Our shared vision for education

Prithika Acharya, Associate Director, EMEA - UK, Growth, Toddle Speak to any forward-thinking educator about how we should be teaching our children and a few recurring themes emerge. We all envision a world where students have the opportunity to construct their own meaning by asking questions, testing theories, deriving insights, and experiencing failure. We all want our students out in the real world, engaging with local communities and working on problems that matter.

We want an education that is deeply personalized, where skills and competencies are prioritized over facts, an education that celebrates our shared humanity. But these ideas are not new. They echo the philosophies of early thinkers like Piaget’s constructivism, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, and Dewey’s and Freire’s ideas of critical pedagogy and schools as institutions of social reform.If we have had such widespread consensus on what teaching and learning should look like, why has progress seemed so elusive? Why do most classrooms around the world still mirror those of the last century?

The answer, simply put, is that it’s very hard. This transformation demands an immense investment from our teachers, whose workload is already staggering. A McKinsey study highlighted that teachers work more than 50 hours a week, spending more than half their time on preparation, evaluation, and administrative duties instead of direct face-time with students.For our ideals of education to become a reality, we need to empower our teachers with time, resources, and the right kind of professional development opportunities.Generative AI: A step closer to learner-centred educationRecent advancements in generative AI hold the key to realising our century-old vision of education in classrooms around the world. AI has the potential to transform every part of the teaching and learning process, and the most powerful application of AI in education will be in enhancing teacher capabilities.It brings the promise of liberating teachers from non-core tasks, allowing them to focus on their true passion: teaching. AI, if used in the right way, can usher in a new era of personalised, relevant, and experiential learning.Our Work With AIAt Toddle, we have always been ‘Teachers First’ in our approach. We started building Toddle as a passion project in our school with the belief that in order to facilitate progressive, future-ready learning, teachers need the right tools. After all, the tools we use shape our practice. What started as a passion project in a school has now evolved into an AI-powered teaching and learning platform trusted by over 2,500 schools across 100+ countries.With Toddle AI, we’ve taken a giant leap forward in our mission of supporting educators in delivering future-ready education.Our goal is to provide each teacher with a personal teaching assistant possessing near-magical abilities.When we first introduced Toddle AI, we began with three AI-powered capabilities: lesson planning, progress reports, and a writing assistant. Since then, what’s possible has expanded enormously. Today, AI is woven into the teaching and learning journey on Toddle. Educators can use AI to generate ideas and learning experiences while planning curriculum, create authentic assessments and rubrics, design differentiated learning materials, provide meaningful feedback faster, and draw insights from student learning.Our Curriculum Design Assistant helps educators move from ideas to thoughtful units and learning experiences. Assessment Builder helps teachers create meaningful assessments in minutes, while Grading Assistant supports educators in providing high-quality, personalised feedback more efficiently. More recently, we’ve taken this further with AI Tutors, which give students personalised support as they learn, and AI Insights, which help educators make sense of learning data and identify patterns that might otherwise be difficult to spot.What makes Toddle AI particularly powerful is that we are building it as a core capability of our platform. It’s not another product layered on top of a school’s existing systems. AI is deeply integrated into the Toddle ecosystem and enhances everything a teacher does, from curriculum planning and assessments to feedback, reporting, student support, family communication, and data analytics.The goal remains the same as when we started: to help teachers reclaim their time while elevating their practice, so they can provide every child with the personalised learning experience they need and deserve. Where we go from hereThe age of AI will reshape how we teach, what we teach, as well as our roles as educators and students. Much like the internet and smartphones, we’re at a transformational frontier. A frontier that is exciting and fascinating. And a bit scary.If you’ve looked at AI and wondered, “What does this mean for me?”, you’re not alone. If you look to our past, teaching has always evolved with change. Whether it was the rise of the internet or Covid-19, thoughtful teaching has always thrived.Teachers are resilient heroes who adapt to constant change: new students, new curricula, new technology, new schools, and new and hybrid learning environments. With each fundamental shift, we evolve, we learn, and still, we teach.With AI, things will change, and I believe they will change for the better.I invite you to put on your teacher hats and look at AI with an inquiry mindset.Let us guide this technology, rather than letting it guide us. Be curious, ask questions, solve problems, experiment with new ideas, and keep your students at the core of everything you do.https://youtu.be/EB9lvu7AdTs?si=IcPhFj1cVmubxxEe