Making Learning More Human: The Real Promise of AI in Education

When we talk about technology in education, the conversation often begins with the technology itself and forgets the people in the room.

• What can this new tool do?

• How many classrooms have it?

• How many faculty members are using it?

• Can AI help? Should we even use AI? What does it say about us if we use AI?

• What will the next generation of devices make possible?

I think we should begin somewhere else.

We should begin with the people. Start with the teacher.

Learning is, and has always been, an intensely human experience. The best teachers do much more than deliver information. They recognize the puzzled look on a student's face and realize that an explanation isn't working. They find another way to explain the concept. They know when a student needs to be challenged and when that same student needs encouragement. They spark curiosity, build confidence, recognize potential, and develop relationships that can influence students long after a particular lesson is forgotten.

No technology - not a laptop, smartphone, learning management system, or artificial intelligence - should be intended to replace that.

Instead, perhaps the most important question we can ask about technology in education is this:

How can technology give us more opportunities for those human moments to happen?

Technology Should Augment the Humanity of Learning

Just as AI should not be writing my BLOG for me, I will readily admit that it has reworded phrasing in this post, it has corrected my grammar, and even made content suggestions. But this is a person writing words here. We have been introducing technology into classrooms for a very long time. Calculators changed how we approached mathematics. Computers changed how students wrote, researched, analyzed data, and created. The Internet opened access to information on a scale that would have been unimaginable only a generation earlier. Mobile devices put much of that capability into something students could carry in their pockets.

Each of these technologies brought legitimate concerns, and each could be used poorly. But when used intentionally, they also expanded what teachers and students could accomplish together.

A computer can allow a student to visualize a scientific concept that is difficult to describe on a whiteboard. A mobile device can make classroom resources from museums, libraries, laboratories, and experts around the world accessible. Digital collaboration tools can allow students to work together beyond the physical boundaries of the classroom. Accessibility technologies can provide opportunities to students who might otherwise encounter significant barriers to learning.

None of those things diminish the teacher.

They give the teacher more tools.

Artificial intelligence should be viewed through the same lens.

The question shouldn't be, "How much can AI do?"

It should be, "How can AI help teachers enhance teaching and students' access to learning?"

Those are very different objectives.

AI Can Give Teachers Something They Desperately Need: Capacity

One of the greatest opportunities for AI in education may not be replacing anything that happens between a teacher and a student. It may be reducing some of the work surrounding those interactions. Teaching involves an enormous amount of work that happens before and after the actual lesson.

Teachers develop lesson plans, create assignments, prepare assessments, build rubrics, search for resources, communicate with students and families, adapt materials, review student work, provide feedback, analyze results, document progress, and handle countless administrative responsibilities.

AI can assist with many of those activities.

A teacher might use AI to develop a first draft of a lesson plan based on the information the teacher provides, generate additional practice questions based on the teacher's curriculum, brainstorm an activity that feels stale, create examples at different levels of difficulty to help the one teacher serve each student where they are, develop the beginnings of a rubric, or adapt a reading for students at different reading levels.

AI might help a teacher examine assessment results and identify a concept that many students appear to have misunderstood. It might help create additional examples for tomorrow's lesson or suggest another way to explain a difficult concept. Notice that each example above begins and ends with the teacher?

And there is an important word in all of those examples: Help.

• The teacher remains the expert.

• The teacher knows the students.

• The teacher understands the curriculum.

• The teacher evaluates whether the material is accurate and appropriate.

• The teacher decides what happens in the classroom. Period.

AI simply gives that teacher additional leverage. And perhaps the most interesting question isn't whether AI can turn 45 minutes of preparation into 15. It's what the teacher can do with the other 30 minutes.

• Could that time be spent giving better feedback to a student?

• Could it allow for an individual conversation with someone who is struggling?

• Could it give teachers more time to collaborate with one another?

• Could it allow them to improve tomorrow's lesson?

• Could it simply give an exhausted educator enough breathing room to be more fully present when students walk through the door?

If technology creates more capacity for those things, then we have accomplished something meaningful.

AI Can Enhance What Happens in the Classroom, Too

There are also opportunities to use AI alongside teachers during instruction.

Imagine that a teacher has just explained a difficult concept. Most of the class understands it, but several students don't.

Traditionally, the teacher might explain it again.

Now imagine the teacher has another resource available.

AI could help generate a different analogy. It could provide a visual way of thinking about the concept. It could create a simpler example for one group of students and a more challenging example for another. It could generate additional practice problems or help adapt material to meet different learning needs.

The technology hasn't replaced the teacher. It has expanded the teacher's options. This can be done by the teacher or a tool the teacher provides, depending on the classroom model the teacher has selected to use.

And the teacher remains the person making the most important decision: What does this student need next?

That distinction matters.

The most sophisticated AI system in the world doesn't know a classroom in quite the way the person standing in front of it does. It doesn't share the history of those students. It hasn't watched their confidence develop throughout the semester. It doesn't necessarily recognize that today's frustration has very little to do with today's lesson.

Teachers do.

Technology should support that human judgment rather than attempt to engineer it out of the educational experience.

Some of AI's Greatest Impact May Happen Around the Classroom

One of the best things about AI is its flexibility and dynamic nature. Our thinking here is not simply about what it can do in the classroom environment, because we know educators do quite a bit outside the classroom, from planning and projects to administrative activities.

There is an entire ecosystem surrounding learning that can benefit. Before class, AI can help teachers prepare materials, develop examples, anticipate misconceptions, and differentiate instruction.

During class, it can provide additional practice, accessibility support, explanations, translations, visualization, and formative feedback.

After class, it can help identify patterns in student performance, suggest areas that may need reinforcement, organize information, and help teachers prepare for the next learning experience.

