For the last eight months I have been supporting Gary Swabel and Tejas Gorla as they have developed an AI teacher coach, called Aristotal.
Apparently, I was a good choice as the educational consultant on this project, as I wasn't enamoured with tech; indeed, I was renowned as a headteacher for saying that the only device I wanted our Year 7s to have mastered by the time they arrived at Huntington School was a pen. That meant I was hyper-critical of Aristotal through its development stages as I was not impressed by the AI-wizardry, merely looking to see how Aristotal could help teachers and school leaders.
The AI coach is very simple. You sound record your lesson and upload the file onto the programme. It makes a transcript of your lesson in seconds, reads it and then begins asking you questions about it. It is a brilliant questioner. It gives you options about what you would like to do next. It makes a record of your decisions and when you upload the sound recording of your next lesson, it looks backwards to what you agreed to work on and then helps you reflect on how you developed your teaching in the new lesson. You can track your progress over time.
Beyond the teacher coaching facility, it has other functions, including: the ability to customise your coaching according to your school-wide CPD priorities; Quick Help & Resources; and a leadership coach. Here is link to a video explaining Aristotal, including testimonies from the teachers who have already used it: Aristotal-demo on Vimeo
When we were trialling Aristotal, I demonstrated it to Dylan Wiliam, who was impressed and is now a member of Aristotal’s Advisory Board, along with me, Gary, Tejas, Mary Myatt, and another member of the current edu-world, who will join once she has finished a major piece of work on the school curriculum.
Aristotal has a hugely helpful function whereby it will detail the evidence-base for its suggestions. When we asked Aristotal for the evidence behind its feedback when trialling it with Dylan, it cited Dylan half the time, which was amusing.
I think Aristotal has the following advantages over a human coach:
- Aristotal is time efficient, in that the timing and length of the sessions are entirely down to the coachee.
- Aristotal is entirely confidential to the coachee.
- Aristotal is available 24/7/365.
- Aristotal does not need to coordinate diaries with another human being to coach.
- Aristotal is unfailingly positive and polite, something even the cheeriest human being finds hard to be all the time.
- Aristotal can provide the evidence-base behind whatever it is suggesting you might do to improve your teaching.
- The quality of Aristotal's coaching is consistently high.
- Aristotal is incredibly resource-efficient (cheap) compared to 1:1 human coaching.