Brisk Teaching’s new white paper, From Efficiency to Efficacy: Measuring AI’s Instructional Impact, offers a new framework for understanding whether AI is meaningfully improving teaching and learning.
As AI tools have made their way into classrooms, time saved has become one of the most common ways to measure their value. And understandably so. Teachers have limited time and increasingly demanding workloads, so a tool that helps them create lessons, differentiate materials, or provide feedback more efficiently can make a real difference.
But time saved only tells us so much.
The more consequential question is whether AI helps educators deliver better instruction—and, ultimately, improves learning for students.
That question is at the center of Brisk Teaching’s new white paper, From Efficiency to Efficacy: Measuring AI’s Instructional Impact. Drawing on insights from educators, district leaders, and researchers, the paper proposes a framework for evaluating the instructional value of AI-assisted interactions.
The premise builds on decades of learning science. We already know many of the practices that contribute to effective instruction, including timely feedback, spaced practice, appropriate scaffolding, and differentiated content. The challenge has often been giving teachers the capacity to deliver those practices consistently for every student.
AI has the potential to expand that capacity. Measuring whether it does so, however, requires districts to look more closely at the instructional moments in which the technology is used.
The framework outlined in the paper is designed to do just that. It focuses on interactions that are observable in real time, grounded in research, and close enough to the classroom to help educators adjust their practice while learning is still underway. Each AI-assisted interaction is weighted according to its instructional value, providing a more meaningful picture of a tool’s potential impact.
This shift matters because the decisions districts make now—about which AI tools to adopt, how to implement them, and what evidence to expect from vendors—will shape the role of AI in classrooms for years to come.
Efficiency gains are important. But the real promise of AI in education lies in its ability to help teachers deliver stronger instruction and create better learning experiences for students.
The next step is making sure we know how to measure it.
