AI has role in classrooms, freeing teachers to do what tech cannot

Tools help educators automate admin work to focus on teaching and caring

- Gabrielle Chan

What AI has done is to reshape how teachers spend their working hours. Eight in 10 teachers say such tools help them plan lessons or automate administrative work, but the time saved often gets absorbed by other responsibilities. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCKPHOTO

(PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCKPHOTO)

At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive. Teachers in Singapore are among the world’s fastest adopters of artificial intelligence (AI) and, to be fair, they probably thought it would mean shorter working hours.

But this has not quite happened.

Three in four teachers here use AI tools to teach or support learning, according to the latest Teaching and Learning International Survey (Talis). They also clock an average of 47.3 hours a week - slightly higher than six years ago, and above the global average.

What AI has done is to reshape how teachers spend their working hours. Eight in 10 teachers say such tools help them plan lessons or automate administrative work, but the time saved often gets absorbed by other responsibilities from verifying AI outputs to learning new systems to providing more personalised support for students.

While no one expected AI to drastically shorten teachers’ hours, the technology was often seen as a way to ease workload pressures. The latest findings show that while AI has become a regular part of teaching, its benefits are less about saving time and more about changing how that time is spent.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) has rolled out Al-enabled tools for marking and lesson planning, but the expected gains in efficiency are not immediately visible.

Across industries, this tension is not unusual. Automation rarely reduces working hours outright; instead, it reshapes how people work.

For teachers, the question is not whether AI saves time, but whether it makes their time count for more.

TIME IS NOT SAVED BUT REALLOCATED