Pilot Study
A Framework for Education in the Era of AI
AI is changing the conditions of teaching and learning.
Education is asking important questions about AI use, academic integrity, assessment, lesson design, and what students should still be expected to think through and do for themselves.
But there is a question underneath many of them:
Is pedagogy, by itself, still sufficient?
Not whether pedagogy should disappear.
But whether relying predominantly on a teacher-led educational approach is sufficient for an environment in which learners have unprecedented access to information, explanations, feedback, content generation, and increasingly sophisticated AI assistance.
AI may not require education to abandon pedagogy. It may require education to stop assuming pedagogy alone is sufficient.
WHAT IF WE INVESTIGATED THAT?
Momentum Consulting Firm is inviting educational teams, schools, and district groups to participate in an 18-week Sage-Seeker's Sabbatical™ Pilot Study.
The pilot explores what happens when educators have more than one educational approach available to them—and develop greater capacity to recognize when different kinds of direction, independence, inquiry, and learner responsibility may be appropriate.
The goal is not to replace pedagogy with another 'Gogy'.
It is to investigate what becomes possible when pedagogy is no longer the only familiar territory.
For generations, pedagogy has been the educational approach most familiar to K–12 teachers. Andragogy and heutagogy offer other ways of understanding teaching, learning, and the learner's relationship to the learning process, yet most educators have had little formal opportunity to explore them.
The Heuta-Heuristic Framework™ brings these educational approaches into a broader landscape and adds a heuristic dimension grounded in lived experience, organic self-observation, discovery, and what educators come to know through their own practice.
Students were capable of curiosity, discovery, independent thinking, and learning beyond direct instruction long before AI arrived. What AI has changed is their access: learners can now seek information, explanations, feedback, ideas, and assistance without waiting for those things to come through the classroom.
That makes an old educational question much harder to ignore:
Are we preparing learners only to receive instruction, or are we also helping them develop the ability to direct and make sense of their own learning?
The Heuta-Heuristic Framework™ gives educators a structured way to explore that question while expanding the educational approaches available to them. Pedagogy remains part of that landscape, alongside opportunities to work and think through andragogy, heutagogy, and Heuta-Heuristics.
The framework asks educators to step beyond the security of the educational approach they know best and become willing to explore what else may be possible.
The Heuta-Heuristic Framework™ is not a framework for teaching with AI. It is a framework for navigating teaching and learning in an era transformed by AI.
The Sage-Seeker's Sabbatical™ is designed to develop educators from the inside out—strengthening how they think, respond, adapt, make professional judgments, and create learning experiences for students.
Through the Sage-Seeker's methodology, educators engage
mental fitnessneuroscience-informed practiceslearning sciencesmetacognitionspeculative thinkingemergent strategiesorganic self-observation of their own lived practice
as interconnected parts of professional growth.
The purpose is not simply to know more. It is for what educators discover, reconsider, and develop to become visible in the experience of teaching—and ultimately in the experience of learning.
01
Develop greater awareness of themselves, their learners, and what is unfolding in the learning environment. With exposure to pedagogy, andragogy, heutagogy, and Heuta-Heuristics, educators can move beyond automatic reliance on familiar practices and draw from a broader range of possibilities for teaching, supporting, challenging, and creating space for students to become increasingly capable and self-directed learners.
02
Develop ways of noticing and responding to the pressures, patterns, assumptions, and recurring challenges that can make teaching feel exhausting or leave educators feeling stuck. Mental fitness, self-observation, reflection, and new ways of making sense of experience can help educators meet difficult moments with greater awareness, flexibility, and choice rather than continually returning to responses that are no longer serving them or their learners.
03
As educators change how they work, students experience the difference. The aim is to create learning environments in which students are supported in becoming more aware of how they learn, more able to make meaningful decisions, more willing to pursue questions and possibilities, and increasingly prepared to take an active role in their own learning while still receiving the teaching and support they need.
04
Prepare educators to make thoughtful choices about where AI can extend teaching and learning and where human relationship, judgment, creativity, reflection, productive struggle, and meaning-making need to remain central. The goal is not simply to introduce another technology into existing practice, but to help educators consider what kinds of teaching and learning are called for when students have powerful new tools available to them.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Teachers are scholars.
Yet the demands of K–12 education can leave little protected intellectual space for teachers to explore their own questions, make meaning from what they experience, and remain intellectually curious about the work they do every day.
Traditional professional development often begins with someone else's expertise.
The Sage-Seeker's Sabbatical™ begins with the knowledge, experience, observations, questions, and curiosity educators already bring with them—and creates opportunities to encounter new scholarship, frameworks, perspectives, and ways of thinking that can expand what they bring back to their practice.
