I’m not American. I’m a Brit now living in New Zealand. I don’t have an American’s energy, optimism, or loyalty to market capitalism. This didn’t stop me in 2011, becoming one of the millions of educators who believed the iPad was the end of education as we knew it. The iPad meant nothing was ever going to be the same again. The iPad meant the end to so many of our problems. I even launched myself as @iPadWells.
I joined the wave of iPad experts, websites, and conferences. It took us all a few years, but by about 2017, the word iPad had started disappearing from our branding. I became @EduWells, and iPadpalooza became The Learn Fest.
‘The latest ed-tech bandwagon’ has been discussed many times. As AI becomes the new bandwagon, my questions here are:
1. What’s the need that draws educators to join another bandwagon quickly?
2. Does the AI bandwagon distract us from discussing what learning is?
3. Is it the nature of school that leads us to need new ‘entertaining’ distractions?
What’s the need that makes educators jump on bandwagons?
I may not be American, but unless you are Singaporean or Finnish, I’m betting you are not an educator automatically enrolled in a continuous, evidence based, strategic teacher training program. I’m sure you had a year or so of training at the beginning of your career, but since then, you’ve been trying this and that and getting ideas from here and there. You’ve been experimenting in your classroom; some things have seemed to go well, and some have not.
This unstrategic environment that we call education is why these bandwagons do so well. Instead of incrementally improving learning and the subsequent results by organizing experiments to be strategically and rigorously tested, we exist in a culture of “I guess we may as well try this.” Due to the lack of shared training experience, too many teachers are often scared to share practice. Still, they lack the teaching confidence or evidence to suggest that colleagues stop an unsuccessful practice. We don’t feel we have the authority to tread on others’ toes. AI seems to have become the latest tool to keep us from having the more challenging debates and ‘Open to Learning’ conversations about testing what we should and shouldn’t be doing.
Does the AI bandwagon distract us from discussing what learning is?
I can see a parallel between education’s habit of compartmentalizing the world into subjects and topics without an eye on how learners develop across those compartments and how teachers equally lurch from one classroom idea or tool to another. In developing our learners and education itself, we seem to lack understanding and habits relating to how learning happens. We are so busy moving forward that we lose interest in looking back to properly evaluate what we learned from the last experience. This leads students to start and stop isolated units of study without visible evidence of overall personal development and teachers to quickly adopt new EdTech tools like AI as a distraction from evaluating the last tool’s impact on growth.
I’m all for teachers experimenting, but an issue in education is that we never made testing the results of experiments a serious part of being an educator. Not having a culture that will check on the adoption of AI means that in most classrooms, its use and subsequent discussions will become mainly useful time killers for educators unaware of what they do that does or does not have a real impact.
Authentic learning is incremental and continuously reflective (possibly every minute). AI might assist with this, but the learning focus needs to remain on students seeing and feeling their development week after week. Too much emphasis on the mechanics of AI will distract us from that.
Does the nature of school lead us to need new ‘entertaining’ distractions like AI?
You only got a B minus, but don’t worry; we’ll do more creative writing next semester.”
The fragmentation created by school structures is detrimental to learning and development. Dylan Wiliam highlights that teacher feedback about assessments often goes unread because it’s about what has been and not what is coming. Developing skills and knowledge is rarely planned carefully across units of study, so it becomes a cyclical process of topic completion and product output.
While we remain comfortable delivering these isolated work units, attempting to randomly make each unit more entertaining makes sense. This often drives us to implement things like AI as an enhancement of a finite experience rather than a learning companion. Schools even allow AI for one unit and not for another. This cyclical input output culture frames AI more as an occasional production assistant or momentary entertainer rather than an ongoing learning companion.
Many people reading this will feel they need more support to change the nature of the school. Still, I urge you to focus primarily on how AI might assist you in developing the sort of students and class culture where they see and feel their development. This class culture should be the aim of more than planning how AI will help produce the next output or distract us for another hour. But whatever you do, collect data to test whether it helped.
About the author
After 20 years of teaching and leading schools, Richard is fascinated by education’s lack of progress in matching the changing world. After teaching in the UK, Richard moved to New Zealand in 2006 with his wife and two daughters. He has held teaching and leadership positions in both public and independent schools. He became noticed online around 2012 for his writing about implementing digital technologies, mainly because his school was the first in New Zealand to roll out Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Richard is the Author of “A Learner’s Paradise: How New Zealand is Reimagining Education,” a book deal resulting from his online writing and speaking in the U.S., Australia, and around New Zealand. He is now focused on how much education is exploring what works and what doesn’t and how much he can change teaching habits to show more detailed concern about their impact on learners.
