Teacher burnout is a problem. In the past 12 years, 16 percent of teachers in the U.S. left their jobs each year and half of that cohort left education entirely, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. With the average quit rate across industries in the U.S. at just below 2 percent, this number is stark. “I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new when I say teachers quit physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted,” Eileen Yaeger, a middle school history and science teacher at Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, told Observer. Having to make an immense amount of decisions on any typical school day, teachers face a special kind of exhaustion: decision fatigue. If too many decisions—and, perhaps, too much work—are contributing factors to teacher burnout and attrition, could A.I. swoop in to help?
For Yaeger, who has been working in education for more than 20 years, it already is. Yaeger creates every lesson according to the Universal Design for Learning principles, which are based on a framework designed to elevate strengths and eliminate barriers for individual learners. “I use A.I. as a think partner to create inclusive lessons that cater to the diverse needs of my students by offering multiple means of representation, engagement and expression,” she said.
For example, when teaching students whose native languages are not English, Yaeger uses generative A.I. for translation into “several languages at once,” she said. She also uses the technology to adjust the text not by grade but by WIDA English Language Development (ELD) level, a framework for educating multi-lingual learners.
Jeff Stoltzfus teaches a course in media technology at Lancaster Catholic High School in Pennsylvania. Stoltzfus was a videographer and became a teacher during the pandemic. A self-proclaimed early adopter of new technology, he recognizes that not every teacher is going to get the same value out of A.I. “There’s definitely an awareness. All my colleagues, I would say, run the gamut. There are some that hate it, and there are some that find uses for it,” he told Observer.
Stoltzfus has used A.I. to create curriculums, which he has limited experience with. “Being more of a visually creative person, writing feels like work to me,” he said. “It takes me longer, and I’m just constantly pointing over my writing, so I don’t love it. [A.I.] was helpful, at least in getting me half of the way there, and then I could customize it.”
In Stoltzfus’ field, he grapples with whether there’s still value in teaching students how to use a real camera, like a DSLR with manual settings, when today’s smartphones can achieve similar photography quality. Stoltzfus approaches this problem with the help of A.I. He used Pi, an A.I. chatbot made by Inflection AI, to draft a lesson plan.
“It helped me create a lesson plan for a scavenger hunt, where students take the same photograph with a DSLR and with their phone, and then compare the results of the two to see the things that they’re able to do well with one and are challenged with the other, or vice versa,” Stoltzfus said.
Besides Pi, Stoltzfus also uses Google’s Notebook LM, which can turns documents into interactive podcasts.
However, A.I. is not at the place where it can grade students’ work, at least in Stoltzfus’ realm because art is largely subjective. “It’s my failing students that consume most of my extra hours,” he said, referring to how it requires extra work to communicate with and build plans for students who may need extra support. “I wouldn’t want that to be automated. That’s part of being empathetic.”
Stoltzfus still has a lot of work, but A.I. seems to take the edge off. For teachers like Yaeger who are able to trim hours off their work week, the difference is more substantial and potentially career-saving.
While teachers work in their own ways to improve their quality of teaching and life through tech, third-party companies are working on building out options for teachers, too. The online learning platform Coursera, for example, recently announced A.I.-powered capabilities through Coursera Coach, which allows educators to deliver interactive, personalized instruction. Other platforms, like TeachMateAI and MagicSchool, are designed specifically with teachers in mind.
“GenAI will make personalized, interactive learning possible at scale, while A.I. tools streamline administrative tasks,” Marni Baker Stein, chief content officer at Coursera, told Observer. “This frees teachers to focus on what they do best—connecting with students, inspiring growth, fostering creativity.”
One of the online courses Coursera offers for educators is “AI in Education: Leveraging ChatGPT for Teaching,” developed in collaboration with OpenAI and taught by Ethan Mollick, a Wharton School professor and the author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Its product, Coursera Coach, acts as a personal tutor powered by LLMs and trained specifically on the teacher’s course material, Stein said.
Coursera Coach is available in 24 languages and can help students master course concepts more effectively, test their skills and receive feedback in real time (even when the teacher is busy helping another student). One instructor uses the tool to facilitate one-on-one Socratic dialogues in remote learning sessions.
Students, too, are using A.I. at a high rate, with 48 percent saying they use ChatGPT at least weekly, according to 2024 research from the Walton Family Foundation. When it comes to teachers, Coursera’s in-house research shows nearly half of teachers use A.I. often, and 21 percent use it consistently.
Stoltzfus is a creative person and a teacher. For both of these categories, he said, “It’s not the end of the world. It’s the beginning of a new world.”
