AI’s Learning Potential

There’s so much negativity around artificial intelligence and its impact on the world. I found some evidence last week that AI might not be all bad.

EducationWeek published an article titled “How Chatbots Can Help Train Teachers.” (10/20/25) In the article it opens with a story of a Albuquerque, New Mexico education technology resource teacher that is responsible for training 300-plus new teachers on how to be an effective classroom instructor. So, to help her, the resource teacher uses a chatbot to answer many questions for new teachers and their mentors about topics like classroom management, lesson planning, and differentiating instruction.

Christina Nunez, the Albuquerque resource teacher, created the bot as part of a program for innovative educators at Google, started by surveying new teachers on their greatest needs.

“Nunez shared this example of a teacher interacting with the bot:

Teacher: ‘Hey, I have a group of boys who continue to get up during class and when I tell them to sit down, they just laugh.’

Chatbot: ‘Dealing with students who are not following instructions can be challenging but there are some strategies you can use to address this behavior effectively.’

The bot went on to suggest that the teacher establish clear expectations, use positive reinforcement, and implement restorative practices, with additional information about all those methods.”

…

“The chatbot can’t replace a real-life mentor, Nunez emphasized. But teachers and mentors appear to find it useful. Albuquerque’s bot has been used nearly 5,000 times since its debut last winter, Nunez said.”

Imagine a learning organization that rewarded top-performing adult learning leaders in the areas of reading, writing, and problem-solving (including problem-solving in mathematics, science, and the social sciences) with a salary of $100,000-$150,000 a year. Our traditional public school system can’t do this since their model is to assign one teacher to 25 students on the elementary level and 150 to 180 students on the secondary level. The traditional system must hire the right number of teachers to match their employment model, so teacher salaries are always lower than desired. And some of those teachers hired within that model just aren’t very good.

But what if a learning organization only hired the best adult learning leaders and supported them and their young learners with a chatbot? Could one adult learning leader support the learning of 100 to 150 young learners with the support of AI? We are probably a ways away from finding out the answer to that question, but it’s an interesting one, nonetheless.

The 74 posted an article titled “New Data Shows More Districts Are Adopting AI but Still Need a Coherent Strategy.” (11/12/25) The article focuses on findings from The Center on Reinventing Public Education regarding the number of school districts using AI and, more importantly, how they are using it.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has been tracking the evolution of how districts and schools approach generative artificial intelligence since 2023. CRPE released their 2025 findings last week.

“Since last year, more districts have been publicly sharing information about their AI strategies, and these are increasingly sophisticated and varied. While only a few are using AI to fulling rethink instruction or tackle longstanding challenges, the total number of districts in our database of early adopters has nearly doubled in a year, from 40 to 79, with the most growth happening in urban areas.”

Amongst CRPE’s other findings, the report emphasized that:

More early adopters, including more urban districts, are piloting systemwide AI strategies

Early adopters are also focusing more on students

Reimaginers continue to push the edge of what’s possible

And, districts must advance coherent AI strategies for teaching and learning

This last one is important. So many times, within our traditional public school system, innovation is reserved for adults, while the young learners receive the same instructional strategies present in our classrooms over the past 50 years. In order to save our public schools as we know them and slow the decreased enrollment we’ve seen in our K-12 districts over the past five years, today’s leaders would be wise to “put the pedal on the gas” when it comes to embracing and implementing artificial intelligence strategies when it comes to teaching and learning.

Indeed, artificial intelligence and the traditional system’s ability to understand it and use it might be the saving grace for what we currently know to be our public schools.

Til tomorrow. SVB