Mar 11, 2026 · 1 hr 21 min · 10 segments
In this in-depth interview, Daisy Christodoulou explores the evolution of AI in education assessment, focusing on the capabilities and limitations of large language models and AI auto-marking systems…
Daisy ChristodoulouGuest
Craig BartonHost
What about when it comes to like resource creation and lesson planning? Because this is something I wrestle with, Daisy, right? Because you'll have seen the same as me where you go into some schools and everything's pre-planned.
So there's like a PowerPoint for every lesson and it's either been bought in or it's been planned by the head of department or whatever and fingers crossed it's of high quality or higher quality than a junior professional to use your terminology would produce and that junior professional you know the NQT or whatever they go into their room and they deliver that slide by slide and my thing there has always been it's probably a Good in the short term or better in the short term for those kids in the moment, because it's probably going to be a better learning experience than certainly I would have been able to do at that age.
But unless that junior professional has a chance to wrestle and ask questions about why that slide, why that question and so on.
that they're not going to develop and it feels to me i don't know whether ai is better for this because you can have that dialogue so if you you know you could say i'm teaching my year eight bottom set tomorrow morning adding fractions last lesson they did equivalent fractions a few of them struggled with this how should i start my lesson blah blah and then it would bang you out a worksheet or something and then you could if you wanted to you could start quizzing it so on one level it feels to me both in terms of professional development and lesson planning and resource creation that AI could be an absolute godsend for this, certainly a step above the pre-prepared PowerPoints.
But then at the same time, I think what's stopping teachers just saying, do me a worksheet on fractions, out it comes, and then delivering it? What's your take when it comes to lesson planning resource creation?
So I think this is one of those where it's like we have to live in the world we're in and not in the ideal world I wish we lived in.
Now, in the ideal world we wish we lived in, we would have teacher training that was far more integrated with the resources you'll be using.
So I don't think it is great for every teacher to be designing all their resources from scratch.
I also don't think it's great for every teacher to be delivering pre-delivered lessons that maybe they've just seen the night before.
But I think what the kind of what actually should be happening is when you're training, I think you should be training with a specific set of resources and learning how to use those and learning all the design decisions behind those.
So for example, there's some phonics programs that have very specific resources and a lot of training that is associated with those resources.
So you can go, I've been on it, the Read, Write, Ink, Roof My Skins training course, two days long, and it's baked into the resources.
And you're learning about like the design decisions behind why it is like this.
And again, to be honest, in other professions, I don't know what the analogy would be, but... you know I can't imagine like as a doctor like you know when you're in training that people are just completely agnostic about I don't know the tools that you use and it's like you know we'll just train in this generic sense and then you'll go out into a school and actually you know they'll all be doing you know you train in a hospital you train one way and you go into hospital and they might be you know using all these different tools and different systems and it's like oh you just pick that when you get there yeah it's like you know there is the standardization goes back like a layer before And the standardization is baked into the training.
And I think for all that I think teacher training has improved a lot in the last 10 or 15 years, there is a level at which it is still quite generic.
And I'm not blaming anyone for that because it's kind of the way our system is.
But I would be thinking to myself, you know, when I train, if you are going into a school and you're going to be teaching an inspector calls on day one, I actually think your training needs to be in like, these are, this is, I do think you can say there are optimal ways, maybe not an optimal way, but there are better and worse ways of teaching any spectacles.
And, I don't think it should be your responsibility to be creating all this from scratch.
What about when it comes to like resource creation and lesson planning? Because this is something I wrestle with, Daisy, right? Because you'll have seen the same as me where you go into some schools and everything's pre-planned.
So there's like a PowerPoint for every lesson and it's either been bought in or it's been planned by the head of department or whatever and fingers crossed it's of high quality or higher quality than a junior professional to use your terminology would produce and that junior professional you know the NQT or whatever they go into their room and they deliver that slide by slide and my thing there has always been it's probably a Good in the short term or better in the short term for those kids in the moment, because it's probably going to be a better learning experience than certainly I would have been able to do at that age.
But unless that junior professional has a chance to wrestle and ask questions about why that slide, why that question and so on.
that they're not going to develop and it feels to me i don't know whether ai is better for this because you can have that dialogue so if you you know you could say i'm teaching my year eight bottom set tomorrow morning adding fractions last lesson they did equivalent fractions a few of them struggled with this how should i start my lesson blah blah and then it would bang you out a worksheet or something and then you could if you wanted to you could start quizzing it so on one level it feels to me both in terms of professional development and lesson planning and resource creation that AI could be an absolute godsend for this, certainly a step above the pre-prepared PowerPoints.
But then at the same time, I think what's stopping teachers just saying, do me a worksheet on fractions, out it comes, and then delivering it? What's your take when it comes to lesson planning resource creation?
So I think this is one of those where it's like we have to live in the world we're in and not in the ideal world I wish we lived in.
Now, in the ideal world we wish we lived in, we would have teacher training that was far more integrated with the resources you'll be using.
So I don't think it is great for every teacher to be designing all their resources from scratch.
I also don't think it's great for every teacher to be delivering pre-delivered lessons that maybe they've just seen the night before.
But I think what the kind of what actually should be happening is when you're training, I think you should be training with a specific set of resources and learning how to use those and learning all the design decisions behind those.
So for example, there's some phonics programs that have very specific resources and a lot of training that is associated with those resources.
So you can go, I've been on it, the Read, Write, Ink, Roof My Skins training course, two days long, and it's baked into the resources.
And you're learning about like the design decisions behind why it is like this.
And again, to be honest, in other professions, I don't know what the analogy would be, but... you know I can't imagine like as a doctor like you know when you're in training that people are just completely agnostic about I don't know the tools that you use and it's like you know we'll just train in this generic sense and then you'll go out into a school and actually you know they'll all be doing you know you train in a hospital you train one way and you go into hospital and they might be you know using all these different tools and different systems and it's like oh you just pick that when you get there yeah it's like you know there is the standardization goes back like a layer before And the standardization is baked into the training.
And I think for all that I think teacher training has improved a lot in the last 10 or 15 years, there is a level at which it is still quite generic.
And I'm not blaming anyone for that because it's kind of the way our system is.
But I would be thinking to myself, you know, when I train, if you are going into a school and you're going to be teaching an inspector calls on day one, I actually think your training needs to be in like, these are, this is, I do think you can say there are optimal ways, maybe not an optimal way, but there are better and worse ways of teaching any spectacles.
And, I don't think it should be your responsibility to be creating all this from scratch.
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