Chapter 2: Teaching and Learning in a GenAI World

In this chapter, we focus on our research related to the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to transform schooling around the world. In fact, in many individual places, the transformation is already happening.

We share some historical context based on the work of John Goodlad, as mentioned in Chapter 1, and we review the research approach we used to gather multiple forms of data from stakeholders in the GenAI and education spaces.

Finally, we summarize our findings through the themes that emerged from this research. These findings support the ideas, insights, and recommendations we reveal in subsequent chapters.

As part of the background work for this book, we revisited John Goodlad’s work, A Place Called School (Goodlad, 1984), a seminal treatise on the role and function of schools in society in the 1980s. Goodlad offered a comprehensive look at the reality of school for that generation of students, just at the time of the development of standards for schooling. Although it has now been more than 40 years since his book was published, Goodlad’s work connects to the rise of GenAI in schooling because the reality is that there has been a lack of any real progress to transform mainstream schooling in places like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia since that time. In A Place Called School, Goodlad revealed how much learning time is wasted every day simply because of the way schooling is designed. The “sit and get” approach of most school designs places students in rows facing the front of the room, with interaction discouraged, while the teacher talks for the majority of class time. These decontextualized classroom environments devolve into places in which passive, bored children go each day to watch their teachers work.