CONTRIBUTORS
Can AI help plug the staffing gap?
This month, NAOMI HOWELLS, Managing Director at recruitment specialist Class People and regular Education Today columnist, discusses the place of AI in addressing pupil engagement problems and staffing challenges.
The latest trend survey from Edurio highlights that there has been a fall in the number of pupils that find learning interesting. Just 28% of the survey of over 76,500 pupils said that they always or quite often found what they learned at school interesting. This, at a time when the country is experiencing widespread teacher shortages, there’s growing pressure on SEND resources, and countless teachers are struggling with workload. For many, AI is being posed as the solution to all challenges, offering capacity and resources to engage and inspire. Is it really that simple?
Insights into AI are mixed, with supporters arguing it can add flair and realism to teaching, as well as supporting with aspects such as marking. Meanwhile detractors are concerned over the quality of the content, the potential impact on research and learning skills, and argue that it will likely diminish human connection. In reality, the debate is not so much around the value of AI, but
on how AI is employed as a solution. In the last few months, we have witnessed AI offering clever, engaging, and tangible improvements to education, supporting teachers to enhance their lessons through unique experiences. For example, the Holocaust Educational Trust has just launched “Testimony 360” which allows pupils to hold virtual conversations with Holocaust Survivors via VR headsets. Other applications include monitoring for plagiarism, delivering marking and even live feedback on pupil work, offering live translation of lessons, and even analysing data to create personalised lesson plans for individual pupils. One private school in London has even gone so far as to trial a “teacherless” classroom for 20 GCSE pupils, although what the long-term impact of this is, remains to be seen. It’s clear that the advent of AI can offer significant opportunities to enhance lessons and reduce teacher workload and burnout, however it is not all rosy. A recent study from Germany, published in Science Direct, has highlighted that AI tools such as ChatGPT have eased students’ cognitive load, but do so at the expense of critical thinking. In short, generative AI has assisted in gaining knowledge, but has reduced cognitive effort, as well as diminishing the quality of their reasoning and arguments. Convenience has traded off depth and quality it seems.
What’s more, AI is a tool that’s trained on what already exists, which means that it has inherited inaccuracies and biases from the content it consumes, including racial and gender bias. Similarly, there are concerns over the security of sharing of pupil data, with the Department for Education currently advising schools to look at homework policies, and to avoid entering sensitive or private data into generative AI tools.
For now, at least, it seems that schools can harness the advantages of AI to boost pupil engagement and alleviate some teaching pressure, but investment will be better spent on AI-based resources than on open generative tools such as ChatGPT. This is essential to maintaining the quality and content of learning, while offering efficiency gains into schools.
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www.education-today.co.uk Teachers are people, too.
In his column for Education Today this month, GARETH CONYARD of the Teacher Development Trust discusses why it is crucial to take a people-first approach.
Here at the Teacher Development Trust, one of our organisational values is ‘heart’. By that, we mean it is important to remember the people involved in any process – it is the teacher at the front of the classroom or the school
leader trying to implement a new approach – who matter most in any professional development. After all, even the very best development based on the most robust research will only be effective if it can be taken forward in practice and if the person engaging in the training is able to do something with it. So often, it can be this moment of implementation when good intentions fail to translate into meaningful change as the routines of school life reassert themselves.
This always feels more prominent to me at this time of year. There is something about the shorter days and darker evenings that seems to inhibit the processes of change, something about this moment in the school year, which means the new beginnings of September have morphed into the harder grind of getting through work during what can feel like the longest of terms. It is so important that those of us working outside of the direct impact of the rhythms of the school year recognise what it feels like teachers and school leaders – people arriving to work in the dark and leaving in the dark, too often with little opportunity to engage in any professional development until the evening or at the weekend. It is important to recognise that, on a very human level, it is understandable that professional development is delayed or abandoned.
What can make a difference? In 2021, we undertook some research to understand how the culture of a school – the context in which any professional development was being taken forward – influences the success of that professional development. Our Culture of Improvement report identified five key aspects of teachers’ working conditions that seem to have an impact on ensuring effective professional development:
1. Taking a collaborative approach across the school to explore data, plan curricula, and moderate assessments. 2. Involving the whole staff in school planning and decision- making. 3. Creating a culture of mutual trust, honesty, and respect 4. Building a sense of shared mission and purpose 5. Ensuring behaviour is well managed in school and that teachers
feel supported by senior leaders.
These five aspects are not always straightforward to implement, and the role of senior leaders is creating that atmosphere of trust and collaboration is crucial.
Culture only goes so far of course, and there is nothing anybody can do about that wider late autumn feeling, of shorter days and darker nights. But, when done well, creating the right school culture can have a significant impact on the success of any professional development undertaken.
November 2024
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