Beyond the classroom, similar technologies can support tutoring, advising, accessibility services, library research, career development, student support, and institutional communications.

The result shouldn't be a smaller educational environment. Ideally, it becomes an environment in which those people have better information, better tools, and more time to help students.

Students Need to Learn How to Use AI, Too

Of course, this conversation is not solely about teachers. It is about so much more. Students already have access to extraordinarily powerful AI tools, and those tools aren't going away.

Simply asking whether students should be "allowed to use AI" may therefore be the wrong question.

We should be asking how they are using it. Consider two students working on an essay.

One asks AI: "Write my essay for me."

Another asks: "Here's the argument I'm developing. Don't rewrite it for me. Challenge my assumptions and ask me five questions that would help me make the argument stronger."

Both students used AI.

But those are two fundamentally different educational experiences.

The same is true in mathematics.

"Give me the answer" is very different from "Here is what I have done. Look at tit and explain in terms I can understand where my reasoning went wrong, and help me understand what I should consider next."

In one case, AI replaces thinking.

In the other, AI stimulates it.

In the end, the student becomes one of the most important elements of AI literacy:

Students need to learn how to use AI to extend their thinking without outsourcing the thinking that creates learning.

We Shouldn't Automate Away Productive Struggle

Technology is often designed to make our lives easier by removing friction, and in most cases, that is exactly what we want it to do. Education, however, is different. Often, we see that some of the friction we experience while learning serves an important purpose, as the struggle itself is where learning takes place.

A student who wrestles with the first paragraph of an essay is learning how to organize and express an idea.

Getting an equation wrong and working backward to understand why can be more valuable than simply being given the correct answer.

Searching for evidence, struggling to articulate a thought, or discovering that an original argument doesn't hold up forces us to question, reconsider, and try again.

These moments can be frustrating, but they are also where understanding develops -- and AI can help! If AI is always there to immediately provide the answer, rewrite the paragraph, solve the equation, or construct the argument, we risk using technology to eliminate not just the frustration of learning, but some of the learning itself.

That gives us another useful principle for educational technology:

Good technology should remove unnecessary friction without eliminating productive struggle.

There will be times when the appropriate educational decision is to use AI.

There will also be times when the appropriate decision is to close the laptop, put away the phone, and wrestle with the problem. And both teachers and students should be free to make that choice.

Knowing the difference is part of both good teaching and good use of technology.

Technology Doesn't Have to Be the Center of the Classroom to Transform It

All too often, we equate educational innovation with how much technology we can see in the classroom. More laptops, more screens, and more digital tools can make a classroom look technologically advanced, but the most effective use of technology may be when students barely notice it at all.

Imagine a teacher beginning a lesson and realizing, based on yesterday's assessment, that several students are struggling with a particular concept. Before class, the teacher has used AI to help identify a pattern in the learning. This allowed that teacher to prepare a different explanation, a visual example, and a few additional practice activities at different levels of difficulty to help the students access the information. During the lesson, those resources are simply available when the teacher needs them. The students aren't thinking about AI, data analysis, cloud computing, or the systems that helped create the materials. They're thinking about the problem in front of them, asking questions, working with one another, and interacting with their teacher.

In that classroom, technology has played an important role, but it never became the focus of the learning experience. Perhaps that is what mature educational technology should look like: working quietly in the background, giving teachers better information and more options while allowing teaching and learning—not the technology—to remain at the center of the classroom.

Learning should always remain at the center.

And teachers should remain at the center of creating those learning experiences.

In an AI World, Teachers Become More Important

I know, many of you are thinking "yeah, right..." But this is an interesting paradox we see emerging in schools that are leveraging AI responsibly and thoughtfully. AI is making information incredibly inexpensive.

Consider this... ee can generate explanations, summaries, quizzes, images, presentations, examples, study guides, and even entire lessons in seconds. But when information becomes abundant, something else becomes increasingly valuable:

Judgment.

Is this information accurate?

Is this source trustworthy?

Does this argument make sense?

What is missing?

What assumptions are being made?

Why should I believe this conclusion?

How does this connect to something else we've learned?

And perhaps most importantly:

What does it mean?

Those are not simply information-retrieval questions. They are questions of critical thinking, expertise, experience, curiosity, and judgment. They are also the kinds of questions great teachers have always helped students learn to ask.

In that sense, AI doesn't make teachers less important; it inherently increases their value. AI can tell you what you did wrong. AI can even help you see where the errors or omissions might be, help you fix them, and even give you information as to why. But reasoning is best taught through a teacher who reinforces, helps the student think things through, and walks the student down the path.

It may make the distinctly human parts of teaching more important than ever.

The teacher is increasingly not simply a source of information but a mentor, subject-matter expert, coach, critic, facilitator, and designer of meaningful learning experiences.

That isn't a diminished role. It may be a more consequential one.

Keeping Learning Human

Responsible AI adoption in education shouldn't mean keeping AI -- or any other technology -- out of classrooms.

And innovation shouldn't mean putting AI into every classroom activity.

There will be times when the best tool for learning is artificial intelligence. Sometimes it will be a laptop. Sometimes it will be a smartphone, an interactive display, a simulation, a video, a calculator, or a book.

And sometimes the best technology available will still be a teacher, a student, a difficult question, and a conversation.

Our responsibility as educators is to know the difference.

Perhaps, then, the measure of successful technology adoption in education shouldn't be how much teaching we've managed to automate. It should be whether technology gives teachers more opportunities to teach, students more opportunities to think, and both more opportunities to connect with one another.

Because for all the remarkable things artificial intelligence may eventually bring to education, the most important element in the classroom is still the human one.

And the real promise of AI may be its ability to help us make learning not less human, but more human than ever.