Heather Gauck has spent most of her three-decade teaching career sleep-deprived — turning in after midnight and waking up at dawn. The Michigander made the sacrifice to ensure she completed all the lesson planning and grading needed to serve her special education students in Grand Rapids Public Schools while raising three children of her own. But with artificial intelligence, Gauck has now reclaimed a precious resource: time.
“This year alone, I’ve used AI to help with lesson plans, differentiating materials, writing parts of IEPs [individualized education programs], communicating with families, and all of that adds up to an entire planning day that I get back,” she said. Entering the 2025-26 school year, she’s excited to continue using the technology.
Gauck is far from alone in her AI use. A recent poll of over 2,200 teachers nationwide by the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup found that those who use AI on a weekly basis save an average of 5.9 hours per week, or six weeks per school year. If all teachers saved this much time, it could reduce turnover and help close achievement gaps by letting educators focus on students instead of paperwork, educators told The 19th.
The report — “Teaching for Tomorrow: Unlocking Six Weeks a Year With AI” — described the hours regained by teachers through automated administrative tasks as “the AI dividend.” Its findings revealed that about 30 percent of educators use AI weekly. Overall, 60 percent of teachers surveyed used AI for work during the 2024-25 school year, enabling them to give students detailed feedback, create personalized lessons, email parents and return home from work earlier.
“The teachers are innovating,” Andrea Malek Ash, lead author of the report and a senior research consultant at Gallup, said of AI use in education. “They are trying to figure out how this can benefit their students, how it can benefit their educational practice and their teaching at school.”
Tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and MagicSchool AI, which helps with lesson planning and differentiating instruction, have shaved off hours of labor for Gauck. She can plug text into ChatGPT and request a “kindergarten-level version,” generating accessible materials for students in seconds.
If AI had been widely accessible when her three sons were growing up and experiencing “all that crazy busy time in their own schools,” Gauck said, “it would have been amazing.” When they were still K-12 students — her youngest son is now in college — Gauck would spend her nights on her computer, working to identify ways to engage the youth she teaches. Some are on the autism spectrum. Others have learning disabilities or health or emotional impairments, she said.
“I have, say, 20 students on my caseload, and every single student is different, so it was my job to meet and to try to figure out every single one of their different needs,” she said.
For critics wary of privacy risks or academic dishonesty, Gauck said the following about AI: “It’s not going away.” Her advice is for schools to prioritize giving educators hands-on training with ethical, classroom-focused tools. Rather than banning AI, teach students to apply knowledge creatively, she said. They can start small, trying one AI tool and expanding from there.
But only about 1 in 5 teachers work at a school that has an AI policy, a trend that Malek Ash would like to see change. “Put a policy together because it will help your entire school reap the benefits of that AI dividend, no matter what the policy is,” she advised school officials. “Listen to your teachers. Go to them to find out where to start and what would be most helpful to them in terms of how to support them.”
Thirty-seven percent of teachers say they use AI tools at least once monthly when preparing for instruction, “Teaching for Tomorrow” found. Educators also often use AI to create worksheets (33 percent), modify materials to meet students’ needs (28 percent), complete administrative work (28 percent) and develop assessments (25 percent).
Maria Ott, a professor of clinical education at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, said teachers can determine when AI is most fitting for their needs. They might find AI appropriate to use in grading straightforward assignments or providing routine feedback but unsuitable for assessing sophisticated high school essays, she said.
Teachers should be asking: “How do you use this as a thought companion, to give you some ideas but not to replace your expertise?” Ott said. “How do you use it to generate ideas that you might not have thought of on your own, but then you as the educator decide ultimately what goes into your classroom or what doesn’t go into your classroom?”
Teachers who use AI are more likely to be optimistic about its impact on student outcomes: 48 percent of educators who use AI weekly think the technology will improve student engagement, compared with 25 percent of their colleagues who don’t use AI.
Kira Orange Jones, CEO of Teach Plus, a national nonprofit focused on equity, teacher leadership and student achievement, said the “Teaching for Tomorrow” report affirms the experiences of the thousands of teachers her organization has trained. She particularly took note of the statistic indicating that teachers who engage AI are more optimistic that the technology can facilitate student learning.
“It all comes down to putting the tools in the hands of teachers and creating opportunities for them early on,” Orange Jones said. “Ensuring that teachers are at the table to help design and develop AI use is going to lead to better student outcomes and more student learning, which is what we all care about.”
Using AI routinely during the 2024-25 school year led to some breakthroughs for Gauck and her K-4 students. She used MagicSchool AI to develop a private, secure chatbot to help a conflict-prone child process emotions in real time, as Gauck couldn’t always be immediately available to her.
“It was sort of her safe, guided digital helper that she would be able to talk with,” Gauck said. “And then it would talk through different strategies, step by step, until I was ready to talk to her in person. It was pretty amazing to see.”
As a recent participant in Teach Plus’ Leading Edge Fellowship — which provided educators with hands-on AI and emerging technology experience — Gauck said it’s imperative for teachers to vet the AI tools they use for security and privacy. That can be tricky since many school systems don’t have official guidance on the technology. The Michigan Department of Education does provide AI guidance, including endorsing AIframeworksdeveloped by the K-12 nonprofit Michigan Virtual.
