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The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) necessitates educating all students about AI. This, however, poses great challenges because most K-12 teachers have limited prior knowledge or experience of teaching AI. This exploratory study reports the design of an online professional development program aimed at preparing teachers for teaching AI in classrooms. The program includes a book club where teachers read a book about AI and learned key activities of an AI curriculum developed for middle schoolers, and a 2-week practicum where teachers co-taught the curriculum in a summer camp. The participants were 17 teachers from three school districts across the United States. Analysis of their surveys revealed an increase in teachers’ content knowledge and self-efficacy in teaching AI. Teachers reported that the book club taught them AI concepts and the practicum sharpened their teaching practices. Our findings reveal valuable insights on teacher training for the AI education field.
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AI Book Club: An Innovative Professional Development Model for AI Education
This paper describes an AI Book Club as an innovative 20-hour professional development (PD) model designed to prepare teachers with AI content knowledge and an understanding of the ethical issues posed by bias in AI that are foundational to developing AI-literate citizens. The design of the intervention was motivated by a desire to manage the cognitive load of AI learning by spreading the PD program over several weeks and a desire to form and maintain a community of teachers interested in AI education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each week participants spent an hour independently reading selections from an AI book, reviewing AI activities, and viewing videos of other educators teaching the activities, then met online for 1 hour to discuss the materials and brainstorm how they might adapt the materials for their classrooms. The participants in the AI Book Club were 37 middle school educators from 3 US school districts and 5 youth-serving organizations. The teachers are from STEM disciplines as well as Social Studies and Art. Eighty-nine percent were from underrepresented groups in STEM and CS. In this paper we describe the design of the AI Book Club, its implementation, and preliminary findings on teachers' impressions of the AI Book Club as a form of PD, thoughts about teaching AI in classrooms, and interest in continuing the book club model in the upcoming year. We conclude with recommendations for others interested in implementing a book club PD format for AI learning.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048746
- PAR ID:
- 10399569
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2022
- Volume:
- 54
- Issue:
- 3
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 202 to 208
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499318
