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Student teachers paired with AI reported lower cognitive load than those paired with a teacher.

AI pairing improved critical thinking over time; teacher pairing did not show this same gain.

Teacher-paired students designed more practical, classroom-ready lesson plans than the AI group.

Co-authored by Hannah Feeney, Jessica Murphy, Kodie Curran, and Michael Hogan.

It is 9.30 p.m., and you are a student teacher tasked with developing a lesson plan integrating maths, science and engineering for your iSTEM class tomorrow morning. You have two options. One is your class teacher, whose three years in the classroom have attuned her to what students need, but she left hours ago, and her strength is practical experience, not the precise theoretical framework your assignment calls for. On the other hand, you can consult ChatGPT. While artificial intelligence (AI) has never taught in a real classroom, it can draw on thousands of lesson plans built around your exact pedagogical framework and synthesise them in layman’s terms in under a minute. Which do you reach out to?

Since the release of generative AI in 2022, this has been the question facing students, teachers, and wider society. While AI allows for unprecedented productivity, providing its users with on-demand responses to an almost unlimited range of prompts, many fear its advances come at the expense of human skill and judgment. This is especially profound within education, where schools and universities act as a bridge between current theory and future practice—and where a critical question follows: If an AI tool can plan a lesson in seconds, what is left for the human teacher?

AI in and of itself is neither a harmful nor beneficial force, with its impact wholly dependent on the context in which it is embedded. Both humans and AI have their unique........

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