Using Professional Development to Empower Teachers to Create AI Chatbots

Overview

AI-powered chatbots can be valuable tools for enhancing instructional practice, but their impact depends on intentional design and integration. Teachers can enhance their instructional practice by leveraging AI chatbots thoughtfully — in a way that is aligned with their broader system’s vision — to support lesson-planning, differentiation, and student learning. By integrating this technology into their practice, educators can streamline tasks that are teacher-facing, student-facing, and for more general purposes to provide classroom support. This technology can help teachers generate differentiated instruction ideas, brainstorm lesson plans, provide relevant and actionable feedback, and support students with diverse and individualized learning needs.

Example from the School Teams AI Collaborative

Georgia Mejia, an instructional leader at Lynwood High School, part of Lynwood Unified School District in Southern California, and participant in the School Teams AI Collaborative, developed an instructional professional development (PD) session and a step-by-step video tutorial to help staff create their own AI chatbots. Implementing this strategy required the following steps:

• Selecting the Appropriate Tool: At Lynwood, George utilized and introduced Playlab to educators, a chatbot creation tool that allows teachers to customize AI assistants for various educational purposes, from lesson brainstorming to real-time student support.

• Providing Dedicated Time to Learn and Test Technology: By guiding their educators through structured PD opportunities and providing them materials they can reference as they embark on building out their chatbots, staff were better empowered to take their time to understand the technology and determine its best use case in their context.

• Putting Chatbots Into Action: Taking the next step in their professional learning, a group of AI Pathfinder Teachers at Lynwood High School piloted chatbot use in their classrooms. These AI-powered assistants were designed to generate differentiation strategies, provide grading rubric support, and even serve as 24/7 student tutors.

• Strengthening AI in Context: Teachers strengthened the instructional relevance of their chatbots by training them on California state standards, allowing a deeper connection between the chatbots’ work and their overarching curriculum and learning objectives.

This initiative was instrumental in fostering AI literacy among Lynwood educators while beginning to equip students with effective, self-directed learning tools.

Applying This Strategy in Your Context

Educators who want to utilize chatbots to improve instruction can take the following steps:

1. Identify Your Use Case: Determine how a chatbot could support your instructional practice. Examples include lesson planning, student feedback, differentiation strategies, IEP support, or career counseling.

2. Use a Chatbot Creation Tool: Platforms like Playlab allow teachers to build and customize AI chatbots without coding experience. Consider remixing an existing bot or creating one from scratch. Additional tools that can help users build custom chatbots include ChatGPT, Botpress, and Chatbase, among others.

3. Customize for Your Needs: Upload reference materials such as assignments, state standards, rubrics, and instructional guides to align the chatbot’s responses with your curriculum.

4. Test and Refine: Pilot your chatbot in the classroom or across your system and gather feedback from users. Monitor chatbot interactions and refine its workflow to improve performance.

5. Scale Up and Share: Once your chatbot is successful, consider creating a department, grade, or school-wide "bot kit" for teachers to access shared AI tools that enhance instruction.

Importantly, educators and leaders should consider how their choices around chatbots connect to their system’s broader instructional vision – or even at a more localized level, such as their school or department’s instructional goals, or their own priorities for student learning in their individual classrooms. Key considerations should include understanding:

• How much cognitive lift students should be responsible for when using AI tools.

• At what point educators and students should engage with AI tools in the learning process.

• What use cases of AI would be discouraged.

• What the end goal of using AI will be.

By considering these points thoughtfully and intentionally, leaders and educators will be better poised to make effective, strategic decisions about when, where, with whom, and how to use AI-enabled practices in their classrooms.

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.