Seven Reasons Why Schools are Not Ready for AI

We are all reading the excitable rhetoric on how AI is going to change the world, and many of us are having lots of fun getting 'the AI' to write our reports, lesson plans, and strategy documents.

But if we wish to make adoption institutional, fully integrating AI in a meaningful way into schools, there are seven barriers that need to be overcome.

The below are based on my experience of leading ed tech implementation over the last 15 or so years. They are now even more relevant today, as the urgency of change is greater.

At this point I offer this only as a way to generate debate as I certainly don't have all the answers. However, the more we discuss, the more we will work them out together.

#1: Teachers who don’t want to rock the boat

Teachers are by nature creatures of habit. Of course we are: it’s such a tough job, with so many variables, that once we have a system that (sort of) works for us we aren’t keen to change. This is because our systems are hard-won: after a few years we know both our strengths and limitations and work within them. The irony is that the longer we perpetuate this way of working, the more likely we are to lose our classes.?

Recently, I took on a few English classes at a school I’m currently more directly supporting. I’ve not taught for a few years, having moved into Headship and then group management. I was surprised at the reduced attention span of the students I was teaching. It was as if they couldn’t focus for more than a few minutes. Activities that would have worked well even ten years ago were no longer effective and I found myself back as a trainee, trying to figure out how to move on. Perhaps it was me and I’ve lost the art, which is a possibility, but I am more and more hearing of teachers who are scratching their heads, working out what on earth to do with their increasingly challenging classes.?

My belief is this will only get worse. We will only see students becoming increasingly distracted and distractible, as they realise that they can get everything they need, and more, through AI. When the adult in the room is no longer the sole guardian of either the knowledge or means of dissemination, students may well begin voting with their feet and opting out of listening to us. At best, this means rooms full of empty eyes. At worst it will be full scale anarchy.?

In other words, if we don’t rock the boat, it will be well and truly rocked for us by the tsunami of student disaffection that is fast approaching.?

#2: The fear of chaotic classrooms

Nobody likes chaos. It’s human nature to crave some sort of peace and order, and there is nothing more depressing and stressful for a teacher than having a class who cannot be settled and who are on the edge of being (or are fully) out of control. It’s basic Maszlow’s hierarchy: learning cannot happen if the basic human needs of safety and security aren’t met.?

As mentioned in number 1, once a teacher has things the way they like them, they are unlikely to want to change. Even bringing in group work against sitting silently in rows can be a challenge for some. Now, there is a place for sitting in silence: thinking time is vital for all of us, and it is hard to think when you are surrounded by noise. But the world does not move on if we all sit quietly facing forward and never interact with those around us. There has to be a place for debate, discussion, and ideas sharing.?

However, the irony is that by moving into more of a real world, project-based, inquiry-led pedagogy, many behavioural issues vanish. Children generally misbehave en masse for three reasons: either they are bored because the subject matter is irrelevant and/or the teacher is boring; because they don’t understand because the level is pitched too high; or because it is too easy for them and they feel patronised. For most teachers, particularly if you also have exams to get through and Ofsted to keep happy, it follows that it’s best not to try anything new and risk losing the class for the same of some experiment the young, keen Deputy Head wants to force on you (that was me, by the way).

#3: Teachers trained in the old paradigm?

It is hard to break the mould when there is no obvious alternative. Teachers have been trained in broadly the same way since education as we know it has been in existence. Of course, it has become more advanced, more sophisticated and offers trainees a broader pedagogical palette on which to draw, but in general new teachers are entering the workforce with the same narrow, subject-based and siloed approach to being ‘the English teacher’ or ‘the early years teacher’.?

This does need to change. In an age of AI, when not only the information is easy to get hold of but also the means by which it is disseminated can be tailored to the individual, teacher training colleges will have to offer a different approach. Teachers need to soon be entering the workforce who know how to leverage AI in the most effective way, whether this be through their own planning and administration, or through teaching students how to best use it. We need to move from the ‘one hour of English followed by one hour of Maths’ towards multidisciplinary, inquiry-based learning with teachers as coaches and facilitators. The term ‘guide on the side’ became rather hackneyed in the last decade, but perhaps now we will see it come to fruition. Teachers will increasingly see themselves as one more ‘node’ in an increasingly broad web of learning modalities, and will need to be trained in order to understand that from the start.?

#4: Parental suspiciousness of anything that smacks of using their children as guinea pigs

Back in 2011 I was given the task introducing iPads into the sixth form of the school in which I was the (young, keen) Deputy Head. This was in the early days of school-wide mobile device implementation and no one really knew what they were doing (me included). The initial letter sent back to parents was met with a good deal of negativity, with many parents believing that their children spent enough time on devices and didn’t need any more. We ran workshops and offered one to one meetings and eventually won most of the parents over. But it was a battle.?

It will no doubt be the same when we start bringing AI into the classroom. Generally, parents don’t like to think of their children being the ones to try things for the first time. They generally prefer us to stick to what worked for them. Not always, but the majority.

