Despite all its power and potential, AI isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for the challenges teachers and students face, especially as we recover from the pandemic. Teachers are and always will be the most crucial drivers of student success in the classroom.
Ultimately, the utility of AI in schools will depend on how comfortable teachers feel using it. Caution surrounding the use of AI is well-warranted; however, its presence in our daily lives is increasingly hard to ignore.
HMH recently released a study—Empowering Education with AI: The New Teaching Assistant—that describes the four different personas of teachers when using AI in the classroom. To understand the opportunities and obstacles that will shape the future of AI in the classroom, we must examine teachers’ perceptions, current usage, hopes, and fears about the emerging technology.
These four teacher profiles aim to represent the varied relationships teachers have with AI:
- Digital pioneers represent educators who are early adopters. They have fully embraced AI and are already finding ways to integrate it into their classrooms. They invest time outside of school to research and learn about the latest innovations, using trial and error to determine how AI can benefit teaching and learning. Digital pioneers can even guide other teachers on how AI could fit into their classroom routines.
- Aspiring users are eager to explore AI’s potential but are constrained by the lack of time, knowledge and guidance to effectively integrate into their classrooms. These obstacles hinder how much they can use AI in the classroom, despite their desire to innovate. While aspiring users might know how AI can benefit teaching and learning, the lack of sufficient preparation leaves them cautious about how AI could negatively affect the student experience.
- Pragmatic streamliners look to AI tools for their time-saving potential, readily using them to automate administrative tasks like grading or lesson planning. For these educators, the benefits of AI are less related to its benefits for student learning and more tied to how it can make the administrative burden that accompanies the teaching experience less time-consuming. Pragmatic streamliners understand that while AI might not be a universal tool, it is useful for efficiency and convenience.
- Reluctant adopters approach AI with distrust, skepticism and a preference for traditional classroom methods. They believe AI could do more harm than good and negatively impact students’ empathy, creativity and critical thinking. Reluctant adopters are generally less tech-savvy than other educators and are hesitant to embrace newer technologies, especially AI.
Who’s leading a rapid increase?
While every educator might not singularly identify with one of these four profiles, being able to broadly assess how teachers approach AI can inform how we can support its use in the classroom, especially when we pair these insights with findings from our 10th annual Educator Confidence Report. For the first time, this year’s report included a K–12 AI Confidence Index examining educators’ attitudes towards and relationship with AI. The report finds that their use of generative AI increased 5x in just one year.
We can imagine digital pioneers and pragmatic streamliners leading this rapid increase, encouraged by how much it frees them up to focus on more important aspects of the classroom experience. Nearly three in four teachers who use AI say it saves them time, which helps fulfill their primary desire for “a more balanced workload.”
FETC 2025: How to grow when things don’t go our way
We could do more to ease the countless demands on teachers’ time and attention. Instead of AI being yet another tool in the fragmented universe of edtech resources, it should be integrated into trusted platforms and established workflows to simplify teachers’ lives. Better yet, a one-stop-shop solution that serves as a universal interface with essential tools and resources, including AI, would prevent it from becoming an additional burden.
Perhaps most importantly, over half of educators who don’t currently use AI say they “are concerned about the lack of guidance around generative AI.”
Providing ongoing, comprehensive professional development around AI is one of the most effective ways to better equip educators to seize the opportunities this emerging technology offers, regardless of how they already feel about it.
We must heed the concerns of the reluctant adopters whose apprehension about AI is often founded on hard-won experiences of how technology affects the classroom environment. Additionally, it is important to understand the time and resource constraints of aspiring users who see the benefits, but need help implementing AI within the classroom.
Usage guidelines and professional development that address this unease and constraints educators may have are not just beneficial for educators who haven’t fully embraced AI; they are essential for protecting the privacy and safety of students.
Prioritizing guidance and guardrails
The overwhelming majority of educators believe that AI creates the need for professional development that supports classroom integration, so districts and schools should prioritize professional development and establish clear policies for implementing the technology. It’s also imperative the federal government continues work that helps mitigate the risks AI poses by providing recommendations like those included in the U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology’s recently released AI toolkit.
Prioritizing guidance and guardrails around AI’s use is the only way we can truly maximize its potential in education while also protecting the well-being of teachers and the safety, privacy and success of students. While new technology easily captures the public imagination, teachers and students deserve to be our main focus.
