Robot Manufacturers

Many fear the day that robots replace humans in the workforce, but what about the robots that are already there? For centuries, we have been programming students to comply, to become cogs in the machine. Maybe we've been manufacturing robots all along.

Think about this...

I think there are a lot of menial tasks that teachers can get caught up in that a computer could do just as well, if not better. Now, it's not a matter of if it will happen, but when. This is not something we should fear, but something we should embrace. Because when it happens, teachers can focus on refining and defining their craft.

Envision students getting instruction tailored to them by their own personal learning assistant. Equipped with AI, voice recognition, and object recognition, it will analyze student performance and adapt instruction based on the feedback/data it gathers every second of every day. This assistant will be able to do all of the procedural or computational tasks that a teacher can do, and it will be able to do them with more accuracy, proficiency, and without bias. Here's a few examples:

Reading: Running records will become a thing of the past. A machine equipped with voice technology will be able to listen to a student read a passage and calculate any decoding errors/mispronunciations a student makes. It will ask the student a set of comprehension questions to determine how well a student understood the reading passage. Using this data, it will determine reading fluency rate and a reading comprehension level. It will then provide specific, personalized instruction to that student. It could also have the ability to record via audio/video to review in the future.

Writing: Equipped with cameras to recognize objects, the assistant will take a snapshot of a student's writing. It will analyze that writing for errors in spelling, grammar, sentence structure, etc. It will determine misconceptions with pinpoint accuracy and provide spelling, phonics, language instruction based on the individual student's needs.

Math: Not only will the assistant be able to determine if a student got the answer correct or incorrect. It will determine why/how the student arrived at that answer. It will analyze misconceptions and provide instruction to correct those misconceptions.

Grading: There will be no need to collect grades because it will all be collected already. We will probably see report go from number/letter scores to a standards-based style. Along with the report card will be snapshots of student work for parents to see and understand how their child is currently performing in the classroom.

Standardized testing: This will become a thing of the past as well.  At any point in time, we will be able to compare student data with others in the classroom, district, state, nation, or other countries. This data won't come from one assessment that students take towards the end of the year. It will be collected constantly and daily, giving us a much more accurate picture of student performance than any standardized test ever could.

I have heard countless veteran teachers reminisce of teaching days long ago. "Teaching's not what it used to be," they'll say. If it's not already, in a decade or two, it will be completely unrecognizable to them. I think our role as educators will be significantly different and all the more important. We have the opportunity to be the ushers of a new wave of innovators and entrepreneurs the likes of which the world has never seen. Google has provided us access to all that we have ever wanted to know. Now we need teachers that can teach us what Google can't.