A study tour of two innovative schools in New England has led me to rethink my understanding of how AI will reshape the role of the teacher in the modern classroom.
On this tour, I was fortunate to join a team of 30 principals from the Beijing area, who are participating in a three-year leadership development program. We visited the Met School, the flagship of Big Picture Learning, and the four-year-old New England Innovation Academy. These schools, one public, focused on career exploration and internships, the other, private, and focused on entrepreneurship and human-centered design, are as different as two schools could possibly be. That said, they both wrestle with the arrival of AI and what it means for the role of the teacher.
I asked Joe Battaglia, Director of Curriculum and Instruction at the Met School, how he and his staff were incorporating AI into their instructional programming. Battaglia said they are taking a multi-pronged approach that remains true to the school’s CTE focus.
“We’re having our students use their learning plan goals around CTE competencies and brainstorming some additional areas of learning for their Learning Through Internship requirement,” he said. “We’re having them put in some of their interview questions for mentors and getting help creating more that are in the same focus areas. We’re also using AI to help advisors brainstorm project areas specific to these internship sites and the job descriptions of the mentors and the needs of the particular place aligned with the learning goal areas that students need to investigate.”
Greg Mertz is the Director of Innovation at the New England Innovation Academy. It is not an overstatement to say that he is at the leading edge of instructional innovation. He acknowledged that NEIA is in the same position as everyone else – AI is so new to the educational space that we seem to be stumbling around trying to find a clear path forward.
“We are working on an organizational lens towards AI,” Mertz explained. “We realize we are very much in an early adopter mode. This is still such a squishy, unknown space. The gap between a new practitioner and an expert is so narrow. I can turn off my computer on Friday and come back to the office on Monday to find an entirely different menu of technology options that I have to learn.”
Mertz provided as well a description of the role he thinks administrators responsible for teacher professional development and the introduction of new technology should adopt. “For people who work in roles like mine we are used to taking complex ideas or tools and reducing their complexity so that teachers can consume them and use them,” Mertz said. “To do that we have to stop thinking of AI in broad terms. We have to view it as a set of discrete tools that should be used in specific cases to solve specific problems.”
Conversations with other teachers, students, and administrators at the schools made me realize that I have been wrestling with this issue, too. In prior blogs, I have explored how AI is reshaping curriculum standards, textbooks, 21st-century skills, as well our understanding of what it means to be creative or employ critical thinking to solve vexing problems. Unwisely, I’ve ignored the fundamental issue of the role of the teacher.
After many conversations, endless reading, classroom observation both here and in China, and long chats with my silicon thought partner (ChatGPT o1) I’ve come to the conclusion that the flipped classroom serves as an effective launching point to rethink the role of the teacher.
The Origin of the Flipped Classroom
A short definition: The flipped classroom style of teaching involves students learning new content at home, often through videos or readings, and then using classroom time for interactive activities, discussions, and problem-solving with the teacher’s guidance.
As a reminder, It emerged in 1984 from the former Soviet Union via the work of Militsa Nechkina, a member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. A decade later Alison King published “From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side,” setting in motion the U.S. adoption of this process. It was really the work of two Woodland (CO) Park High School chemistry teachers, Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams, who launched the popularity of the flipped classroom in 2007 when they began to upload and post their lectures for students who missed/skipped class.
With the arrival of AI-powered textbooks and extraordinary AI-powered tutors such as Khammingo and Microsoft Reading Coach perhaps it is time to revisit the idea that a classroom teacher should no longer be the first responder for knowledge delivery.
My first call was to Dan Jones, author of Modern PBL. Jones, who teaches seventh- and eighth-grade social studies at the Richland School of Academic Arts in Mansfield, OH, shared his thoughts and then suggested I read his other book, Flipped 3.0 Project Based Learning: An Insanely Simple Guide. This conversation confirmed I was heading in the right direction so I made a second call to Bergman, now a science teacher at Houston Christian High School, to pitch this idea.
“Our book on flipped classroom and mastery learning was written before the arrival of AI,” he said when we chatted, “but it can serve as a model for how AI will impact the role of the teacher. If you are a professorial-style teacher then you will be out of a job. If you are a facilitator it will enhance your practice. In my room, kids are working on different things all day long. Teachers who view themselves as the ringleader of a circus will get a boost from AI.”
Bergman made an interesting connection between AI and the graduate assistants and student teachers who work in his classroom. “I’ve always been grateful to have extra bodies to help me in my classroom,” he said. “I’m starting to think of AI, particularly when it is used as a tutor or instructor, as another extra body in the room that I have to manage.”
