frictionless technology – A Missouri educator warns that “frictionless” classroom technology can create an illusion of accelerated learning: polished student output, faster pacing, and confident dashboards—while the brainwork that builds durable understanding quietly disappears. In pla
On a Wednesday afternoon, the shift is visible before a single grade is posted. In Mr. Reyes’s classroom, half his eighth graders are on Chromebooks. One student is on a math app, solving problems while she copies the answers. Another is skimming an AI summary of plate tectonics he didn’t assign. A third is on the “right” tab—except his eyes haven’t moved in two minutes.
Mr. Reyes has stacks of essays to read, the third in a row that sounds nothing like the students who turned them in. The vocabulary is polished. The transitions are flawless. The voice is gone. He looks around and thinks, “It used to work. Now I can’t tell what my students actually know.”
The dashboard says proficiency. The work says something else. Monday is when the contradiction shows up—when students who seemed to “got it” on Friday can’t explain it, build on it, or transfer it to something new.
That gap—between what looks accelerated and what is actually learned—is the argument Dr. Sonya Murray makes against “frictionless technology,” which she describes as a trap that replaces the reps that build durable learning.
Dr. Murray’s warning is grounded in a single idea: output can look accelerated while learning stays stuck. The polish belongs to the tool, not the child. And when the proof is demanded, the students struggle—not because they are lost, but because the thinking didn’t happen in the room.
In Dr. Murray’s telling, that’s the illusion: the pace feels accelerated, the data looks accelerated, and the results appear faster. Underneath, students miss the work that strengthens the brain. Frictionless technology, she says, is “remediation in disguise”—and the remediation has little or no lasting effect.
Relationships are the dining table
For years, Dr. Murray has argued. alongside her co-author Gwendolyn Turner. that education should move from remediation to acceleration—and that the order matters. In their 2023 book. *Serving Educational Equity: A Five-Course Framework for Accelerated Learning* (Corwin. 2023). they lay out five “courses” educators must serve to every learner. placing relationships first.
Dr. Murray describes relationships as the dining table: curriculum, data, and student agency are the courses that can only be served on top of it. Without that relationship between a trained educator and the child, she says, the rest falls apart.
She spells out the promise as SERVE, with grade-level instruction at the center. That last “E”—“Engage at Grade Level”—is the imperative she says frictionless technology most often violates.
In Dr. Murray’s view, substitution is the betrayal. Technology can deliver content, she argues, but it cannot read a face. It cannot hear hesitation in a student’s voice and slow down. It cannot decide that one student needs a harder question and another needs a hand on the shoulder. That kind of responsive expertise is the “diagnostic instrument” of a trained teacher—something no app can replicate.
Her story of substitution starts with her own education. Dr. Murray credits a second-grade teacher, Ms. Cross, for shaping her decision to become an author. Ms. Cross, she recalls, put Dr. Murray’s writing on the wall of the classroom when she was seven. There wasn’t an app—only “a piece of tape and a belief” that what Dr. Murray wrote deserved to be seen.
Dr. Murray ties that moment to neural pathways she says software has never matched. Without Ms. Cross, she says, there was no table for curriculum, data, or later student agency to rest on.
“Ms. Cross was the table,” she writes in the narrative that drives the article. “The piece of tape didn’t just hold my writing on the wall. It held me up.”
When coverage wins, depth gets sacrificed
Dr. Murray places part of the blame on classroom pressure—pacing guides, scope and sequence, and “the curriculum we ‘have to get through.’” When adults decide students aren’t ready for grade-level work and then “hand them a tool that quietly proves us right,” she says depth is sacrificed.
Frictionless technology, she argues, promises to help teachers cover more, faster. What it actually does is help them cover more in shallower depth—so the gaps that aren’t built today show up next year.
She points to two sets of data she says align with what teachers see: students are off-task on their devices for roughly two-thirds of class time, and fewer than 30% of Gen Z students report feeling engaged in their classrooms (Gallup, 2024).
The argument turns more urgent with a specific testimony date. On January 15, 2026, cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate. Dr. Murray says he argued that classroom technology designed to be frictionless—designed to finish the cognitive work for students—silently dismantles mechanisms the brain uses to learn.
She includes the gym analogy Dr. Horvath used: if someone gave you a tool that lifts the weights for you, you would never expect anyone to get strong. Strength comes from effort—the work itself.
In that framing, effort is education. Dr. Murray says students have been handed tools that lift the weights for them, and then adults wondered why they aren’t getting stronger.
Why the brain isn’t fooled
Dr. Murray then leans on learning science to describe why the illusion doesn’t land inside the brain the way it lands on dashboards.
She references Robert Bjork’s research on “desirable difficulties. ” which she says shows that struggle to retrieve information from memory strengthens learning. She cites Daniel Willingham’s framing that memory is the residue of thought. If students offload thinking to a chatbot, she says there is no residue.
