#222 AI in Education with Becky Allen

In this long-awaited sequel (eight years after her last appearance), Craig welcomes back Becky Allen — education researcher, co-founder of Teacher Tap, co-author of The Teacher Gap , and now a consultant to the US-based Alpha School chain — for a deep dive into AI in education, with a particular focus on AI as a personal tutor. Becky is a self-confessed AI optimist who uses LLMs for almost everything (with a fervent endorsement of WhisperFlow voice transcription as a game-changer for giving models richer context). She walks through what she's been seeing inside Alpha School, where students do roughly two hours a day on AI-powered learning apps and spend the rest of their time on project-based learning, sports, and life skills. Her clearest examples of where AI tutoring genuinely shines are in generative prerequisite-knowledge conversations and in forcing students to engage step-by-step with worked examples — pulling them out of the passive eye-darting that kills most textbook learning. From there, Craig walks her through a battery of common sceptical pushbacks (screen time, scalability, Alpha's wealthy demographic, motivation without an audience, the Khanmigo flop, applicability to the Global South, and the future of subject-specialist teachers) and Becky pushes back on each with characteristic nuance. Her core thesis: AI won't transform mainstream schools much — they're too operationally complex to bend — but it will enable a parallel world of micro-schools, alternative provision, and remote subject specialists, particularly for the growing population of persistently absent and home-educated children. The conversation closes with reflections on whether AI will take her own job (and what to advise her children) and a prediction that the most concrete thing AI will fix in mainstream schools is marking. View the show notes here: podcast.mrbartonmaths.com/222-ai-in-education-with-becky-allen

You can listen to #222 AI in Education with Becky Allen online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

#222 AI in Education with Becky Allen is an episode from Mr Barton Maths Podcast by Craig Barton.

This episode is 01:36:21 long.

This episode was published on May 13, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Mr Barton Maths Podcast when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.