I think the deskilling of teachers is an interesting concept. I start teaching before there was an accepted view of how planning should look. The arrival of Ofsted did change that I think but I'd suggest that laptops and printers changed it more . When I was a head I certainly never wanted to read everyone's planning. I had better things to spend my time on like being in classrooms, talking to kids and looking at outcomes. Student teachers and recently qualified teachers seemed to really go to town. Colour coding, highlighting etc. You'd never do all that if you had to write it out by hand. When I was a local authority adviser I did watch an awful lot of lessons. I rarely examined the lesson plan in detail unless something wasn't going well. I saw a lot of overplanning and that's definitely a waste of teacher time. In the film Happy Go Lucky, there's a scene where two of the characters who are primary teachers are seen spending Saturday morning making masks from paper bags and loads of scrap material. Later in the film you see the kids doing the activity in class. And having fun doing it. It's a great example of the difference between planning and preparation. The best teachers are engaged in preparation 24/7. I think so anyway. They are sparked of by things they see, read, hear. They get an idea and squirrel it away until it's useful. I don't believe AI can do that for you.
There’s a lot of talk about how teachers should stop "reinventing the wheel" and just use ready-made resources. But that misses the point of what teaching is.
For my family, this craft is in the blood. Back in the late 60s, I remember my mum spending her evenings and weekends "sticky-back" coating spelling flashcards. By the mid-80s through to the 2000s, I was doing the same, only my weekends were full of "Banda" carbon copies and later drawing onto acetates for the OHP.
When I moved on to designing PowerPoint, Flash animations and videos for my Chemistry students, it wasn't just about making things look "pretty." It was pedagogy in action. I was building visualisations to bringing the abstract to life because I knew where misconceptions lay (from assessing their work).
Generative AI simply isn't there yet; in a subject like Chemistry, it often dreams up visualisations that are plain wrong. A teacher-made/ adaptedresource ensures accuracy and fits the sequence of your teaching.
The freedom to being creative is what makes teaching pleasurable. Year by year that freedom has been removed only to be replaced by conformity, usually by those who have never spent time at the chalk face.
It’s the same story when it comes to marking. Don’t get me wrong, Comparative Judgement is a fantastic tool for dealing with massive cohorts or big summative exams. But it shouldn't be the only way we look at a pupil’s work.
A teacher needs to read what a student has written. That "genuine" feedback loop is where we spot the tiny sparks of understanding or the specific hurdles a child is facing. If we hand all that over to an algorithm, we lose the ability to really "see" our students. Teachers need to keep those diagnostic skills sharp, or we’re just data entry clerks
Ultimately, the goal should be to reduce the soul-crushing administrative tasks that have nothing to do with learning, the endless data inputting, emailing, fighting with the photocopier ....
Teachers constantly find themselves in a position where they are constantly having to defend their professional practice. We shouldn’t have to justify why we want to create our own materials. Designing lessons and understanding student work is the job. We need the time and the trust to be the experts we are.
Thurday afternoon. In five minutes I ran 28 handwritten scripts - pencil text in four boxes on one page - through the scanner creating a single Pdf. Then I spent two (interesting) hours discussing the assessment criteria with Claude and how to give feedback to the students. Traditionally, it would have taken two-three boring hours just to assess and give perfunctory feedback to 28 students, good 5/6 etc. In contrast, I was able to upload a Pdf copy of their work and personal, targetted feedback on their OneNotes, within hours of them completing the work. Interestingly, I have been working with AI and this class for 18 months now. When I was calibrating the levels with Claude (he/she/it) pointed out that one of the students had improved significantly over the last two assignments. I hadn't noticed. I hadn't asked Claude for the info, but Claude knew that I would welcome the news.
Your work is very important in making teachers productive and student learn through feedback. I have been following you for a while and I'm learning a lot. As a lecturer, Essay test or Exam Assessment (Traditional paper and pen) has been a pain in the neck of lecturers especially in a school with a very large population. An AI assessment brings a great relieve for both the lecturers and the students (They don't have to wait long for results). This led me to build an essay test assessment system where the teacher can set exam and the student would write the exam and get instant results and personalized feedback. It has been helpful and I'm currently running a research on its usability and user experience. The name of the website is EASIL. Link: easil (dot) cereustechnologies (dot) com.
“If a teacher never read another student essay again I would be very concerned.” You are actively contributing to this becoming a reality by incorporating AI into teacher assessment.
