I have tried to keep this short. There is more detail in the student-facing Foundations pages (Class Expectations, AI Documentation Protocol, The Rubric Explained, Defending Your Work, Peer Review, Notetaking & Notemaking) if you want it. You're welcome to read those too.
1. What this course is
This is a redesigned high-school Earth and Environmental Science course. It is built around the NGSS Earth and Environmental standards (the US science framework AISC uses), but it organizes the year around eight units that each end with an authentic deliverable + a public defense.
"Authentic deliverables" means real-world writing or design tasks, not multiple-choice tests. Across the year your student will produce: a Source Dossier, a Goldilocks Report on planet habitability, a Landscape Reading of a Chennai-area location, an Engineering Portfolio for a tectonic city, a Chennai Climate Brief for policy-makers, a Position Paper on a water-rights dispute (anchored in the Cauvery dispute), a Sustainable Land Plan for a real region, and an Energy Mix Design + public Op-Ed.
Each deliverable is followed by a defense, a Q&A panel, a roundtable, a planning board, or an op-ed reading, where your student puts their work forward and other people push on it. The defense is not theatrical; it is the form most consequential adult decisions take, from job interviews to policy hearings. Most high-school students never get this practice. Yours will, eight times this year.
2. The AI question: what we actually do
This is the part of the course that probably differs most from what you may have experienced. Your student will use exactly one school-approved AI platform for the year, assigned by class section: two sections use Flint, one uses BoodleBox. The course's named AI partners (the Skeptic, the Source Evaluator, the Planet Hunter, and so on) are characters that live inside that single platform: your student logs into one tool, not many. Both platforms are school-approved, both give me visibility into student conversations, and the one-platform model was a deliberate choice: the course teaches working with AI well, not juggling AI products. AI use is not banned. AI use is not optional in the sense that students cannot avoid engaging with it; it IS managed through a documentation protocol that I want to explain clearly.
Why we use AI in this course
Three reasons, in plain terms:
- AI is part of the world your student is preparing for. Pretending it doesn't exist would prepare them for a world that doesn't exist anymore. Every job they will hold will involve AI somehow; learning to work with it well, not naively, not avoidantly, is part of their education.
- AI is genuinely useful for the cognitive work the course asks for. Researching exoplanet data. Drafting a position paper. Rehearsing for a defense. These all benefit from AI as a thinking partner if the student uses it well.
- Banning AI doesn't work. Students who know how to hide AI use will hide it. Students who don't know how will get in trouble. Both responses produce no learning. Working WITH AI use, openly, with documentation, is the only honest pedagogical option I have found.
The AI Documentation Protocol
- Every assignment where your student used AI requires an AI Documentation entry: what tools, what prompts, what they accepted from the AI, what they rejected, what they would do differently next time.
- Disclosed AI use, even heavy use, is treated as legitimate scholarship: the same way using a calculator or a textbook is legitimate.
- Hidden AI use is treated as academic dishonesty, identical to plagiarism. Course consequences apply.
- If your student is unsure whether their AI use is documented appropriately, they are encouraged to ask me before submitting. Asking is never the wrong move.
What this means for your student's daily work
Your student will likely use AI for: clarifying confusing readings, brainstorming a draft's structure, testing arguments against AI-played counter-positions, rehearsing oral defenses with an AI-played panelist, translating dense readings (especially valuable for EAL students), and checking their own work for gaps.
Your student will likely NOT use AI for: writing complete drafts they submit unchanged, generating ideas they have not engaged with, or replacing the substantive thinking the assignment is designed to develop. The line between legitimate use and substitution is the discipline we are teaching.
What you can ask your student about AI use
Useful questions:
- "What did you use AI for on this assignment?"
- "Show me a place where you decided NOT to use what the AI suggested. Why?"
- "What would you do differently with the AI on the next assignment?"
- "Did you check the AI's facts? How?"
Less useful question: "Did you use AI?" The answer should always be yes-with-documentation; the question is HOW.
3. How grades work
Your student's grade in this course is reported across three strands separately, not as a single number. This is intentional, and it takes some getting used to.
The three strands
| Strand | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Knowledge & Understanding (K/U) | Your student's grasp of the scientific content: facts, concepts, frameworks. Did they understand the science? Did they apply it accurately? |
| Thinking & Transfer (T/T) | Your student's analytic work: reasoning from evidence, evaluating sources, taking perspectives, constructing arguments, transferring knowledge to new cases. |
| Communication (C) | Your student's ability to communicate clearly for the intended audience: writing structure, scientific language precision, whether an oral defense holds its audience. It is not a score for grammatical accuracy or for how native your student's English sounds; an error that does not obscure meaning does not lower the band. |
Each strand is scored 1–8. A grade report looks like 7-6-5: Knowledge 7, Thinking 6, Communication 5. The three numbers tell a profile: this student has strong content, decent reasoning, and developing communication. That profile is more useful than a single "75%" because it tells them what specifically to work on.
Why three strands instead of one number
A single number erases what your student does well and what they need to grow. Two students who score 75 might be very different learners: one strong on content and weak on writing, one strong on writing and weak on content. Both need different feedback. Strand-based grading makes that visible.
This also means: when your student's grade report shows 7-6-4, the right response is not "why didn't you get all 7s?" The right response is "the 4 is on Communication: what can you do to strengthen that?" The profile is information about where to focus, not a verdict to defend.