Familiarity is important to this model. Research that focuses on the flipped classroom shows that students tend to have better outcomes when the videos they consume for instruction feature a teacher they have a personal relationship with. This is a refrain familiar to me: When I was completing my teaching internship 30 years ago I was advised to mimic the style of my mentor teacher.
I want to extend this idea to a concept called the Persona Pattern in prompt engineering. As we bring in the “extra body” of AI helpers we should use this feature of prompt engineering, when possible, to make the AIs adopt the style and tone of a student’s regular classroom teacher. For me, the snark dial would be turned to 11.
Other Models for the Role of the Teacher
My suggestion to flip the role of the teacher with AI doing the work formerly relegated to pre-recorded video is not the only idea floating around.
I was asked by my Chinese colleagues during a break in the study tour to give a lecture about the top innovations being developed by American educators. Among those I cited is a fascinating effort by the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University to reimagine the role of a teacher. In simplest terms, think of the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child.” The Next Education Workforce (NEW) can be thought of as operating under the premise that “it takes a village to teach a child.” In the context of an AI-powered world, that village of educators must be expanded to include AI teaching and support systems.
The core elements of the NEW model are structured into three buckets of responsibility: Team-level, school-level, and system-level elements.
The features of the team-level elements that are most amenable to enhancement via AI include differentiated roles and responsibilities, personalized learning, and dynamic scheduling. For a deeper understanding of the Next Education Workforce model, you can review an earlier piece published in Getting Smart.
Other thought leaders have focused on this topic. In a blog for Medium, Rohan Roberts suggests teachers will now focus on “teaching students self-awareness, empathy, and resilience, preparing them for the emotional complexities of modern life;” Dr. Katie Martin recommends that teachers should mediate student interactions with the professional world, becoming facilitators of the connections students need to complete real-world tasks; Amy Walter and Jaclyn B. Stevens, in a post for North Carolina State University, suggest that teachers should continue to impart knowledge but now must also serve as role models, mentors and advocates for their students’ success; and finally, Catherine Felix writes that teachers’ role may shift toward that of overseers who design and select machine-led instruction.
What Does My AI Thought Partner Say?
ChatGPT o1 did not disappoint when I offered the following prompt: “I need your help. Like many educators, I am trying to rethink what the role of the teacher will evolve into in a K-12 classroom in which students have access to AI-powered tutors and AI-powered digital textbooks. What are your thoughts?”
It offered me a list of six ideas (take this link to read the full response):
- Learning Architect
- Skill Development Coach
- Ethics and Digital Literacy Guide
- Mentor and Motivator
- Community and Culture Builder
- Real-World Connector
All of these suggestions are worth thinking and writing about, but to me, the most intriguing is No. 3: Ethics and Digital Literacy Guide. Apparently, the Washington State Board of Education agrees. The Board recently announced the launch of a multi-year initiative to update high school graduation requirements because of a widespread concern “among students, educators, and employers that current graduation requirements don’t prepare students with skills needed in a modern world, such as technology literacy, financial education, and cultural understanding.” Much of that skill-building would involve a parallel process of skill-building for teachers. Surely, in a world dominated by disinformation, a solid grounding in ethics and digital literacy would benefit both students and teachers.
The new models of AI are not positioned or programmed to offer ethical advice to humans. They can never look a student in the eye and say, “When I was 13 …” The impending arrival of artificial general intelligence won’t change that simple fact either. You don’t need to be a human to teach, but you need to be a human to teach with empathy, compassion, and understanding. There may shortly be a sensor-equipped AI that will say, “I know what you are feeling” but there is no AI that will ever say “I know how you feel.”
So how about this? Let’s welcome AI into our classrooms, relieving us of clerical drudgery and assisting with the overwhelming task of differentiating instruction and support. We’ll take care of the human stuff because, well, we’re human.
Perhaps a good way of doing that from a policy standpoint is to reimagine how AI in the classroom will shape next-generation teacher credentialing programs. For example, Relay Graduate School of Education is testing AI-powered classroom simulators that are realistic and responsive. Better yet, I can imagine a revision of such documents as the California Standards for the Teaching Profession to incorporate more of a focus on how educators should define their role with the understanding that AI will be their co-teacher. I envision a reciprocal triad: teacher-student-AI.
This initiative, however, is off to a slow roll. A recent report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education includes responses from the leaders of more than 500 schools of education. A summary of the data shows that only one in four of these programs incorporates training on the use of AI in innovative teaching methodologies.
I think back to the beginning of the Obama administration when the President appointed Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff. Emanuel famously told Obama, “Never allow a good crisis to go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.” The arrival of AI is such a crisis – and opportunity – to reimagine the role of the teacher.
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