Integrating Generative AI into High School STEM Education: A Professional Development Framework for Teacher Capacity Building

The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI) have upended the education landscape and more so in STEM education at high schools. As a result of the AI revolution since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, high school teachers and their school administrators have been struggling to contain the use of AI by their students. The central debate is how much AI to allow students to use and more importantly, how to assess students performance. The heart of the problem that high school teachers face is their lack of technical depth of what AI is and how to understand it to guide students inside and outside the classroom. The solution is to equip teachers with scientific knowledge about AI. Teachers need to understand the concept of prompt engineering, among others. This paper presents a comprehensive professional development (PD) framework designed to build teacher capacity for AI integration in high school STEM classrooms. The PD, part of an NSF grant for three years, aims to teach STEM teachers form the Greater Boston area the fundamentals of Generative AI. The PD is an structured as an intensive four-day professional development program supplemented by virtual sessions. During the four days, the project team use the concept of “teaching with AI” and not “teaching about AI”. The latter is the focus of computer science courses. The framework addresses key competencies including prompt engineering, ethical considerations, student-centered learning strategies, lesson plan adaptation, and assessment design. The first year or running the PD program reveals that teachers have learned much needed AI competencies. They are able to develop expertise for sustainable AI integration. The main contribution of this research is the development of AI-focused AI PD framework. Current literature on teachers PD lacks the existence of such a framework to the new emergence of Gen AI.