How might we help teachers build more engaging, adaptive learning experiences, ensuring no student is left behind?
How might we help teachers build more engaging, adaptive learning experiences, ensuring no student is left behind?
Where teachers are using AI, it is often limited to automating routine tasks rather than as a transformative force in their teaching (Teacher Task Force, 2025). There is a narrow view of AI primarily as tools designed to automate or replace core teaching and learning functions (Holstein & Aleven, 2022; Cukurova, 2025). This is a critical challenge facing the educational community.
EdTech Hub’s AI Observatory is exploring how education systems can empower teachers through effective teacher–AI collaboration and hybrid intelligence systems that extend the abilities of human cognition.
This week, in Issue No. 21 of the #WaypointWednesday, we spotlight an emerging body of research and how countries are surfacing teachers’ visions of their future roles.
Early signals
Emerging research to enhance teacher-AI synergy
Harnessing the strengths of both AI systems and teachers in complementary ways could maximise AI’s benefits while mitigating its limitations (Hemmer et al., 2024). An emerging body of research is beginning to explore how such complementarity can be achieved in practice across different contexts.
- Kenya – Teacher-AI Collaboration: EdTech Hub researchers & partners evaluated teacher–AI collaboration in EIDU’s DPL tool in Kenya. A/B testing showed that when teachers could override system-suggested content, learners achieved higher digital scores. This result underscores the importance of further research to enhance teachers-AI synergy. (Sun et al., 2024)
- Europe – The Teacher-AI Complementarity (TAICo) Project: The TAICo Project will explore the role of AI in complementing teachers’ skills across various educational contexts, to understand how AI can support rather than replace the human element in teaching. (TAICo Project)
Surfacing teachers’ visions of their future roles
Speculative stories and perceptions provide a way to understand how teachers anticipate their evolving roles in the age of AI. Such narratives reveal teachers’ hopes, concerns, and expectations about collaboration with AI. (Gidiotis & Hrastinski, 2024)
- Brazil, Türkiye, Spain – AI Roundtable for Teacher Educators: Teacher educators imagined future “human-plus-AI” teaching practices where teachers and AI collaborate to enhance learning. In one story, Teacher freedom, a teacher controls all classroom technology by voice, staying mobile, attentive, and free from screens. (Peachey, N., British Council, 2025)
- China – Types of teacher-AI collaboration: A study involving focus group interviews with thirty Chinese teachers identified six anticipated models of Teacher–AI Collaboration (TAC). These were thematised as One Teach, One Observe; One Teach, One Assist; Co-teaching in Stations; Parallel Teaching in Online and Offline Classes; Differentiated Teaching; and Team Teaching. (Kim, 2024)
Reflections:
- Focusing on teacher–AI collaboration and hybrid intelligence (where synergistic human-AI systems extend the abilities of human cognition) addresses the risk of human cognitive atrophy (the decline or weakening of people’s mental abilities such as memory, problem-solving, critical thinking, or creativity) in teachers and learners. (Cukurova, 2025)
- While Teacher-AI collaboration can enhance learning experiences, there is still a need for preserving AI-free zones—spaces where students and teachers engage in thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration without algorithmic mediation. Much like digital detoxes, which are shown to enhance wellbeing, focus, and clarity, AI-free learning spaces can help individuals reconnect with what it means to be a human, critical, and creative thinker.
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We’d love to hear from you! What’s been shaping your thinking on AI? Drop your thoughts (and reading recommendations) in the comments. Explore more from EdTech Hub’s AI Observatory.
EdTech Hub’s AI Observatory is made possible with the support of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
