Teacher Orchestration Systems Supported by AI: Theoretical Possibilities and Practical Considerations

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies develop and even become ubiquitous, their promise for supporting teaching and learning affords new possibilities. To support teachers and teaching, AI technologies can be designed in ways that are human-centered, amplifying the teacher’s cognitive capacity and expertise, particularly with respect to supporting ambitious learning practices such as problem-based and inquiry learning. In particular, AI technologies have immense potential to support classroom orchestration – how teachers organize classroom activity across individual, small group, and whole-class scales. Effective classroom orchestration is key to supporting STEM inquiry, productive disciplinary engagement, and collaboration. However, given the practical challenges of classroom activity, effective orchestration can be difficult to achieve. Teacher orchestration systems supported by AI can assist teachers in facilitating classroom activity by offering them information about pedagogical tools (e.g., curriculum materials, technologies) and suggestions for strategies, tracking student activity in real time, and seamlessly completing managerial tasks to “free up” the teacher for supporting authentic inquiry. In this chapter, we outline design considerations that emerged as we designed such an orchestration assistant, an AI-supported teacher orchestration system. We first consider the theoretical possibilities currently available for supporting pedagogy with AI. Next, we discuss how those possibilities might be enacted, complicated, or transformed in the context of real classroom activity. We ground our discussion in design considerations from our orchestration assistant project. We conclude with some open questions about such AI-supported systems for teachers.