Using AI to Support Academy-Based Interdisciplinary Learning

Overview

Making learning more authentic and relevant is a persistent challenge across K-12 education. Breaking down traditional siloes between academic content and career and technical education (CTE) pathways offers a powerful opportunity to help students see real-world applications of their learning. However, designing interdisciplinary activities that connect core standards to career skills—and developing the pedagogical approaches needed to support this work—can be incredibly time-intensive for educators.

Generative AI offers a new way to remove some of these barriers. By building custom chatbots, schools can help academic content experts generate activity ideas, rubrics, and student-facing materials that align with both academic learning objectives and CTE pathway skills. This approach makes interdisciplinary collaboration more manageable, supporting teachers in creating learning experiences.

Example from the School Teams AI Collaborative

Educators from Desert Edge High School, part of the Agua Fria Union High School District, launched an initiative to strengthen interdisciplinary learning across core and CTE pathways. Their academy-based learning (ABL) approach combined teacher collaboration with AI-powered tools to create high-quality, career-connected resources. The team approached this work through the following steps:

• Forming Cross-Content Academy Teams: As part of the district’s broader transition, educators piloted new ways to make academic learning more career-connected. Teachers from core subjects (e.g., Chemistry, World History, Spanish) partnered with CTE pathway teachers (e.g., Sports Medicine, Business Marketing) to form academy teams aligned to major industry clusters. This structure promoted interdisciplinary collaboration as an early test.

• Developing a Custom AI Chatbot to Support Resource Creation: The district’s Director of Educational Technology, Drew Olsson, partnered with instructional leaders to design and launch the Academy-Based Learning Assistant chatbot. They built the chatbot using these instructions to pull from key reference materials, including state content standards, CTE pathway standards, and examples of project-based learning activities. This intentional design ensured that AI-generated outputs were anchored in the instructional outcomes prioritized by the district.

• Refining, Reviewing, and Organizing Resources: After using the chatbot to generate draft materials, teachers refined and strengthened the outputs, prioritizing quality over quantity. They focused on ensuring academic rigor, real-world relevance, and strong alignment to content and career skills. Completed resources were submitted through a shared Google Classroom and a tracking spreadsheet, a centralized, evolving resource library accessible across campuses. Below are examples of interdisciplinary lesson plans developed through this process, showing how academic content and CTE skills were intentionally connected in student-facing activities:

  

• Reflecting and Iterating on AI-Enabled Curriculum Design: As an early pilot effort, the team approached the work with a mindset of experimentation and learning. Teachers and leaders captured lessons from the implementation process, such as how teachers interact with AI outputs, where additional support is needed, and how peer review processes can be strengthened, and then applied those insights to future iterations. While AI accelerated initial drafting, the team emphasized that human expertise, collaboration, and continuous improvement are essential to building strong, sustainable interdisciplinary learning experiences.

By combining thoughtful collaboration structures with AI-enabled planning supports, Desert Edge High School educators are creating more authentic, career-connected learning experiences while piloting new models for interdisciplinary curriculum design.

Applying This Strategy in Your Context

Schools and systems looking to strengthen connections between academic learning and career pathways can use AI tools to make interdisciplinary curriculum development more manageable. Custom-built chatbots can help generate high-quality, career-connected resources while ensuring educators retain leadership over quality, relevance, and alignment. Educators and leaders can take the following steps to adapt this strategy:

1. Form a Team: Bring together a cross-functional team. This may include pathway teachers (e.g., CTE, the arts), non-pathway teachers (e.g., English, math, science), academic team leads, the CTE coordinator or director, curriculum specialists, and/or the curriculum director. Ensure the group represents diverse expertise and has shared ownership.

2. Define the Desired Experience and Chatbot Goals: Identify the types of cognitive work you want the chatbot to support, such as generating draft project ideas, aligning activities to standards, or designing interdisciplinary rubrics. Decide what kinds of outputs the chatbot should produce, how structured or open-ended prompts should be, and how much expert judgment you expect users to apply.

3. Assemble and Train the Chatbot Using Key Resources: Gather reference materials the chatbot will need to deliver high-quality outputs. This might include CTE pathway standards, academic content standards, examples of scaffolded interdisciplinary tasks, and/or strong project-based learning models. Use generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, MagicSchool, or other chatbot builders to develop a custom tool anchored to these resources. Pilot the bot with a small team before broader rollout.

4. Prioritize Peer Review and Refinement: Create processes for teachers to collaboratively review, revise, and strengthen AI-generated materials. Emphasize that AI is a starting point and that human expertise is critical to ensuring rigor, relevance, and instructional quality.

5. Capture Lessons Learned and Iterate: Approach the work with a pilot mindset. Gather teacher feedback, monitor challenges and successes, and refine both the chatbot and collaboration structures over time. Use these insights to guide future iterations and support broader scaling efforts.

By embedding AI-powered supports into curriculum design, educators can strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration, create more authentic learning opportunities, and streamline the development of high-quality, career-connected resources. AI tools like custom chatbots make it easier for teachers to design engaging, standards-aligned activities while ensuring human expertise remains at the center of instructional innovation.

This AI-enabled strategy was developed by a member of the School Teams AI Collaborative—a partnership between Leading Educators and The Learning Accelerator (TLA). The Collaborative was developed to bring together innovative educators from schools across the country to share ideas and discover effective ways to use AI in the classroom.