In the year 2002, I had 29 struggling readers in my special education classroom—a mix of third, fourth and fifth graders, of whom more than half were English language learners.
I was expected to assess each of them at least four times during the school year, which included listening to them read aloud, marking their reading errors and tracking how many words they could read correctly per minute. I also had to analyze the root cause of their errors and create individual intervention plans based on my analyses.
How do you achieve a consistent reading assessment experience for a classroom of 29 students without a second person to help you? How do you mitigate absences and frequent classroom interruptions? It’s impossible to do, yet we still ask our teachers to complete these tasks daily.
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While it didn’t exist when I needed it 22 years ago, I believe artificial intelligence technology can provide today’s teachers with critically needed support. With it, teachers can more easily assess student reading and get actionable data that allows them to personalize reading practice for students. Today, speech recognition technology automates many of the tasks I was asked to complete manually more than two decades ago.
So why aren’t we embracing AI?
Unfortunately, when educators and administrators hear the term “artificial intelligence,” they often conflate it with ChatGPT, cheating and the threat of technology as a teacher replacement. To empower educators, we need to understand the benefits of AI and seek to change the narrative that surrounds it.
AI isn’t a scary unknown. Educators are already using artificial intelligence in various ways, such as to help write lesson plans, compose letters to parents and organize professional learning activities. By expanding the use of AI in the classroom to automate repetitive tasks, educators can consistently and accurately understand the needs of individual students and provide them with personalized micro-interventions to get them back on track.
While some learning tools on the market today analyze student data, offer basic insights and suggest interventions, AI-powered products can deliver appropriate interventions when students need them. One such solution is the AI-powered Reading Assistant recently launched by EPS Learning. It can listen to and assess oral reading, detect the cause of a reading errors and provide immediate feedback to support the student in the moment.
For example, if a student is struggling to recognize a specific spelling pattern related to word pronunciation, it delivers a micro-intervention to help the student decode the word. If the student is unfamiliar with a particular vocabulary word, the tutor might provide a definition or picture support. Each intervention is aligned precisely with the skills a student needs to master before progressing to more complex text.
I can only imagine how, over 20 years ago, a solution like this would have enabled me to spend more critical one-on-one time with the students who needed me most and how it would have amplified the impact I had as a teacher.
I can’t emphasize enough that artificial intelligence will never supplant a teacher’s role. A machine doesn’t know if a student interacted with a bully that day or comes from a home with food insecurity. AI should be used as a tool to give teachers the bandwidth to build a relationship with each child and make sound instructional decisions—which they can’t do if they’re pulling aside kids for one-to-one assessment and reading practice every day.
By demystifying artificial intelligence and helping educators understand how to leverage it effectively, we can increase the time teachers can spend with students and improve academic outcomes. The impact of this work extends beyond the classroom: today’s educators can play a vital role in helping this generation experience the value of AI when it’s used ethically to enhance learning and enrich our lives.
