#223 What do 10,000 teachers think about AI?

Craig Barton
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Episode details

Grainne Hallahan, formerly an English teacher, now runs the questions at Teacher Tapp — the app that surveys more than 10,000 teachers a day. She came on with five AI-related findings from the archive, on cheating, lesson planning, attendance targets, and whole-school policies, plus three favourite Teacher Tapp findings to finish.

Talking points

  1. Grainne Hallahan tells the story of Teacher Tapp, the app that surveys more than 10,000 teachers a day and now feeds into government policy reviews.
  2. 58% of secondary teachers have suspected a student of using AI when told not to, but only 13% applied a sanction — most just had a quick word and moved on.
  3. I shared the story of the Year 10 lads who used ChatGPT on their maths homework and coordinated their wrong answers to avoid suspicion.
  4. We agreed the only real fix for AI-cheating is to stop judging kids on what they produce outside the classroom and start assessing them on short, paper-based in-class quizzes instead.
  5. 20% of teachers have used AI to plan a lesson this year, up from 14% — and the teachers most likely to do it are the least experienced or teaching outside their specialism.
  6. Grainne talked me out of my position that AI could plug the gap for new teachers without a good mentor, arguing that the answer to a mentor shortage is more mentors, not more AI.
  7. The DfE has been rolling out AI-generated attendance targets, and 42% of primary leaders and 32% of secondary leaders said the targets were “not important at all.”
  8. 41% of secondary senior leaders say their school has an AI policy, but most teachers do not know it exists — so the policy may as well not be there.
  9. Girls’ football in primary has gone from 37% to 51% of schools in three years, with schools that run a girls’ team almost doubling the lunchtime participation rate.
  10. Grainne’s favourite ever Teacher Tapp finding: the teachers most looking forward to going back in September are the ones who think they have improved over the last year — and a good line manager pointing that out costs nothing.

Video:

Links from Grainne:

  1. Teacher Tapp if you are a teacher in England and not already on it.

New stuff I have been working on:

  1. My Tips for Teachers Guides to… series
  2. My updated mrbartonmnaths website

My usual plugs

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