<![CDATA[This account explores what a first-cycle classroom action research (CAR) in an introductory economics course taught a research-teacher that the formal publication could not contain. Through subjective personal introspection (SPI), it examines the antecedents, actions, and outcomes of designing and inhabiting a four-component authentic assessment ecosystem across a fourteen-week trimester. Three insights emerge from this inquiry. First, scaffolded sustained engagement works because it keeps students engaged with an economic issue long enough for it to become genuinely complicated, but maintaining these conditions across a large class demands a quality and volume of instructor labor that the design does not acknowledge. Second, feedback is constitutive of learning in theory and finite in practice, and the line between guiding students and spoon-feeding them is one that pressure makes easy to cross. Third, the problem with generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom is not AI use itself but intellectual outsourcing, a form of academic dishonesty that predates the tools that now make it easier. Each insight carries implications for the design of Cycle 2.]]>
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