Could teachers be replaced with robots?

[noblegiraffe]

This is increasingly being suggested as a solution to the critical lack of teachers, particularly at secondary school.

My general position is that we saw how pupils are not motivated to learn when left to their own devices at home over lockdown. As a teacher, a lot of my day is spent getting kids to do the work, in various ways.

This blog by Becky Allen "Will students feel motivated to work for the AI-masters?' is an interesting discussion of the issue. It refers to Animal Crossing making you feel guilty for neglecting your characters, the Duolingo owl encouraging you to keep a streak and so on. Personally, I find closing the rings on my Apple Watch the only thing that has motivated me to do regular exercise.

But what these things all have in common is that they are things that the student has opted into in the first place. Presumably there was some initial motivation on their part that just needs a nudge to keep going.

An important part of teaching is building relationships with the pupils on a human level. Can a student build a relationship with an AI? Well, definitely. But on a widespread enough scale for it to be more effective than humans interaction? Not sure.

However, would it be better than no teacher? Most likely.

https://rebeccaallen.co.uk/2024/01/13/artificial-incentives-will-students-feel-motivated-to-work-for-their-ai-masters/

If AI is so intelligent, it won't take long for the robots to think 'fuck this' and go off and do something else.

It might work if they put a T-1000 in front of Year 9.

Otherwise, no chance.

Gamifying education seems like a good idea.
I used to love the game where I'm the world is Carmen Sandiago.

I learnt to use the encyclopedia that accompanied the game, I learned to skim read so that I could solve the problem and I also learned a little geography.
Add compulsion and a feeling that I much commit everything to memory for an exam and it would have quickly lost the fun factor and turned into a stressful exercise.

I'm not sure how you combine compulsion with a computer program and make it very successful.

Also what do you do why with with later readers?

Maybe there are some useful ideas here
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/education/2016/jun/07/sugata-mitra-professor-school-in-cloud

Encouraging collaboration and maybe a little competitiveness may help?

I've just thought there are other pretty good games that were then adapted to target certain topics. Eg chemistry fluxx.

He's not a household name because he's a bit of a fraud.

If AI was used for the parts of teaching that are very time consuming and are significant contributors to the huge workload, then I think it would be a valuable contribution in education. Already my DH uses some AI functions to assist with e.g. report writing. As a form tutor he has to review and spell check the reports from class teachers, AI speeds this up massively.

There was a thread on here recently complaining that a teacher had used AI to generate a parental email.

It's like during lockdown when parents were complaint that Lazy Teachers weren't recording their own lessons but were instead providing links to Oak Academy that had been specifically funded by the DfE for that exact purpose.

@noblegiraffe what about a teacher streaming from one location into a class room or multiple classrooms eg on a screen Afterall if the students are behaving and want to learn then it seems feasible

Like I said, a big job of the teacher is getting the kids to do the work. You can't do that if you're not in the room. As was discovered during lockdown.

in that case if they dont learn or want to learn then they are restricted in progressing onto university etc, at some point schools can only do so much,

A robot or hall of tablets or a virtual lecturer with ex-army invigilating!

I can do a lot more than a robot in terms of getting the kids to do the work, which is the point of this thread.

true, within context of the op, if they were to use Ai, then the students should be willing to learn via the Ai or robot, otherwise why waste the learning time just messing around when others want to learn, or if its distance learning and the students dont learn then realistically they dont achieve the eg gcse etc

I think it’s inevitable. There are not enough teachers and there is no way to make the job more attractive unless society itself changes. I don’t know a single teacher who left because of the money …..in fact it’s often the only reason they stay because it’s well paid with excellent holidays and they can’t match the salary in another job. They leave because of the behaviour of children and parents

I think we will end up with neurotypical average intelligence and above well behaved well supported children sat in classrooms taught via a mixture of pre-recorded lessons and adaptive AI work and teachers will be deployed to the SEND / vulnerable/ unsupported children only. With the current explosion of SEND with almost a fifth of children now apparently having a SEND I think this is going to be the only way it is affordable anyway.

I don't think AI could adequately replicate the teacher's role, because it would lack three key features of the teacher-student relationship: 1) trust, 2) respect and 3) safeguarding.

1. I don't trust an AI teacher to tell me the truth and it seems to be a massive multi-step recursive ballache to get an AI model to verify its own information and cite only genuine sources with a reliable methodology as to how it knows it has done so before answering. So whereas a human teacher will be able to say "I don't know, I'll have to look that up", an AI teacher (based on current models) would be more likely to make something up to successfully deliver the lesson, thereby misleading the pupils.

AI teachers wouldn't be able to be trained on the internet generally if you want them to be correct - I guess they would need an additional closed system of knowledge akin to subject-specialism degrees and a very sophisticated verification system in order for pupils, parents, etc to be able to trust them to teach the pupils adequately without misleading them.

2. And there wouldn't be respect between a pupil and their teacher because the teacher is a machine. This could impact the child's development in all sorts of unexpected ways, such as damaging their self-esteem through constantly receiving "false" praise, causing them to experience emotional neglect from not having humans nurturing them, only developing social skills to the extent an AI recognises and exhibits them, demotivation because no human is there to witness and share their achievements, and so on. Humans are social creatures and you only have to look at how covid lockdowns affected schoolchildren to see that removing human teachers is a recipe for disaster in terms of social and psychological development.

