Why teaching resists automation in an AI-inundated era: Human judgment, non-modular work, and the limits of delegation

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used in education, posing significant challenges for teachers adapting to these changes. GenAI offers unprecedented opportunities for accessibility, scalability and productivity in educational tasks. However, the automation of teaching tasks through GenAI raises concerns about reduced teacher agency, potential cognitive atrophy, and the broader deprofessionalisation of teaching. Drawing findings from prior literature on AI in Education, and refining through a recent systematic literature review, this chapter presents a conceptualisation of five levels of teacher-AI teaming: transactional, situational, operational, praxical and synergistic teaming. The framework aims to capture the nuanced dynamics of teacher-AI interactions, particularly with GenAI, that may lead to the replacement, complementarity, or augmentation of teachers' competences and professional practice. GenAI technological affordances required in supporting teaming, along with empirical studies, are discussed. Drawing on empirical observations, we outline a future vision that moves beyond individual teacher agency toward collaborative decision-making between teachers and AI, in which both agents engage in negotiation, constructive challenge, and co-reasoning that enhance each other's capabilities and enable outcomes neither could realise independently. Further discussion of socio-technical factors beyond teacher-AI teaming is also included to streamline the synergy of teachers and AI in education ethically and practically.

Language agents are increasingly deployed in complex professional workflows, with tutoring emerging as a particularly high-stakes capability that remains largely unmeasured in existing benchmarks. Effective tutor agents require more than producing correct answers or executing accurate tool calls: a robust tutor must diagnose learner state, adapt support over time, make pedagogically justified decisions grounded in educational evidence, and execute interventions within realistic learning-management systems. We introduce EduAgentBench, a source-grounded benchmark for holistically evaluating tutor agents across the full scope of teaching work. It contains 150 quality-controlled tasks across three capability surfaces: professional pedagogical judgment, situated multi-turn tutoring, and Canvas-style teaching workflow completion. Tasks are constructed through a pedagogical-insight-driven pipeline and evaluated with complementary verification signals and human review. Across a comprehensive evaluation of frontier models, our findings reveal that current models are generally capable of bounded pedagogical judgment, but still fall short of professional teaching standards in situated tutoring and autonomous teaching-workflow execution. To our knowledge, EduAgentBench is the first theory-grounded and realistic benchmark for evaluating the holistic teaching capability of tutor agents, providing a measurement foundation for developing future tutor agents that can support realistic teaching work.

Artificial intelligence is changing the task composition of computing work faster than curricula and training typically adapt. This is a curriculum-framework paper, grounded in a structured narrative review of labor-market and software-engineering evidence and illustrated through an exploratory pilot course: the review supports the framework, and the pilot illustrates it rather than serving as primary evidence. The central claim is that near-term change is task reallocation rather than full replacement: routine implementation is increasingly automated while verification, systems thinking, security, and the ability to supervise and orchestrate AI (keeping a human in the loop) gain value. We organize the response as a capability-assurance framework anchored by a Capability Ladder: a five-level progression (trigger, automation, workflow, AI agent, agent team) that classifies the operational autonomy of AI-augmented work and the human supervision it requires. We map the ladder to course-level updates, workload-aware assessment, and stackable workforce credentials, and illustrate it through a two-semester pilot of a team-based, no-code course enrolling computing and business students. We argue for targeted modernization around durable capabilities rather than wholesale curriculum replacement, and we are explicit about evidence limits: labor signals are confounded by non-AI forces, industry reports are directional, and the pilot is exploratory.