You will need to consider an implementation plan, to ease your school or college into a more AI-friendly way of working and learning. For now, it is simply worth noting that you mustn’t overlook parents, as they are the ones who either pay the fees or often pay over the odds for their mortgage or rent to live in an area with a good school.

#5: The endpoint of university entrance

We can in theory be as innovative as we like with younger students, but as soon as they hit the age of 14 or 15, we feel the pressure of terminal exams. As soon as we know that students have to sit in a stuffy hall in May, June or November, scratching their answers on a piece of paper, our approach fits this endpoint. We teach to the test, which necessitates a rote-like approach to ‘getting through the syllabus’.?

This trickles downwards, as we want to ensure that students have these skills as early as possible so the jump from the UK’s Key Stage 3 (from aged 11-14) to Key Stage 4 (14-16) isn’t too great. We therefore begin to test earlier and earlier, which was seen at its nadir in the obsession primary schools had with SATs. Thankfully much of that madness has passed, but we are still caught in a culture where we value the act of measurement itself rather than stopping and thinking about whether this constant testing is actually adding value to the child’s learning. We must all ask ourselves - who are we doing this for? When we can honestly answer that question, perhaps we can move on.?

Universities will need to adjust anyway, as if they don't they risk becoming irrelevant far faster than conventional schools. I can see a time in the not too distant future where businesses visit schools and students compete, Dragon's Den-style, for high profile apprenticeships where the employer can train the student far more effectively than the university. We will still need doctors, but for most other professions how much longer does the university have?

#6: A one size fits all (or none) inspection regime

In addition to the terminal exam and university entrance pressure, schools are faced with the added stress of inspection compliance. When, like a Premier League football manager, you’re largely measured on your last set of results, school leaders are going to play it safe and do nothing that might, even in the short term, impact on exam grades. In addition, many inspectors struggle to understand seemingly looser, more project-based pedagogies, preferring instead seeing students in rows facing forward. This is why Steiner schools often receive low Ofsted ratings: inspectors don’t understand them.

There’s a place for working in silence: not every moment of a school day should be filled with collaboration and noise. We all need time to think and to plan, before sharing our ideas with others. But if we allow the inspection tail to wag the school dog, it is hard for us to know how we can step out of this paradigm and into another. Schools will need to be brave and push ahead with what they know is best for their students, taking any criticism from the established order as they do so. This is the only way change can happen.?

#7: Boxes filled with boxes

The physical design of schools has not radically changed since formal education began. They're still boxes filled with boxes. We’ve experimented (and largely failed) with plaza learning, typified in the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme in the early years of the first Blair administration. Whilst laudable in its aims, it was too far ahead of its time, bringing in open plan spaces and expecting teachers who had never experienced this new way of working before. It failed because teachers weren’t prepared and had no idea how to use these shared spaces. They reverted to type, with the male geography teacher with the loud voice drowning out every other teacher in the space. Apologies for the stereotype but I have first hand experience of exactly that.?

The aim was laudable as it was based on what politicians and school architects had seen in schools like Hellerup and Orestadt Gymnasium in Denmark. These innovative, light and spacious schools seemed to herald an entirely new way of teaching and learning, creating mixed use spaces that allowed for students to engage in a mixture of self-paced learning and small group work guided by their teachers. However, for schools in the UK, nothing about their pedagogy had changed to fit these new buildings. Perhaps politicians and architects had believed that function would follow form, rather than the other way around: that teachers would naturally adapt their practice to fit the space. This didn’t happen, and many plaza learning schools were retrofitted with classrooms at great expense.?

That said, it feels like we are fast approaching the right time to revisit this approach. Perhaps not to the extreme of plaza learning, but certainly to reassess how we design schools to fit new learning modalities. If students can access the information they need, curated in the way that best suits their level and learning style, then the ‘one to many’ model - with one teacher instructing many students at one time - is no longer fit for purpose. And if that is the case, then the idea of the conventional classroom ceases to make sense.?

Classrooms are the classic example of form following function: their size and shape (rectangles of between 40m2 and 60m2 that fit between 20 to 30 students) are ideally suited to the one teacher delivery model. However, if we no longer need that model, we no longer need that shape of room. We are better off designing schools with a mixture of learning spaces that suit different types of teacher- and tech-supported learning: larger open plan learning centres, group rooms for teacher led mentorship, cubbyholes for silent solo work, and soundproof pods for pair and small group work. Outdoor learning should also factor large in how we design these spaces: in most parts of the world having a mixture of fully open and covered spaces will allow for an extension to indoors space and give students flexibility for where they wish to learn.?

We are closer to this change than many of us realise so it is contingent on all of us to ensure we think carefully about the current blockers to progress and consider how we can strategically overcome them. School leaders the world over have to put this at the top of their agenda, for to ignore this is to fast risk becoming out of pace with the way in which students are now moving.