On 15 September 2025, GenAI4ED joined forces with the TAICo Teacher AI Complementarity (www.taico-project.eu) and augMENTOR (https://augmentor-project.eu) projects to co-host TAICO-Dialogue: A Dialogue Lab on the Role of Teachers and AI in Education (TAICO-Dialogue ), at the 20th European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) (ECTEL 2025 – EATEL) in Newcastle, UK.
The ECTEL conference (ECTEL Conference – EATEL), is a key event organised by the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) for the past 20 years, where researchers, EdTech experts, European Research Projects, and policy makers from around the world meet to share the latest advances on technology in education.
In this context, the TAICo- Dialogue (TAICO-Dialogue ) emerges as a space where the future of AI in education, and the role and impact on teachers, are discussed with a goal in mind: beginning a dialogue series that can lead to evidence-based policy recommendations. Research Analyst Alba Paz-López from Trilateral Research (TRI) represented GenAI4ED as one of the event coordinators and contributed to the workshop with research findings from her work as part of GenAI4ED, in co-authorship with Dr. and Research Manager Pinelopi Troullinou (TRI).
Around 50 participants from research, practice, policy, and the EdTech sector participated in the workshop, exploring four key tensions around AI in education: training AI literacies vs. creating conditions for adoption, tool focus vs. pedagogical alignment, teacher-AI teaming vs. automation and displacement, and fast adoption and guidance vs. ethics and evidence in policy making.
The workshop adopted a World Café format: a dynamic model of dialogue where participants are divided into thematic tables of discussion, answering specific questions, recording their answers, and then moving on to the next table. First, participants had the opportunity to briefly introduce themselves and their work, followed by a short presentation of the papers submitted to the workshop. Then, participants engaged with the different World Café tables. In these interactive sessions, participants exchanged perspectives on the four tensions, and their associated risks and opportunities, with a special focus on the evolving nature of teaching including new skills, responsibilities and teachers’ place as co-designers of AI. Finally, moderators of each table, members of TAICO, augMENTOR and GenAI4ED, summarised to the group the conclusions reached in the discussions of each table.
TRI researchers shared GenAI4ED’s findings regarding how generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping teachers’ work in secondary education. Drawing from insights from its systematic reviews of academic literature and policy documents, as well as its taxonomy of generative AI tools for education, TRI’s research highlights teachers’ and students’ recognition of GenAI’s potential to enhance teaching and learning through engagement, feedback, and lesson and content design. Research also uncovers rooted concerns over data privacy, transparency, cognitive impact, and overreliance on technology, at an individual and systemic level. Additionally, evidence also shows that guidance documents do not offer practical advice for teachers, who often lack the training and institutional support needed to use GenAI effectively and safely.
These findings sparked lively debate during the Dialogue Lab, particularly around the tension “Tool adoption vs. pedagogical alignment”, as research findings indicate teacher AI-tool overwhelm, and urgent need for subject-specific AI training, which underscore a current lack of pedagogical alignment. These points of discussion reinforce a shared call to position teachers as co-designers and decision-makers in shaping human-centred AI for education.
Despite potential drawbacks, in discussing opportunities and risks of AI adoption, one of the most compelling conversations revolved around rethinking pedagogy. Traditional teaching and assessment methods, sedimented for decades, are indeed threatened by AI. Yet, some participants framed this threat as an opportunity: “We can finally talk about pedagogical design”. Perhaps AI’s very disruption is the push education needed to take new breath.
Other key takeaways from the Dialogue Lab were:
- The importance of targeted training, adapted to the level and needs of stakeholders, and which is specific (for concrete subjects, tools or practices) rather than generic.
- The need to rethink assessment strategies to focus on process rather than product.
- The importance of responsible development of AI, which preserves agency and directly addresses teachers’ needs.
- Policies and regulations from the top down that support data protection and transparency, and which are translated into accessible information for stakeholders
- Focus on critical thinking and critical analysis of AI outputs, data and AI literacy, and collaboration as pathways for future action.
The TAICo Dialogue Lab marked the launch of a European dialogue series on teachers and AI, with further events planned over the coming year in different contexts, including formats more directly targeting teachers themselves. GenAI4ED will seek to continue engaging with these Dialogue workshops, contributing insights, facilitating exchanges between stakeholders, and supporting the co-design of responsible and effective uses of AI in education.