Online Workshops: 2026-2027

October 7 – 8, 2026
12:00 – 6:00 p.m. EDT
$249

Registration Opens August 26th

The increasing surrender of human reasoning to AI is problematic for several important reasons. AI is programmed through, and trained upon the products of, to varying degrees, flawed human thought. It therefore frequently and regularly makes blatantly false claims and remarkably basic conceptual errors. Apart from this, any (likely impossible) “perfection” of AI would need to take into account an even more important fact: by default, solutions to complex human problems require skilled human reasoning. Technology cannot generate human values, nor determine our ultimate purposes, prioritize our questions, guide our interpretations, or formulate our concepts. These functions must be performed within individual human minds. 

In this workshop, participants will explore questions that include: What are AI’s proper uses and boundaries in human life? What role must critical thinking play in interpreting and engaging with AI? How is AI most useful? How is it least useful? What are some pitfalls of using AI in instruction, business, and personal life? How does knowledge of critical thinking help us appropriately navigate AI? How can we identify critical thinking within AI? How can we correct for problems in AI as users of this still-emerging technology?

November 13 – 14, 2026
12:00 – 6:00 p.m. EST 
$249

Registration Opens August 26th

Socratic questioning is disciplined inquiry that can be used to pursue thought in many directions and for many purposes, including to explore complex ideas, get to the truth of things, open up issues and problems, uncover assumptions, analyze concepts, and follow out logical implications of thought. Educators, professionals, indeed, anyone interested in probing and improving thinking with depth and rigor can—and should—construct Socratic questions and implement Socratic dialogue as a routine part of problem-solving, decision-making, learning, and teaching. We, our colleagues, our students, and our employees should be proficient in the discipline of Socratic questioning so as to reliably employ it in expanding our knowledge, in working through complex issues, in understanding and assessing our and others’ reasoning, and in following out the implications of what we and others think.

This workshop will establish or deepen your understandings of Socratic questioning, illuminate the conceptual tools that critical thinking brings to it, and accordingly facilitate guided practice of its processes.

January 9 – 10, 2027
12:00 – 6:00 p.m. EST 
$249

Registration Opens August 26th

We can educate our students only so far as we can help them cultivate their intellects. How effectively we do this depends upon our willingness and ability to approach learners as thinkers, our fields and disciplines as modes of reasoning, and each course’s “content” as an interconnected constellation of concepts that our students must think through. In turn, that thinking begets meaningful learning only to the extent that it is done critically, instead of superficially, haphazardly, vaguely, narrowly, etc.
The above understandings emphasize a need to bring the concepts and tools of critical thinking into everything we do in our instruction. It is through critical thinking that we make explicit the intellectual tools our students need to internalize course content and leverage the resulting insights to live successfully, ethically, and with apt capacity to meet the increasingly complex challenges of their present and future world.

In this workshop, we will work towards internalizing the foundations of critical thinking that are essential to education in all disciplines and at all levels, whether in-person or online, and we will practice applying those foundations to our instructional strategies and techniques.