Chat GPT’s Study Mode has, perhaps coincidentally, been released to the public whilst teachers in the Northern Hemisphere are away on holiday. If you haven’t used it yet, then you absolutely must have a go. It is genuinely impressive – and has already helped me with my childhood bête noir of re-arranging equations!! There are countless reviews out there about what it offers, but it does genuinely seem like a tool which, at the very least, will do significant damage to the already under threat personal tutoring market. Whilst existing personalised AI tutors have been with us for a while already, and the likes of Khamigo are probably big enough to weather the storm, a raft of smaller providers aimed at schools will now be feeling somewhat poleaxed that the big LLM boys have trained their guns on this space.

What does it mean for classroom teachers? Well, if it is a challenge to the tutoring market then that is one angle of threat to teachers’ incomes. Reportedly 43% of us (in the UK at least) have tutored at some point in our careers in order to supplement our term time salaries. Beyond that it continues to feel like a further small step towards the role of teachers shifting more to their ‘value add’ being in pastoral support and coaching. There are interesting school models cropping up, even in the UK, that tap into this idea – personalised lessons where students spend two hours with their personal AI tutor doing ‘knowledge implanting’ in the mornings – followed by ‘knowledge deployment’ via life skills enrichment activities with your ‘guide’ and classmates in the afternoons. We’ll look more at what this could mean for both public and private school models in future posts.

In the meantime, with this move, OpenAI have made a decent start on the defence that  LLMs cause ‘brain rot’ (if you haven’t been following this ‘critical thinking / cognitive offloading’ debate then don’t worry it isn’t likely to disappear for a while yet!!). The knowledge rich corner aren’t lying down around the value of teachers continuing to teach for knowledge (and it’s a decent argument), but I found this insight (from Leah Belsky – Head of Education at OpenA) that “7 out of 10 employers would rather hire someone with AI skills over someone who had up to 10 years of experience in a given function”, pretty powerful too. Indeed when 24 year olds with AI skills are being paid $100m a year it suggests that schools need to be doing more in the digital skills space!! And as we’ve been saying for a while, that actually means they need to be doing more in the explicit development of thinking space too. 

Whilst all this continues to play out, we can be pleased that we aren’t either interpreters or translators – top of Microsoft’s new list of jobs most at threat from AI. But if we don’t quite believe we can make it as computer scientists, then is it time for us teachers (7th most at risk out of 22 industry groups) to start training up as dredge operators?