The best teachers can quickly assess, motivate, and form deep relationships with their students. … [+] What will it take for AI instructors to match them?getty
In the last few years, AI tools have taken on an increasingly diverse set of educational roles, from teaching assistants to study buddies to administrative support. While AI’s growing presence in classrooms is beyond debate, a more profound question remains: Can AI match the best teachers in providing the highest-caliber education—and if not, what is standing in the way?
I turned to Thomas Howell, the founder and CEO of Forum Education, New York City’s leading private tutoring company, to explore what these challenges might be. Forum Education provides best-in-class support to students from elementary school through Law and Medical School. Only 2% of applicants are accepted as tutors, and top instructors can earn $1 million per year.
The Best Teachers Quickly Identify Student Challenges
The hallmark of a good instructor is the ability to identify a student’s source of confusion quickly. Anyone who has taught a mathematics course has encountered a student struggling with a concept and being confused to the point where they cannot articulate a question. In such situations, the best diagnostic tool is not dialogue but observation. By observing how a student starts and stops while working through an exercise, an expert instructor will often immediately pinpoint the issue and begin to address it.
This is just one example of a wide range of nonverbal behavioral signals that the best tutors intuitively recognize. Others include noticing when a student is ready to engage in productive learning versus when they are merely going through the motions to please their parents or when a student finds a particular aspect of a problem interesting while the broader context in which it is being learned is not. The best instructors are attuned to these distinctions and seamlessly adapt to accommodate them.
This is also why traditional assessments become superfluous in one-on-one instruction. A skilled instructor observes a student’s real-time thinking process in a one-on-one context, eliminating much of the guesswork that standardized tests or written assessments are designed to uncover. While the AI can parse text or spoken queries, it remains a struggle to interpret subtle cues like hesitation, tone, or body language—signals an expert human tutor relies on to pinpoint confusion.
The Best Teachers Excel At Motivating Students
Beyond identifying confusion, human tutors excel at another essential aspect of learning: motivation. Motivation is a key component of any instructional project, and an expert instructor needs to inspire her students so that, given the choice between doing the work and doing something with higher short-term appeal, the student chooses to do the work. This often involves fostering in the student the desire to succeed in order to impress the teacher. Any good coach or teacher naturally takes pride in the success of their students, and good students want to show their teachers how well they have done. But there is a big difference between getting praise from your teacher and getting praise from an AI.
How likely is this to happen with AIs? While AI-based gamification—think Tamagotchis or fitness trackers—can prompt certain behaviors, this type of extrinsic motivation differs from the genuine desire to impress a mentor or coach who cares about your success and with whom you have an emotional connection. While a leaderboard may motivate, the motivation is not driven by a desire to impress the app or the leaderboard itself, but by the people, one knows who are paying attention to the leaderboard.
The Best Teachers Are Fundamentally Relational
The reason the machine instructors fall short compared to the best humans is that education is fundamentally relational. When developing online schools in the 2000s, I often emphasized the importance of preserving natural human interaction over flashy technology, with the exhortation that it was the “schoolness” that was essential, not the “onlineness.” While the technology was necessary since the students were scattered around the world, it wasn’t enough to create an online school where students would want to be. One could easily imagine a student saying, “My online high school is amazing. The teachers are great; the other students are super interesting, and I love spending time with them. The system might crash every once in a while, but overall, this school is amazing.” It is much harder to imagine someone saying, “The teachers are ok, maybe not as good as my old school, and the other students are sort of dull, but the immersive video conferencing technology is so amazing; this is the best school ever.”
The Best Teachers Cultivate Intellectual Effort
Against this backdrop, Howell suggests the most significant risk AI poses is not displacing teachers but eroding genuine intellectual effort. “The more AI replaces human work,” he warns, “the less we learn. AI breaks new ground in automation, which may perpetuate the notion that humans can be eliminated from the learning loop altogether.”
The question we must confront is, why are we studying anything? Is it to gain specific knowledge, or is it to develop general skills and build intellectual muscle? If the latter, then if AI does the heavy lifting, students may lose the very practice that cultivates analytical skills. It may be that the presence of AI necessitates an evolution of the curriculum. Still, ultimately, there will remain a proper sequence of exercises to be done to develop the intellect. This is the student’s job; the instructor’s role is to motivate, chastise, celebrate, and optimize.
The Best Teachers Have A Theory Of Mind
Ultimately, what is essential for an expert instructor is a theory of mind. Unless an instructor understands that students possess their own thoughts, beliefs, desires, and emotions—and, more importantly, can discern what those are for each individual student—the instructor will not be able to perform at the highest level. The expertise required is not just in the subject matter but also in understanding the students themselves. This insight cannot be extracted from language, nor does it stem from a semantic model of the subject. Until AI can truly adopt a theory of mind—understanding and responding to students’ individual beliefs, motivations, and emotions—it will remain a powerful tool but not a complete solution. Top-shelf education demands the human touch. The optimal path will remain to combine AI’s efficiency with the empathetic, relational power of the best teachers.
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