Like it or not, artificial intelligence has become so rapidly ubiquitous in K-12 education that teacher education programs are now puzzling over how it should be worked into how teachers are prepared—if at all.
The American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education released a new framework today calling for university-based teacher-education programs, which by federal estimates prepare more than 90% of new educators, to build a comprehensive approach to preparing teachers to understand how the technology can affect K-12 education—for good or ill.
AACTE, which represents more than 500 public and private college and university programs, also suggests that some aspiring teachers who oppose the technology on ethical grounds should be allowed to avoid using it and still receive their teaching credentials, a proposal that could be tricky for states to implement.
The framework, developed by a task force of both members and outside experts, lays out technical skills, pedagogical knowledge, and ethical judgement that teachers need to learn to use and teach AI well in the classroom. It does not include specific curriculum examples or standards, and AACTE considers it a starting point for deeper conversations among higher education institutions.
AI’s implications for training encompass many of the fundamentals of teaching candidates learn, including planning, assessment, differentiation, instructional choices, and professional ethics, said Anne Tapp Jaksa, a teacher education professor and senior research director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Digital Curricula who helped develop the framework.
The framework says preservice teachers need explicit training on:
- Ethics and policy, such as AI literacy and equitable access.
- Practice and implementation, including being able to evaluate student work produced using AI tools.
- Cognitive issues both in the technology, such as biases and hallucinations, and in how the technology affects people, such as the effect of using AI on students’ critical thinking skills.
- Professional expertise, including how teachers use their own judgment and continue to build teacher-student relationships
“AI forces us to reconsider what counts as evidence of learning,” Tapp Jaska said. “If a candidate can use AI to generate a polished lesson plan or reflection or an assessment, the important question becomes whether that product actually demonstrates the candidate’s own professional reasoning.”
If traditionally teacher education has been designed around teaching to the average student, “there is no such thing as average when you think about what we can do today with AI to design and structure what learning looks like in different ways,” said Carole Basile, the dean of the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at ASU. “So we’re beginning to ask a different set of questions around what teaching could look like.”
Basile noted that ASU’s teacher college has overhauled its curriculum to focus on how instruction could evolve in the wake of AI. Teacher preparation in AI, she said, must move from focusing on training teachers to use individual tools to helping teachers make their own tools and understand how AI can support, rather than replace, their professional judgement and relationships with students.
Teacher training on artificial intelligence to date has typically come from individual districts or professional organizations—often developed with AI industry groups and focused on learning specific platforms or prompts, said Peña Bedesem, a co-chair of the committee that developed the framework, and an associate professor of special education at Kent State University in Ohio.
It’s important that teacher education on AI “not become just a computer science course,” Bedesem said. “That’s not going to be efficient, and it’s not going to be effective.”
AACTE also calls for teacher training and licensure programs to give teachers the right to refuse to use the technology altogether.
“AI is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid, but there may be a legitimate privacy, accessibility, cultural, pedagogical, or ethical reason not to use a particular system,” said Tapp Jaska, who helped develop AACTE’s framework. Teachers should not be prevented from attaining a teaching license because they choose not to use AI.
But not using AI may be harder to do once teachers have entered the classroom. Much of the more than $1.7 billion in Title II teacher-training grants now prioritizes preparing educators to to use AI in their classrooms, per an April 2025 executive order on AI-based teacher training signed by President Donald Trump.
