Recently, I was invited to be part of a five member panel at Google to discuss the impact that AI will have on teaching and learning in schools. My fellow panelists were drawn from the technology sector. As a historian of schooling and veteran high school teacher, I was expected to offer a brief perspective about previous technological innovations that had entered classrooms. Here is what I said to the 200 participants:

Over the past century, every technology introduced to improve teaching and learning has been hyped as “revolutionary” and ”transformational.”

Consider this list:

*Radios in classrooms

*16mm movies

*Overhead Projectors

*Instructional television

*video-casettes

*1:1 laptops

*Interactive Whiteboards

That inflated vocabulary of previous classroom technologies triggering sweeping changes in teaching and learning continues in 2024.

In speaking of AI recently, the Dean of the Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, said:

“[This Technology] is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching.”

Yet there is little evidence that classroom use of these previous technologies forced classroom teachers to rethink, much less reshape, their instruction. Nor have I found convincing evidence that these technologies altered fundamentally how teachers teach, increased student engagement, or raised test scores.

So I have concluded that those pushing AI use in classrooms fail to understand the complexity of teaching.*

Why do I say that?

Promoters of AI have attended public and private schools for nearly two decades and sat at desks a few feet away from their teachers. Such familiarity encouraged AI advocates to think that they knew thoroughly what teaching was like and how it was done. That familiarity trapped promoters of AI into misunderstanding the sheer complexity of teaching especially the cordial relationships that teachers must build with their students.

Anyone who has taught at least three to five years appreciates the extensive knowledge, skills, and emotional connections needed to get kindergartners, fifth graders, or high school seniors to learn. By “emotional connections, ” I mean building relationships with individual students and a class are paramount in getting students to learn. Few boosters of AI, for example, seldom mention that a teacher-student relationship is unlike a student-machine connection.

Teaching, then, is not a mechanical act of connecting dots. Teaching is a complex act that requires knowledge of subject matter, managerial skills, and emotional labor. Often, it is improvisational. Most important, however, is that teaching requires gaining students’ trust. It is both an art and a science that takes years to master.

This brief history of hyped-up technological innovations previously adopted by public schools and the lack of causal links between these new technologies and altering how teachers teach or student learn may feel like I am raining on the parade of AI promoters. So be it.

While I believe AI will not force practitioners to rethink how they teach, nonetheless, as so many teachers have done in the past, they will adapt AI to fit the contours of their classrooms. And in doing so, AI may become just another item added to the list of previously hyped technological innovations that evoked initial gasps of delight and slowly became part of many teachers’ repertoires.

Or maybe AI in classrooms will become just a footnote in a future doctoral student’s dissertation. Too early to say.

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* Beyond understanding completely the complexity of teaching, perhaps those who create these tools are driven by the simple fact that the U.S. public schools market is large (i.e., nearly 50 million students and three million teachers) and lucrative. Further, schools are just as vulnerable to technological fads as are women’s fashions, deodorants, and automobile styling.