Gauck said her preferred AI tools meet Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act standards. Seesaw, another tool, “integrates AI as a teacher-controlled helper for things like translation and reading fluency, never giving students direct access,” Gauck said. “It. . . does not use data to train models without consent.”
For one of Gauck’s students, AI led to a breakthrough. The fourth grader often acted out in class due to his struggles with literacy, which prevented him from spelling simple words, let alone writing short stories. After he verbally told her a story idea, complete with characters, conflict and setting, she input them into MagicSchool AI, and it generated a narrative based on his vision.
“And to see the smile on his face was priceless because he was no longer somebody who was failing in school,” Gauck said. “He was an author. Even though he didn’t physically write the story, that was his idea.”
For Jaycie Homer, who teaches career and technical education at the Sixth Grade Academy in Lovington, New Mexico, AI has been a game changer as well. In addition to teaching CTE and serving as the technology department head, she is a teacher-leader involved with yearbook, student council, honor society and other projects. AI helps her stay balanced as she assumes multiple roles in a Title I school where a disproportionate number of students are economically disadvantaged.
Homer developed her school’s AI policy, noting that it was designed to include educator input, district oversight and ongoing evaluation of both benefits and potential risks. Her district, Lovington Municipal Schools, has integrated “AI in ways that align with instructional goals, maintain student privacy and support equitable access,” she said. “We also look closely at how each tool complements our curriculum and teaching practices.”
Beyond districtwide AI policies, Ott would like to see collaborations among educators about best practices for the technology. Teachers at the same grade level can decide on AI guidelines for students. Educators can have some powerful conversations about emerging technology, she said.
“Teachers should be driving this,” she said. “They’re the ones who are going to ignite innovation in this space. As teacher expertise around AI and its potential expands, you’re going to have a lot of innovation coming out of classrooms across the nation. It might be an opportunity to really enhance the profession and in ways that we can’t maybe even fully comprehend yet because it’s so new, and we’re learning as we go. It’s an exciting time for teachers.”
Homer has leveraged AI to customize lesson plans, modify student materials and generate rubrics or project guidelines. Using that tool and others, such as Diffit to differentiate instruction and Gradescope for assessments, has reduced the time she spends on administrative tasks by five to six hours per week.
“I can now spend that time building relationships with my students and focusing on that deeper instruction,” Homer said. “We have a large population of English language learners, with 86 percent of my student population being Hispanic, and I go in there and tailor lessons more to them or to my students on IEPs.”
Sixty-four percent of the teachers surveyed for “Teaching for Tomorrow” say the materials they modify with AI to meet student needs are better quality. Sixty-one percent say AI helps to improve their insights about student performance, and 57 percent say AI has led them to enhance the quality of their student feedback and grading.
“Our teachers are working with students in under-resourced schools across the country,” Orange Jones said. “And so what we often find is that teachers are constantly making trade-offs about how to spend the limited time that they have. And many times those solutions are incomplete. AI could be one solution that actually gives teachers tools to have more time to spend in places that will actually be focused on creating an affirming learning environment for students.”
The time Homer saves with AI allows her to be more present for her own two children — a daughter who does competitive dance and a son who participates in soccer, basketball and track. AI, she believes, has helped her avoid burnout.
“Teacher burnout is one of the No. 1 reasons why people leave the profession, or why teaching has such a high turnover rate,” said Homer, an 11-year teaching veteran. “I feel like college doesn’t adequately prepare you for all of the real-world scenarios you’ll face in the classroom, and everything does get overwhelming when you don’t have everything organized and streamlined and lessons prepared and ready to go.”
Beyond administrative tasks, Homer uses AI to help create high-quality, personalized learning experiences that would otherwise take her hours to plan or require a larger support team to create, she said. She’s used AI to simulate real-world scenarios tied to career paths that interest students. They have role-played as managers and employees, building their communication, listening and critical thinking skills, she said.
“Say you want to grow up and be a doctor, but what does the doctor actually do?” Homer has asked students. “I go in and use AI to simulate a day-to-day environment in the office of a doctor, and you can see what they actually do. Is this something you want to do or not, or would you want to be a travel nurse or go overseas? It just broadens their horizons.”
Providing students with such experiences has been critical, since her school is in rural New Mexico, where access to innovation can be a struggle, she said. Resource gaps, staffing shortages, and limited funding and access to specialists are the norm for schools in her region, she said.
“Students in small towns don’t need to wait for a big staff or resources to start innovating anymore,” she said. “AI opens doors that geography has kept closed for too long.”
But teachers at rural schools (57 percent) use AI less than their urban (58 percent) and suburban school (65 percent) counterparts, according to the study. Homer is working to change that. This month, she’s leading a three-part webinar series about AI tools for teachers. Over the summer, she made recommendations to New Mexico’s Legislative Education Study Committee about the guidance that needs to be in place to support educators’ use of AI.
Gauck doesn’t need convincing about the technology’s importance in education’s future. She said there’s no way around it.
“As an educator, it is my job, it is my role, it is my duty to try to figure out how to use AI, but have it be safe and ethical,” she said. “It’s moving at such a fast and furious pace that instead of just sticking our head in the sand, we need to go in, curious and optimistic, but also educate ourselves on how to use AI appropriately.”