The AI Documentation requirement
If your student used AI on a deliverable AND their AI Documentation is missing or insufficient, the work is returned as incomplete and re-enters the reassessment process. It is not scored until the documentation is provided. No strand is capped.
This rule exists because we cannot fairly assess what YOUR STUDENT understands if we cannot tell which parts of the work were theirs vs. the AI's.
The rule does NOT punish AI use. Once the documentation arrives, every strand can score in any band. Disclosed AI use, even extensive, is treated as scholarship.
Practical implication: if your student tells you they "didn't have time" to do the AI Documentation, that's a problem to address, the documentation is required, and skipping it has direct grade consequences.
The Rubric Explained page (available to your student) covers all of this in more detail. You're welcome to read it; it walks through how to read a strand-based grade as a profile.
4. The defense formats
Eight times across the year, your student will defend their work in front of an audience. The audience varies: a NASA Evaluation Committee for the habitability report, a Defense Panel for the engineering portfolio, a Stakeholder Roundtable for the water-rights position paper, a Policy Panel for the climate brief, a Regional Planning Board for the land plan, an Op-Ed reading for the energy mix. Sometimes the audience is classmates in role; sometimes I bring in colleagues or other adults.
This is hard. The first defense usually goes badly. The third gets easier. By the eighth, your student should be able to stand up, hold a position under questioning, and revise it gracefully when given better evidence. That skill transfers to almost every adult context that matters: college, work, civic life, family decisions.
How you can support your student around defenses
- Ask them what they're defending and who the audience is. The framing matters.
- Help them rehearse if they ask: be a polite-but-questioning audience. Don't be hostile; that's not what the actual room will be like.
- After a defense, ask: "What question were you least prepared for? What would you do differently next time?" The reflection is part of the learning.
- Resist the urge to coach them to memorized answers. The defense is supposed to be live thinking, not recitation.
What you should NOT do
- Don't write their defense responses for them. The defense is the assessment; outsourcing it (even to a well-meaning parent) defeats the point.
- Don't tell them the questions in advance if you somehow learn them. The unfairness is real.
- Don't assume a rough first defense means your student is failing. The first defenses are SUPPOSED to be hard. The growth is across the year.
5. The Chennai anchor
Many of this year's assessments are anchored in real Chennai or South India contexts: the Pichavaram mangroves, the Pallikaranai marsh, the Cauvery water dispute, Chennai's climate adaptation challenges. This is deliberate: the science your student studies should connect to the place they live.
Practical implication: your student may bring home questions about local Chennai issues (water shortages, monsoon flooding, urban encroachment on wetlands, the 2015 floods or 2019 water crisis) that are part of their unit work. Engaging those questions with them, especially if you have local knowledge or family history with these issues, directly supports their learning. Personal stories from Chennai residents are often more useful than what's in the textbook.
6. Specific ways you can support your student
Across the year
- Make space for the work. The course assigns more writing than a typical science course. A predictable place and time for that work helps.
- Ask about the AI Documentation. If your student tells you they used AI, the next question is "how did you document it?" Make this routine.
- Read one of their drafts before they submit. Not to edit it (please don't): to ask one good question about it. "What's the strongest counter-argument to what you're saying?" is almost always the right question.
- Take the defense days seriously. If your student has a defense the next day, that's the night to leave them alone with their notes rather than schedule a family event.
- Don't compare strand grades to single-number grades from other courses. The two scales aren't comparable. A 5 on a strand is not "50%."
If your student is struggling
- Encourage them to email me directly. Coach them to be specific: "I'm stuck on X" not "I'm stuck."
- If multiple assessments are colliding, tell them to come to me about triage. I'd rather negotiate an extension than have your student drown silently.
- If the struggle is broader than one class, sleep, mental health, social, please loop in the school counselor. I am not their counselor; I am their science teacher. But I want to know when there's a bigger context I should be aware of.
If your student is an EAL learner
English-language learners get explicit support in this course. The EAL Teacher Strategy Guide walks through specific accommodations: longer wait time during defenses, permitted use of bilingual dictionaries, permitted use of AI for translation BEFORE generative work, the ability to draft in L1 and translate to English. The strand rubric also protects EAL students structurally: their K/U and T/T scores are not dragged down by developing English. The EAL Support hub also has a ~140-term Master Vocabulary Reference in Tamil, Hindi, French, Korean, and Japanese: useful for any family that wants to discuss course concepts with their student in their first language.
If you are an EAL family and you want to understand specifically how the course supports your student, email me. I will walk you through it.
7. When and how to contact me
| Situation | Best channel |
|---|---|
| Quick question about an assignment | Email: I respond within 24 hours during the school week |
| Your student needs an extension or accommodation | Email me directly. Briefer is better; specific is critical. |
| Concerns about a grade | Ask your student to talk to me first. If after that you still want to discuss, email me to schedule a conversation. Grade conversations work best when your student is part of them. |
| Bigger-picture concerns about the course | Email me to set up a conversation. Parent-teacher conferences are also a natural venue. Don't sit on concerns: early conversations are easier than late ones. |
| Academic-integrity concerns (AI or otherwise) | Email me directly. These conversations are confidential and I take them seriously. |
| Praise / positive feedback (always welcome) | Email, conference, or just a quick note. It matters and I read it. |
Thank you for trusting me with your student's science education this year. I take it seriously.
Ms. Jayanthi and Mr. Ignash
Earth and Environmental Science · American International School Chennai