After my lessons, an AI writes a report — not just on my student, but on me.
I teach 1:1 on Zoom. With the student's consent, I audio-record each lesson and feed Zoom's transcript into Claude. It reviews my teaching: what worked, what to change, even my own English slips as a non-native teacher.
Some catches are small. One stung. Across three lessons over about a month, it flagged the same habit: when my student pauses mid-sentence to search for a word she knows but forgot, I hand it to her. A flagged moment looks like this:
Her: “Because of the social, uh, social, uh, uh…”
Me: “Social media.”
When the word is one the student already knows, I now try to leave more time before helping. I might count to five, then offer the first letter if a cue is needed. That creates an opportunity to retrieve the word independently; it does not guarantee the word will be remembered. Unfamiliar vocabulary calls for a different response: I provide the language the learner needs and make room to practice it.
Now the limitations, because they're real
- Zoom's speech recognition mangles accented speech — hers and mine. Some lines come out as word salad, and once it put an English mistake in my mouth that the recording shows I never made.
- A transcript can't tell you how long I actually waited before I jumped in: the silence that matters isn't in the text.
- Once the report praised my student's “spontaneous speech.” She was actually reading a scripted answer off the screen. I caught that, not the AI.
My rule now: anything surprising gets checked against the recording, and the judgment stays mine. How I handle lesson recordings and transcripts →
Why keep doing it
Because a 1:1 online teacher has no mirror, and nobody sits in the back of a Zoom room. This is the first feedback loop I've built that points at me instead of my students. And it doubles as quality control: the transcript shows me whether the language I planned the lesson around actually came back in her talk, or whether a task I designed just fell flat. It also works the other way: the transcript catches her emergent language, the words she needed mid-task but didn't have, and those go into the next lesson.
How to try it
You don't need any special setup. Just don't ask a chatbot “how did I do?” That question invites flattery. Give it one lesson transcript, tell it which speaker is you, and point it at specific moves: where you supplied a word the student was still reaching for, where you asked a question and answered it yourself, whether your instructions landed. Make it quote the exact lines.