, students should really be doing that evaluative part all along the way.

And that includes evaluating anything that they get from an outside source, whether it's a scholar or a chat bot. You can easily see where, obviously they made a couple of updates here, but as you were talking here, there's like this thread of a lot of stuff is still the way that it kind of was, right?

We're still trying to find evaluation. We're still trying to have critical thinking be present. We're still trying to have students create their own argument and create their own essay and that structure. And so, as we think about the new guide here, do you have maybe specific supervision habits that you would say, keep these, the ones that you've always been doing, keep those, because that's important.

And then I guess, are there any supervision habits that you'd be like, yeah, you can ditch that now. Like don't worry about that anymore. You know, it's interesting I just, rather than keep and ditch, I like to think about tweaking. Right? That wasn't an option, Michele, come on. I'm not about like an either or person.

So I would definitely keep the discussion pieces going. Well let me ask you the question, is there something you think should go? Because that is interesting to me. Is there something that you see? Well, just as you've been highlighting here, just the amount of policing and the amount of like, let me double check this and make sure that said, have you done it correctly, you know, it really emphasizes, I think, the wrong thing about the essay.

Now as a DP coordinator, ultimately, a lot of academic integrity issues do end up on my plate, and I do have to turn into a detective sometimes, which I'm like, I don't remember doing this at university, but I can do it. But I think ultimately I would say, let's stop paying so much attention to let me authenticate, let me authenticate, let me authenticate.

I'm not saying that's not important. It is important. But I think what's of more value is, what you've been saying so far, really helping to draw that interest in that passion from the student, really trying to get them to see that this is a valuable piece of work that they're bringing to the table, for all the skills that you just identified.

And I think it's important to help students recognize, like, you're not responsible for bringing new knowledge to the planet right now. Like that's a doctoral thesis. That's stuffed beyond that, you know? Right now I want to see you synthesize these ideas, put together an argument, construct stuff. You're going to learn some specific skills along the way. That's the point here.

The point here isn't to have a perfect, polished piece of work. And I think, for me personally, that's where I would say go that direction, ditch a little bit more of the let me police every piece of this, and just say, like, how am I inspiring this kid with every interaction I have with them? Yeah. And in terms of the policing, what I tell them is that it's part of my job to be able to authenticate work.

And I can't authenticate work that you can't speak to, if you can't explain a concept. And I also ask students about their research, because right now there's a lot of AI programs that will summarize long papers and so forth. And so I say, look, it's fine to have AI help you sort through and figure out where you want your research to go.

But once you land on a certain paper, you don't just cherry pick two quotes, and that's all you know about that research paper. Because I'm going to be asking you about the research. Like, so what is this research paper? How does it add to your argument or what was the main point of it? And if you can't speak to that, you don't own this, and I can't sign on the line.

I'm like, you're tying my hands. Help me help you. And then they're like, oh, well, that makes sense. So, and I said I'd love to be able to click the box and authenticate this, but I just can't right now. You need to own more of this. So I do think that it is a little bit of exhausting right now. I will admit that it does take more time, but, my relationships with my students are great, once we have those honest conversations.

Very rarely do I have a student who pushes back and says, well, I didn't do this. And they're like, okay, okay, okay. It sounds like this, because you're making a safe space. It sounds like, at least what I'm picking up here, is you're not coming at them like, I'm here to accuse you or turn you into the authorities.

It sounds like you're really coming into this and creating a safe space for then they feel like, oh, connection is more important right now. And I think that's a hugely valuable thing. Yeah. And I am really interested in what they have to say. And even if they feel like it's not important, I'm like, well, that, and just to try to find a nugget, that actually is interesting, let's go down that path.

And they're all in once you're all in. And I've been at schools where people are supervising 26 essays. That's just so many. I know that it’s sometimes impossible to figure out the logistics. But if you can get it down to five or fewer, then you actually have the time to meet with the students and have these conversations.

And so I think part of it is going to be a retooling, on the school's part, to make sure that it's actually doable for the supervisor and student time wise. I've seen really interesting things where that they'll take, you know, like, Faraday's or something like that, where they just have meetings all day long just for EE students and, you know, things like that.

So I think making sure that you take the time to build in the right conversations is really important, too. Yeah, I mean, it's not just about having time to talk. It's what are you talking about, and when are you doing those conversations. If it's all kind of back and forth just on paper and feedback in the beginning, and then you're not having the conversation until later on, then you don't have that relationship built up.

