How Teachers Are Really Using AI
and Why It’s Only Half the Story
When we talk about AI in education, the conversation often swings between extremes. From “robots will replace teachers” to “AI is just another passing fad.” But the reality, according to the latest OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2024), sits somewhere in between… and it’s revealing.
What the Data Says
TALIS 2024 captured the perspectives of roughly 300,000 teachers and their principals across more than 50 education systems worldwide. Each participating country sampled around 4,000 teachers from 200 schools per education level, covering primary (ISCED 1), lower secondary (ISCED 2), and upper secondary (ISCED 3) teachers.
This means TALIS provides a remarkably comprehensive snapshot spanning classroom teachers from early years through upper secondary education and offers one of the clearest pictures yet of how educators are encountering AI in practice.
TALIS 2024 shows that around one in three teachers across OECD countries have used AI tools in their teaching. The numbers vary dramatically: 75% of teachers in Singapore and the UAE report using AI, compared to fewer than 20% in France and Japan.
Among those who do use AI:
68% use it to learn about or summarise topics,
64% use it to generate lesson plans,
25% use it to analyse student data or participation, and
26% use it for grading or assessment.
Teachers see both promise and peril. About 40% agree that AI helps them support students individually, while seven in ten worry that AI enables plagiarism or cheating.
Perhaps most concerning: three in four teachers say they lack the skills or knowledge to teach effectively with AI, and half don’t believe AI should be used in teaching at all.
So, while headlines might suggest an AI revolution sweeping through classrooms, the reality is much more cautious with a blend of curiosity, experimentation, and apprehension.
The View from The AI Educator
In The AI Educator, I take a slightly different lens. I’ve never seen AI adoption as a binary of “use it or don’t.” Instead, I argue that what matters most is how we use it, and more importantly, the values guiding that use.
In Chapter 2, for instance, I describe teachers as knowledge designers, not content deliverers. The book frames AI as a thinking partner, as a collaborator that can amplify human judgment, not automate it.
The OECD findings highlight a troubling imbalance: AI is being used most often for efficiency tasks meaning it’s used for summarising content or generating lesson plans rather than pedagogical innovation. This suggests many teachers are still using AI to save time, not necessarily to transform learning.
That’s understandable. But if we stop there, we miss AI’s deeper potential: to help students become critical co-creators of knowledge, not passive consumers of machine output. As I write in Chapter 8, “AI is neither a miracle solution nor a looming threat, but a tool whose value depends on how thoughtfully it is woven into the fabric of education.”
Where We Go from Here
The TALIS data tells us teachers are cautiously stepping in but often without enough guidance or training. In contrast, The AI Educator calls for teachers to step up and lean in and take ownership of AI’s integration through ethical reflection, creative experimentation, and community dialogue.
We can’t just focus on using AI to make teaching easier; we need to focus on how it can make learning richer. That requires more than digital literacy. It requires pedagogical imagination.
As we move forward, the challenge is not simply to increase the number of teachers using AI, but to support them in using it with purpose including a grounding in trust, empathy, and human-centred design. Because in the end, as I argue throughout the book, AI may change how we teach, but it will never change why we teach.