For over 30 years, Brian Cooklin led international schools across Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Having worked across diverse education systems to prepare schools for a rapidly changing future, he is uniquely positioned to assess the forces now reshaping classrooms, namely artificial intelligence (AI). Much of the debate today centers on whether schools should embrace, regulate, or restrict AI entering their halls.
Former Executive Director of Nord Anglia Education, Cooklin argues that the next phase of education will be defined by personalization at scale, not novelty. Tools like AI chatbots and smartphones can improve learning when schools decide, deliberately, what they are for and how they will be governed. What matters most is whether educators can harness technology instead of letting it dictate behavior. “It’s always the case with any technological development,” Cooklin says. “Are you in charge of it or is it in charge of you?”
Personalized Learning at Scale
Individualized support is perhaps the hardest, and most important, thing to deliver to students. AI, Cooklin says, can provide “step-by-step guidance” for every student at once and change formats instantly. If a student struggles with text, for example, AI can “turn the text into pictures or into an audio that they can listen to.” It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that Cooklin saw how quickly this potential could be realized. “One of the tools we used was an AI learning tool,” he says. It began by assessing each student’s level in English, math, and science, then adapted the sequence and difficulty for each learner. “It didn’t matter whether [a] learner had dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia. AI set the level for that child and then posed work that would extend them and push them to the next level.”
Cooklin sees the more consequential shifts happening inside classrooms, where AI can replicate what strong teachers have always tried to do: assess where a learner is, identify gaps, and scaffold the next step. In some markets, national strategies already exist to harness this potential. For example, in Singapore and Abu Dhabi, markets familiar to Cooklin, policymakers are pushing the strategic frontier. Singapore’s national approach to digital government and education gives it an infrastructure advantage, while Abu Dhabi has invested heavily in research capacity, including a university dedicated to AI.
Knowing Where to Draw the Line
Connected devices such as smartphones are often the vehicle for delivering this personalized learning at scale. In the school context, however, smartphones continue to reignite familiar concerns about attention, focus, and cognitive stamina, and some countries have taken a stricter approach. In Sweden, for example, legislation was introduced to remove devices from classrooms and return to textbooks, a move framed as a response to declining reading habits and other foundational skills. “I don’t think it needs to be an either or,” says Cooklin, who is less concerned with their presence than with ensuring their use is intentional and purposeful. The more important issue is how a school designs learning so that technology supports, rather than replaces, cognitive effort.
Used properly, smartphones can extend the same principles of personalization he described earlier. Cooklin points to a simple five-minute routine at the start of class: retrieval practice. What did students learn yesterday? A short quiz, delivered via phone or an interactive screen, can reinforce memory and reveal misconceptions before a teacher moves on. Smartphones can also act as accessibility tools, including visual timers for learners who benefit from clear structure and time cues. The risk, of course, is that a device is always a portal to something else. “If you say to your class, take a smartphone out, what are they doing with it throughout the lesson?” Cooklin asks. “It could just as easily be checking TikTok or getting the answer on ChatGPT.”
Strategy is the Difference Between Adoption and Impact
The schools that benefit from AI are the ones that treat AI like any other core change initiative: with governance, accountability, and metrics.
“At the moment, it seems to me that everybody’s rushing in an ad hoc way,” Cooklin says. “There’s no control over it. There’s no plan, in most instances.” Just as schools had to create “online rules of engagement” during COVID, Cooklin says they now need an AI code of conduct. “This is what you can use it for, this is what you can’t use it for. This is when it’s to be used, this is when it’s not to be used.” Without that framework, implementation devolves into departmental inconsistency: one enthusiastic head of department pushes tools forward while another resists, and the organization never builds coherence.
Cooklin also warns against over-reliance on a single “AI champion.” Expertise that sits with one person disappears when that person leaves. What works better is building distributed capability across subjects and functions, supported by professional learning communities that share use cases, risks, and guardrails. “We’re being overtaken by events,” he says. Building capability takes time, yet tools evolve quickly, with more interactive “agentic AI” already on the horizon.
The Teacher’s Role
Across sectors and industries, AI will make some longstanding routines obsolete and in education this means we are seeing a shift away from the teacher as content-deliverer and toward the teacher as mentor. “You don’t need to be sitting writing lesson plans because you can get it immediately through AI,” he says, describing traditional planning as “a ridiculous waste of time now.”
Cooklin believes the most valuable human work in education is relationship-based coaching. AI can spot conceptual gaps. Teachers give meaning, context, and confidence. “The way you get success for any child is to build the confidence,” he says. “You do it by knowing them profoundly as an individual. Fundamentally, what you’re talking about is the teacher as a coach. There’s a great opportunity for teachers to teach.”
A Turning Point for Education
Cooklin expects hybrid learning to expand, driven partly by parent behavior since COVID. Attendance challenges in several Western countries suggest some families now see online options as viable, especially when children face bullying or anxiety. Virtual academies and online providers are growing, and schools are exploring models that split learning between physical campuses and remote instruction.
The larger disruption, however, could be structural. “Why are we still teaching in year groups focused on external exams determined by university entrance?” Cooklin asks. “I think all of that has to go.” AI makes mastery-based progression more feasible by continuously assessing what a student knows and recommending what comes next. Students who are ahead in math should not be held back by age-based grouping. Students who need more time in a skill area should not be forced forward by a calendar. “There is no substitute for the social interaction,” but for Cooklin, schools of the future will look less like factories organized by age and more like flexible communities organized around readiness, coaching, and continuous feedback.
Follow Brian Cooklin on LinkedIn or visit his website for more insights.
