GenAI and Teacher Roles

This week as many of us are on or nearing a holiday break, I would like to share two recent AI articles that might impact teaching and learning. The first article is entitled, “Transforming Teachers’ Roles in the Era of Generative AI (GenAI): Perceptions, Acceptance, Knowledge, and Practices” by Zhai (Oct 2024). The author suggests that existing literature treats GenAI in isolation, overlooking how they collectively influence teachers’ ability to effectively integrate GenAI into pedagogy. This paper attempts to fill this gap by proposing a framework that categorizes teachers into four roles—

Observer,
Adopter,
Collaborator, and
Innovator.

The findings emphasize that teachers should not only accept and understand GenAI capabilities but also integrate it deeply into their teaching practices in targeted, appropriate ways. This approach follows other appropriate, relevant and meaningful (ARM) tech adoption approaches.

The second related paper is entitled, “Are They Ready to Teach? GenAI as a Means to Uncover Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)” by Blonder, et. al (2024). The authors share ideas on integrating GenAI to enhance the pedagogical development. They suggest applying the GenAI tool to evaluate pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). By holding interactive dialogues with GenAI, pre-service teachers engage in lesson planning in a way that reveals their understanding of PCK (part of the TPaCK model discussed earlier, where T is technology by Koehler & Mishra, 2009).

The authors proposed method involves two stages of GenAI application:

Recording teachers’ chats with the GenAI over the planning of a lesson.
Assigning trained GenAI to scrutinize and evaluate the information gleaned from the chats.

To examine their idea, they provided ChatGPT 4.o the following information:

Copied the full chat “Molecular vs. Ionic: Differences” (Feldman-Maggor et al., 2024) onto a document and attached it to the chat. The dialogue contains eight prompts and eight chat responses.
A short explanation about PCK was copied from the introduction.
The following prompt: “In the document, you can find a conversation of a chemistry educator with chatGPT. The educator asked the chat to help in designing an activity for the chemistry lesson. Please analyze the PCK of the teacher as it is reflected in the conversation based on the definition of the PCK components. Pay attention to analyze the teacher’s prompts and not the knowledge that is reflected in the responses.“

The authors then critically read the information about the PCK components to verify the chat’s evaluation (Tao et al., 2024). They concluded that the chat’s analysis of the revealed PCK within the provided dialogue was accurate. Thus, they added human verification to the GenAI evaluation to improve human–machine collaboration.

In this conceptualization paper, the authors highlight the aspects of integrating GenAI:

Lesson planning facilitation: Using GenAI to design lessons and activities helps teachers put their theoretical knowledge into practice.
Knowledge assessment: GenAI can assist in evaluating the PCK of teachers by analyzing their interactions and the tasks they create with the GenAI, thus providing data for improvement. Of course, GenAI results are not always accurate. Educators should be aware of this limitation when using GenAI (Tao et al., 2024).

References

Blonder, R., Feldman-Maggor, Y. & Rap, S. (2024). Are They Ready to Teach? Generative AI as a Means to Uncover Pre-Service Science Teachers’ PCK and Enhance Their Preparation Program. J Sci Educ Technology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-024-10180-2

Zhai, X. (Oct 2024). Transforming Teachers’ Roles and Agencies in the Era of Generative AI: Perceptions, Acceptance, Knowledge, and Practices. J Sci Educ Technology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-024-10174-0

Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1), 60–70. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2010.07.009

Finally, for those of you celebrating holidays, I wish you all the best!

I will not be sharing an article next week, December 27, 2024 but will continue in the new year on January 3, 2025.