Why ALIGN Is a Cognition Frame, Not a Compliance Checklist

People chose whether a tool replaces thought, or deepens it.

Dec 15, 2025

The training was excellent. The framework made sense. Everyone completed the audit, ticked the boxes, generated the documentation. Six months later, nothing had changed.

Strategic thinking and AI have a similar problem - people assume tools that structure thought end up replacing it.

The Lump of Cognition Fallacy

Andy Masley (2025) recently coined a term for something that’s been bothering educators for a while - the lump of cognition fallacy. It’s the mistaken belief that thinking is a finite substance that tools drain and that when a student uses GenAI, there’s less thinking left for them to do.

In his article with Tawnya Means (2025), they point out that the fallacy is obviously wrong once you name it. We out-source cognition constantly. GPS handles navigation so we can think about the meeting ahead or driving through the bad weather to get there. Grocery stores standardise their layout so we don’t waste mental effort finding milk unless they’ve just mixed it up again to make you walk through aisles you wouldn’t otherwise visit! They note that Alfred North Whitehead observed, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

I noticed that a similar thing happens with strategic frameworks in education.

The Strategic Version

There’s a reason schools keep adopting SAMR, TPACK, or the latest EdTech framework and a reason those adoptions keep disappointing. The surface logic seems sound - a framework provides structure, structure guides decisions, decisions improve practice. Simple.

Unfortunately, something often goes wrong between “provides structure” and “improves practice.”

Schools seem to implement frameworks the way they implemented smartboards. The technology changes but the thinking doesn’t. Larry Cuban (1986) documented this pattern decades ago; each wave of classroom technology met with transformative promises, absorbed into existing practices, eventually abandoned when miraculous results failed to materialise. Tyack & Tobin (1994) called this the ‘grammar of schooling’, when timetables, assessment regimes, and departmental structures are so deeply embedded that reforms get absorbed into them, rather than changing them. New technology, old grammar.

The same thing happens with strategic frameworks, and in fact many other education models! Adopted enthusiastically, implemented with compliant faithfulness, then, quietly shelved when improvement doesn’t follow.

Mark Anderson captured it in a 2015 blog post title: “SAMR is not a ladder.” The model gets treated as a taxonomy to climb — substitution bad, redefinition good, reach the top. The moment SAMR becomes “we must hit Redefinition,” the thinking has already stopped. The framework became the goal. This outcome was clearly explained in the original Freakonomics book, for those that remember them! It’s often the cause of you sitting on the tarmac in the plane for longer than necessary to prior to take-off.

The lump of cognition fallacy explains the pattern. People assume the framework does the thinking, so there’s less thinking left for leaders to do. Fill in the SAMR grid, complete the TPACK audit, tick the boxes. The framework handles strategy, freeing leadership for... what, exactly?

This is so backwards. Frameworks can’t replace strategic thinking any more than GenAI can replace learning. They can structure and deepen thinking but only when people use them as thinking tools rather than thinking substitutes.

Fidelity Without Understanding

A recent piece by Brendan (2025), writing about explicit instruction in maths classrooms, captures the failure mode precisely: “Fidelity without understanding leads to rigidity.”

Explicit instruction (showing, supporting, stepping back aka I Do, We Do, You Do) works when teachers understand why each phase matters and when to move between them. Without that understanding, it becomes mechanical compliance. Teachers click through every slide. They follow every page. They hesitate to skip, adapt, or return to earlier content, not because they’re unwilling to think, but because it’s never been made clear what’s essential and what’s flexible.

The identical pattern appears in EdTech strategy. Schools implement frameworks with perfect fidelity to prescribed phases. They complete each step. They generate the documentation and, nothing changes.

Senge’s collaborators, in “Schools That Learn” (2012), identified the same problem in professional development. They called it “drive-by staff development”, the one-day training, the workshop without follow-up, the input that generates compliance without building the capability independently. Classic “one-and-done” CPD! The format looks like learning. The certificates prove participation. Regrettably, nothing shifts because understanding never developed.

As Brendan says, the real work doesn’t sit in the phases. It sits between them.

When do you return to assessment because evidence suggests your plan isn’t working? What triggers adaptation versus continuation? How do you interpret ambiguous data about whether technology is actually serving learning? These decisions require understanding what’s beneath the phases i.e. why they exist, what they’re meant to accomplish, when they’ve succeeded or failed.

Brendan puts it directly: “Explicit instruction is not a set of steps. It is a decision-making framework.”

What ALIGN Is Intended to Be

ALIGN (Assess, Link, Integrate, Gauge, Nurture) is a frame for thinking about educational technology integration. It brings together eight established models into a coherent whole. It separates strategic thinking from operational practice. It gives shared language for conversations leaders are already having.

What it isn’t, is a compliance checklist.

This distinction matters because the moment a framework becomes checklist, it stops ability being developed and improved. Schools adopt it, follow it, complete it, but develop none of the strategic thinking it was meant to enable. The framework does the thinking, leadership ticks the boxes. Lump of cognition in action.

