Claude, are you gonna take my job?
Today I am doing something for the first time on this blog…writing because I want to and not because I have to as an assignment for my masters.
Recently, an article came out about how AI is going to take everyone's jobs (there are so many I can't even find the one I am referring to). So, in reaction to this, I've been wondering about how to protect myself from unemployment, what skills I need to improve in order to stay relevant within my field as an IB educator at an international school. In a very meta way, I asked Claude "Are you going to take my job?" It said no, because of the human side of teaching, etc. I then asked what skills to work on and it told me to consider becoming an AI expert within the field of education. Hilarious that an AI is telling me to become an AI expert, but I digress.
Through this conversation, things got more interesting. I pushed back a little because I already use AI all the time, so "become an AI expert" felt like a non-answer. So we dug into what AI is actually bad at. I started listing real frustrations from my own practice: it can't format a document properly, it loses the thread of what a unit is trying to achieve, and it doesn't know what my students don't know. That last one is where things clicked.
A good example came up almost immediately. I asked it to write test questions that assess student thinking about reproduction, not just memorization, for my MYP 3 class. Claude wrote a question about aphids. Aphids are actually a great example for the topic, biologically speaking. But Claude doesn't know that my students have never heard of an aphid, which means they can't engage with the question at all. The content knowledge is there. The pedagogical context is not.
This led to a lightbulb moment. This is TPACK, in real life.
While AI might be able to replace teachers in TK, CK, or even PK individually, it is currently unable to replace the overlap. So, to answer my own question of how to position myself to still be a teacher in 20 years, if that's what I choose, I don't need to know the most biology, or be the most innovative with technology. What makes teachers human, and therefore irreplaceable, is being able to read that these kids, in this school, don't know what an aphid is and therefore can't answer the very good question about reproduction written by a robot.
Citations:
Educational Technology. (n.d.). Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) framework [Image]. https://educationaltechnology.net/technological-pedagogical-content-knowledge-tpack-framework/
