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Guest Author:Sethi De Clercq
Sethi De Clercq is Head of Key Stage 1 at Rugby School Thailand and a passionate advocate for Education Technology
The Tension Between New and Old
Teachers today will recognise the scene. It’s the start of a new academic year, a new term or you’ve just started at a new school. The staff room is abuzz with teachers sharing the many ways they are going to try to get their class motivated for the coming term and you go over the INSET schedule to see where new initiatives, or older and familiar ones, are going to be discussed and sight slightly… As a profession, we in education stand at a crossroads. On one side, we have a steady stream of new tools that continue to come out daily; AI assistants, digital platforms, online assessment systems, the latest and greatest EdTech product our Leadership teams bought into, all promising to transform learning. On the other, we hold onto established pedagogies like Talk for Writing, mastery in mathematics, or guided reading, which have decades of evidence and classroom practice behind them.
The challenge is not choosing between the two. The real opportunity lies in blending them and using what we already know works, while letting new tools take away some of the heavy lifting. The key here is to ensure we make evidence-based decisions when adopting new tools or ensure that due diligence has been done when dealing with personally identifiable information(PII). The future of education, in many ways, will be less about reinventing the wheel and more about attaching an electric motor to it.
Why Pedagogy First Matters
At the heart of good teaching is pedagogy. It gives us the “why” and the “how.” And as Simon Sinek said many years ago, “All organisations start with Why, only the great ones keep their Why clear year after year.” Can we as educators truly say our “why” of adopting new ideas and tools is still clear? So let Pedagogy shape our decisions: how we introduce new knowledge, how we scaffold practice, how we build independence.
When new tools arrive, the temptation is to use them because they look impressive or because they’re marketed as the next big solution. But without anchoring them, and thus ourselves, in pedagogy, they risk becoming gimmicks. A shiny digital quiz is meaningless if it doesn’t connect to formative assessment strategies. An AI-generated resource may look polished but will fall flat if it doesn’t serve a clear teaching purpose.
By starting with pedagogy, we ensure that technology, and its integration, supports learning rather than distracting from it. As I’ve often said, if pen and paper is the pedagogically superior technology for a task, USE that!
Case Example: AI Enabling Pedagogy
Recently, I explored how Google’s Gemini could support Talk for Writing. As a school we have seen great success in the use of Talk for Writing, and it has shown to be an effective pedagogical vessel to create confident writers in a school where the majority of students are Multilingual learners. The pedagogy itself didn’t change. The phases; imitation, innovation, and independent application, remain the backbone. What did change though was the way I could create resources to bring those phases to life
I asked Gemini to build a Bingo game generator using animal sounds to hook Year 2 children into a poetry unit on onomatopoeia. It coded a working website in minutes, something that would have taken me hours, and as a result may not have happened, as I would probably have chosen to spend that time planning my other lessons. The website generates bingo sheets on demand, differentiated if the teachers chooses to and allows for exports and printing. Custom resources for our teachers in minutes! Later, I used the same tool to create a soundboard for our cold writing task, where children listened to sounds and wrote sentences before being introduced to the concept of onomatopoeia. This ‘cold task’ writing was made appropriate for our classes, our year group, and used animals they would recognise and know!
Again, the pedagogy stayed constant. The technology simply amplified what was possible, reducing preparation time and giving my team something engaging, ready to use, and tailored to our needs.
Opportunities for Integration
The potential for blending established approaches with emerging tools goes far beyond one case study. Some key opportunities include:
- Using different types of LLMs (GenAI) as a planning assistant: generating scaffolds based on your class data and what your students need, writing prompts that are even more personalised, or variations of model texts to support different learners and where they are at in the learning process.
- Digital platforms for formative assessment: Probably the best known use of EdTech and the one most teachers are at least somewhat familiar with. However, these tools provide instant feedback and data, strengthening established assessment-for-learning practices and speeding up the turn around for feedback. This in turn allows us to follow the pedagogical best practise of keeping feedback timely.
- Collaboration tools for both students and teachers: enabling group planning and work, peer reviewing, and inquiry-based approaches to extend beyond the classroom walls.
All of these aren’t about replacing teacher expertise. If one thing these are all ways we can amplify the teachers’ understanding of how to teach and deliver content in meaningful ways, yet spend less time on the planning and prepping, and more on the relationship side of things. They’re about giving us more time and flexibility to focus on the teaching moments that matter. The moments that keep the human in the loop and place relationships central!
The Risks if We Get It Wrong
Of course, integration isn’t without risks. As with everything change can bring inherent risks with it as well. Especially if we adopt tools without considering pedagogy. We risk replacing pedagogy with gimmicks: Tech becomes the driver, and the learning purpose is lost. Time and time again we see poor planning lead to this very issue. We use a Tablet and Google Classroom because it’s easy. But is it right? We share Google Form to gather ideas and feedback from our students, but is it effective? What about those learning moments we see during PD workshops but seldom in classrooms, groups work, post-its around the room, plenty of movement and lots and lots of discussion and room for deep thinking.
Another risk is that we become over-reliance on AI: Children might consume ready-made answers rather than grappling with the process of learning. We no longer embrace failure and wrong answers as the stepping stones that lead us across the river. We lose the so-called ‘Power of Yet’ and have replaced it with ‘Cookie-cutter AI answers’.
There’s also the equity gap to consider: schools with more resources or more confident staff may advance quickly, leaving others behind. Those with powerful PD programs are able to excel faster and provide the training that enables their staff to implement technologically innovative and pedagogically sound practices. The tools used are safe and paid for. All whilst others, school and district rely on free offerings where too often the hidden cost of free is the data harvested or lack of security features.
These risks remind us that teachers remain essential as mediators of both pedagogy and technology.
A Framework for Merging New Tools with Established Pedagogy
So can we provide a simple framework to guide integration? One I’ve been trying to use when making decisions for my own class has been what I call the 4A framework(Going with four here as the 4C’s for 21 Century learning really stuck with me!)
- Anchor: Start with the pedagogy. What are you trying to achieve? What is your long-term WHY?
- Align: Match the tool to the specific learning intention. If the tools do not match your intentions, reevaluate and look elsewhere.
- Adapt: Adjust the tool for your context, your learners, and your subject. No copy-paste-fit-all!
- Assess: Reflect on the impact of what you’ve tried. We all have great and less-than great lessons. Did the tool used or selected deepen learning, save time, or improve engagement?
This ensures that technology isn’t bolted on in a makeshift fashion but embedded with purpose.
The Teacher as the Bridge
So really what I’m trying to say is this. I do not have an answer for poor implementation. Nor do I know where moral panic about Tech and AI begins or ends and where it is justified. But what I do know is this; Technology will not replace teaching or teachers. But teachers who put humanness first whilst harnessing it, anchored in trusted pedagogy, will not only survive but thrive in the years ahead.
The future of education is not about abandoning what works. It’s about recognising that the familiar practices we trust can be energised, streamlined, AND extended by new tools, as long as we keep an open but purposeful mind. The teacher becomes the bridge: connecting the reliability of established pedagogy with the possibilities of innovation.
In that space, the future of education feels less like a disruption and more like a continuation of what we’ve always done best…helping children learn, grow, and succeed.
Sethi De Clercq
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