How teachers can use AI to leverage the classroom experience of their colleages

Source Domain: edsource.org

The current wave of artificial intelligence in education is focused on one idea: AI that helps students — AI tutors; AI homework helpers; AI systems that explain concepts or generate practice questions.

Those tools can be useful. But they miss where the most important decisions in education actually happen.

The most important decision in a classroom is not what a student asks an AI system. It is what a teacher decides to do next.

Every day, teachers make hundreds of small judgment calls. Should I re-teach this concept or move on? Are my students tuning out because the work is too hard, or because they don’t see the point? Which of the dozen things I could try tomorrow is most likely to actually work?

Most of the time, teachers answer those questions the same way they always have: by drawing on their own experiences, instincts and whatever advice a colleague or coach can offer. That is not nothing, but it does mean every teacher is largely starting from scratch, learning lessons that other teachers in other classrooms have already gone through.

What if that didn’t have to be true?

The most important decision in a classroom is not what a student asks an AI system. It is what a teacher decides to do next.

At Navigator Schools, a network of public charter schools serving more than 1,800 students across California, we have been testing a different use of artificial intelligence. Instead of focusing on AI that delivers content to students, we are leveraging this technology to help us examine those hundreds of seemingly small decisions teachers must make every day.

Over years of instructional coaching, our schools have built up a large archive: thousands of classroom observations, the specific action steps teachers tried in response, and records of what happened to student performance afterward. We started asking whether AI could find patterns in that history and use them to help teachers make better decisions faster.

Consider what that looked like for…

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