The 6 Hours a Week AI Is Giving Teachers Back — And How to Actually Use Them

Marielyn Wong
2 days ago
3 min read

A Gallup and Walton Family Foundation survey found that teachers who use AI tools weekly gain nearly six extra hours per week (Gallup, 2025). Over a school year, that's six full weeks.

Six weeks.

That number gets cited a lot. What gets cited less often is the honest follow-up question: where do those hours actually come from, and what do teachers do with them?

Because if the answer is "the hours go back into catching up on admin," the maths don't help much. And if "using AI tools" means spending 45 minutes crafting the right prompt to get a mediocre lesson plan, that's not a win either.

This is a practical guide to the highest-return AI tasks for educators: what to start with, what to skip, and what to do with the time you get back.

Where the hours actually come from

The biggest gains come from three categories of task: student Q&A support, repetitive content generation, and administrative writing. These are the areas where AI is reliably useful right now, without requiring significant prompt engineering or quality checking.

Student Q&A and after-hours support One of the most underappreciated time drains for teachers is the volume of student questions that arrive outside class hours, via email, messaging apps, and learning management systems. Many of these questions are repetitive. The same five questions about the same assignment, from twenty different students.

AI tools can handle a significant chunk of this load, especially when they're grounded in your actual course content. Platforms like Noodle Factory's Walter, for example, allow educators to load their course materials and learning outcomes. Walter then fields student questions within that content, consistently, at any hour, without the teacher needing to respond to each one individually. The result is that students get timely support, and teachers get their evenings back.

Lesson plan drafts

AI is a strong first-draft generator for lesson plans, particularly when you give it clear context: subject, level, learning objective, duration, and any constraints (no group work today, we're in a computer lab, students struggled with X last week). The draft won't be perfect, but it gives you something to react to rather than starting from a blank page, and reacting is faster than creating.

Rubrics, feedback templates, and marking guides

These are high-effort, high-repetition tasks that AI handles well. A rubric for a persuasive writing assignment, a feedback template for lab reports, a marking guide for a presentation assessment. All of these can be drafted in minutes and refined in a few more. The quality check matters here, but the scaffolding is solid.

Administrative writing

Parent communications, end-of-term reports, meeting summaries, policy acknowledgements: this is some of the most draining writing a teacher does, and it's also some of the most formulaic. AI drafts these well.

What to skip (for now)

Assessment questions that test higher-order thinking are harder than they look for AI to get right on the first try. You'll spend more time fixing hallucinated facts and poorly calibrated difficulty than you would writing from scratch. Start with lower-stakes content generation and work up.

Similarly, highly personalised feedback on individual student work still requires a teacher's judgment. AI can help structure it, but the substance has to come from someone who knows the student.

What to do with the time

This is the more interesting question.

The hours AI returns to teachers are most valuable when they go toward the things AI can't do: noticing the student who's disengaging, having the conversation that a struggling student actually needs, designing the activity that makes a concept click, building the relationship that makes students want to show up.

Six hours a week is enough time to do more of the teaching that brought most educators into the profession in the first place. That's the real return on the investment.

A practical starting point

If you haven't used AI tools much yet, start with one task this week: use an AI tool to draft a lesson plan or a rubric for something you need to prepare anyway. Don't spend more than 15 minutes on the prompt. See what you get, adjust it, and note how long it took compared to doing it from scratch.

That's the honest baseline. From there, you'll have a sense of where AI actually saves you time in your specific context, which is more useful than any general statistic.

Sources

Noodle Factory builds AI tutoring tools for universities, polytechnics, and K-12 schools across Southeast Asia. Learn more at noodlefactory.ai.