From ABCs to AI: How teachers’ roles are being rewritten

Do you picture a classroom as a lone teacher at the front and a sea of pupils taking notes? It’s time to update the mental image. 

The OECD’s latest education policy outlook report sets out how the role of teachers is changing fast – and why smart use of technology should elevate (not erode) the craft of teaching. 

Teacher shortages are a tough reality 

Across OECD countries, 47% of lower-secondary principals in 2022 reported that teacher shortages were hindering instruction – up from 29% in 2015. That’s a serious challenge for the structural stability of education systems. Many of those systems are planning ahead; but only two-thirds have teacher-shortage projections for 2025–2030 at primary and secondary level, and fewer than half have them for other levels. 

All of this means that demand for teachers is spiking, forecasting is patchy, and the margin for error is thin. 

AI needs to support teaching – it can’t operate as an autopilot 

AI won’t slot into education systems as a replacement for teachers; but it can offer valuable augmentation for what humans do best. 

In the near term, AI can take on the admin and repetitive prep that eats hours – drafting materials, providing quick formative feedback, and surfacing insights from learner data – so teachers can spend their energy on motivation, mentoring, and meaningful work with students. 

When we asked Dr. Lin Zhou (SVP and Chief Information Officer at The New School) what AI could do for education in an ideal world (one in which nothing ever goes wrong, he said: 

“In an ideal world, AI stands as a potent force for democratising education, empowering students with unparalleled access to resources and tools.” And importantly, “Through automation, AI liberates valuable cognitive resources, for more meaningful and intellectually stimulating pursuits.”

But that doesn’t happen by accident. Technology can only improve teaching if education systems build the right human infrastructure around it – skills, time, leadership, ethics, and evidence. For edtech builders and adopters, that means designing for the teacher, not around them. 

Tools should reduce workload without turning teachers into system administrators. Data features should help teachers make better judgements, not second-guess them. And professional development has to go beyond platform how-tos to cover the big issues: things like assessment, bias, and pedagogy.

The OECD’s practical roadmap to enhancing education with tech 

The report sets out a pragmatic way forward that addresses shortages while improving quality. 

These three levers stand out:

• Get more teachers into the workforce. This means entry paths need to widen, teachers should be supported if they decide to re-enter the profession after a break, and education systems should target the subjects and regions that are particularly hard to staff.
• Allocate teachers to areas of greatest need. Use smarter deployment, team-based roles, and mobility options to balance expertise across schools and programmes.
• Make teaching more attractive. Build career structures with progression and recognition and deliver competitive pay and targeted incentives. 

For tech professionals, each lever is a partnership opportunity. For example, alternative pathways into teaching can be paired with high-quality digital micro-credentials and mentoring platforms. Smarter allocation needs trustworthy data pipelines and privacy-preserving analytics. And to make teaching more attractive as a career, tech can give teachers tools that respect their time and creativity. 

Design with equity, access, and agency

Across tech and education, we have a collective responsibility to keep equity front and centre.

“AI promotes a culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration, breaking down silos between academic disciplines and facilitating holistic learning experiences,” Dr. Zhou pointed out. “Through AI-driven platforms, students from diverse backgrounds can engage in collaborative projects, drawing upon their unique perspectives and expertise to tackle complex challenges.” 

That’s a vision worth building towards – but it can only become a fair reality if access, accessibility, and agency are baked in from day one.

The point of edtech is to enable teaching, and teachers, to thrive. Change is accelerating, but in education the most important elements are human: curiosity, empathy, judgement, and the ability to connect learning to real lives. 

So we have to design AI to protect teachers’ time and give them space to lean into those qualities. 

Let’s co-design tech with educators. Let’s make sure we measure impact beyond engagement metrics, publish evidence, and prioritise tools that give time back. Because if we do that, then the future of tech-enabled learning looks less like a replacement plan — and more like a partnership.