I made it through a two-year teacher preparation program and the first six years of my classroom career before I heard anyone say the word “protocol.”
By then, I had joined the staff of New Technology High School in Napa, which had adopted the Buck Institute for Education model of project-based learning. Our trainer, Dr. Thom Markham, author of the PBL Handbook, used a protocol called “Critical Friends” to shape peer feedback during a session in which we shared our project designs.
The structure relied on sentence stems (“I like …,” “I wonder …,” and “a good next step …”) to structure the conversation and keep it on track. The idea felt revolutionary. I quickly realized it could help students as well, many of whom struggled to offer feedback more specific than “that was cool.”
The eight years I spent at the Buck Institute introduced me to a world of protocols, which became an integral part of our design and instructional model. The protocols we used with teachers in our workshops were modified to guide the work of students.
Now, in a world of instruction powered by AI, I wondered if protocols still had a place in the modern classroom. And if they did, would we need to modify them to account for teacher and student use of AI?
Instructional Protocols: A Brief History
First, a definition. Instructional protocols are structured routines that guide discussion, analysis, or learning tasks.
They emerged during a broader shift in education in the late twentieth century. As schools moved away from lecture-centered instruction toward collaborative and inquiry-driven learning, educators began searching for repeatable structures that could help groups work productively together. Early versions of these routines appeared in professional development (PD) settings during the 1980s and early 1990s, particularly in teacher networks experimenting with reflective practice and collaborative problem solving.
These experimental networks included the Coalition of Essential Schools, founded by Theodore Sizer in 1984. CES schools experimented with structured routines for examining teaching and student work. These routines eventually evolved into what became known as “tuning protocols.” The most famous of these can be seen in a video called “Austin’s Butterfly: Building Excellence in Student Work.“
Around the same time, Harvard Project Zero researchers and affiliated networks promoted structured protocols for examining student thinking.
These approaches emphasized equity in conversation, disciplined observation, and reflective inquiry.
The underlying idea was simple: When conversations about teaching or student work follow a clear structure, they tend to be more focused, equitable, and productive.
The same principle is now surfacing in discussions about creative work in the age of AI. Increasingly, experts argue that success with AI will depend less on clever prompts and more on the ability to design repeatable processes. In other words, the real advantage comes from building workflows rather than simply generating outputs. Educators can learn to view protocols as workflows because they provide repeatable, structured steps that guide how students move through a task or discussion to produce consistent, high-quality outcomes.
One of the most influential developments came in the mid-1990s with the creation of Critical Friends Groups through the National School Reform Faculty (see below) at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.
As the idea spread, protocols migrated from professional learning communities into classrooms. By the early 2000s, many educators began adapting these routines to guide student discussions, collaborative projects, and inquiry-based activities.
Protocols such as Socratic seminars, structured peer critique sessions, and design-thinking cycles became common tools for organizing classroom dialogue and problem solving. The attraction was practical. Protocols reduced the cognitive load on teachers designing lessons while giving students predictable structures that encouraged participation and deeper thinking.
Organizations that Specialize in Protocols
In the last decade, instructional protocols have been further refined and packaged into scalable teaching frameworks. What began as a method for improving teacher collaboration has evolved into a broader instructional strategy for organizing complex learning tasks.
Over time, this work became institutionalized. Several organizations now specialize in developing, training, and disseminating instructional protocols. A few of the most influential include:
National School Reform Faculty (NSRF)
NSRF’s work centers on equity, democratic practice, and reflective inquiry, encouraging educators to examine their teaching collectively rather than working in isolation. Instead of functioning as a traditional membership organization, NSRF operates as a network of trained facilitators and educators connected through ongoing collaborative groups.
The organization is best known for developing and stewarding Critical Friends Groups (CFGs), small communities of educators who meet regularly to analyze student work, reflect on instructional challenges, and improve practice using structured discussion protocols.
NSRF has developed more than 200 such protocols designed to ensure equitable participation, build trust, and focus conversations on student learning. The organization trains and certifies coaches who facilitate these groups and maintain the integrity of the model, while also licensing the Critical Friends Group trademark and offering fee-based training and support to schools and districts.
Eduprotocols
EduProtocols is a professional learning framework built around reusable “lesson frames” that teachers can apply across subjects and grade levels. Instead of designing a new activity for every lesson, teachers use structured protocols that students quickly learn and repeat with different content. The goal is to move classrooms away from passive technology use and toward repeatable learning routines that emphasize collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and creativity.
