I couldn’t help but smile last Friday when I read Adam’s Home Truth and realised we had both been pondering the conundrum of AI!
No secret – I have been resistant! The thought of taking a short cut and plugging some prompts into a GPT makes me uncomfortable. I’m used to research, plowing through books, pulling out the pieces that grow my understanding. I am used to highlights and note taking, marking pages and finding quotes.
And I absolutely love that as I do that work, I come across other little gems of new knowledge or old learning quickly forgotten. And often those gems lead me into memories of life experiences or reminders of something from long ago.
For me, education and learning is about thinking and making connections. Teaching is about creating the conditions that facilitate critical thinking, collaboration, innovation – it is not about teaching students what to think, but teaching them how to think.
My resistance to using AI has come from my deep desire to support students beyond surface level learning that summarises what we already have, and into a deeper level of being able to recognise inconsistencies and contradictions, spot fakes and irregularities, debate mistruths and think critically.
We’ve all seen the research emerging around the technology – attention spans are shorter; brains are developing differently with excess screentime; there are impacts on our ability to maintain focus and a real struggle about protecting and even sometimes being able to recognise intellectual property. Personally, I struggle with this concept of having to explain the world in a 30 second Tik Tok format – I actually refuse to do it. Life’s greatest lessons rarely come in a 30 second jab – they usually evolve over time and are deeply complex.
Despite all this, I can also recognise that in 2025, the world is a very complex place – life feels busier; we are bombarded with news, fakes, scams, mistruths; cost of living is high; getting ahead seems harder; wellbeing feels like a selfish option – yet the pressure to look after ourselves has never been higher; and we are overwhelmed by the quick fixes – the rapid fire ads that point out all the things we are lacking and how we all need to improve! Cognitive overload is a thing – our minds are in a constant state of high alert with a million things to think about and some days even I have no stored responses to help me stay regulated when things just happen! Cognitive load is high – not because we are thinking harder, but because there is just more bombarding our brains.
We talk about reducing workload for teachers all the time. Programming and lesson design, as well as marking and providing feedback, are the very essence of a teacher’s workload. I pour lots of cognitive energy into such things. I do a lot of academic thinking before I go into the classroom. I make sure I know my content, how to teach it and have great supporting resources; I make sure that I know my students and how they learn, based on the massive amount of information found in learning and behaviour plans.
And, I have realised that GPT tools will reduce that cognitive effort – leaning into this technology reduces the time spent sorting, sequencing and presenting knowledge. What a great way to save some cognitive energy!
I have realised that my cognitive load will be better supported by a focus on putting the thinking in the right place – using the AI to pull together suggestions, ideas, and the stuff that already exists somewhere.
And then I will do the thinking about how to best step into the human and relational side of the learning journey. I will think about the individual adjustments to support students who I have taken the time to get to know as people, not just documented diagnoses and education plans. I will put my thinking time into reading the room when we are all together; recognising things in the moment and supporting myself and those around me to stay regulated and in the learning zone; designing the systems that keep us in the most purposeful and transformative learning spaces possible, for most of the time; putting the humanness into the interactions; consider how to prime for success and thinking about the how circle architecture could enhance engagement for everyone!
So, rather than resist the tech tools, I am going to lean into letting them do the grunt work, whilst my capacity to think like a human allows me to better invest my time and cognitive energy into language, conduct and mindset tools that preserve the humanness in our schools.
