The Wichita school district in Kansas is preparing for a big summer of learning—for teachers.
The district is teaming up with a local university to host a two-day conference about artificial intelligence, challenging teachers to spend part of their preservice week learning about AI and its many functions, challenges, and opportunities. Then, on the second day, attendees will split up into groups of four to complete challenges, such as designing lessons.
The catch? There will be a fifth member of each team: an AI tool.
“We will challenge them with: How do you truly design learning experiences that are rigorous, meaningful, relevant to students, while using AI in the best possible way,” said Dyane Smokorowski, the coordinator of digital literacy for the district.
The two-day conference will be optional professional development for teachers, though the majority are expected to attend, Smokorowski said. It is intended to blend the need for AI literacy with engaging and relevant activities that educators can take back to the classroom to kick off the 2025-26 school year.
The Wichita district is one of a small number of school systems that have taken a structured, districtwide approach to professional development around the use of artificial intelligence—even if it’s not required learning. Most districts have yet to take such a step, largely because either the technology is evolving so quickly it’s hard to keep up, or leaders don’t really understand it themselves, so it’s difficult to facilitate widespread, effective training. Some districts have made smaller-scale efforts to teach educators about AI, by infusing concepts into existing professional development or by offering less formal opportunities to experiment with the technology.
Experts in the field say that providing some level of guidance and training about the rapidly evolving technology, even if it’s not perfect or comprehensive, is better than nothing at all. And it’s training that many educators want and are looking for anyway.
Still, the majority of teachers say they’ve received no professional development on using generative AI, according to a nationally representative survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center in October. Six percent of teachers say they’re receiving ongoing training on the topic, while 58 percent say they’ve received no training at all.
For educators who have received training, 41 percent rated it as “poor” or “mediocre” while 18 percent thought it was “good” or “excellent.”
Despite the widespread lack of training, about one-third of teachers say they use AI-driven tools in their classrooms in some capacity. Of those teachers, more than 1 of every 5 say they use the tools “a little,” and nearly 1 of 10 reported using them “some.” Two percent of teachers say they use AI tools “a lot.”
The survey results illustrate the galaxy of opinions about AI tools. For some, the technology promises more manageable workloads and less clerical work, like paperwork and responding to emails. But for others, it’s more ominous, posing threats to job security, increasing cheating and plagiarism among students, and making it possibile for personal or confidential information to be misused.
Artificial intelligence has actually been around for decades, though attention to it has spiked in the past two years, following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Since then, AI—particularly generative AI—has evolved rapidly, with new tools and iterations available seemingly daily. That rapid evolution is from where much of educators’ concern and confusion stems, said Pat Yongpradit, the chief academic officer for Code.org and a lead for TeachAI, an initiative to support schools in using and teaching about AI.
It’s also why most districts have yet to roll out professional development modules or mandatory training sessions about how to use—and not use—AI.
But tackling AI training doesn’t have to be so daunting, Yongpradit said.
Despite how quickly it is evolving and in whatever forms it may take in the future, artificial intelligence does have some basic components and strengths and weaknesses that will remain the same. Educators can learn about those, like the role of data and algorithms that power AI-generated responses, biases the technology has and why, and the importance of a human being double-checking its accuracy.
“Even if it’s advancing and even if it gets more and more capable, just the idea of having some of that general AI literacy can go a long way,” Yongpradit said.
Once districts take the initial steps to train their educators, leaders can also survey their teachers about what parts of the basic AI training were useful, what didn’t work, and what they’d still like to learn more about.
Districts using optional activities, existing PD to teach AI
Some districts are taking the plunge, finding relatively simple and straightforward ways to explore AI and use it in their schools.
The Fox Chapel Area school district in the Pittsburgh area has taken an approach that blends exploratory learning with some expectations to try out the technology in small ways, said Superintendent Mary Catherine Reljac.
Some early and enthusiastic adopters of AI in the district have hosted optional “lunch and learns” and after-school professional learning to demonstrate how to use the tools for such classroom tasks as lesson planning and responding to parent emails, Reljac said. Students have also participated in talks about their thoughts, concerns, and hopes for how to use AI to learn and prepare for future jobs.
The district has also mandated professional development, requiring some educators to create an “interesting lesson with artificial intelligence.” If that sounds vague, Reljac emphasized, it’s on purpose.
Administrators strategically didn’t clarify whether teachers should craft a lesson about AI or use AI to help create their lesson. They wanted to “leave a bit of creative opportunity and personalization,” which can generate more interest and a sense of autonomy over the activity, she said.
Some teachers constructed classroom-assignment rubrics using AI, while others used AI to produce examples of essays using the parameters of a classroom rubric. Then, students evaluated the AI-generated essays against the teacher’s rubric.
“Our logic is that if we embrace it, it helps to diminish anxieties and fears, and the way we’re approaching it allows for multiple on ramps and off-ramps so people can explore and learn in ways that are comfortable to them,” Reljac said. “We’re seeing that pay off as a lot of our people are embracing it after they find a few tricks they can use it for.”
Eventually, though, Reljac said the Fox Chapel district intends to develop and implement some sort of required professional development module for educators. In the meantime, staff have been provided some basic parameters about AI tools. For example, they are not supposed to put personal or confidential information into any AI system, nor should they assume AI-generated responses are factual.
“I think eventually there will be core concepts that have to go through a professional development module or workshop,” Reljac said. “I just don’t think we’re there yet because the tools are evolving so quickly.”
Another approach that could prove effective is incorporating relevant AI tools into already-existing professional development modules, said Virginia Reischl, the coordinator of literacy and language for the Orange County Department of Education in California.
Finding practical ways in which AI applies to different subjects—like creating historical timelines for a history teacher or showing an English teacher how to use AI to support struggling readers—and infusing that into professional development already on the schedule can help avoid resistance, she said.
“Teachers don’t want another thing on their plates,” Reischl said. “So, if you can avoid a stand-alone training and instead say, ‘This is how AI can support you and the work you’re already doing,’ it’s going to draw people in.”
Finding ways to incorporate AI training into existing professional development opportunities can offset the challenge of finding time to target the topic, too, Reischl said.
Finding the fun in AI learning
In Wichita, district leaders are also prioritizing fun and collaborative ways to practice using AI.
The district has held virtual “game nights” on Microsoft Teams with parents and students, during which teachers use AI for “prompt engineering.” For example, a teacher could ask an AI tool to explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the voice of Winnie the Pooh and have students critique the response. Then, students and parents could ask for the process to be repeated with a different process and a different character.
The game nights help build community connections while also allowing educators to explore how to phrase prompts correctly to get the desired outcome and reiterating the importance of fact-checking AI-generated responses.
“I feel that there is an urgency that staff should have some AI literacy so they can guide students to be good digital citizens with AI themselves, and there’s not anyone else really going around and having community events that give families the chance to build AI literacy, too,” said Smokorowski, Wichita’s digital literacy coordinator. “So, we need to take the lead so that our students have the best foundation to have success with AI as it grows.”
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
