Revised September 2026. The original version of this piece treated concepts, symbols, and frameworks as neutral tools and recommended a handful of them, including “pipeline” and “return on investment,” without asking what they assume. This version keeps the idea and asks that question.
Picture a district planning meeting. Someone puts up a slide showing where students fall off track, and says the pipeline is leaking in ninth grade. Everyone nods, because everyone knows what a leaking pipeline means, and within a few minutes the conversation has moved on to how to plug it. Nobody decided that students are something flowing through pipes toward an outlet, or that the problem is a hole in the wall rather than, say, what ninth grade asks of them. The metaphor decided that before anyone spoke.
That moment is what I mean by thought technology, and it’s why I’ve come to think the concepts and frameworks we use to plan are educational technology in the same sense a platform is, arguments included.
What is thought technology?
The phrase comes from Michael Nielsen’s 2016 essay Thought as a Technology. Nielsen defines a cognitive technology as something people design outside their heads that others can internalize and then think with. Language is his first example: a child hears a word, starts using it, and before long the word is part of how they think. Maps, notations, and artistic techniques work the same way, and so, he argues, can software interfaces. Once you’ve internalized one, it stops feeling like a tool at all. It becomes part of how you see.
Nielsen is writing about interface design, mostly in mathematics and physics, so I’m extending his idea when I apply it to the frameworks and metaphors that circulate in schools. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch, since language is his founding example, but it’s worth saying that this is my application and not his.
What do our frameworks assume?
If a framework is something we think with, then it shapes what we can think, and that’s where it starts to look like a platform. I’ve argued elsewhere on this site that platforms aren’t neutral containers, since their defaults and required fields carry arguments about what learning is. The frameworks we borrow for planning do the same thing, only more quietly, because they live in our heads rather than on a settings page.
“Return on investment” asks us to treat learning as a yield on spending, which makes whatever can be measured and attributed to a program look like the return and everything else look like waste. The “five whys” of root cause analysis assumes there’s a single cause at the bottom if you dig far enough, which is exactly what Richard Cook argues complex systems don’t have (I wrote about that in The Hidden Cost of EdTech Complexity). Even “scaffolding,” one of the most useful metaphors we have, pictures the learner as a building going up to someone else’s plans, with support removed once the structure can stand. None of these is useless. Each makes some things easy to see and other things hard to see, and once a staff has internalized one, the hard-to-see things tend to drop out of the conversation.
Nielsen draws a distinction that helps here. He contrasts tools that simply hand us an answer, which he calls cognitive outsourcing, with tools that change the thoughts we’re able to think. A framework can work either way. Used well, it gives a team a new way of seeing a problem. Used as a shortcut, it does the thinking for them, and the team ends up fluent in the vocabulary without the understanding underneath. Nielsen makes a similar point about software: you can master Microsoft Word’s interface without becoming a passable writer, because Word doesn’t carry many deep principles about writing. A lot of the frameworks passed around in education are like that. People learn the labels and the diagram without ever getting the idea.
Where are the better frameworks?
One of the most interesting parts of Nielsen’s essay is about what he calls hidden representations. Experts in a field often think with private images and examples that never appear in textbooks. He quotes the engineer Gerald Sussman realizing that what his circuits classes taught students to write down wasn’t at all what a good engineer actually does. The expert’s working picture stayed hidden because the usual media had no place for it.
Schools are full of these. Experienced teachers carry their own ways of picturing a class, a unit, or a struggling reader, and those pictures are often richer than anything a district imports from business or engineering. When we reach for “pipeline” or “portfolio” in a planning meeting, we’re often skipping past the thought technology already in the room. So rather than recommending a list of frameworks, I’d suggest a few questions to ask before a team adopts one: 1) What does this framework make easy to see, and what does it make hard to see? 2) What does it assume about learners and about learning? 3) Where did it come from, and what was it built to do there? 4) What pictures do the experienced people in this room already use, and could we name those instead?
What about my own frameworks?
I’m not outside this. A lot of my work is built on borrowed frameworks: Rogers’ diffusion categories for planning rollouts, Kirkpatrick’s levels for evaluation, action mapping for design. The one I’m most attached to is atomic design, which I’ve used for years to build LMS templates out of atoms, molecules, and organisms. It’s a genuinely useful way to think about modular course design. It’s also a metaphor that pictures learning as something assembled from interchangeable parts, and I’ve spent enough time on this site worrying about modular efficiency versus organic coherence to know that isn’t a neutral picture.
I don’t think the answer is to stop using frameworks. We can’t think without them, which is Nielsen’s whole point. What I can do is hold them the way I’m trying to hold platforms, knowing they make an argument and deciding whether it’s one I want to make.
If there’s a metaphor your school or team can’t stop using, I’d like to hear what it’s doing for you, and to you. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there are more tools, articles, and resources at bradylicht.com.
