A profound question is explored in a Forbes article: Can AI match the best teachers in providing the highest-caliber education—and if not, why?
Thomas Howell, the founder and CEO of Forum Education, New York City’s leading private tutoring company, explores three keys.
1) The best teachers quickly identify student challenges
A good instructor can identify a student’s source of confusion quickly. In a mathematics course where a student is struggling with a concept and confused so much they cannot articulate a question, the best diagnostic tool is observation. Observe how a student starts and stops while working through an exercise and an expert instructor will often immediately pinpoint the issue and address it.
The best tutors intuitively recognize a wide range of nonverbal behavioral signals. Others include noticing when a student is ready to engage in productive learning versus when they are merely going through the motions, or when a student finds a particular aspect of a problem interesting while the broader context of what is being learned is not of interest.
A skilled instructor observes a student’s real-time thinking process in a one-on-one context, eliminating much of the guesswork that standardized tests or written assessments are designed to uncover. AI can parse text or spoken queries, but struggles to interpret subtle cues like hesitation, tone, or body language. These are signals an expert human tutor relies on to pinpoint confusion.
2) The best teachers excel at motivating students
Human tutors excel at motivation. An expert instructor needs to inspire her students so that, given the choice between doing the work and doing something with higher short-term appeal, the student chooses to do the work. Any good coach or teacher naturally takes pride in the success of their students, and good students want to show their teachers how well they have done. There is a big difference between getting praise from your teacher and getting praise from an AI.
AI-based gamification—think Tamagotchis or fitness trackers—can prompt certain behaviors, this type of extrinsic motivation differs from the genuine desire to impress a mentor or coach who cares about your success and with whom you have an emotional connection
3) The best teachers are fundamentally relational
Machine instructors fall short of the best humans because education is fundamentally relational. It’s important to promote natural human interaction over flashy technology. One could easily imagine a student saying, “My online high school is amazing. The teachers are great; the other students are super interesting, and I love spending time with them.” It is much harder to imagine someone saying, “The teachers are ok, maybe not as good as my old school, and the other students are sort of dull, but the immersive video conferencing technology is so amazing; this is the best school ever.”
4) The best teachers cultivate intellectual effort
Howell suggests the most significant risk AI poses is not displacing teachers but eroding genuine intellectual effort. “The more AI replaces human work,” he warns, “the less we learn. AI breaks new ground in automation, which may perpetuate the notion that humans can be eliminated from the learning loop altogether.”
Ultimately, there remains a proper sequence of exercises to be done to develop the intellect. This is the student’s job; the instructor’s role is to motivate, chastise, celebrate, and optimize.
5) The best teachers have a theory of mind
It is essential for an expert instructor to have a theory of mind. Unless an instructor understands that students possess their own thoughts, beliefs, desires, and emotions—and can discern what those are for each individual student — the instructor will not be able to perform at the highest level. The expertise required is not just in the subject matter but also in understanding the students themselves. This insight cannot be extracted from language, nor does it stem from a semantic model of the subject. Until AI can truly understand and respond to students’ individual beliefs, motivations, and emotions—it will remain a powerful tool but not a complete solution. Best-in-class education demands the human touch. The optimal path will remain to combine AI’s efficiency with the empathetic, relational power of the best teachers.
Forbes
