AI-Resilient Assessment Design: Half-Day Workshop for English Departments

What the workshop is

A half-day professional learning session for English Departments, focused on one practical problem: how to redesign assessment so that AI either cannot do the thinking for students, or makes its role visible and assessable.

The session draws on Austi Academy's AI-Resilient Assessment Design framework, developed specifically for Stage 6 English and aligned to NESA's syllabus outcomes.

It is not a theoretical overview of AI in education. It is a working session. Teachers leave with a redesigned task, not a set of slides.

The problem we want to solve

The essay was not broken because students stopped thinking. It was broken because the essay was always a proxy for thinking, not thinking itself. AI did not create that problem. It made the problem impossible to ignore.

A student who can generate a fluent, coherent, well-structured response in seconds has not learned to analyse literature. They have learned to use a tool. Those are not the same thing, and the difference now shows.

The durable response is not tighter supervision or detection software. Both treat the symptom. The durable response is to redesign what we ask students to do, so that the assessment captures thinking that AI did not produce and cannot replicate.

What teachers actually do in the session

Part one: the framework (90 minutes)

We work through five assessment design approaches, each tested against Stage 6 conditions and each built on the same principle: AI-resilient tasks require evidence that was not available to the AI.

The five approaches are:

Anchoring assessment in the student's own reading experience, using journals and metacognitive tasks that AI cannot retrofit

Making the process the assessment, not just the product, including how to weight reflections and AI-use declarations

Using oral assessment for the parts that matter most, with practical guidance on logistics and marking

Assessing transformations rather than analyses, including how to design tasks around set texts

Building assessment around structured discussion, including how to run and mark Socratic seminars

For each approach, teachers see a worked example using a familiar text and a practical version they could use next term.

Part two: redesign (60 minutes)

Each teacher takes one existing assessment task from their current program and works through a redesign using the framework. This is not a hypothetical exercise. The task they bring in is one they need to run.

The session ends with each teacher presenting their redesigned task to the group for feedback.

What teachers take away

A redesigned version of one existing task, ready to use

A library of NESA-aligned AI-resilient task templates for Module B set texts

A departmental implementation framework for planning assessment across the year

Who this is for

English Department heads and their teams in NSW secondary schools. The framework is built for Stage 6 and aligned to NESA outcomes. Schools preparing for HSC cycles where AI authenticity is a live concern will find it most immediately useful.

Format and logistics

The session runs for approximately three hours, including a short break. It can be delivered at your school or online.

Groups of up to fifteen teachers work well. Larger faculties can run two parallel sessions.

To discuss availability and pricing

Workshop pricing starts from $1,200 for a single-department session. Online delivery and multi-session arrangements are available.

Email Dan Misra at dan@austi.org