Teachers in the Age of AI: Why Fear is the Real Threat

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t going anywhere. In fact, its rapid uptake across industries has made it one of the most disruptive forces in recent history. Education is no exception. Walk into staffrooms today and you’ll hear a familiar story: schools responding to AI not by embracing it, but by retreating. Some are returning to textbooks, doubling down on end-of-semester exams, or scrapping assignments altogether.

Why? Is it Fear?

Fear that AI will undermine authentic student work? Fear that traditional tasks are now meaningless? Fear that teachers will lose control?

But here’s the reality: hiding from AI doesn’t make it disappear. If we continue to fear it rather than embrace it and learn with it, we risk creating the very future we dread. One where AI takes over the spaces we’ve vacated, and teachers risk becoming redundant.

This cannot happen. Teachers are not replaceable. But to secure our relevance, we must reimagine our role.

The Fear Response in Education

History shows us that new technologies in education often trigger initial resistance. When calculators became mainstream in the 1970s, there was uproar about students “losing” their mathematical ability. When Wikipedia gained traction in the early 2000s, many schools banned it outright, claiming it would kill research skills. In reality, both tools transformed learning once educators shifted their focus from fear to adaptation.

We’re seeing the same pattern now with AI. According to recent surveys, over half of Australian teachers report concerns about students using AI dishonestly (ACER, 2024). In response, many schools are reverting to high-stakes exams or “AI-proof” assessments. But this approach is shortsighted. Exams measure only a narrow band of skills, often privileging rote recall and time-pressured writing over deeper understanding, creativity, or collaboration (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020).

If we make exams the default simply because they are “AI-safe,” we’re not preparing students for the future; we’re locking them into the past.

What’s Really at Stake

It’s important to be clear: AI itself will not replace teachers. What threatens teachers is our failure to evolve alongside it. If we retreat to practices that AI cannot touch, rather than leaning into practices where humans add unique value, we risk making ourselves irrelevant.

Think about it: AI can already produce essays, solve equations, analyse data, even generate lesson plans. What it cannot do is build trust with a young person, respond with empathy to a student’s struggles, or nurture curiosity and character. These are fundamentally human domains.

As Harvard’s Tony Wagner (2010) has long argued, the future workforce requires more than academic achievement; it requires “survival skills” such as critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, and collaboration. These are skills AI cannot replace. They are cultivated in classrooms through relationships with teachers who know how to guide, stretch, and support.

If we let fear drive us backwards, we risk neglecting the very dispositions our students need to thrive in an AI-saturated world.

Why Teachers Are Still Needed

The truth is, teachers are more needed than ever.

1. Human Skills: Empathy, ethics, resilience, and communication are central to education. Research from the World Economic Forum (2023) consistently lists “human” capabilities such as creativity, collaboration, and emotional intelligence as the most valuable skills for the future workforce. Teachers model and develop these.

2. Dispositions for Flourishing: Schools don’t just teach content, they shape dispositions: curiosity, perseverance, a sense of agency. As Yong Zhao (2018) highlights, dispositions are the foundation of lifelong learning and success. Teachers, not AI, are the drivers of this.

3. Guides in Ethical AI Use: Students will encounter AI everywhere in their adult lives. Teachers are needed to show them how to use these tools critically, ethically, and productively. Without this guidance, students risk falling into uncritical dependence or misuse.

4. Assessment with Integrity: AI may change how we assess, but it cannot remove the need for human judgement. As Dylan Wiliam (2018) reminds us, the most powerful assessments are those where feedback shapes learning; something only a teacher can personalise and humanise.

In short, AI can do tasks, but it cannot teach people. Teachers remain the drivers of growth.

The Way Forward

So, what does embracing AI in education look like? It doesn’t mean replacing teaching with technology. It means rethinking how AI and teachers work in tandem.

• Shift from Content Delivery to Coaching: With AI able to deliver information instantly, teachers can focus more on coaching students through skills, dispositions, and real-world application.

• Embed AI Literacy: Instead of banning tools like ChatGPT, teach students how to use them thoughtfully. This could mean critiquing AI-generated text, comparing it to human writing, or using AI to brainstorm ideas before refining them independently.

• Design Rich Assessments: Move away from one-size-fits-all exams and towards learning journals, portfolios, and project-based assessments. These not only reflect authentic learning but also resist being outsourced to AI.

• Feedback as Dialogue: Create opportunities for iterative feedback where students use teacher input to refine work over time. This shifts assessment from a one-off judgment to an ongoing conversation.

Where to now?

We need to stop and ask ourselves, honestly: what is the role of a teacher in today’s world?

We need to acknowledge that many of the practices that once defined teaching, carefully curating and delivering content, guiding students through structured knowledge, assessing to ensure mastery, were essential for their time. But in a world where information is instant and AI can reproduce answers in seconds, those practices alone are no longer enough.

That realisation can feel uncomfortable. It should feel uncomfortable.

But discomfort is the start of growth.

So what does it mean to sit with that discomfort? It means:

• Naming the fear openly in staffrooms and leadership meetings, rather than quietly retreating into old practices.

• Interrogating our current assessments and asking, “Does this measure what matters for our students’ future, or is it simply what feels safe?”

• Reflecting as professionals on which parts of our role are timeless, and which parts must now evolve.

• Investing in professional learning to build our own AI literacy, so that we can confidently guide students in using it well.

And then, once we’ve sat with that discomfort, we must be bold and brave enough to act.

To honour the strengths of our profession while letting go of what no longer serves our students’ futures. To embrace the work that only teachers can do: shaping humans. Leading with empathy, creativity, and vision. Guiding our young people to use AI wisely while developing the dispositions that no machine can replicate.

If we can do this, we will not only preserve the role of teachers, we will elevate it. Teachers will become more vital than ever before, because in a world full of AI, it is the human touch that will matter most.

📌 At EduShift, we believe this is the moment for education to transform. Let’s stop fearing AI and start using it as a catalyst for change, keeping teachers at the heart of learning, where they belong. We run workshops to support how to embrace AI in your teaching and learning. Get in touch to learn more.