Imagine a classroom where the session doesn’t begin with the usual “What are we going to learn today?” displayed on a screen or board—nor with a standard title or topic—but with an unexpected invitation: “How will what we discover today help us create change?” This subtle shift moves students from merely raising their hands to answer, to actively designing, debating, and proposing ideas.
In this setting, questions stop being formal instruments and instead
become levers for deep learning.
Drawing from my own experience as a university professor and AI enthusiast, I share a collection of practical exercises—Prompts in Education (Galindo, 2025). Here, my central premise is that the way questions are constructed is not just rhetorical; it’s deeply epistemic, shaping how we think and learn. When educators craft questions with intentionality—focusing on inquiry, metacognition, and agency—they invite students to investigate, reflect, and take ownership of their learning. Changing “What do you know?” to “How will you use what you know?” isn’t just rhetorical—it opens up a new pedagogical ecosystem.
We are all part of this evolving ecosystem. Its strength lies in connection and responsiveness.
We are all part of this evolving ecosystem. Its strength lies in connection and responsiveness.
This reflection ties together ideas from previous posts at Escrituradigital.net. In “If You Don’t Like Writing, It’s Because…”, I suggested that writing—and asking questions—is a way of thinking, not just fulfilling a task. There, I argued that in almost every conversation about writing, it’s necessary to address persistent questions: about what and how we write. In “What Do You Learn in an Artificial Intelligence Workshop?” I explored teaching as experience design, emphasizing that defining objectives through well-formulated questions raises the bar for learning. And in “AI Literacy: Key Steps,” I claimed that interacting with language models is fundamentally an act of writing and reasoning—the first step is sensitivity and mastery of written expression. Together, these posts create the foundation for this work.
Between building reality like machines and becoming aware of how we teach them to build it.
The urgency of this topic is reinforced by findings from “A Definition of AGI” (Hendrycks et al., 2025), which redefines artificial general intelligence through ten cognitive domains: general knowledge, reasoning, memory, reading, perception, planning, metacognition, creativity, social learning, and transfer. The authors found that GPT-4 achieves roughly 27% and GPT-5 about 57% general competency, revealing uneven cognitive profiles—strong in language reasoning, weak in memory and transfer. This signals that AI, though powerful, still doesn’t learn like humans; educators remain essential as designers of questions that foster human reflection, judgment, and creativity.
The study highlights a paradox: AI excels at linguistic reasoning but struggles with memory and transfer—good at correlations, weak on comprehension. This contrast underscores the unique human value in education. While language models learn correlations, humans learn meanings. The true heart of teaching lies in transforming data into meaning, instruction into experience, and answers into new questions. Every teacher who writes a good prompt isn’t just dialoguing with AI—they’re training their own metacognition and modeling critical thinking for students who are learning to live alongside algorithms.
Reclaiming the power of words through prompts
In Prompts in Education, I present a curated set of statements designed to activate critical thinking, challenge single-answer logic, and empower students as co-designers of their learning journey. Each prompt resonates with emerging pedagogies, embraces hybrid learning contexts, and addresses the didactic gaps revealed by generative AI. The three tables in this “lab”—organized by basic cognitive domains, extended digital domains, and hybrid applications—offer a navigation map for educators to experiment, evaluate, and redesign their own prompts.
The goal is not for teachers to simply “use prompts,” but to understand the rationale behind each question—how it activates cognitive processes, configures teaching intentions, and transforms conversations with AI into exercises in critical and ethical thinking.
Read the full text (spanish too) at: https://cutt.ly/PromptsCognitivoDigital
I invite you to explore this piece and other reflections on Escrituradigital.net about language, thought, and educational technology. At its core, teaching has always been an art of asking the right questions.
