Why teachers might not have a need to be using GenAI to create their lessons … but why they might end up using AI generated content anyway

To date, we are not finding that many teachers making regular use of generative AI to assist them in their work. Our research schools are certainly making efforts to introduce staff to the technology, and the majority of teachers in our initial surveys are saying that they are reasonably interested. Yet in comparison to the hype, actual teacher use of GenAI remains a minority activity for the time being.

Our interviews with school leaders are throwing up some interesting reasons for this.  One recent interview involved a discussion of teachers using GenAI to assist with lesson planning and the production of lesson content. Alongside the suggestion  that teachers might lack the necessary time and energy to play around with new tools, was the observation that many teachers already have perfectly good lesson content to hand. Moreover, if this lesson content has been produced by trusted colleagues and peers then it can be assumed to be something that will work … something that GenAI cannot guarantee. 

In this sense, we are finding that many teachers still see far more sense in relying on trusted colleagues for their content. As this interview excerpt explains, Brookdale’s English department has an established culture of lessons being produced by one of the lead teachers. This culture of ‘using Jim’s resources’ continues to trump any need for teachers to turn to AI-generated content. 

However, as Neil points out, if Jim begins to (surreptitiously) turn to generative AI to help produce his next batch of resources then the situation potentially gets more complicated. Then, we might reach a point where Brookdale’s English teachers are all using  AI-generated lesson content while all believing themselves to not be! Teachers have long borrowed and reused other teachers’ work … identifying how generative AI is becoming part of these circulations of resources, ideas, content and rubrics is not as easy as asking each teacher ‘have you used AI?’.

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[TIM]: We did throw Eduaide over to our teachers and say, “Hey, here’s a more nuanced version of GPT to have a play with”. But I don’t think that many did …

[RICK]: Not many at all. I think two said that they were using it. 

[NEIL]: Why do you think that is? 

[RICK]: There was probably some really talented digital coaches who were developing some supporting resources, but probably in the daily grind of teaching it maybe didn’t necessarily get the airtime it could have done.

[TIM]: I guess you’ve got to have a use case first … so, one of the things that goes on in our English faculty is that we have a stunning junior English faculty head who devises the most amazing resources, and you can just walk in and teach from them. So why would you be off developing other things when you just use Jim’s stuff? And probably across most departments … yeah, we have a fairly tight curriculum.

[RICK]: Yeah, that would be my sense. I’m teaching some history for the first time this year, and we’re all using shared resources. That’s the probably the expectation as well – use the good resources.

[NEIL]: Which raises the question whether Jim is going to start using Eduaide in the future to come up with new resources, but then people won’t know that they’re using AI generated work! 

[TIM]: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. And it’s absolutely the case. [waves a document around]. One of the amusing things is this ICT report that we wrote internally. I declared at the start that this has been developed by Tim Smith *and* GPT *and* CoPilot … so I’ve kind of flagged that’s the case. But yeah, I can imagine more and more people aren’t going to declare when they’ve used it, or think: “Oh, I wonder whether that’s problematic?”.

[RICK] I think that’s a really interesting point … I think a lot of colleagues who would have historically been expected to produce written prose themselves will, you know, begin to lean on these tools but feel a little bit insecure about acknowledging that.

18_06_24: interview with Tim (Head of Teaching & Learning) and Rick (Digital Innovation Lead)