Because the protocols follow consistent workflows and are designed with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in mind, they can support a wide range of learners, including English language learners and students with special needs. The approach draws on research from scholars such as Robert Marzano and John Hattie, embedding multiple evidence-based instructional strategies into each activity.
EduProtocols was created by educators Jon Corippo and Marlena Hebern, who introduced the framework as a way to “teach better, work less, and achieve more.” Their books, The EduProtocol Field Guide series, outline the core lesson frames and serve as the primary reference for teachers implementing the model. Over time, the concept has grown into a broader professional learning ecosystem that includes books, online courses, coaching, and school-based training through the EduProtocols Plus membership platform.
EL Education
This national nonprofit (formerly known as Expeditionary Learning) places a strong emphasis on protocols as core to its ELA curriculum and its professional development model. EL Education publishes a large, coherent set of classroom and PD protocols (e.g., “Back‑to‑Back and Face‑to‑Face”) used nationally in schools adopting EL curricula or practices.
In addition to these powerhouses, two other organizations play key roles in the development and dissemination of protocols:
- The New Teacher Project publishes observation and instructional protocols (e.g., classroom observation tools by subject) that guide lesson quality analysis and feedback cycles in many systems.
- What Works Clearinghouse / IES uses detailed review protocols to define evidence standards and practices; while aimed at research review rather than classroom moves, these shape PD and implementation guidance nationally.
Instructional protocols have matured from informal routines into fully developed instructional frameworks supported by specialized organizations. Taken together, these organizations demonstrate how protocols have evolved from a niche tool for teacher collaboration into a widely adopted strategy for organizing teaching, professional learning, and educational research at scale.
Protocols Modified for the AI Classroom
As mentioned earlier, my introduction to the instructional use of protocols arrived when I sat in front of a group of teaching colleagues and listened as they worked through the Critical Friends protocol while examining my project design.
Decades later, I wondered what would happen if I fed that protocol into a large language model (Gemini, in this instance) and asked it to revise the protocol in light of the fact that the teacher’s work being reviewed may have been written all or in part by AI? So I did.
You will notice that the revised protocol preserves the original Critical Friends structure but introduces several modifications to account for the possibility that instructional artifacts were created with generative AI assistance:
- Addition of an AI disclosure step in which the presenting teacher explains whether and how AI tools were used, including what portions were generated, revised, or written independently.
- Expansion of both clarifying and probing questions to explore the teacher’s design decisions when working with AI, rather than assuming sole authorship of the artifact.
- The feedback phase includes a new dimension that examines the quality of the teacher’s collaboration with AI, identifying where AI output was effectively adapted or where stronger professional judgment may be needed.
I repeated this task, asking Gemini to revise the protocol for student peer feedback with a similar assumption: Students may have used AI to generate all or part of their draft and were likely to use it to make revisions.
As you can see, this version was adapted for student use by simplifying the language, shortening the steps, and focusing feedback on clarity, ideas, and improvement rather than authorship:
- Addition of a brief “author context” step where students explain the assignment, what they are trying to communicate, and whether they used AI for brainstorming, drafting, or editing, normalizing AI as part of the writing process.
- Revision of the questioning and feedback stages with age-appropriate vocabulary and concrete prompts.
- The feedback phase explicitly encourages students to focus on the strength of ideas, evidence, organization, and clarity.
AI use is becoming increasingly common among teachers and students, making the need for modifying cherished protocols obvious. A good next step, to quote a beloved protocol, might be to launch a work session in which you feed your favorite protocols into a large language model and ask it to revise and adapt them for use, with the understanding that AI has shaped the work and thinking under examination.
Final Thoughts
Instructional protocols occupy an important place in conversations about effective teaching. They represent a practical response to a persistent challenge in education: how to create learning environments where discussion is purposeful, participation is equitable, and thinking is visible. By providing simple but disciplined structures for collaboration and inquiry, protocols help classrooms and professional communities move beyond unstructured conversation toward deeper analysis and shared learning.
Pair that understanding with a new reality: Generative AI is rapidly becoming part of how teachers and students brainstorm, draft, and revise their work.
As you can see via my simple experiment, the protocols we rely on to structure learning experiences can withstand the arrival of AI. Perhaps they may even thrive, in part because they focus on human emotion and lived experience. Technology has changed. The humans using it haven’t.
