Like it or not, artificial intelligence is becoming a major tool in education.
Last week, the Ministry of Education launched guidance for UK schools and universities on how teachers can safely use generated AI.
This guidance suggests that AI can help reduce the time spent on administrative tasks such as writing.
Advocating AI as a workload savior is very in line with how companies use this technology. Their goal is efficiency. The idea is that when you fully phrase the input, AI can generate a polished, fully formed response in one attempt, without the need for back and forth interactions.
It's great for workplace productivity and could be great for teacher administrators too.
But I think we can do better in education.
A new way of thinking about AI
The suggestion that we use AI to draft letters to parents about lice outbreaks misses the real education possibilities of generation AI.
We need to move beyond thinking in terms of one-way communication – you tell the AI what to do, and it spits out a response – and then work towards two-way dialogue and train students to do the same thing.
Researching around how we learn supports this idea. In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom explained how one-on-one teaching is more effective than group teaching. Bloom's research highlights multiple reasons for this, but the key factor is the power of two-way communication. Effective learning is not just about receiving information, he suggested: it's a loop. Messages are sent, received, clarified and refined until they are fully understood.
Bloom called the discovery “a problem.” This is because most of the learning takes place through one-way communication. From physical books to Google searches and YouTube videos, most of the tools we use to retrieve information share the same issue. I will provide an answer, but please do not check your understanding.
Even in the classroom, providing the kind of personalized dialogue proposed by Bloom is difficult to help students learn best.
AI has the power to change this, but only if you change the way you use it.
We need to learn about the skills habits we have grown. Communication with an AI chatbot is not like using Google search. I don't like talking to Alexa or Siri.
We've been taught to ask the AI questions and then accept the answer or ridicul it when it doesn't live up to our expectations. But in 2025, AI chatbots don't give bad answers. They just give the unfinished one. Insufficient output is usually the result of leaving the conversation before it is complete.
It doesn't encourage engineer AI to give a neatly packaged answer. Instead, I try to do exactly what the name says to us: chat.
That means AI understands and analyzes my answers and adopts something like this:
- “This is what I understand. Am I correct?”
- “Ask me five questions that test my understanding. Then tell me where I went wrong.”
- “Listen to my argument and tell me where I am biased.”
Taking this approach, AI will stop being a static answer generator and become part of the feedback loop.
Not only do I want AI to make me more efficient, I also want to make it more effective. To do this, you need to act like a personal tutor, not like a search engine or productivity tool.
Does this approach make AI perfect and error-free? Of course it's not. But at school level work, it is very good and improves at an incredible speed.
The imperfections of AI make it even more important that teachers are involved in it in this way. If the use of generative AI is formed solely by business leaders and policy makers, they may not serve learners as much as possible.
As learning experts, teachers are great for finding bias, correcting errors, and guiding students about when and how to use AI. This is not just about protecting academic integrity. It's about ensuring that AI truly strengthens learning rather than simply making education more efficient.
The way to use AI in education is still in shape. Having others define their purpose risks becoming another tool for convenience.
However, in the hands of teachers, AI can be much more powerful. It could be a bridge to personalized and interactive learning for all students.
Education has always been shaped by people who understand learning the best: teachers. Educational AI must be an exception.
Jacques Dougal is a humanities teacher and business teacher at Gran Canary School in the UK.
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