Subject: ALL
Level: UK Curriculum, all levels
Link: https://teachmateai.com/
In my ongoing quest to balance the ever-expanding demands of teaching with maintaining a high standard of lesson delivery, I recently trialled a tool that has been gaining traction: Teachmate AI. If you are unfamiliar with it, the platform essentially serves as a virtual teaching assistant, streamlining everything from lesson planning to differentiation and resource curation.
Initially, I approached it with cautious optimism. The promises were enticing: time saved, quality raised, a better work-life balance. And in many respects, it delivered. With a few well-placed prompts, I was able to generate lesson frameworks that were not only structurally sound but surprisingly thoughtful in their pedagogical underpinnings. It is not just a copy-and-paste machine. It can, when used carefully, help generate activities that mirror the kind of intentionality we pride ourselves on as teachers.
For me, the most significant impact was the time it returned to me. I could devote more attention to marking with meaningful feedback, or better yet, spend more time actually talking to students. And for anyone who has ever stared at a blank planning sheet after a long parents’ evening, there is a quiet relief in knowing you do not have to build every single element from scratch.
That said, there is no getting around the discomfort some feel about using AI in teaching. For many of us, teaching is a profoundly human craft. Handing over even part of that process to a machine can feel like a betrayal of sorts, of our training, our instincts, our students’ individuality. There is also the cost, not just financial, though that is a fundamental factor, but also the cost of potentially becoming too reliant on a system that does not yet understand the nuances of a classroom dynamic.
Still, I find myself coming back to a central truth. Anything that gives teachers time to think, reflect, and adjust is worth exploring. Teachmate AI will not replace good teaching, and it certainly will not replace the teacher. But in an education system that increasingly expects miracles with less time and fewer resources, tools that offer breathing room deserve consideration, even if that consideration comes with a degree of healthy scepticism.
If nothing else, it has sparked a few questions I think are worth sitting with. What does quality look like in teaching? Who gets to define it? And how do we keep hold of the parts of this job that made us love it in the first place, while still letting the tools around us evolve?