In Shanghai, AI is the teacher's assistant

From El Salvador to Kazakhstan, startups are trying to develop AI tools to improve teaching and learning, writes Jean-Claude Brizard, CEO of Digital Promise, in Fast Company. In the U.S., we're too obsessed with "how AI makes it easier for students to cheat" to see the potential. Brizard was superintendent of schools in Rochester and in Chicago.

Shanghai educators have piloted “AI infusion,” using artificial intelligence as "the operating system for the entire educational experience," he writes. They're thinking strategically.

"Every teacher has an AI assistant" to "handle lesson planning, grading, analytics, and professional development," Brizard writes. The goal is to give teachers time "to focus on mentorship, creativity, and human connection."

"Educators receive tailored and specific feedback on teaching patterns, courses are reengineered to emphasize relationships between concepts to help students build system understanding rather than memorizing facts, and every school is part of a virtual ecosystem that extends beyond classroom walls," he writes.

AI could be a valuable diagnostic tool and a catalyst for change, writes Robin Lake, who runs the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State. "AI gives educators the potential to understand, diagnose and respond to students’ learning needs" and "recommend targeted interventions," she writes. Over time, it can track whether "specific, evidence-based actions . . . improve learning."

Like Brizard, Lake thinks using AI effectively will require rethinking teacher's roles. In what she calls the "precision learning model," a teacher would not be expected "to diagnose, design, deliver, remediate, counsel and motivate simultaneously," she writes. "Schools would instead deploy differentiated teams, with some adults specializing in diagnostics and data interpretation and others in instruction, mentorship or intervention, all supported by AI systems that surface evidence and guide decisions."

"AI in schools must serve human-centered learning that doesn't simply push for more efficiency," warn two recent reports, writes Greg Toppo on The 74. He cites Beyond the AI Inflection Point and Think Forward.