This article will discriminate between kinds of robot, point to its burgeoning development and application in the home and workplace, and describe its growing use in the classroom as a teacher. It will describe its potential to support, for instance, language development, social, and emotional training [e.g., for children with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD)], and teaching and assessment, and will review researchers', teachers', students', and parents' responses to this use. Some of these responses recognize the potential usefulness of humanoid robots, but also show an awareness that digital "thought" (AI) is not the same as human thought (HI), and show some caution about using robots as teachers. This disparity generates problems and dilemmas. These stem from, for example, a lack of discretion in decision-making, a lack of emotion (other than by simulation), a limited creative ability (in the foreseeable future), the nature of AI/HI relationships, ethical/legal matters, and culturally unsuitable programming. These matters point to the need for forethought about robot roles and for a code of practice for teachers who work with them. Derived from the discussion, such a code is proposed. The introduction of robot teachers will have significant implications for teachers' roles and their professional identity as human teachers move from being often solitary sources of learning to becoming teaching and learning managers who need to provide learning opportunities creatively. The change in teacher identity and the teacher's roles is described.Keywords: robot teachers, teachers' code of practice, teachers' roles/identity, digital versus human thought, fostering constructive thinking 1 The definition of AI adopted by the UK's Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI, 2018, p. 13) is: "Technologies with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, and language translation."
Newton and Newton
Robot Teachers and Human TeachersAndroids are humanoid robots which mimic human form and behavior (Kanda et al., 2009). The pace of development of robotics is rapid, often encouraged by governments for its perceived economic advantages. For instance, the workforce in Japan is declining at a rate which seriously threatens its economy and the expectations of its people. Robots are seen as a part of the solution. As well as using them to manufacture goods, the aim is to put them to use as cleaners, sales assistants, museum guides, carers for the young and old, TV programme presenters, and of particular relevance here, as teachers (Robertson, 2007). This is not a pipedream of robot engineers; Japan and South Korea, for instance, intend to make significant use of humanoid robots within the next decade, while interest in robot as teachers, as it is reflected in the number of publications about them, is increasing around the world (Robertson, 2007;Steinert, 2014).Robots in the classroom can have diverse uses. Some are objects of study for students to...