VIEWS & OPINION
How teachers can harness the power of AI in the classroom
Comment by MEL PARKER, Educational Consultant at RM
It came as no surprise when Gillian Keegan, the UK’s current education secretary, turned to the topic of Artificial Intelligence in her opening speech at the Education World Forum in May. The forum, which took place in London, is one of the most important annual events for the educational community. And, after the past year, it would have been odd to avoid the subject that everyone has been thinking about – both in education, and every other industry around the world.
At the moment, those who work in education are split largely into two camps: those who oppose AI, and those who believe we should embrace it. Keegan, as reported by The Independent, finds herself in the latter camp. Yet, it’s clear that many teaching professionals find themselves in the former. Almost half of teachers in a recent EducationWeek survey said that AI would have a negative effect in the next five years. Only 27% said it would be positive.
Why we need to embrace AI Teachers are cautious, or even afraid,
because it is still unclear how AI could, or should, add value to a classroom. AI can be implemented for an endless list of means. Its potential seems almost limitless. And the impending shift that the education sector, as with every other sector, will need to go through is daunting. We’ve only just moved over the edge of the precipice – or so it seems.
As highlighted in a recent RM report, many people who express fear of AI have already been using it for many years. Internet search platforms like Google have been using machine learning for a long time. So when tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT attracted attention earlier this year, it was only the sudden public accessibility that earned people’s recognition. The technology itself has been around for a while.
However, conflicting media reports have left many to fear it, with stories of robot teachers replacing jobs sadly dominating headlines. These all fail to recognise that AI is already driving the most significant changes in back office-type work, yet any change in the relationship between humans and AI will be gradual and guided by regulation. Even then, there’s a strong general consensus that human teachers will always provide the best education. Students need human-to-human contact.
This point is, in fact, something that Keegan made clear in her speech at the Education World Forum. “AI could have the power to transform a teacher’s day-to-day work,” she said. “For example, it can take much of the heavy lifting out of compiling lesson plans and marking. This would enable teachers to do the one thing that AI cannot, and that’s teach, up close and personal at the front of the classroom.”
Where AI will help
The administrative tasks that I have referred to could include generating lesson plans which cater to each individual student’s needs. This could dramatically reduce workloads, giving teachers more time to spend one-on-one with their students. Indeed, aside from teachers’ work in schools, AI has already proven its ability to shake up how departments work. It is also being used through third-party software in the non-teaching departments of those organisations. to reduce the burden of tedious tasks for administrative teams.
This can, of course, extend to teachers’ work. Letters that teachers need to write to parents can take hours from a day. With AI, that time could be reduced to minutes. More advanced tasks could include question writing. If I were a teacher and I needed to produce a series of 10 practice GCSE questions of increasing difficulty for a homework task, why would I spend an hour doing so, when AI platforms can produce the same results within minutes? The limit to this is
really as far as the user’s creativity extends.
One task that deserves attention in relation to AI is marking. Research has suggested that marking is, beside actual teaching, the task that teachers spend the most time on. If AI could help even a little bit with that task, teachers would experience a significant difference in their lives. I’ve used it myself to mark a student’s essay against AQA standards. The process took only a few minutes, and the system performed well. That time reduction, extended across the entire sector, would improve teachers’ availability for other tasks by a huge margin.
It’s important to recognise here that teachers will, and should, remain the final decision makers. They need to remain the final point of contact for students. But that doesn’t mean that AI should not be used in an assistive role. In marking, it could make suggestions, with the teacher making the final judgement. It could even review marks given by a variety of teachers to recognise biases and anomalies. This will rapidly accelerate those processes, condensing hours of work into minutes. Teachers will then have time and energy to focus on teaching.
Anybody who remembers the advent of the internet will remember the uncertainty and, in some cases, dismissal by the public. Now look where we are today. AI is no different; the potential is huge. And while we’re still unsure of its final destination, learning how to use it in the meantime is the best we can do. In retrospect, would you have advised teachers to educate children in using the internet properly and safely? We don’t need AI to figure that one out.
June 2023
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