Opportunities, challenges and school strategies for integrating generative AI in education

K-12 schools (multi-school sample) with professional development context

Canada

Teachers and school leaders participating in AI seminar

• In-school (K–12)

Survey-based qualitative reflection after teacher education seminar

Single data collection cycle; reflections completed within ~30 minutes

76 educators (73 teachers, 3 leaders)

Online survey tools and generative AI platforms (e.g., ChatGPT)

• Variation in AI policy maturity across schools
• Uneven teacher confidence and prior AI training
• Access and licensing limitations for AI tools
• Need for clearer ethical and privacy guidance

K-12 learners (indirectly represented through educator reports)

Mixed; increasing student exposure to GenAI at home and school

Not required for end users; teacher AI competency varies

• Understand opportunities for GenAI in teaching, administration, and assessment
• Identify major implementation barriers in school settings
• Propose practical school strategies for AI-ready implementation

• Strengthen teacher and student AI literacy
• Promote critical evaluation of AI-generated outputs
• Align policy, pedagogy, and technology adoption

• Not a randomized intervention measuring causal learning gains
• Not limited to one subject or one single AI tool
• Not a technical benchmarking study of model performance

Generative AI assistants (primarily LLM-based chat tools)

• Tutor
• Automation tool
• Co-creator

Primarily natural-language prompting and response

• Teachers use prompts for lesson planning and material generation
• AI supports drafting, summarizing, feedback, and communication tasks
• Assessment support includes question generation and feedback scaffolds

• Human review of AI outputs before classroom use
• Fact-checking and source verification expectations
• School-level guidance for privacy, plagiarism, and responsible use
• Teacher facilitation to reduce over-reliance and preserve critical thinking

• Educators receive GenAI-focused professional learning
• Participants reflect on opportunities and concerns from practice
• Responses are thematically analyzed across research questions
• Findings inform school-level strategy recommendations

• Humans define pedagogy, ethics, and final instructional decisions
• AI assists with draft generation, ideation, and routine workload support
• Teachers validate quality, fairness, and contextual appropriateness

• Professional development aligned to real classroom use-cases
• Policy-aligned examples for acceptable and unacceptable AI use
• Guided prompting and evaluation routines for students

• School readiness gaps: unclear policies, limited infrastructure, uncertain governance
• Teacher readiness gaps: insufficient practical training and technical support
• Student readiness gaps: academic integrity concerns and low critical evaluation habits
• Risk of over-reliance reducing critical thinking and independent problem-solving

• Adopted socio-ecological framing to address meso and micro implementation factors
• Proposed AI-ready school strategy using policy, organizational learning, and improvement loops
• Emphasized cross-stakeholder collaboration (leaders, teachers, parents, experts)

• Overall teacher sentiment was more positive than negative
• Experienced AI users reported stronger optimism and practical value
• Teachers identified broad subject-specific opportunities for classroom integration

• GenAI seen as useful for lesson design, administration, and formative assessment support
• Awareness-to-implementation gap remains a major barrier
• Need for institutional supports to translate interest into sustainable practice

Educators recognized meaningful potential in GenAI, but repeatedly linked successful adoption to structured training, clear policies, and practical safeguards for ethics, privacy, and academic integrity.

• Data privacy and cybersecurity are recurring concerns in school adoption
• Bias, misinformation, and hallucination risks require explicit mitigation
• Academic integrity policies need updates for AI-assisted workflows
• Responsible use must include transparency, human accountability, and age-appropriate guidance

• Practitioner observation
• Activity documentation

• Supports design of school-readiness frameworks for GenAI integration
• Informs professional development models for teacher AI competency
• Provides empirical themes for policy design in K-12 AI governance

• AI literacy and teacher professional learning
• Educational leadership and school change management
• Assessment integrity and responsible AI in classrooms

• Completed

K-12

In-school

Teaching support / Assessment support / Admin support

Teacher-guided AI integration

Medium

Medium