You don't have that conversation of why are we even doing this, until they've already done it. And so I think that what you're saying here about making sure that, from the beginning, the relationship’s in place, the trust is there, the intentions of, from you, you're not, as John called, just a detective trying to catch them.

It's like, no, we've both on the same team here. We're trying to get to this together. I know you use this for these things. I know that you can't use it for these things. And this is why, and being able to have that open dialog, I think is really important. And I think that you, before we started recording, started talking about that this is something that you really are investing in with your classes and making sure that there is this human connection in the classroom and building this safe space.

Now that we are recording, could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. It's funny, for all my work in AI, I started off this year, like, off screens, where we spent the first week or so, intentionally building relationships without screens, in my literature at my TOK classes, where we would sit in tables of four, facing each other.

And so even if they have a Chromebook or something right in front, that's still a slight barrier. And we would do actual writing and connecting, and we would have breakfast days and things like that. So, I think creating the conditions for learning is just as important as the learning itself. And certainly we open up our Chromebooks, we do things like that.

We make sure that we are part of the digital world, because we need to have students be future ready. But I think going back to what Clara was saying about human flourishing, we need to build that climate first. So we create those safe spaces. We create that community first. And I think as teachers in the secondary realm, where we see our students so often throughout the week, we have, that’s something really special for us that we are able to connect that.

And the students in IB are taking all sorts of classes with each other. And so it's like, oh, that was happening in history. And we have like moments of, sort of, connections. So I spent a little bit of time doing that in the beginning. And I think it's really important to just, kind of, make sure that students have that time to connect with each other.

Yeah. My daughter is almost three now, so it's a little different than the DP. But her school we just got out of this. They do a research project? Yeah, they do extended essays. It's great. On Paw Patrol. Sweden’s wild. Yeah. No. So, we're having this parent meeting yesterday, so that’s why it’s on top of mind, and they were basically saying that they don't, in their three year old's curriculum, It's like they don't do anything except for relationship building and talking about friendship and all of the like, social skills is like the first part of the curriculum, because they believe that nothing else can happen until the kids feel safe and comfortable and they know who their friends are in their class, which is all of them and their teachers.

And that it's like, no, if the foundation of trust isn't there in the classroom, nothing else can happen. And I don't think that that part actually changes between preschool and 16 year olds. It's going to change the conversations completely. No, I think that's definitely right. And I think what you're hitting on here, too, is that if the first time you meet your supervisor is like halfway through or something, and all it's been is email exchanges, you don't have the connection.

So I think it's really important in the supervisory process, too, because some of the students might not even know their supervisor. It might be, a person might be assigned to them. Yeah. But I also think, if you think of any project management that you do later on in life, you have your handful meetings in the beginning and then it's fine for them to give me a little drive by email.

We are talking about my research question, what do you think about this? And they just send me a quick email and then I can answer that. So once you get that discussion going and that rapport going, just like in any long term project management, you know, it's not efficient to be able to meet every week.

Who has time for that? But you've got to get that foundation going. And then you can do some of the, I even have like hallway chats when I'm sitting at my door between hallways. Somebody’s like, I have this idea, I'm like, oh, that sounds great. Okay, have a good launch. Some of these things can work organically.

It doesn't have to be the three meetings and then you're done. You can have these small little, moments of connection throughout. Michele, what I love about this conversation is it's just really, it's inspiring about the extended essay, but it's inspiring about just good teaching and it's coming in to the point of why I think so many of us get into education anyway, and why we get to do this thing.

And that's to work with young people and help them flourish and help them grow. And so, yeah, I just love that this conversation about the extended essay has really struck at the heart of what we do as educators. I know obviously the EE has just gone through a new iteration. It's going to be changing, and we can assume that it's going to continue to change and develop in the years to come.

What do you hope that a student's extended essay experience still feels like in five years, ten years, 15 years, etc. regardless of how the tools might be five years, ten years, might keep changing? 5 years, 10 years, I hope they are still being able to scope problems. I think that they are able to do something that they are passionate about, that they are able to see this as a deep learning that maybe they're a little bit interested in something that happened in their history class or literature class.

Maybe they've been dancing since they were three and want to get back to that, that they're still able to explore something, whether or not it helps them later on in their career. It might come back to them like it did with my son, in a different way. And I hope it helps them develop research skills, that give them that evaluative, to give them that deep knowledge and that evaluative piece that's going to help them flourish later on, in this world of emerging tech, that seems to be changing by the minute.

So, I hope I still see all of that in 5 to 10 years to come. What Michele is describing is strongly supported by research on learning. Studies have consistently shown that students are more willing to take risks, to ask questions, and to persist through challenges when they feel psychologically safe and supported by their teacher.

