Teaching Authentic Intelligence in an "AI" World

Since its inception over forty years ago, JSWP® has held and advocated a multi-sensory, vertically articulated, and cross-curricular philosophy about the importance of students reading and thinking independently and sharing successfully their thinking through oral and written communication.

Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) has come onto the business and academic scenes as a timesaving method of writing; and, in some cases, “AI” is a viable and expeditious form of drafting and editing documents. However, as educators, our first mission is to develop and produce thinkers in our society.

Glen Slater, an Australian-trained Jungian psychologist and one of my venerable professors at Pacifica Graduate Institute where I earned my doctorate, examines in his 2024 book Jung vs Borg how to preserve humanity in an accelerating technological age. Slater is concerned that “increasingly, . . .we're drawn off and distracted to the point of losing our connection to those elements of creativity that drive us to be a better species . . . Unless we start figuring out a way to educate the whole person, we're just going to breed a race of automatons.”

JSWP devotes its time, energy, and professional development to guiding educators how to teach “Authentic Intelligence” to young and maturing minds, to teach the whole person.

When students learn to examine carefully their unique experiences, intuitive contemplations, rational observations, and reflective reading, they can then formulate and communicate those thoughts through writing. Subsequently, their creative expression and innovative ideas result in both personal growth and an evolving collective human experience that ultimately and positively affects generations to come.

Many teachers that we have met are gifted writers themselves; however, they have confided in us that they have difficulties isolating or understanding their innate processing and writing skills and conveying those skills to their students. The Jane Schaffer Academic Writing Program and this guide, Analytical Response to Literature, have been created to provide teachers with a step-by-step visual thinking process of what comes to them naturally, filling the gap between thinking and writing as twilight fills the gap between the night and the day.