How to make thinking visible for every student in ethics

Why this matters

In one ethics class, two students can turn in the same sentence, "Dropping the bomb was justified", for opposite reasons. One weighed the deaths against an invasion. The other stopped at "it ended the war". The written answer shows the verdict, and the teacher has to guess which reasoning sits behind it.

Making thinking visible: three strategies for ethics class

Harvard's Project Zero built its Visible Thinking approach on two practices: thinking routines that guide how students work through a question, and documenting student thinking so the teacher can see it (Project Zero).

1. Ask for a position before the theory
2. Push back with a counterexample
3. Read the chat, not just the final answer

One teacher can't push back on 30 positions in a single period. Sparky, Flint's AI tutor, does it in each student's chat, and every message is saved for the teacher to read.

Two students interview Oppenheimer and reach different judgments

Sparky plays J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1954, after his security hearing. Students question the man who led the building of the bomb, which is what makes this the ‘cool assignment’.

The students and chats are examples we wrote for this page. The quote comes from the Scientific Panel's report.

How to read every student's reasoning

Sparky grades each interview against a rubric with four rows: asking questions, using evidence, responding to counterexamples and defending a judgment. The activity page shows what the class did well, where the reasoning broke down, and every student's session.

To check that the reasoning in a message is the student's own, hover over the message and open its paste history. Flint shows any text the student pasted while writing it (help center).

Set up the activity for free

The Oppenheimer interview is in Flint's public library, with Sparky's role, guidelines, greeting and the four-row rubric already written. Open it, select Try this activity to copy it into a free Flint account, and move it to a class. Every student gets their own interview, and the activity page fills in as they work.

The guidelines give Sparky dated facts from the historical record and tell it to say when something is only reported, but Sparky can still get a detail wrong, so run Preview session before you assign it. To interview a different figure, change Sparky's role and the facts in Guidelines for Sparky, and keep these two rules from the guidelines so Sparky never settles the question for the student:

In 2022 the Department of Energy vacated the 1954 decision that revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance, and called the process behind it flawed. That gives students one more question to argue after the interview: was the government fair to him?

For more ethics activities, see Flint for ethics. Our Campfire session on making student thinking visible with AI shows how teachers in other subjects use chats the same way.