That's especially important for something like the extended essay, where students will inevitably encounter uncertainty, setbacks, and moments of self-doubt. The relationship isn't separate from the learning. In many ways, it's what makes the learning possible. I'll wrap up with one more question, and we talk about what you hope for the students.

But what about for the extended essay coordinators? What do you hope that they would do differently with the new 2027 changes when they land? With the new 2027 changes, you know, doing differently is I just think that, like, what you were saying the policing, we live in a real world. And if a student is going to be turning in something that's not their work, we can't sign off on it.

But then giving them ways to say, how is this going to work. Like, rather than yes-no, let's talk about that process. And everyone has guidance for use and misuse of AI. IB came out with this really great document about 13 scenarios a few years ago, just making sure that students are aware from the get go of what is permissible, not permissible, making sure that the research reflection space is really utilized, so everyone can point to the same document when you're having these conversations.

So I think more upfront, I don't want to say prevention, but more upfront knowledge and transparency, I think is going to be better for everyone, later down the line. Great. Thank you so much, Michele. This has been so, so great. I love talking about extended essays now, as of today. Yeah. And I just wanted to end with I completely empathize with all the coordinators and the supervisors out there that are doing the hard yards, because teaching and learning in the age of AI is difficult.

It's like the transition is hard. I'm sitting there in the classroom, I have had to change a lot of things that I do. And so this isn't all just like rainbows and puppy dogs. This is hard work. But I've found that, like, if I just tweak a few things and not think of it as having to change everything, it becomes a lot more doable.

And, I would say, any advice that I have is just to sort of think of everything in small steps rather than big leaps, and to not think you're going to have it all figured out right away, because everything is always changing. So, just being flexible, I think and balanced, as we look forward to this, this new iteration for anything, not just the EE, but in all things in teaching and learning.

Yeah. Thanks, Michel. I'm feeling way more inspired now. So appreciate it. Thank you so much. Right. Well, I'm so glad we got Michele on the show. This is my first time getting to meet her, really. I mean, I had heard of her and some of the work that she's done, but this is, you can see why she's such a popular IBEN educator, somebody who does workshops and obviously leads a lot of things.

She just dripping with passion when it comes to what to do with the extended essay. Yeah, exactly. And it's not just the extended essay, which obviously that's a huge part of her work, but with Kognity, she's been doing a lot of different work on her voice framework, which we kind of talked about in the episode.

And I hate when I just say, like AI professional development, because what does that even mean anymore? Everything, to some degree is touching AI. But I really like her framework, because I think that it feels very human, actually. And it's like, nope, these are the tools. We are not shying away from them.

But this is our approach that is very human centric, between the relationship building and the conversations that you have with the kids. That was definitely my takeaway, from chatting with her, is just it's you have to have the human connection to really pull out the best from that individual. And I think if you get too caught in to the criteria and to cut into the assessment and to cut into catching them out for any sort of academic integrity issues, you miss that piece.

And I think that's my biggest takeaway, is just build the human connection, help to draw out whatever is inspiring that young person. And I think it's so clear that she's able to do that. And so I think she was talking about, which is how to have that continuous conversation with students, really, those continuous exchanges.

I think that's really valuable for, again, helping to develop the young person's voice. Exactly. And I think that with the IB, kind of the developments that they're changing with the extended essay, with the AI design principles, I think that the piece that I really like, that we all keep coming back to is the teacher agency piece.

And I think that it's funny when she said, like, I do a lot with AI, but I actually don't use computers sometimes. And I'm like, yeah, that's good. Like, nobody should find that controversial. And I think that that's the whole point, is like the teacher knowing when to turn it off and when it's like, this is not the right time to have a computer out.

Like, it doesn't always have to be out. And it shouldn't always be out. And being able to decide where it makes most sense is probably the most important thing. I agree, I agree. Yeah, just super valuable, very inspirational conversation there with Michele. We hope that for each of you, our listeners, that you enjoyed that conversation as well.

And we look forward to seeing you again in another episode of IB Unplugged. IB Unplugged is a Kognity podcast for IBDP educators, helping you teach with more confidence, creativity, and joy. Our show is hosted by Courtney Marline and John Patton and produced by Katilina Gaffney, edited by Damir Zvekanov, and supported by Karla Cetina.

If you have a topic or question for us to explore, please reach out on kognity.com/ibunplugged. See you next time.

The Extended Essay & Authenticating Student Thinking w/ Michele Lackovic

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