AI and the teacher replacement issue

Quite a few people have been commenting and suggested ideas around the reality that teachers could be in some way, ‘replaced’ by AI. Some people sit on the camp of believing, steadfastly, that teachers can never be replaced by AI, insisting that the sort of things that teachers bring to a classroom can never be automated. There is the view certain aspects of teaching should not be automated and never can be. The reality that in a school environment, teachers being present is vitally important according to some people. Alternatively, there are some people who talk about all the aspects of teaching being automated or replaced. For the majority, though, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I suppose the question, is where in the middle, how far towards the automate does a person stand in their beliefs.

I have thought for a long time that a great deal of what a teacher does, can be automated, and in the AC (afterchatGPT) era, be replaced by AI. And that's only looking at it with the current lens of what AI can do or what AI promises to do in the near future. When we try and look more longer term, there are, perhaps, more questions to ask as regards what can be replaced and what can't or shouldn’t be replaced.

I began to think about this in greater detail and with more depth after a recent class I taught where, with some quite challenging students, i.e various social and emotional needs, various learning needs but also an interesting makeup as a group in terms of some students who are engaged but others not so. After over 20 years in various systems, I can judge this as a fairly average type of class with a handful of students with some challenging behaviours but nothing that's really above and beyond what a typical teacher would expect.

So, with that context, I found myself in a conversation during the last 20 minutes of a double period, with just one or two students.  Quickly, though, this became a group of four or five students. I'm not sure how or why the number swelled as they did but I quite liked that it, and it’s the sort of thing I have experienced many times in my life: an organic discussion unrelated to the content of the lesson.

I think the conversation started after I joked to one particular about vaping. He assure me that he doesn’t and then it went from there. We talked about drugs and about street crime. They told me stories about their lives, their near misses with individuals while out in the city. They asked me about my life experience in working in challenging schools and in challenging jobs and I was sharing some insight into some of the things I had experienced in life and some of the roles I'd had, the sort of things I'd seen. The conversation just bounced around from topic to topic, all individuals were candid, open and clearly expressing themselves as they chose often focusing on what happens to a lot of young people as they're growing up and a lot happens to a number of people in their lives

I gave my viewpoints on things, eg letting them know that the biggest threat they faced to their safety at this stage in their lives was motor vehicle accidents but most of the time I was really about them sharing and listening to each other as much as it was about listening to me.

All this got me thinking that if we move forward into an AI dominated education system, a system where teachers are largely or totally replaced, have we lost ‘this sort of scenario’, this kind of engagement. What exactly am I talking about losing here, though? Is it:

·         The chance not to be judged?

·         The chance to share life experience that I gave them and they gave me?

·         The chance to speak in a shared space?

·         The chance to bounce off of them and read into the nuances of when to do that and when not to, and for how long?

·         The chance for young people to speak honestly and openly to an adult who will not listen, not judge?

·         The chance to be led into a conversation, to be given confidence to grown into the conversation, to share which happened in such an instance which is needed by some young people to open up?

I’m not sure. Yet, this has got me thinking about a teacher/student experience can and should be so much more than just:

·         This is a curriculum we have to cover

·         These are a set of skills I want you to learn

·         This is the knowledge I want to acquire/develop

One of the beauties of teaching for me, is that I can bring my lived experience of the fact that I was young once, I have lived a life, I have had a number of careers, I have been a youth worker, a social worker, I network locally, nationally and internationally, I constantly learn and share widely, I have travelled the world, lived in 4 different countries, I have my own kids (I share their experiences and trying to parent them).

So, if we replace all this with AI, can we ever replicate these experiences, the sharing, the human relationships/communication I have described here? Will AI ever be able to engage in this way to allow young people who need these avenues to be there for them to learn these aspects of life? (Some young people will undoubtedly prefer to talk to a chatbot in similar circumstances).

Thus, the question is about what we stand to lose or diminished by replacing the teacher in the classroom, not in terms of what teaching is perceived to be by many, but what it actually is, a lot of the time, or at least should be.

I would just like to close by sharing that at the end of the conversation I described above, the students turned round and said, just before he left, “good chat”. That phrase, which I don’t recall ever hearing so widely used before coming to Australia, says so much to me. It tells me that the conversation was worthwhile to those young people and that, quite frankly, is enough for me.