Instead of positioning teachers primarily as recipients of professional knowledge, the Sabbatical gives them space to observe themselves organically within their own practice, follow what captures their attention, examine what they may have taken for granted, make discoveries from lived experience, and develop professional knowledge from what they come to understand.
That intellectual growth returns to practice—shaping how educators teach, respond to challenges, support learners, and create conditions in which students can become increasingly capable of directing their own learning.
Bring what you know.
Bring what you have noticed.
Bring what troubles you.
Bring what doesn't make sense yet.
Bring what you're curious about.
Investigate it.
A break from traditional PD. Not a break from professional growth.
Long before generative AI entered schools, Dr. Trudi Perkins was exploring a question that would eventually help shape this work:
What happens when students are trusted with greater responsibility for their own learning?
While teaching high school English through a Career Technical Education course in the Game Design Pathway, she began exploring creativity, student independence, intrinsic motivation, and what could happen when she trusted students to remain true to their own learning.
The course, Writing Games for Social Change, was developed and piloted over three years and ultimately received California A–G approval. It went on to be used in other schools.
But some of the most compelling evidence came directly from the students.
Students assigned to other classes would sneak into Dr. Perkins' classroom and ask if they could stay rather than go to their scheduled class.
And one day, in the middle of students working on their projects, one student suddenly called across the room:
“Hey Ms. Perkins! I just love this class!”
Those experiences raised questions that continued long after the course ended: What had changed in the students' relationship to learning? What had changed in the teacher's role? And what had become possible when students were given room to bring more of themselves into the learning process?
Those questions became part of a much longer professional and scholarly exploration of teaching, learning, learner independence, and what educators themselves may discover when they become willing to examine familiar practice in unfamiliar ways.
The framework did not begin with AI. It began with students.
The Sage-Seeker's Sabbatical™ and the Heuta-Heuristic Framework™ grew from a body of work grounded in classroom experience, interdisciplinary learning, scholarly inquiry, and continued investigation of educational practice.
Classroom educator and instructional leader across English, STEM/STEAM, and Career Technical Education.
EdD in Educational Leadership, USC Rossier School of Education · Master's in English · Master's in Education Media Design and Technology · continuing AI certification study and hands-on AI building.
Her work crosses education, language and writing, learning design, technology, and the emerging possibilities of AI.
Creator of Writing Games for Social Change—developed and piloted over three years, approved for California A–G use, and subsequently used in other schools.
Her writing life began before her career in education, with published freelance work in nationally distributed magazines. Her later scholarly publications have explored heuristic inquiry, speculative methods, and educational practice, and she currently serves as a peer reviewer for the American Federation of Teachers' American Educator.
Dr. Perkins' scholarship on heuristic methodology was selected for the Journal of Cultural Marketing Strategy's 10-year anniversary special issue—one of ten papers the journal identified as its most impactful from its first decade, selected for originality, methodological rigor, and relevance.
Scheduled Workshop Presenter · October 24, 2026
Presenting the Heuta-Heuristic Framework™ and an approach to professional growth that reconnects teachers with their intellectual curiosity, lived professional knowledge, and ability to transform what they discover into practice.
The Sage-Seeker's Sabbatical™ begins with educators, but the transformation is intended to travel.
As teachers bring what they are developing into practice, students encounter new opportunities to exercise judgment, make choices, understand themselves as learners, take greater ownership of their learning, and become more capable of seeking the kind of support they need.
The larger school community matters, too. Administrators, support professionals, students, and eventually families all influence the conditions in which teaching and learning take place. Developing greater understanding across those relationships can help create an environment that supports both educator growth and increasing learner independence.
The aim is not simply to transform an individual teacher's practice. It is to explore what becomes possible when that transformation begins to influence the educational environment around the learner.
The Pilot Study begins with a practical question:
Can an approach like this create meaningful and sustainable change within the realities of an educational setting?
The pilot will explore what happens when the framework meets actual educational environments—including whether it:
The pilot turns these questions into an opportunity for discovery—investigating what actually happens when the framework meets the complexity, possibilities, constraints, people, and lived realities of an educational environment.
The Sage-Seeker's Sabbatical™ Pilot Study can be implemented at different organizational levels:
A team or department within a school
An entire school
A district-level group or initiative
The framework provides a shared approach without requiring standardized teaching.
Educators retain their professional judgment, disciplinary expertise, individuality, and knowledge of their students and communities.
The commonality is the framework—not uniformity of practice.
If the questions explored here connect with something you are seeing, experiencing, or considering in your own educational setting, a discovery conversation is the next step.
We can discuss your educational setting, the group you are considering, what participation could look like, and whether the Sage-Seeker's Sabbatical™ Pilot Study is an appropriate fit.
Request information and schedule a discovery conversation with Momentum Consulting Firm.