In the fast-paced world of education, the idea of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) makes us ask the question: Could this be a game-changer?
What would be the circumstances that will make us confident that we could create genuinely improved practices and avoid the risk of falling behind?
The path to answering this lies not in the technology itself but in the ability of educational institutions to navigate change, to carefully evaluate ideas, and to empower their team. It takes a strategic approach to ensure that the result is game-changers and not just gimmicks.
No change in classroom practice can happen without professionals learning and adapting. This requires a deep understanding of how to initiate change and how to create conditions – not just processes – that foster purposeful and thoughtful changes in practice.
As the famous line from Peter Drucker goes: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Even the best-intentioned AI strategy will flounder without the enabling conditions.
The exploration phase of AI implementation begins with a thorough examination of existing teacher and staff development strategies and priorities. A deep understanding of what is currently working and what could be improved serves as a compass, guiding educational leaders in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their current professional development initiatives to plan for and introduce change.
As Professor Viviane Robinson has said: “Don’t design the future until you deeply understand the present.”
Gain confidence in your starting point
Starting a group journey without a strong understanding of where you are, what resources you have, what people’s needs and limitations are, and how people feel is a strategy for disaster. We see this a lot.
When the Teacher Development Trust carries out its review work with schools and trusts, we often encounter frustrated leaders who are having to unpick where and why things went wrong with their plans.
The root commonly lies with moving ahead too quickly based on hunches of where things are, rather than a clear-eyed picture of strengths, resources, needs and weaknesses.
When we work with schools to solve this, the work (whether around AI or not) includes evaluating whether current strategies align with school improvement plans and staff needs, whether they contribute to fostering an environment that is open to change, and whether they are built on solid foundations of research that embed evaluation from the outset.
As with implementing any new initiative, confidence in navigating change is the cornerstone upon which successful AI integration will be built.
- Reflection question: Are you as confident as you need to be in where you are now in order to plan change well?
Bringing your staff with you
The urgent drumbeat about extraordinary advances in AI makes some of us wonder if we should just focus on its adoption as our main priority.
But of course, within schools, AI is not actually a goal. However, it is a potential tool to enhance our abilities to help children learn and succeed in an ever-changing world.
It is this latter point that needs to be where you begin the conversation with staff, students and parents, allowing us to ask key questions:
- What concerns or hopes do you have that we need to recognise, discuss and address?
- Which are the areas where AI could be a game-changer, not a gimmick? Which are the areas where AI should not have a role? How would we test and evaluate this?
- What knowledge and skills do you need in order to be involved in this testing and evaluation work? What resources do you need? How could we help you feel confident in the next steps?
- What can we do to give you the conditions to learn and develop in this space?
Educational leaders must invest in developing their staff to ensure they are equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to leverage AI effectively, as and when effective practices are identified for rolling out.
Using well-evidenced mechanisms for staff development that are already embedded – be that lesson study, coaching or teacher learning communities – will help introduce the unfamiliar in a familiar and disciplined way.
This ensures that any activity that is taken will not just be disjointed and abstract, nor just a flash in the pan, but will be a thoughtful, impactful process that is creating expertise, revealing evaluation data, and embedding itself sustainably into future work.
In our work to help schools introduce collaborative enquiry and pedagogical coaching we find the need for clear training and implementation planning to build capability and capacity for this to work well – and AI is no different to any other change in this respect.
You probably don’t need to make this a blanket imposition. Effective change often happens in stages and starts with pilots and building cultural momentum which then starts to drive itself – this is commonly a key point of discussion and reflection as we coach leaders through effective change in this area.
Right now, you may be better off identifying smaller numbers of staff to gain expertise and start engaging in structured experimentation and enquiry in AI.
This leaves other staff free to focus on pre-existing needs and challenges and opens the possibilities that your more cautious and skeptical colleagues can, in due course, hear from their colleagues involved in pilots about what AI’s potential is, rather than having to rely on your enthusiasm for its potential.
And remember that any skepticism or concerns should not be dismissed out of hand. Of course, as a school you will need to decide where AI can have a game-changing role but also those areas where it should not have a role (or at least adoption should be more cautious) – and equally you will need to understand what safeguards are put in place when it comes to AI.
Taking this measured approach will build ground-up enthusiasm and ownership for change that will last even in busy and difficult times.
- Reflection question: Are you confident in your change and implementation process, starting with small and targeted work and with a clear plan for evaluating, scaling and winning hearts and minds?
- Reflection question: Are you as confident as you need to be that you have the rigorous and effective structures in place that can guide and shape the experimentation and learning process, such as a lesson study or collaborative enquiry cycles?
Capacity for leading change
Having just one leader trying to push this agenda risks AI work being “just another thing” that gets lost in the noise. Think carefully about how you are building senior leadership capacity to design and implement professional learning and change around AI, so that there is a shared endeavour that produces a coherent plan that can be skilfully implemented by all leaders, both senior and middle.
As we train cohorts of CPD leaders, we find that this specialist skill-set needs a firm grounding in evidence about effective change, professional learning and an ability to foster culture, not just process.
This can then underpin and support growing skill and expertise in the use of AI, a field that is so rapidly changing and developing by the week.
Final thoughts
The successful integration of AI in schools requires a strategic and thoughtful approach. Educational leaders must begin by assessing the effectiveness of their current CPD and staff development strategies (using tools like the TDT's CPD diagnostic review).
Confidence in implementing change, a commitment to staff development, and a focus on active engagement are the key pillars that will ensure AI enhances, rather than hinders, the teaching and learning experience. By embracing these principles, schools and educational trusts can pave the way for a future where technology and human expertise work hand-in-hand to nurture the minds of tomorrow.
- David Weston is founder and co-CEO of the Teacher Development Trust, a national charity for schools, childcare settings and colleges focused on creating workplaces where teachers thrive and become expert so that pupils succeed. Find out more at https://tdtrust.org/. Follow David on X (Twitter) @informed_edu and find both his and previous Teacher Development Trust articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/teacher-development-trust
- Anne Cameron is the head of marketing and Development at the Teacher Development Trust.
TDT National Conference
The Teacher Development Trust will be exploring how new experiences, research, thinking and technologies are constantly shaping the narrative around teacher professional development at their upcoming national conference on January 30 in central London. To register, visit https://tdtrust.org/annual-conference-2024/