The American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education has released a new framework for preparing teachers to understand how AI can affect K-12 education, reports Education Week.
The framework lays out technical skills, pedagogical knowledge, and ethical judgment for teachers to effectively use and teach AI in the classroom.
The framework calls for preservice teacher training on:
- Ethics and policy, such as AI literacy and equitable access;
- Practice and implementation, including being able to evaluate student work produced using AI tools;
- Cognitive issues such as biases and hallucinations, and in how technology affects people, such as the impact of AI on students’ critical thinking skills;
- Professional expertise, including how teachers use their own judgment and how to continue to build teacher-student relationships
“AI forces us to reconsider what counts as evidence of learning,” says Anne Tapp Jaksa, a teacher education professor and senior research director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Digital Curricula who helped develop the framework. “If a candidate can use AI to generate a polished lesson plan or reflection or an assessment, the important question becomes whether that product actually demonstrates the candidate’s own professional reasoning.”
If traditionally teacher education has been designed around teaching to the average student, “there is no such thing as average when you think about what we can do today with AI to design and structure what learning looks like in different ways,” says Carole Basile, the dean of the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at ASU. “So we’re beginning to ask a different set of questions around what teaching could look like.”
Teacher training on AI has typically come from individual districts or professional organizations—often developed with AI industry groups and focused on learning specific platforms or prompts, says Peña Bedesem, a co-chair of the committee that developed the framework, and an associate professor of special education at Kent State University in Ohio.
It’s important that teacher education on AI “not become just a computer science course,” Bedesem says. “That’s not going to be efficient, and it’s not going to be effective.”
AACTE also calls for teacher training and licensure programs to give teachers the right to refuse to use the technology.
“AI is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid, but there may be a legitimate privacy, accessibility, cultural, pedagogical, or ethical reason not to use a particular system,” says Tapp Jaska, who helped develop AACTE’s framework. Teachers should not be prevented from attaining a teaching license because they choose not to use AI, she says.
Education Week
