The algorithm has figured you out. If you are a teacher, your Instagram, TikTok and FaceBook feeds this week are once again full of AI EdTech platforms being advocated by mainly American and UK-based teachers, almost all of them promising the same thing. More time for teaching. Less time on planning. Save fifteen hours a week. Reclaim your evenings.
The promotional videos are everywhere, and the timing is not accidental. It is the end of the school year. We are finishing courses, preparing students for the State Examinations, organising summer tests. The audience is exhausted, and the pitch lands precisely because of that.
There will be a lull. Once the school holidays begin, the marketing will quieten. Then the companies reload from mid-August, ready for back-to-school. Teachers are under genuine pressure, and a platform that promises to give a teacher back an hour is not a frivolous thing. The appeal is real, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The Promise
The pitches are remarkably similar. Full lesson plans in thirty seconds. Differentiated worksheets in a click. Slide decks generated on demand. Quizzes mapped to the specification. School reports drafted. Marking schemes turned into automated rubrics. Underneath all of it sits the same promise. Save the time. Reclaim the evening. Get back to the part of the job you actually trained for.
What’s Actually Inside the Box
Lift the bonnet on most of these platforms and the technical pitch is the same. They have been preloaded with curriculum and syllabus content (more than likely from the USA or the UK). If you are “lucky” their developers may have gone to the trouble of preloading them with NCCA specifications, The SEC marking schemes. and few years of past papers. Add a chatbot interface, a tidy UI, and of course a subscription tier.
A platform that has ingested the marking scheme is not a platform that understands what good teaching looks like. It can pattern-match a lesson plan against a rubric. It is not the same as the experienced teacher who knows that this Junior Cycle class needs more time on cause and consequence, or that this differentiated worksheet has dropped the cognitive load below the level that produces real learning, or that this lesson opener is technically correct and pedagogically dead on arrival. The marking scheme is not the curriculum. The specification is not the subject.
Help, in the Right Hands
The teachers I know who swear by these platforms are, almost without exception, experienced teachers. They have been planning lessons for twenty years. They know what a strong opener looks like, because they have run hundreds. They know what an effective worksheet feels like in a mixed-ability class.
What they have, that the platforms do not, is friction. Years of friction. The friction of lessons that flopped, of mistakes corrected the hard way, of mistakes you only recognised when you watched a colleague handle the same situation differently. That combined experience is what produces professional judgement. It is precisely what allows them to use AI EdTech well. They can bring their professional validation to every AI output. If something is wrong, they spot it. If something is contextually inappropriate, they reject it. The platform helps because the expert at the controls knows good when they see it.
The friction we find annoying in the moment turns out to be the most valuable part of teacher training.
And to be honest; as a lifelong learner I am still very much in training mode.
The Beautiful Struggle of Learning to Teach
The cognitive struggle that produces deep learning in students is the same cognitive struggle that produces expert teachers. Recently I read the 2010 paper by Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer and Vaughan in the journal Cognition. It’s a fantastic read. It also clarified what I already knew from thirty years in the classroom.
The researchers printed learning material in slightly harder-to-read fonts and tracked retention. In the laboratory study, students given the harder version recalled fourteen percentage points more than those given the easy version. They then took the experiment into real high school classrooms across English, Physics, Chemistry and History with two hundred and twenty-two students in total. The harder-font group consistently outperformed the control group on actual classroom assessments. Why? Slight difficulty triggered deeper processing. Students could not freewheel. They had to engage and learn.
The researchers called this a desirable difficulty, and crucially they showed it works in real classrooms, not just in lab conditions. The principle is not specific to students. It applies to anyone learning a craft
I am the epitome of this myself. I started teaching thirty years ago, a young man who was probably not very good at the job. I got better. I got better by writing lesson plans that flopped, by marking essays that taught me where students misunderstand, by watching experienced colleagues, and by slowly building the kind of professional judgement that only comes from time in the room. There were no shortcuts in the school of hardknocks and making mistakes; only career defining experiences and lessons.
The Challenge for Teacher Training Colleges
Before I conclude, I want to offer a suggestion to the teacher training colleges. PMEs on placement are very busy. Beyond the teachers whose classes they are taking, their networking opportunities are limited. But the AI chatbot is there on the screen. Always available.
The colleges must actively encourage and facilitate the human networking that AI is quietly displacing. The peer-to-peer relationships. The mentor conversations. The staffroom corner. These need to be built into the training, named explicitly, and treated as central. PMEs and NQTs need to hear, plainly and often, that the colleague down the corridor is worth more than the chatbot in their pocket.
Finally
The most important thing in any classroom has never been the technology. It is the relationship between the teacher and the student, and the years of friction that build the teacher who can hold that relationship. These platforms have a place, but only in the hands that have done that work. In every other hand, they are quietly competing for the time and attention that built every teacher worth the name. We may not be able to stop them. But we have to be having the conversation, openly and honestly, before the platforms make the conversation for us.
Patrick Hickey (@aiteachingguru on all major social media) is an AI CPD Provider, AI in Education Consultant, Media Contributer, Current Teacher and Assistant Principal in Boherbue Comprehensive School, Co. Cork.
If you have any queries you can email www.aiteachingguru@gmail.com