To get a sense of how quickly artificial intelligence and generative AI is transforming the education workforce, consider this: 60% of school districts in the U.S. were expected to have trained teachers about the use of AI in the classroom by the end of the 2023-2024 school year, according to a report from RAND.
It comes after teachers had no choice but to learn about AI after November of 2022 when ChatGPT hit the scene, becoming widely popular with students, raising questions and fears about AI’s use.
Roughly one year after that, by the fall of last year, 18% of K-12 teachers reporting using AI to help preparing their lesson plans and 15% saying they’ve tried AI at least once, according to the RAND research.
Among the findings:
- Middle and high school English and social studies teachers were more likely to be AI users.
- Most teachers using AI were using virtual learning platforms, adaptive learning systems, and chatbots.
- The most common ways teachers used AI tools were to adapt lessons to fit student learning levels and generate materials.
“It’s not actually too surprising in the sense that educators are innovators,” says Isabell Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, who spoke with me at SXSW EDU in March. “They want to do the best for their learners, for their classrooms, but definitely the data show that education is one of the power users of AI right now.”
The Stanford Accelerator for Learning describes its work as a “hub for researchers, educators, entrepreneurs and others to collaborate on learning solutions.” One area it’s working on: solutions to address concerns about AI and education.
“The concerns range from safety, of course, privacy, lots of privacy questions that are raised by AI, lots of ethical questions and then equity questions,” explains Hau.
She says the Stanford Accelerator for Learning is working on several initiatives to address those concerns and stresses the importance of partnerships between leaders in government, education and school districts to build frameworks for responsible AI use in classrooms. One example of her organization’s work, she says, is advising on a rating system for AI tools, applications, and language models.
Convincing teachers of the benefits of incorporating AI in the classroom, though, isn’t a slam dunk.
Twenty-five percent of teachers feel that AI tools in grades K-12 do more harm than good, 32% think there is an equal mix of benefit and harm, 6% think AI does more good than harm, and just over one-third (35%) aren’t sure, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Still, Hau notes that some of the initial fear around using AI in the classroom is easing and she sees potential around using it as a creative tool to help students, including those who are neurodiverse and multilingual learners.
“I call it actually the AI renaissance. To me, it’s very similar to what I imagine our ancestors lived through in the 14th to 16th century, where I see a lot of human ingenuity going on in a way that I had not seen happen in education for decades,” says Hau. She adds: “I see a lot of creativity right now happening at many levels.”
Using AI to Maximize Efficiency
Along with creativity, there is also an emphasis on using AI to maximize efficiency for teachers, known for being overworked and underpaid.
“We did a recent survey where we found most teachers actually work 50 to 60 hours, which is beyond and above what they’re expected to do,” says McKinsey & Company partner Saurabh Sanghvi, who also sat down with me at SXSW EDU.
“We mapped out where are they spending time? And you find that teachers are spending a lot of time on administrative tasks, on feedback, on grading, and things like that, and not that much time or not as much time as they would like to in one-on-one student interactions or supporting students that they know have a lot of needs,
Sanghvi points to research from McKinsey finding about 30% of activities across all occupations could be impacted by AI and generative AI.
Using teaching as an example, he points to how AI can be used to augment jobs rather than replacing them.
“The idea is how can you actually help a teacher save 30% of their time and redirect that to actually some of the things that they uniquely can do that we think that generative AI or other technologies are still far from doing, which is the compassion to be able to go and help a student. If we can do that, well, then you could either have teachers that are far less overworked and you can see an improvement in student outcomes,” explains Sanghvi.
You can read the entire McKinsey research report here.
Watch all the WorkingNation Overheard interviews from SXSW EDU 2024 here.
