How Professional Development Influences K-12 Teachers' Views on GenAI

GenAI refers to the technology that can be used to mimic patterns and generate ”new” content based on the prompts it was given and the data it was trained with using various large language models (LLMs). The emergence of GenAI tools brings about great potential in K-12 education while sparking fierce debates around the topic. It is also noted there is a lack of use and understanding of GenAI among K-12 educators. To better support middle school and high school instructors, bridging a gap between them and the university and better preparing K-12 students for colleges, we piloted a program to deliver GenAI workshops for K-12 educators. This paper discussed how this program affected the participants’ perception of GenAI. Survey results showed that professional development opportunities such as our GenAI workshop can be an effective approach to help K-12 instructors better understand the educational use of AI and how to apply AI to their classrooms. Feedback from these instructors provided practical suggestions and directions for future improvements of the workshop. Implications for similar university-level professional development opportunities were also discussed.