Nurturing a thriving teaching profession in an AI-enhanced world

The following is a transcript of a speech I delivered at the OECD Education Policy Reform Dialogues 2024 (25-26 November 2024)

I recently met Jayatheeswaran Vijayakumar, a chemistry and robotics teacher in Kawakawa, Te Tai Tokerau, a rural community with a predominantly Māori student population in the far north of New Zealand. Initially trained as a medical doctor, Jay, as he’s often called, chose to teach through Ako Mātātupu, the Teach For All network partner in New Zealand, because he decided his impact would be greater if he developed many future doctors rather than serving as one himself. Jay sees his purpose as enabling learners to discover their innate skills and leverage them to drive social change. This perspective informs his approach to teaching and leads him to listen for his students’ interests and foster their agency.?

In one of his Grade 11 classes on climate change, Jay faced the common challenge of getting his students interested in the topic and instilling the idea that they can be the people to do something about it. When a student brought up a local problem—the spread of an invasive seaweed called Caulerpa in the waters around New Zealand—Jay seized the opportunity to turn this curiosity into a meaningful learning experience.?

Together with his students, he engaged other teachers, local scientists and community leaders to understand the problem and develop solutions. Alistair Leitch, the Social Studies teacher, guided students in understanding the significance of the seaweed to the marine ecosystem. Rob Heaps, the Materials Technology teacher, a climate change advocate and a scuba diving instructor, led efforts in providing hands-on support for underwater exploration, helping students grasp the ecological challenges posed by the invasive species. The students used drones to map the seaweed’s spread and worked to extract it, gaining a sense of agency, problem-solving skills, and a deeper connection to their environment.?

Meeting educators like Jay, and others across the Teach For All network, has helped me understand what it will take to evolve education and teaching for today’s world—so that we’re equipping students to solve the most challenging problems and build a better future.

There is much focus on the critical importance of technology and AI as we consider the question of the future of education. And indeed, when I spoke with Jay, he was quick to highlight their role as tools for inspiring meaningful learning, deeper thinking from students, and personalized learning among students. AI, he told me, requires his students to sharpen their understanding in order to improve their ability to prompt effectively. For Jay himself, AI saves time by generating lesson plans and feedback reports, which he customizes for his students. His use of AI has inspired other teachers in his school to adopt similar practices. Beyond this, Jay has created a website to ensure all his students—many of whom face significant barriers to attendance, such as long commutes and the need to balance work with school—can access all class materials remotely. He even leveraged AI to code a test prep app tailored to his students’ needs.

Jay’s example illustrates the potential of AI and technology but it also reveals that these tools are no shortcut for attracting exceptional leaders to the teaching profession, cultivating their orientation towards? preparing students to shape a better future, and developing them to recognize themselves, their students, and their communities as sources of power and agency.

A decade ago, we came together across the Teach For All network around a new vision for transforming education. We came to understand that realizing our global aspirations for peace, justice, and sustainability will require equipping students with the agency, awareness, connectedness, mastery, and wellbeing to navigate and lead in a complex world. To deepen our understanding of what this takes, we launched the Global Learning Lab to study classrooms where students are thriving in these ways. What emerged was a framework we now call Teaching As Collective Leadership—a way of teaching that fosters the leadership of everyone in the classroom from the students to the teachers themselves. ?

In classrooms like Jay’s, we’ve observed that teachers who are focused on fostering their students’ ability to shape a better future develop them holistically,?with the agency, awareness, and mastery to address real-world challenges. They create environments rooted in trust and collaboration, co-creating visions for learning alongside their students and engaging them in meaningful, hands-on learning and problem-solving. Jay’s “family-like” classroom, where strong relationships and shared goals form the foundation for deep learning, exemplifies this approach.?

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve observed that teachers like Jay have a different way of seeing themselves and their students than most of us grew up experiencing in school. As Jay demonstrated through his approach to the Caulerpa unit, he sees himself as a learner alongside his students, he sees his students as having the potential to lead today, and he recognizes the assets within the marginalized communities in which he teaches.?He also teaches with a deep understanding of the systemic barriers his students face, such as the roots of his students’ attendance challenges, and leverages technology to create solutions that work for them. Perhaps the most important thing we’ve learned through our work to transform teaching to equip students for today’s world is that first and foremost, we must support the adults in the system to unlearn how we were taught and embrace a different purpose and different ways of seeing ourselves, our students, communities, and the challenges we encounter.?

As we consider the future of teaching, we must first start by re-orienting historical conceptions of education and embracing the purpose of developing students who can shape a better future.?In doing so, we position educators as playing the greatest role in shaping the future. This shift is essential to attracting creative and committed leaders to the profession. Second, we must rethink teacher development, starting with fostering new mindsets and orientations. Most teacher development systems start by identifying and fostering teacher actions, but this falls short without first helping teachers un-learn how they were taught and reimagining their roles and relationships with students and communities. Third, we need to embrace technology as a powerful enabler of holistic student development. AI can deepen student engagement, personalize learning, and save teachers immense amounts of time. Finally, maximizing the potential of technology in education requires investing in teachers’ comfort with experimentation and innovation. Equity-focused teachers oriented towards students’ holistic development must drive the technology revolution in education if it is to fulfill its transformative potential.

As we consider what it will take to nurture a thriving teaching profession in an AI-enhanced world, we must center ourselves on the role of schools in shaping a better future, recommit to attracting the most exceptional leaders into teaching, support them to unlearn how they were taught, and empower them to experiment with technology. Imagine the possibilities for our world if we can work together to achieve this.