The teacher of tomorrow will be neither human nor machine
It was the game that forced mankind to question its place in the world. When IBM’s chess playing computer Deep Blue triumphed over reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov back in 1997, the human race held its breath. Artificial Intelligence had arrived and the race against the machines was over.
Except, the story did not end there.
What happened next is important to all of us working to advance society through technology and innovation. And now that AI has Education in its sights, there are powerful, and ultimately optimistic, lessons for the EdTech community as it ponders the role of teachers in the future (the same may well be true of other professions but I’ll leave that judgement to you).
As documented in The Second Machine Age, shortly after Kasparov’s defeat the chess community organised freestyle tournaments, with teams composed of both human chess players and computers. By now it was clear that through sheer computational power, even a standard chess machine would obliterate the best human players. What surprised everyone was that the best teams were not those with the most powerful computers. Nor did they have world-beating grandmasters.
In fact, the first winning team comprised a pair of amateur chess players who used three basic computers. That’s right: amateur players and basic computers. How so? According to Kasparov himself, it was their understanding of chess as a process that set the pair apart:
Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
The amateurs prevailed because they expertly fused human judgement with technological prowess to achieve the best combined performance. It’s a simple example but one with profound implications for EdTech.
Intelligent tutors are on the rise, automating the delivery of learning tasks and adapting to each student’s pace of learning. Proponents herald them as the liberating force that Education has been crying out for. And yet there is a growing suspicion amongst large pockets of educators that these tools pose an existential threat to teachers.
So which camp to root for? Neither, actually. On the one hand, complete deference to technology is seldom wise.
Any approach to teaching that rests solely on the data-driven choices of a tutoring algorithm is already limited by the absence of human judgement.
The choices we make around students’ learning — such as which lesson they should cover next and how to explain a concept — are too delicate and nuanced to leave in the hands of an algorithm. If the goal is personalisation then technology alone is not sufficient to meet each student’s highly selective needs. Lofty promises of mind-reading Robo Tutors only betray the complexity of learning and teaching.
At the other extreme, teachers who are unwilling to engage with technology will inevitably be replaced by it. Even in their primitive present-day form, intelligent tutors can do much to enrich instruction. They can capture students’ foundational knowledge and skills and offer a level of targeted support that even the best-willed teacher will struggle to sustain. This will only improve as technology evolves to better connect with each student’s learning needs, and even their emotions and preferences.
Ignoring the value of intelligent tutors invites a competition that teachers may be ahead in right now, but will almost certainly lose in the long run.
And so it goes that the relationship between man and machine has long been fraught with tension (Hollywood’s apocalyptic depictions have hardly helped). Fortunately, man vs machine is a false dichotomy and the legacy of Deep Blue is that it gives us an optimistic view of what happens when humans stop racing against machines and instead race with them.
Intelligent tutors come into their own as a resource for helping teachers deepen their classroom dynamics. They come equipped with real-time reports, offering targeted insights on students’ progress. Armed with these insights, teachers can go forth and flip their classroom, blend their learning environments and differentiate their instruction in ways never before conceived.
The promises of personalised learning may finally be delivered but Education is not blessed with silver-bullet fixes. The very best teachers will be those who strive to combine data-driven tools with human judgement.
The teacher of tomorrow will embrace the potential of technology and deploy it in servitude of their instructional goals. There is nothing more human than that.
Originally posted on my personal blog, www.fjmubeen.com
