Empowering Teachers with AI: The Future of Learner-Centred Education

Deepanshu Arora, Co-founder and CEO, Toddle

3 min read

October 12, 2023

Our shared vision for education

Speak to any forward-thinking educator about how we should be teaching our children and a few recurring themes emerge. We all envision a world where students have the opportunity to construct their own meaning by asking questions, testing theories, deriving insights, and experiencing failure. We all want our students out in the real world, engaging with local communities and working on problems that matter.

We want an education that is deeply personalised, where skills and competencies are prioritised over facts – an education that celebrates our shared humanity.

But, these ideas are not new. They echo the philosophies of early thinkers, like Piaget’s constructivism, Vygostky’s social-cultural theory and Dewey’s and Freire’s ideas of critical pedagogy and schools as institutions of social reform. If we have had such widespread consensus on what teaching & learning should look like, why has progress seemed so elusive? Why do most classrooms around the world still mirror those of the last century?

The answer, simply put, is that it’s very hard. This transformation demands an immense investment from our teachers whose workload is already staggering.

A recent McKinsey study highlighted that teachers work more than 50 hours a week, spending more than half their time on preparation, evaluation, and administrative duties, instead of direct face-time with students.

For our ideals of education to become a reality, we need to empower our teachers with time, resources, and the right kind of professional development opportunities.

Generative AI – a step closer to learner-centred education

Recent advancements in generative AI hold the key to realising our century-old vision of education in classrooms around the world. AI has the potential to transform every part of the teaching & learning process, and the most powerful application of AI in education will be in enhancing teacher capabilities.

It brings the promise of liberating teachers from non-core tasks allowing them to focus on their true passion – teaching. AI, if used in the right way, can usher in a new era of personalised, relevant, and experiential learning.

Our work with AI

At Toddle, we have always been ‘Teachers First’ in our approach. We started building Toddle as a passion project in our school with the belief that in order to facilitate progressive, future-ready learning, teachers need the right tools; after all, the tools we use shape our practice. What started as a passion project in a school has now evolved into a platform loved by 60,000+ educators at 1,500+ leading schools around the world.

With Toddle AI, we’re taking a giant leap forward in our mission of supporting educators in delivering future-ready education.

Our goal is to provide each teacher with a personal teaching assistant possessing near-magical abilities.

Toddle AI will not only help teachers reclaim their time but also help them elevate their practice so they can provide each child the personalised learning experience they need and deserve.

As part of Toddle AI’s first release, we announced three big AI-powered features:

Lesson Planning
Progress Reports
Writing Assistant

And this is just the beginning; we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible with this technology. Over the next few months, we will be releasing several other AI-powered features – all designed with a focus on helping teachers do better work, faster.

What makes Toddle AI particularly powerful is that we are building it as a core capability of our platform; it’s not another product, but the platform itself. AI is being deeply integrated into the Toddle ecosystem and will enhance everything a teacher does – from curriculum planning and assessments to progress reports, family communication, and data analytics. I believe this will empower teachers to reshape their practices from the ground up and enable them to spend more time with their students – arguably, the core pursuit of our craft, and the reason many of us got into teaching in the first place.

Where we go from here

The age of AI will reshape how we teach, what we teach, as well as our roles as educators and students. Much like the internet and smartphones, we’re at a transformational frontier. A frontier that is exciting and fascinating. And a bit scary.

If you’ve looked at AI and wondered, “What does this mean for me?”, you’re not alone. If you look to our past, teaching has always evolved with change. Whether it was the rise of the internet or Covid-19, thoughtful teaching has always thrived.

Teachers are resilient heroes who adapt to constant change – new students, new curricula, new technology, new schools, and new and hybrid learning environments. With each fundamental shift, we evolve, we learn, and still – we teach. With AI, things will change, and I believe they will change for the better.

I invite you to put on your teacher hats and look at AI with an inquiry mindset. Let us guide this technology, rather than letting it guide us. Be curious, ask questions, solve problems, experiment with new ideas, and keep your students at the core of everything you do.

Let us guide this technology, rather than letting it guide us. Be curious, ask questions, solve problems, experiment with new ideas, and keep your students at the core of everything you do.

If you’re interested in learning more about Toddle AI, please fill up this waitlist form and we will get in touch with you.

Deepanshu Arora

Deepanshu is the Co-founder and CEO of Toddle. An engineer by background and an educator by passion, he believes that technology in education has only one role to play - that of making teachers’ lives easier by helping them do better what they do best. Deepanshu also leads Toddler’s Den, a network of Reggio-inspired preschools in India. Prior to this, he worked with McKinsey & Company and studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Disclaimer : The ideas and resources presented in this blog have been developed independently from and are not endorsed by the International Baccalaureate (IB)

AI: The next chapter in teaching & learning

Our shared vision for education

Generative AI – a step closer to learner-centred education

Our work with AI

Where we go from here

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