Recently, I was invited to be part of a five member panel at Google to discuss the impact that AI will have on teaching and learning in schools. My fellow panelists came from the technology sector. As a historian of schooling and veteran high school teacher, I was expected to offer a brief perspective about previous technological innovations that had entered classrooms. Here is what I said to the participants:
Over the past century, every technology introduced to improve teaching and learning has been hyped as “revolutionary” and ”transformational.”
Consider this list:
*Radios in classrooms
*16mm movies
*Overhead Projectors
*Instructional television
*video-casettes
*1:1 laptops
*Interactive Whiteboards
That inflated vocabulary of previous classroom technologies triggering sweeping changes in teaching and learning continues in 2024.
In speaking of AI recently, the Dean of the Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, said:
“[This Technology] is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching.”
Yet there is little evidence that classroom use of these previous technologies forced classroom teachers to rethink, much less reshape, their instruction. Nor have I found convincing evidence that these technologies altered fundamentally how teachers teach, increased student engagement, or raised test scores.
So I have concluded that those pushing AI use in classrooms fail to understand the complexity of teaching.*
Why do I say that?
Promoters of AI have attended public and private schools for nearly two decades and sat at desks a few feet away from their teachers. Such familiarity encouraged AI advocates to think that they knew thoroughly what teaching was like and how it was done. That familiarity trapped promoters of AI into either misunderstanding or ignoring the sheer complexity of teaching especially the emotional connections that teachers must build with their students.
Anyone who has taught at least three to five years appreciates the extensive knowledge, skills, and emotional connections needed to get kindergartners, fifth graders, or high school seniors to learn. By “emotional connections, ” I mean building relationships with individual students and a class are paramount in getting students to learn. Few boosters of AI, for example, seldom mention that a teacher-student relationship is unlike a student-machine connection.
Teaching, then, is not a mechanical act of connecting dots. Teaching is a complex act that requires knowledge of subject matter, managerial skills, and emotional labor. Often, it is improvisational. Most important, however, is that teaching requires gaining students’ trust. It is both an art and a science that takes years to master.
This brief history of hyped-up technological innovations previously adopted by public schools and the lack of causal links between these new technologies and altering how teachers teach or student learn may feel like I am raining on the parade of AI promoters. So be it.
While I believe AI will not force practitioners to rethink how they teach, nonetheless, as so many teachers have done in the past, they will adapt AI to fit the contours of their classrooms. And in doing so, AI may become just another item added to the list of previously hyped technological innovations that evoked initial gasps of delight and slowly became part of many teachers’ repertoires.
Or maybe AI in classrooms will become just a footnote in a future doctoral student’s dissertation. Too early to say.
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* Beyond understanding completely the complexity of teaching, perhaps those who create these tools are driven by the simple fact that the U.S. public schools market is large (i.e., nearly 50 million students and three million teachers) and lucrative. Further, schools are just as vulnerable to technological fads as are women’s fashions, deodorants, and automobile styling.
Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 
will AI transform education? I agree with you that it might happen, and if it does it will be a very slow process. But likely not.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Barry.
Dr. Cuban, your courage in speaking against the prevailing winds and pointing to the long arc of history is so valuable right now. Thank you for your continued service to helping us see school reform in clear terms anchored in historical evidence. Ross Wehner
Thank you, Ross. Kudos to you for
World Leadership Schools.
what specifically will it be used for in the classroom?
Can’t say for sure, but my guess would be the following: answer textbook and teacher questions; do first drafts of assignments ranging from classroom essays to research papers; students analyzing AI answers and writings for errors.
Can you suggest other possible uses?
I wonder if AI generated texts might replace textbooks. In Italy, where I live and work (being Italian), textbooks are decisely low quality.
Some LLM have a clarity textbooks usually lack. Plus, an AI can easily tailor texts both on the topic I want to cover (I teach history) and adapt texts for age, complexity, lexicon and so on…on the spot.
Sometimes I have to repeat and adapt my prompts, and surely I revise the results, but still, I think this gives me a level of precision teaching that used to be much more effortful -or impossible altogether.
Students are already usinge AIs rather than books to retrieve info, but that’s a problem: an expert revision is necessary
Many thanks for taking the time to comment on what you do with AI, Francesco.
I will put the link to this on my website for tomorrow Sunday. And I agree. (Plus I really miss Audrey Watters in this debate).
Here the minority government has lately got cold feet. What was going to save staff salaries did the opposite and the results when it comes to literacy and general knowledge of students has been a catastrophe.
Thank you, Sara, for offering what is occurring in Sweden.
Audrey Watters is writing https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/sputnik-was-always-an-ai-moment/?ref=second-breakfast-newsletter
Thank you for the link.
Sound thinking is hard to find on AI and its over-hyped potential to revolutionize K-12 education. Thank you for weighing-in and putting it all in historical perspective. I plan to use it in my Graduate Education course on school reform. It complements the work of today’s Cassandra, Audrey Watters, and particularly her book, Teaching Machines.
Appreciate your commenting, Paul. Thank you. Yes, Audrey Watters is missed.
In October at http://hackeducation.com/2024/10/05/the-return she said she will start blogging on http://hackeducation.com again
Thank you very much for pointing out that Audrey Watters is again posting. . For readers who have appreciated her work, she can be found at: https://audreywatters.com/2024/10/05/the-return
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“Teaching, then, is not a mechanical act of connecting dots. Teaching is a complex act that requires knowledge of subject matter, managerial skills, and emotional labor.”
This! People don’t realise or just look away when trying to implement AI in just about anything.
We’re going to end up seeking help even when not needed
Thank you for taking the time to comment.
Larry, I agree. There are human things that AI will never be able to do and I think great teaching is one of them (poor teaching will probably be outstripped by AI–and it probably should be)
In my work, I’ve taken a different approach: How can teachers help students learn about AI, form intuition about it, and use it safely? That, I think, is a very important skill (and one, frankly, we as a society missed with social media and cell phones).
Here’s our bet: AI Competencies. (https://evergreened.org/ai-literacy-curriculum/) In our model, we have 60 skills for the “age of AI”.
Would love to discuss sometime with you.
Teaching students about AI, Ryan, is obviously a first step. A second step is actually using AI in daily lessons as examples. Many teachers, how many I do not know, already use AI for planning lessons through ChatGPT. And students, how many I do not know, use ChatGPT and similar bots. A third step, I would think, is teaching students the limits (and hallucinations) of ChatGPT and similar bots. From your comment, it sounds like we are on a similar wave length (if not, let me know). Thanks for taking the time to comment.