My work · 03 of 08 · CEPI · San Francisco Bay University

Teaching & Learning Guide

The frameworks I have built for designing courses, with examples of how faculty use them. My team and I collected them in a 54-page guide for SFBU faculty.

I have learned most of what I know about teaching slowly. I learned it in classrooms in Karachi and California, and in conversations with faculty working on their courses. Over the years I turned those lessons into a small set of frameworks. Each framework helps a teacher answer one design question.

At SFBU, my team and I collected these frameworks in Teaching and Learning at SFBU, a 54-page guide we wrote at CEPI for SFBU faculty. This page shares the main parts for readers outside the university. To see the full guide, or to talk about using these frameworks with your faculty, write to me.

To see how these ideas look in a real classroom, open How I Think About Learning on the About page.

For the full guide or a conversation about these frameworks, write to anzar.khaliq@sfbu.edu.

Framework 01

The Pyramid After AI

What should students still do themselves once AI can produce the first draft?

For most of the last century, a finished essay or a correct answer was reasonable evidence that a student had done the thinking. Generative AI has broken that link. A student can now hand in a fluent, well-structured piece of work in minutes. A teacher can learn very little from it about what the student understands.

The Pyramid After AI is my answer to that problem. I drew it as an inverted pyramid above Bloom’s Taxonomy. The two shapes join at the point where AI output becomes the starting point of a student’s work. Above that point are six human capacities. Students use them in cycles and return to earlier ones as their understanding grows.

1Decode

Do I understand the output?

2Judge

Is it good, true or appropriate?

3Shape

Does it make sense, and have I reshaped it?

4Author

Does my thinking, voice and judgment show?

5Transfer

Can I apply this learning in a new situation?

6Become

What changed in me as a learner or human being?

In practice

A psychology student reads an AI-generated summary of trauma research. She notices that it has merged acute and chronic trauma, a distinction that matters in clinical work. Catching that error is Decoding, and it takes knowledge the model does not have.

Framework 02

Think / Do / Create

How should a session, a unit or a course be sequenced?

Many students stop at understanding. A student can explain a concept, pass the exam and still be unable to use the idea anywhere else. Alfred North Whitehead called these inert ideas in 1929. Later research points the same way. Students learn more when they build and interact with material than when they only receive it (Chi and Wylie, 2014).

Think / Do / Create is the smallest design unit I have found that avoids this. Students take in and process an idea (Think), work with it in a real setting (Do), then produce something that did not exist before (Create). Faculty can use the same sequence for a fifty-minute session, a three-week unit and a whole course.

In practice

If students only read and absorb in a unit, they may never apply the idea. If a unit begins with Create, students have to build before they have the materials. A teacher who marks each activity in a week as Think, Do or Create can see where the course is out of balance.

Framework 03

PERS

What should every learning experience feel like?

PERS is the shared language I helped shape for teaching at SFBU. It names four qualities I want in every session, assignment and piece of feedback: Personalized, Experiential, Relationship-Rich and Student-Centered. All four are present in every class in some form. Faculty decide whether each one is designed on purpose or left to chance.

In practice

A faculty member teaching supply chain disruption could open with the same textbook case for everyone. She could also ask students to bring disruptions they have seen in their home regions or family businesses. The concepts stay the same. A student who watched a family business deal with port closures in South Asia brings knowledge that no textbook case contains.

Framework 04

The New Learning Cycle

What steps should students take in an assignment now that they have AI?

The old cycle of an assignment was short: receive it, produce the work, submit it, get a grade. With AI available, a student can complete that cycle without learning much at all.

In the new cycle, students begin with AI. They Prompt and Generate, then Doubt what came back and Argue with it. They Shape it to a real situation, Reflect on what they did and Recreate the work in their own voice. Faculty assess the judgment behind the product: the choices a student made, the options they rejected and the reasoning they can defend.

Framework 05

Regulate, Relate, Reason

What has to be true before a student can think hard?

This sequence comes from Bruce Perry’s neurosequential model (Perry and Winfrey, 2021), and I treat it as a condition for every course I design. A student has to feel safe before they can connect with others. They have to connect before they can reason at the level a university course demands. Stress can impair the prefrontal cortex, which supports complex reasoning (Arnsten, 2009).

For teaching, that means predictable structure first. Next comes a class culture where students are taken seriously even when they are wrong. The demanding intellectual work comes third. A surprise quiz is hardest on the students who are already under the most stress.

Framework 06

Relational Intelligence

Who will this student know at the end of the course that they do not know today?

Relational intelligence is the ability to build and keep working relationships, across disagreement and difference. My working claim is that faculty can teach it and assess it. It includes four capacities: building trust, holding disagreement, repairing a relationship after it breaks and working across difference.

The most direct tool is the relationship-rich assignment. In most assignments, a student deals with a search bar, a rubric and a midnight deadline. A relationship-rich assignment replaces one of those with a person, so the student cannot finish the work without talking to someone. I based the design on Felten and Lambert’s work on relationship-rich education (2020). I also drew on a trial across 22 institutions, in which a brief belonging intervention raised first-year persistence (Walton, Murphy and colleagues, 2023).

Framework 07

CPACT

What does a whole course need, beyond its content?

CPACT stands for Content, Pedagogy, Assessment, Community and Transdisciplinarity. I developed it at Habib University to help faculty plan a course as a whole, with the five parts designed together. Many of my later frameworks came from gaps that CPACT exposed, especially the place of community and relationships in a course.

I also created the R3 Faculty Talks at Habib University, where faculty share how they teach. At the January 2023 edition I spoke about this work.

How They Fit Together

I use each framework at a different level. PERS describes how learning should feel, and Think / Do / Create describes how to structure it. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Pyramid After AI describe the thinking to ask for. The New Learning Cycle takes one assignment through that thinking, and Regulate, Relate, Reason describes what has to be in place first.

See them in use at Roots & Branches