I am converting some of my long academic articles into short blog posts using AI. Here is the first one.
Since ChatGPT appeared in late 2022, artificial intelligence has swept through education. Conferences, workshops, books, webinars, and professional development sessions now promise to show teachers how to use AI to create lesson plans, generate assessments, personalize instruction, provide feedback, and save time.
All of this may be useful. But it misses a much bigger question:
What if the real problem is not how schools use AI, but whether schools themselves are willing to change?
Simply adding AI to traditional classrooms will not transform education. If students continue to study the same prescribed curriculum, sit in the same age-based classes, complete the same assignments, and work toward the same standardized outcomes, AI becomes another tool layered onto an old system. It may make certain activities faster or more efficient, but efficiency is not transformation.
This is hardly a new problem. Schools have repeatedly adopted new technologies while leaving their fundamental structures largely intact. Computers, the internet, interactive whiteboards, tablets, and online learning have all arrived with promises of transformation. Yet the underlying “grammar of schooling”—subjects, grades, classes, standardized curricula, teacher-led instruction, and standardized assessment—has proved remarkably resistant to change.
AI gives us another opportunity. But realizing its potential requires us to rethink several fundamental ideas about education.
The first is personalized learning.
Personalization should not simply mean allowing students to move at different speeds through the same curriculum or use different methods to reach identical outcomes. Genuine personalization begins with students themselves—their strengths, interests, experiences, personalities, and aspirations. Instead of education being personalized for students, students should increasingly personalize their own learning. AI can help them explore interests, acquire knowledge when needed, find resources, connect ideas, and develop areas of unique strength.
The second change concerns project-based learning.
Many school projects are still projects designed by adults. Teachers determine the problem, students complete the assigned process, and everyone often produces similar outcomes. In the age of AI, students can do something much more powerful: find problems worth solving and create solutions that matter to others.
That changes learning dramatically. Students must notice problems, ask questions, investigate possibilities, seek feedback, revise ideas, and produce something of value—a piece of music, a story, a device, a service, a scientific solution, or countless other possibilities. AI can become a partner throughout that process rather than simply a tool for completing assignments.
These changes also require us to reconsider the curriculum.
Instead of organizing virtually all learning around a prescribed set of subjects and standards, schools could create greater space for student-directed learning, problem finding, and problem solving. Some common learning will remain important—citizenship, literacy, numeracy, and other knowledge communities consider essential. But a substantial part of education could be personalized around what individual students want and are able to become exceptionally good at.
Pedagogy must change as well. Teachers do not have to remain primarily deliverers of content. With AI, digital resources, peers, and outside experts increasingly available, teachers can become mentors, coaches, advisers, and designers of learning environments.
Assessment should follow the same shift. If students pursue different strengths and create different kinds of value, standardized tests become increasingly inadequate. Assessment should document individual growth, problem finding, creativity, contribution, and the quality of students’ work over time.
Even the traditional practice of grouping students by age and placing them into permanent classes can be reconsidered. Students might instead come together temporarily around shared interests, problems, projects, or learning needs.
Of course, transforming an entire school overnight is neither easy nor necessary. One practical strategy is to create a “school within a school.” Willing teachers and students can begin experimenting with a fundamentally different model while remaining within the larger institution. Such protected spaces make significant change possible without requiring everyone to change simultaneously.
The arrival of AI therefore presents education with a choice.
We can use extraordinary new technology to make the old system slightly more efficient.
Or we can allow AI to help us ask much larger questions about what students should learn, how they should learn, what teachers should do, and ultimately what schools are for.
The greatest opportunity AI offers education may not be a better way to do what schools have always done.
It may be the opportunity to stop doing education the way we have always done it.
Based on the original article:
Zhao, Y. (2025, February 1). If schools don’t change, the potential of AI won’t be realized. Educational Leadership, 82(5). ASCD.