ALIGN takes a different position. It’s designed as a cognition frame, a tool that structures professional judgment rather than replacing it. The frame doesn’t tell you what to decide. It suggests questions to ask, perspectives to consider, evidence to weigh. Not prescription, but starting points for critical thinking and dialogue. The decisions remain yours. The difference? Your decisions are no informed by input from multiple sources, this is no complicated, it is complex. The complexity of education cannot be managed by simplicity.

This doesn’t mean ALIGN can’t be misused. Any framework with phases can become a checklist if the thinking disappears. What matters is whether users understand why looking at problems from multiple angles matters, when to circle back to earlier phases, and how to learn from the gaps between what they planned and what actually happened. Without that understanding, ALIGN becomes exactly what it’s designed to prevent - compliance theatre dressed up as strategy.

This is harder than compliance. Compliance is comfortable. Someone else has already done the thinking, you just follow their conclusions. A cognition frame forces you to think but gives you a structure so the thinking is directed through multiple perspectives, rather than scattered.

What Makes the Difference

Means & Masley identify five conditions where offloading cognition goes wrong. They translate directly to strategic frameworks:

When building knowledge for the future. Schools can’t outsource strategic thinking to consultants if they need to navigate ongoing complexity themselves. Frameworks that hand you answers don’t develop your ability to generate answers when the context changes.

When thinking is an expression of care. Generic policy implementation signals something to staff. It signals generic thinking. Staff can tell the difference.

When the process is the valuable experience. The struggle to think through a strategic problem develops the capability to handle these problems. Buying a pre-packaged solution bypasses that development.

When it would be deceptive to fake. Adopting a framework to appear strategic while avoiding actual strategic thought is the institutional equivalent of AI-generated sincerity.

When stakes are high and trust is uncertain. Decisions where you can’t verify the reasoning deserve sustained attention throughout. Strategic EdTech decisions affect students, staff, and institutional direction, so outsourcing that thinking to a framework you don’t understand is a risk, not a shortcut.

The framework-as-compliance model fails in all five conditions. ALIGN is designed to avoid them by encouraging personal and organisation capability, rather than creating dependency, requiring local adaptation rather than generic implementation, treating the thinking process as central rather than the documentation it produces.

Scaffolding That Makes Itself Obsolete

The goal of any good thinking tool is to eventually become unnecessary.

A student who learns mathematics through worked examples shouldn’t need worked examples forever. The examples build understanding that eventually operates independently. The scaffold comes down once the structure can stand alone.

ALIGN works the same way. It provides vocabulary and structure for strategic thinking. Over time, looking at problems from multiple perspectives becomes habitual. Evidence-informed decision-making becomes just how things are done. The once necessary framework gradually fades into background competence.

This is what distinguishes a cognition frame from a compliance checklist. Compliance creates ongoing dependency so you need the checklist every time, otherwise, you don’t know what to do. A cognition frame builds capability that persists after the frame itself stops being consciously referenced.

The lump of cognition fallacy assumes there’s a fixed amount of thinking to do, so tools that handle some of it leave less for you. The reality is the opposite. Good tools reallocate and deepen thinking. They free capacity for what actually matters.

For AI, that means freeing students to focus on synthesis and judgment rather than information gathering. For strategic frameworks, it means freeing leaders to focus on institutional dynamics and pedagogical purpose rather than documentation and compliance.

ALIGN isn’t trying to replace strategic thinking. It’s trying to structure and deepen it, so when the frame eventually recedes, what remains is genuine capability for the work that only humans can do.

In a forthcoming piece, I’ll unpack how ALIGN works in detail, not as steps to follow, but as questions to ask. For now, here’s a preview of ALIGN:

References

Anderson, M. (2015). SAMR is not a ladder, a word of warning. ICTEvangelist. https://ictevangelist.com/samr-is-not-a-ladder-purposeful-use-of-tech/
Brendan. (2025). When explicit instruction turns robotic. Substack.
Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. Teachers College Press.
Masley, A. (2025). The lump of cognition fallacy. Substack.
Means, T. & Masley, A. (2025). What if AI isn’t the problem? The Collaboration Chronicle.
Senge, P. M., Cambron-McCabe, N., Lucas, T., Smith, B., Dutton, J., & Kleiner, A. (2012). Schools That Learn (Revised Edition). Crown Business.
Tyack, D. & Tobin, W. (1994). The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal, 31(3), 453-479.
Whitehead, A. N. (1911). An Introduction to Mathematics. Williams and Norgate.

Background sources (informed but not directly quoted):

Blundell, C. N., Mukherjee, M., & Nykvist, S. (2022). A scoping review of the application of the SAMR model in research. Computers and Education Open, 3, 100093.
Caukin, N. & Trail, L. (2019). SAMR: A tool for reflection for ed tech integration.
Guhlin, M. (2015). Tearing down false gods: SAMR pushback begins. Another Think Coming. https://mguhlin.org/2015/05/19/tearing-down-false-gods-samr-pushback-begins-updated/
Hamilton, E. R., Rosenberg, J. M., & Akcaoglu, M. (2016). The Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition (SAMR) Model: A critical review and suggestions for its use. TechTrends, 60, 433-441.