Joshua Levenson is an Executive Headteacher in London, leading a highly successful primary school celebrated for its exceptional performance and strong community ethos. He supports leadership development and school improvement across London, mentors new headteachers, and collaborates with universities on teacher training. Passionate about global citizenship and inclusive education, Joshua integrates innovative strategies to enhance engagement and learning behaviour. As an educational consultant and school inspector, he is committed to fostering excellence and values-driven leadership in schools.
We are sitting in an AI world. The dawn isn’t coming, it is all around. Some of you will already using it to make your lives – personal, professional, social – easier and better. Some will be looking closely at everything you come across now to see if you can spot whether it is an AI image, an email generated by a programme or an essay written by great prompts and not the student themselves. In the education world, there seems to be a mixture of innovators who are actually shaping how we use it to improve what we do and another camp of salespeople who are rubbing their hands at the riches that could be made from the newest and best ‘snake oil’ yet. There will be the early adopters and the ‘sit tight’ crew. Back in the early dot.com days, I remember my maths teacher being very sceptical of the internet. They described it as ‘updated teletext’. There definitely wasn’t a rush to teach that generation of students to use the new technology of the day to great effect, yet three decades later we have teamed our other skills with new innovations to be as efficient as we can. Or at least some of us have and those same people will be looking to be even more efficient.
This is definitely not the time to be waiting for the answers on how we as educators, as well as our students, and our institutions, are embracing what is already in our hands or within touching distance. When there was mention of coding in the curriculum, there was a clamour to create a specific Coding curriculum. By the time the curriculums had actually been written, the focus had shifted to something else. This shows firstly that we were far too late in our actions, but also that whenever we are looking at how we are going to cater to emerging areas, the focus instead should not just be on teaching to the latest trend, but instead teaching transferable skills.
Daisy Christodolou says that when thesauruses came out, it didn’t spell the end of actually needing to know how to select the correct vocabulary for what we are trying to say. This requires us having an understanding of the meanings of words, so that we don’t say ‘she is congenial at playing football’ instead of saying ‘excellent’ when we are looking for a better word than ‘good’. Similarly, the calculator didn’t spell the end to us actually teaching maths, although the device will give us the answer to whatever calculation we are trying to work out. Preparing students to use new tools effectively, so they aren’t stuck in an infinite loop, will be some of the best work educators do.
As well as thinking about how we can prepare our students, we should also look really closely at our settings and institutions. If we are just using AI models to generate an answer to satisfy a task, then we really need to be asking ourselves if the task itself is a meaningful and necessary task? Yes AI models can make our tasks easier, but if for example we are using generated text to fill a report card about a child, as opposed to using the information that we actually know about that child, then is the document itself fit for purpose or could we just look at making the report card more refined so it allows educators to share what they actually know, in a less time consuming way. Similarly with meetings that we as leaders are conducting with staff, if we can ask an AI model to provide a template, a set of questions, a set of responses and a follow up document, then surely not all of that meeting and process is crucial. Some of it will be though, and that is the bit that we should be reviewing and keeping, as opposed to just keeping the same processes that we have always used and simply finding a way to shortcut it and make it quicker. The guiding light that I have in mind for this is the notion of ‘do less, do it better.’ Believing that ‘less is more’ really can be life changing, but only if we are holding on to the right elements!
What we need to do next as educators is think about how we teach our students to be able to consider, review, reflect, be critical and adjust so that they are able to make full use of this technology and all of the other technologies and innovations that will follow this. The one pervading skill for me is ‘curiosity’. Every time I use an AI model to ‘help’ me, I am constantly thinking about how to make the response even better. ‘What if I ask this?’, ‘Rewrite the first part and include this.’ Always tweaking. Always using what I think I know to inform what a tool is giving me. Fostering curiosity in our students is key, “we need more young people to question the answers, as opposed to answer the questions”. However, we have to put this alongside the knowledge and skills elements so that they can make the best use of whatever is ahead. The future is still to come; we have not reached the end. We all need to ready to embrace what is ahead.