She also invokes John Sweller’s point about learning at the edge of working memory, arguing that tools that pre-digest content keep cognitive load artificially low. It feels kind, Dr. Murray says, but it can turn into a missed workout.
For the human side of the same principle, she points to Linda Darling-Hammond’s *Science of Learning and Development*, describing lasting learning as happening inside relationships. A child who feels seen, safe, and believed in encodes more deeply than a child who doesn’t.
In Dr. Murray’s summary of the mechanism, “real acceleration” requires effortful retrieval, productive struggle, deep engagement, and human connection. Frictionless technology removes those elements by eliminating retrieval, removing struggle, replacing generation, and standing in for the relationship.
She argues it’s not merely unhelpful for acceleration, but anti-acceleration.
The test that cuts through classroom choices
Dr. Murray gives teachers a diagnostic question intended to end the debate before it starts: Does the student have to think before, during, and after using the tool—or does the tool think for them?
Her rule is straightforward: if the tool requires retrieval, generation, or evaluation, it’s accelerating. If it delivers polished output that the student didn’t have to build, it’s substituting—no matter how impressive the dashboard looks.
Five Monday moves
After describing the illusion and the science behind it, Dr. Murray turns to action. She says teachers do not need a new initiative—just five small shifts.
First: plan techless first. Design the lesson without a tool, decide where thinking lives and where relationship deepens, and only then ask whether technology actually accelerates thinking or quietly does it for the student.
Second: pick one lesson where a tool has been doing the cognitive heavy lifting and name what brain work it was doing for the student.
Third: build in retrieval instead of review—replace “look back at your notes” with closing everything and writing what students remember.
Fourth: make thinking visible to another human, with one oral check, partner explanation, or whole-class discussion per day.
Fifth: tell students the why. Memory is the residue of thought, and Dr. Murray says students are more interested in that explanation than adults expect.
Back to Mr. Reyes
The argument lands in the classroom again on Friday. Dr. Murray’s narrative shows Mr. Reyes doing something small but deliberate. Before opening Chromebooks. he asks his eighth graders to spend seven minutes writing by hand everything they remember about how the continents move and what drives them. No notes. No screens.
Then the students talk it out: each table gets five more minutes to discuss.
The room changes. Dr. Murray writes that it becomes quiet in a way it hasn’t been in months, and then noisy in a different way it hasn’t been in months. A few students sigh. One asks if he can “just look it up.” Mr. Reyes responds that this part is their brain’s job, and their table’s job.
The work that follows is messier than what AI would have written, she notes. But it is unmistakably theirs. When Mr. Reyes reads the paragraphs that night, for the first time in a long time, he can tell what his students actually know.
The bottom line
Dr. Murray’s closing message returns to the central tension: looks like acceleration, lives like remediation.
Technology in the classroom isn’t the enemy, she writes. Substitution is. Adults may not control how seductive the tools become, but they can control whether thinking still happens in the room.
Ms. Cross didn’t have an app. She had a piece of tape and a belief. Mr. Reyes, on Friday afternoon, is rediscovering the same principle with seven minutes and a blank sheet of paper.
Acceleration over remediation, Dr. Murray insists—because technology can’t replace the power of human connection, and that is where learning that lasts begins again.
References included in the piece are Horvath, J. C. (2025). *The digital delusion: How classroom technology harms our kids’ learning and how to help them thrive again* (Routledge). and Murray-Darden. S. & Turner. G. (2023), *Serving educational equity: A five-course framework for accelerated learning* (Corwin).
Dr. Sonya Murray is identified in the piece as the founder of Accelerated Education Consulting. a Missouri Leadership Specialist with EducationPlus. and a Professor at Saint Louis University. She is also listed as co-author of *Serving Educational Equity: A Five-Course Framework for Accelerated Learning* (Corwin, 2023). The piece says she has served as an executive coach to leaders in many schools. doing gap-closing work including transformations from 1 star to 5 stars on state report cards. and that she partners with schools nationally to build classrooms where every child accelerates through productive struggle. deep engagement. and human relationships.
frictionless technology accelerated learning remediation educational equity classroom technology student engagement retrieval practice human connection AI in education teacher expertise neuroscience of learning
Dashboards be lying fr.
So they’re saying the tech is “frictionless” but the learning still has friction? Kinda makes sense. Also isn’t this what parents already complain about with kids doing shortcuts?
I mean if a kid is on a math app and the teacher assigned it… how is that deceptive? Like the article makes it sound like every student cheating is the app’s fault. I saw a dashboard once and it was correct way more than not, but idk.
This is basically why I don’t trust those school reports where it says “proficiency.” They got these AI summaries now and kids can just paste the easy version and teachers are like “wow.” Meanwhile on Monday they can’t explain anything and everybody acts shocked. Also the “third in a row that sounds nothing like the students” is wild, like do they not notice writing changed? Seems like they’re paying for software and not for actually checking brains.