What do teachers really think of AI in the classroom?

Artificial intelligence has swept into American schools, and more is sure to come.

This year, both Google and Microsoft—the two biggest companies at the forefront of the AI boom—announced major investments in AI training for teachers.

But what do teachers think of this transformation of their work?

Katie Davis, a University of Washington professor in the Information School and codirector of the Center for Digital Youth, studies how technology affects young people’s learning and development. Davis has also been teaching for over two decades—first as an elementary school teacher and now as a professor—so she’s acutely aware of how earlier technological revolutions in teaching have not always played out as hoped.

Davis and a UW-led team of researchers interviewed 22 teachers in Aurora Public Schools in Colorado—a district that’s investing heavily in AI through systems like Google’s Gemini and MagicSchool, an AI tool that helps teachers plan.

Overall, teachers were ambivalent about the technology. They liked that it could reduce workload, especially for rote tasks, but worried that it could erode the social aspects of teaching.

The team presented its research at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Barcelona.

Here, Davis talks about the study and how ostensibly democratizing technologies can widen disparities in schools:

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