Teachers Shouldn't Have To Learn AI While Struggling To Keep Up

This week,(CBC/Radio-Canada) published what 4,000 Alberta teachers are facing: classes with multiple languages, students who need restraint, teachers creating five versions of every assignment using ChatGPT and Google Translate (CBC News).

"Teaching happens in the gaps between emergencies," one first-year teacher wrote (CBC News).

Three in ten are trying to leave the teaching profession (CBC News).

These are teachers who entered the profession to make a difference in students' lives. No one goes into teaching expecting to spend their career in survival mode or planning their exit within the first few years.

What caught my attention: teachers are already using AI to survive these complex conditions. But they learned it through necessity, not necessarily preparation.

A few weeks ago,I wrote about the gap between teacher preparation and classroom reality. I think AI is part of that gap but not in the way we usually frame it.

I think the question we need to ask is deeper than, "should we add an AI module to our teacher prep programs?"

If AI is fundamentally changing what it means to plan, differentiate, and manage cognitive load, that's significant. If it's reshaping what's possible in a classroom and what teaching demands, then as my colleague Jason Shulha, PhD proposed, AI is a curriculum question. And that's a question for teacher education itself.

We need to prepare new teachers who can walk into complex classrooms with both the pedagogical judgment to teach well and the AI literacy to leverage tools that reduce cognitive load without replacing professional thinking.

This is new territory for all of us. Teachers are committed to helping students learn. Why else are they creating five versions of assignments and using whatever tools they can find to help? Some Faculties of Education are beginning to integrate AI into their programs, but like the rest of us, they're all still figuring out what this looks like in practice. This is especially true when it comes to supporting that commitment with the practical tools and judgment teachers need for real classrooms.

And here's the thing: Faculties of Education shouldn't be expected to have all the answers internally.

The expertise needed to prepare teachers for AI-enabled teaching sits across different spaces. These spaces should include K-12 educators, researchers studying AI in education, organizations building pedagogically-sound tools, and most importantly, the teachers who are already navigating this reality.

So who's at the planning table? When we're designing teacher preparation for an AI era, are we bringing together the right mix of voices—not just academics, but practitioners, innovators, and the early-career teachers who can tell us what they actually needed when they walked into their first classroom?

What if we could help new teachers develop AI fluency not as a separate competency, but as part of how they learn to plan, differentiate, and make instructional decisions from the beginning? For colleagues in teacher education: what are you exploring? Where do you see the most potential—or the biggest challenges?"

Reference: CBC/Radio Canada [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/classroom-complexity-teacher-voices-9.7099882]