How AI Helps Our Teachers

Teachers are the most important resource of any school. They guide students' thoughts, hopes, and dreams, helping them grow and learn. Artificial intelligence (AI), a great human invention, already affects our lives in many ways. At SKOLA, a summer English school in London, we started using AI three years ago. Now, we use it in three main ways to make teaching better.

1. Reviewing Teacher Interviews

Our first use of AI is to review teacher interviews. We record and transcribe what is said in these interviews. Then, we use AI to score the interviews based on a list of important skills and qualities we look for in teachers. Each teacher gets a score out of 20, which interviewers can use to check their own opinions. This helps us notice any unfair thoughts we might have and carefully review each teacher's answers to our standard questions. Soon, we plan to give these questions to all job candidates ahead of time, along with information about our school, like how we handle student behavior and our carefully planned lessons.

2. Improving Lesson Planning

The second way we use AI is to help teachers plan their lessons. We require lessons to have five parts: a hook (to grab attention), a check of what students already know, direct teaching, a test, and a way to use new knowledge in a different situation. For new teachers or experienced teachers from other schools, following this structure can be hard. But AI is great at combining different materials, like our lesson plans with our five-part approach. We've found AI is excellent at creating ideas—for example, making interesting pictures for a lesson hook. It also helps improve ideas; teachers can give AI a basic lesson plan and ask it to make it better using the five stages. The best lesson plans we see are when teachers use AI in one of these two ways.

3. Providing Policy Help

Our third use of AI is as a chatbot that teachers can use to find information about our school rules. We have detailed rules about every part of our teaching philosophy. It's a huge task to expect teachers to read every single word. Instead, we put our rules into our AI and offer a chatbot on our website and in our online school environment. This lets teachers ask specific questions and get personalized advice. For example, a teacher might have a question about student behavior and want to know how to handle it, or ask about safety for an upcoming trip. Building a strong school culture from the beginning is a tough job that needs ongoing talks between staff and leaders. In this way, AI is a very valuable tool.

I believe that human teachers will always be the ones teaching in elementary and high schools. However, AI has an important role in finding, training, and supporting teachers in what I believe is the most important job in society. Right now, AI can give a lot of help to teachers, allowing them to teach better lessons in schools that have supportive cultures.

Ben Toettcher

Director