The future of teaching is a topic I often think about as it directly impacts not only my career, but where today’s children are heading.

All it takes is a semblance of honesty and a bit of observation to know we are in the middle of a paradigm shift on how education works. The models of the past are broken and despite the call for nostalgia by people who felt the old ways were better, they’re not coming back.

Many teachers today are either embracing the change and running along with it, or fighting against the current by admonishing how students can’t handle “the basics” anymore (basics being rote memorization, timed tests and other artifacts that have been proven to be ineffective for learning, but easy for assessment).

The public seems to sway one way or the other as well.

Let’s not kid ourselves — the needs of students have changed and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to provide individualized education to each child in the context of a classroom with over twenty students. Many of my colleagues do an excellent job, but burnout is now a major concern.

There’s also the growing divide between students who come from families that can provide direct support to their child’s future and those who cannot. In the latter case, the hope is these students become self-motivated enough to see education is a means to change the course of their future.

The focus for years was on getting these failing students to see the value in education in order to pass. Unfortunately, this was done at the expense of motivating other students to higher levels of achievement, resulting in a strive for mediocrity as the norm.

However, just as the economic middle class is disappearing in our global economy, the “average” student is disappearing alongside it. There’s pressure to get an A, or to resign oneself to getting a passing grade in order to move on. 

What makes closing the gap difficult is finding the motivating factors for each student and carefully selecting appropriate challenges for their skill level. Challenge them just enough and they will stretch themselves to learn and improve. 

If the challenge is too hard, they resign. If it’s too easy, they get bored. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, but again, it’s different for every student.

The promise of AI is to level the playing field by using algorithms from student input to always hit that middle ground. In doing so, it can increase the rate of learning for each student by almost four times what they currently get in today’s education.

In other words, it’s promising a truly individualized education that is four times more effective than even the best classroom teachers.

Considering the current technology of accurately predicting what a user will like next on a platform based on their history, we’re not far off from this being a reality. Whatever my thoughts are about the impact  of this technology on education, it won’t stop it from coming.

Globally, there is going to be a massive disruption in many industries with AI, but I want to focus specifically on teachers.

Every time a new technology comes to pass, there is someone claiming it will be the end of teachers. 

Sound? We can record the best lectures on vinyl and play it for students!

Video? Now we can record the best teachers giving their lessons and play it for students!

Internet? It’s the best of the above two and we now have online courses! You don’t even need to be in a classroom anymore.

MOOC? The best university professors putting their courses online, with video, for free? Higher education just got massively disrupted!

None of those have killed the profession of teaching and I don’t predict AI will either. Why?

Give a student a device that can access the Internet, with all the knowledge of humanity and accessible tools that we couldn’t even fathom ten years ago, and what are they going to do with it?

Entertain themselves.

Watch videos, play games, message each other, etc.

Someone, somewhere at some point, is going to have to hold them accountable. 

This is where I see the teaching profession going in the next ten years. It is going to transform, but with a merging of technological tools and re-thinking of the education system itself: teachers as co-learners, accountability partners and motivators.

Then again, I could be completely wrong and at that point, you can hold me accountable for making such an audacious claim.