School leaders keep asking the same two questions, in the same order. What does a partnership with SolutionWright actually look like on a Tuesday? And where is the line you will not cross for any budget? This page answers both, plainly.
The short answer
A partnership with SolutionWright is a small, calm, transparent engagement with a school or district around one thing: helping teachers and leaders use active inference (as a lens on learning) and modern tooling (as a workbench) without harming students, staff, or the school's public credibility. It is a curriculum-and-workshop engagement, not a vendor rollout, and not a data play.
We are one of five pathways on the community resource map maintained at Themesis. See Where to Start with Active Inference, A Resource Map for 2026: a public map that lists SolutionWright among five ways in, alongside independent tracks. It is a listing, not an endorsement, and we frame it that way on purpose.
What a partnership includes
Four things, always, in this order.
1. Curriculum consulting for a specific course or program (Class C). We sit with the teacher, or the department, and read the unit you already teach. We do not replace it. We map where active inference (Parr, Pezzulo, and Friston, 2022; Class E) as a learning lens fits, where it does not, and where it would be a distraction. Output is a marked-up copy of your existing plan, plus a one-page decision log naming what changed and why. If nothing should change, the decision log says so and we invoice for the review only.
2. A teacher workshop cohort. Small, six to twelve teachers, four sessions, over four to six weeks. We cover the honesty policy first (the AI-authorship fence), the workbench second, and the pedagogy last. Details are in Honesty in Classrooms, the AI-Authorship Fence and The Teacher's Workbench Tour. Teachers keep everything they build.
3. Workbench access for staff, not students. The workbench is a set of tools teachers use to prepare lessons, draft feedback, and audit their own bias. It is not a student-facing chatbot. It is not embedded in a learning management system. It runs on staff accounts, on school-owned devices, with a shared log the department head can read at any time (Class C).
4. Honesty policy support. We help the school write, or revise, the public statement that explains to parents and students what AI-adjacent tools are used, by whom, for what, and with what fence. We do not write it for you. We draft, you edit, your counsel signs. The version that goes out is yours.
That is the whole scope. It fits on one page because it should.
What is off the table
We will not do these things. Not for a bigger contract. Not "just this once." The reasons are in the parentheses.
- No student data extraction. We do not ingest student records, gradebooks, IEP files, disciplinary logs, or anything that identifies a minor. Not to train, not to fine-tune, not to "personalize." If a tool we use touches student data, we walk away from that tool (Class F, falsifiable by inspecting our data-flow diagram at /transparency).
- No marketing to minors. We do not put our name, logo, or copy in front of students. The teacher is the interface. Always.
- No sweeping efficacy claims. We will not tell you this raises test scores, closes gaps, or "transforms" your school. We do not have that evidence, and the field does not have it either (Class U). What we can say is what teachers report after a cohort, session by session, in their own words, with dates.
- No exclusivity in either direction. We will not ask you to stop using another vendor. You will not ask us to stop working with a neighboring district. Schools that want a monogamous vendor relationship should hire staff, not a partner.
- No black-box models of your students. We do not build predictive models of individual students. The learning lens we teach is about the teacher's own generative model of the classroom, updated by evidence the teacher can see, not a machine's guess about a child.
- No claims about AI authoring student-facing text. Every artifact that leaves the workbench for a student is signed by a human. That is the fence. It is not optional in a partnership with us.
Before you sign with anyone, use A School Leader's Checklist Before Any AI Vendor. It applies to us too.
Pricing and cadence, plainly
We publish pricing on the workshop page. See /workshop for the current number. A partnership beyond the workshop is quoted per engagement, based on the four items above, and always includes a written scope you can share with your board. Ranges we usually land in:
- Curriculum review only: two to five sessions with the teacher or department, priced by session.
- One teacher cohort (four sessions): the workshop rate on /workshop, times cohort size, with a district cap.
- Ongoing partnership (a school year): cohort plus quarterly curriculum review plus honesty-policy support, quoted as a single number with a break clause every quarter.
We do not do multi-year lock-ins. Break clauses go both ways. If either party wants out at the end of a quarter, both parties get out, and we hand back everything you gave us.
How we frame our own work, so you can judge us
We teach active inference as a lens on learning and as a research program. Our own build sits on the attainable path toward General Natural Intelligence, natural not artificial. It is a working hypothesis with growing, evidence-classed evidence, tested in the open. Do not take that claim on faith. Test the build, inspect the gates, and help us find where it fails. If a vendor tells you they have cracked learning, or that their model is human-like, or that their tool is "the" way in, you should be suspicious of us for the same reason.
We evidence-class our claims: A for empirical-in-session, B for code or inspection, C for configuration or integration, E for expert citation, F when a falsifier is present, U when unverified. You will see those tags on our public writing, and you can ask for them in any memo we send you.
What we ask of a partner school
Three things.
- A named contact who can say no. One person, usually an assistant principal or a department head, with actual authority to stop us.
- A quarterly read of the shared log. Twenty minutes. You read what teachers did with the workbench. You ask questions. We answer or we fix it.
- Permission to publish anonymized lessons. Not case studies, not testimonials, just the pedagogy we learned together, with your name off it unless you ask us to put it on.
That is the whole ask.
Next steps
If you are a school leader reading this and thinking "maybe," here is the sequence we recommend.
- Read Honesty in Classrooms, the AI-Authorship Fence and share it with one skeptical teacher.
- Take The Teacher's Workbench Tour at your own pace before any call with us.
- Run A School Leader's Checklist Before Any AI Vendor against us and one other vendor you are considering.
- Then book a workshop cohort at /workshop. Cohorts are how partnerships start; they are not how they end.