Who is whose assistant?

What does a typical AI Assistant do for teachers? Google " AI Lesson Planning " and you'll find, more often than not, AI-powered applications that claim to help busy professionals, especially teachers, boil down to the user filling in a form (some details, some words, some categories and maybe a short description) and clicking a *magic button*; moments later, AI-generated content appears on the screen, perhaps with the promise of the teacher being able to make edits, but in essence, that is it.

How does this feel to the teacher? On the face of it, all the teacher has done is fill in a form with no opportunity to bring their professional self or their creativity into the process. Then editing the generated content presents a tedious task under the illusion of authorship.

Behind the scenes after the form has been submitted, a prompt is compiled and sent to an AI accompanied by some instructions about what to do with it. The teacher could quite easily achieve the same result by visiting e.g. ChatGPT in a web browser and writing that prompt themselves (there are many published tutorials to aid in doing so) and the output would be very much the same, and at least in doing so, the teacher has the opportunity to think about any additional subtleties and include them in the prompt.

Indeed, the prompt itself is a piece of creative writing which requires some thought, and the AI will most likely check in with the teacher that the output is acceptable, and offer the option to iterate on it. This is essentially a wrapper for an AI; what has it actually provided to the teacher? Extra minutes in the day?

But in so doing it has:

• dehumanised students by assuming one size fits all in all contexts
• dehumanised the teacher by (1) reducing the teacher's role to a provider of basic classroom information and (2) taking the creative task of designing materials or lesson plans away from them — for some teachers this is the most enjoyable part of their job!

So, who is whose assistant in this setup? Is the teacher not demoted to be the assistant of the AI, doing all the preparation for the creative tasks, but not the creative tasks themselves? And if the AI has created the lesson plan, shouldn't the AI teach it? Is it possible to effectively teach someone else's lesson plan after all? Even a lesson plan written by another human in another context is unlikely to work in a different classroom, with different students, each with different needs.

For a teacher to teach someone else's lesson plan well, it would need to include their knowledge of the class, what they did together last week, last month, how students have responded before, what they like, how they feel, what they want and a million other things. Surely it would be impossible to write a prompt to communicate all of this to an AI.

With Noticing we flipped everything on its head, Noa does the tedius things like filling in forms, and in so doing liberates the teacher to solely think about how their knowledge can best support their students' learning. Noa is still an 'Assistant' but its output is rich, and appropriate, and the teacher's.

And it doesn't stop there. A tireless Noa can act as a mentoring and collegial presence with many faces: it can remind teachers of things, it can prompt new thinking, it can guide them through new development protocols, or just act as a personalised sounding board.

Herein lies the opportunity presented by the advancements in AI technology. The teacher is served, assisted and guided, but never replaced. Augmented, not depleted.