3. And then there's the safeguarding issue that some PPs have alluded to - a teacher's duty to disclose safeguarding concerns isn't there for nothing - it's there because teachers play a crucial role in interacting with a child away from their family/after-school environment and they have a key vantage point in spotting concerns that often wouldn't be noticed otherwise. An AI model is unlikely to be adept at picking up the range of subtle behaviours that might indicate a safeguarding concern. So if teaching is taken over by AI, many children will have no-one at all to look out for them.

Plus, you've got the potential emotional neglect caused by forcing children to pretend that AI models are humans and to treat them as such for over a decade of their lives as they're developing, which I'm sure would raise its own safeguarding issues in the long-term too.

*complete tangent and they ended up discussing the Norman conquest and it's impact on the English language then compared language pre and post NC and ended up looking at modern day influences on English.
A computer/robot couldn't do that

Actually it can do this! And in a fraction of the time a real person can. I am a teacher and I do think the education system is set up on an old 19th century way where you had to have kids in classes because that’s all there was. And education is still based on what used to be fine -no imagination for the world as it is and will be. What is school for? What do we want children to earn and why? Why Maths/geography/mfl?
I teach MFL and really think we should be doing away with whole class teaching now we have better ways for children to access the languages they are interested in (if they are) than arbitrarily insisting on French/Spanish/Mandarin

can AI be programmed to fully cope with the illogical nature of teenagers?

One thing you can be sure of is that private schools will be trumpeting "live teachers!!" as part of their advertising.

AI is not ‘programmed’ it adapts and learns

I think yes, we will move increasingly to a system where "schools" consist of adults there to manage crowd control and the actual teaching happens Duolingo style online. I think there will even be VR suites where kids can experience events and activities to enhance their learning.
The adults will be there simply to get kids back to their computers again.
In a way it will work as ai will be able to personalise every child's learning but of course, those who have barriers to learning or are not very motivated will struggle.

My Foster son worked hard at home during COVID lockdown 1 with no online lessons and just a few worksheets sent home. I asked for the scheme of work he should have been following, then taught him those things with resources I bought online. He got far ahead of other DC in his class and when he went back to school he spent 4 months doing the same work he had already done again. Despite schemes of work being available for all DC in his class not one other DC had been taught the 'Of Mice and Men novel'. Only 1 other DC had even read it. I had gone into lots of depth and he'd done a synopsis of each chapter with time line of significant events and analysed 5 separate characters and picked out 4 or 5 quotes for each character to learn. He'd seen dvd as well. He told me he enjoyed his learning at home more than when he is at school because no one was messing about so he could concentrate more.

@noblegiraffe ,

I have read your threads for many years, and you answered a few of my questions when I was getting into teaching 12 years ago as a second career.

But surely you know that this is an unanswerable question!

Ultimately, with AI developing so fast, maybe all of us, regardless of career, will be made redundant.

As it is now, especially in Maths, a good computer program with lots of different questions, and a clever analytics package, can probably work out where pupils are struggling more effectively than a teacher can, trying to do this for 30 children simultaneously and control behaviour. As for the ‘lecturing’ bit, you can easily access teaching online, and some of the teachers are at the peak of their game, far better ‘explainers’ than most classroom teachers.

What is less knowable is the relationship aspect, in my opinion ultimately the most important and hardest-to-replace part of teaching. Will a robot remember to ask after the health of Johnny’s ailing dog before starting the lesson, or maybe let Charlotte off a homework penalty because they remembered their parents are going through a messy divorce.

I guess that good teachers, whilst maintaining a professional distance, are also caring and empathetic, and that helps to create motivation for learning (as well as being part of broader education, anyway),

Can a robot ever be empathetic, or even fake it well enough to do this? I would have said no a couple of years ago. Now I have to say that I just don’t know.

Arguably AI an do the dog/home work thing better because they don’t have to remember it while doing a register and getting 30 pupils settled.

In the future, the old ways will change. They already have. The way I was taught at school is long changed and obsolete. Teaching will change again. And for the better. I taught myself a language on my own during covid. It was good fun

This wouldn't surprise me at all, parents will need to massively step up or get tutors as if your child is naturally bright they'll fall behind, fast. Already this is happening, but this will just exacerbate the situation

My Y11 son has had several lessons this week where several classes of different ages and subjects were all in the hall because not only were there not enough teachers, they also couldn't get enough cover supervisors to cover the lessons. He's just coming up to his mocks.

I don't think 'AI masters' can truly replace real teachers, but maybe they could be used for cover!

YouTube replaced teachers years ago imo. Also now with ChatGPT, there's virtually nothing that kids can't learn without a teacher present. I bet a lot of teachers use ChatGPT for planning lessons, in fact.

Using ChatGPT for planning a lesson is just a different, and perhaps more efficient, way of gathering and combining resources that are already on the internet anyway. That doesn't mean that the delivery of the lesson, including responding to students' individual needs, questions and responses, isn't still vital. As an MFL teacher, I'd say Duolingo is fun and motivating, but pretty limited.