Part 1

Context and problem statement, main goal and 3 theoretical strands

Context and problem statement

- Teacher educators

- Generative AI (GenAI) 

Aim

What and how do teacher educators want to learn about GenAI?

What themes do teacher educators identify as crucial for their own professional development regarding the integration of GenAI in their teaching?

How do teacher educators want to be professionalized, given the fast-changing nature of these technologies?

Research questions

3 theoretical strands

“Educational institutions must invest in ongoing professional development and support systems to help teachers manage techno-stress and workload burdens from adopting new technologies.” (Yan et al., 2024, p. 1846)

Part 2

Research design, methods and results

Research design: case study

General stance, perceived competence, learning needs

Discussions for deeper understanding, designing and discussing PD pathways

Exploratory mixed methods

Methods

• Survey (N=25):
• Focus groups (N=9)

Results ('Context')

Results ('What')

Teacher educators’ reported interests regarding GenAI-related learning.  

Ranked promises and challenges (Yan et al., 2024)

Results ('What': use case )

Quotes

"I don't like writing generally, ... When I'm grading I can ask AI to assist me ... to uplift my feedback. I designed my own CustomGPT to do that for me in giving good feedback."

"I can imagine that chatbots go wrong from time to time. If it generates something completely wrong, the students and us would have a laugh."

Results ('How')

Teacher educators preferred professional development formats for learning about GenAI.

Results ('How')

Quotes

"Just sitting together with colleagues and each one in turn presenting a case, a problem which they are confronted with and helping them to reflect on it."

"P4, for example, is someone who uses a lot of AI tools already... If there is a tool or platform or anything where I can listen to P4 and the tools P4 uses, it would be great."

"I liked the idea of P3 to have a professional learning community ... because we have already talked about it in the book club and on several other occasions."

Part 3

Key findings and recommendations 

Optimistic about the opportunities...

“I’m not using GenAI in my work. I’m a bit hesitant, because I don’t know what the effect will be."

"It helps me to give students more detailed feedback on physics exercises."

"I have since last week a generative AI model running myself on Raspberry Pi just for training purposes."

but cautious​

Concerned about ethics (digital divide, transparency)

“It’s getting quite unfair for students... They have so many more benefits than using the free version or not using it at all."

"There’s maybe going to be a gap between early adopters in GenAI and people that don’t jump on the train. I don’t know what consequences this gap can have."

“What does GenAI exactly base itself on to come to some kind of evaluation of a work? You should be able to explain it! "

Assessment

"The way we assess is like often still old school, because we don't pay a lot of attention to it. ... And now we are forced to do that."

"Another thing with using AI for assessment and giving feedback – I think that that’s the task of the educator."

"It feels so wrong. It feels like an attack to the core of my profession. It gives me a really strange and uncomfortable feeling."