I think the deskilling of teachers is an interesting concept. I start teaching before there was an accepted view of how planning should look. The arrival of Ofsted did change that I think but I'd suggest that laptops and printers changed it more . When I was a head I certainly never wanted to read everyone's planning. I had better things to spend my time on like being in classrooms, talking to kids and looking at outcomes. Student teachers and recently qualified teachers seemed to really go to town. Colour coding, highlighting etc. You'd never do all that if you had to write it out by hand. When I was a local authority adviser I did watch an awful lot of lessons. I rarely examined the lesson plan in detail unless something wasn't going well. I saw a lot of overplanning and that's definitely a waste of teacher time. In the film Happy Go Lucky, there's a scene where two of the characters who are primary teachers are seen spending Saturday morning making masks from paper bags and loads of scrap material. Later in the film you see the kids doing the activity in class. And having fun doing it. It's a great example of the difference between planning and preparation. The best teachers are engaged in preparation 24/7. I think so anyway. They are sparked of by things they see, read, hear. They get an idea and squirrel it away until it's useful. I don't believe AI can do that for you.
There’s a lot of talk about how teachers should stop "reinventing the wheel" and just use ready-made resources. But that misses the point of what teaching is.
For my family, this craft is in the blood. Back in the late 60s, I remember my mum spending her evenings and weekends "sticky-back" coating spelling flashcards. By the mid-80s through to the 2000s, I was doing the same, only my weekends were full of "Banda" carbon copies and later drawing onto acetates for the OHP.
When I moved on to designing PowerPoint, Flash animations and videos for my Chemistry students, it wasn't just about making things look "pretty." It was pedagogy in action. I was building visualisations to bringing the abstract to life because I knew where misconceptions lay (from assessing their work).
Generative AI simply isn't there yet; in a subject like Chemistry, it often dreams up visualisations that are plain wrong. A teacher-made/ adaptedresource ensures accuracy and fits the sequence of your teaching.
The freedom to being creative is what makes teaching pleasurable. Year by year that freedom has been removed only to be replaced by conformity, usually by those who have never spent time at the chalk face.
It’s the same story when it comes to marking. Don’t get me wrong, Comparative Judgement is a fantastic tool for dealing with massive cohorts or big summative exams. But it shouldn't be the only way we look at a pupil’s work.
A teacher needs to read what a student has written. That "genuine" feedback loop is where we spot the tiny sparks of understanding or the specific hurdles a child is facing. If we hand all that over to an algorithm, we lose the ability to really "see" our students. Teachers need to keep those diagnostic skills sharp, or we’re just data entry clerks
Ultimately, the goal should be to reduce the soul-crushing administrative tasks that have nothing to do with learning, the endless data inputting, emailing, fighting with the photocopier ....
Teachers constantly find themselves in a position where they are constantly having to defend their professional practice. We shouldn’t have to justify why we want to create our own materials. Designing lessons and understanding student work is the job. We need the time and the trust to be the experts we are.
Thurday afternoon. In five minutes I ran 28 handwritten scripts - pencil text in four boxes on one page - through the scanner creating a single Pdf. Then I spent two (interesting) hours discussing the assessment criteria with Claude and how to give feedback to the students. Traditionally, it would have taken two-three boring hours just to assess and give perfunctory feedback to 28 students, good 5/6 etc. In contrast, I was able to upload a Pdf copy of their work and personal, targetted feedback on their OneNotes, within hours of them completing the work. Interestingly, I have been working with AI and this class for 18 months now. When I was calibrating the levels with Claude (he/she/it) pointed out that one of the students had improved significantly over the last two assignments. I hadn't noticed. I hadn't asked Claude for the info, but Claude knew that I would welcome the news.
Your work is very important in making teachers productive and student learn through feedback. I have been following you for a while and I'm learning a lot. As a lecturer, Essay test or Exam Assessment (Traditional paper and pen) has been a pain in the neck of lecturers especially in a school with a very large population. An AI assessment brings a great relieve for both the lecturers and the students (They don't have to wait long for results). This led me to build an essay test assessment system where the teacher can set exam and the student would write the exam and get instant results and personalized feedback. It has been helpful and I'm currently running a research on its usability and user experience. The name of the website is EASIL. Link: easil (dot) cereustechnologies (dot) com.
Insightful and pragmatic. Let's hope that the best of AI is retained, and the worst of its influence is tamed, or better still, eliminated.
AI complements teacher input; it doesn’t replace it. It just requires common sense on the part of the user!
“If a teacher never read another student essay again I would be very concerned.” You are actively contributing to this becoming a reality by incorporating AI into teacher assessment.
Definitely not! https://help.nomoremarking.com/en/article/how-long-does-it-take-to-assess-one-classs-essays-using-comparative-judgement-lrxp0m/