With the increase in the use of educational artificial intelligence (AI) tools across the educational landscape, including in teacher preparation, preservice teachers are faced with new opportunities and challenges with using educational AI tools. With respect to developing coherent and engaging learning experiences, educational AI tools offer a wealth of possibilities for teachers. However, leveraging educational AI tools to support preservice teachers’ lesson planning, who often lack fundamental lesson planning skills, poses an additional challenge but with tremendous opportunity for growth. If preservice teachers learn to critically analyze, evaluate, and otherwise professionally critique AI-generated lesson plans, their creativity, ability to accommodate diverse learners, and develop differentiated learning experience have the potential to quickly develop. Given the limited research on preservice teachers’ perceptions and the value of AI-generated lesson plans, this study sought to address this gap and provide insight on the challenges experienced by preservice teachers and the ways in which their perceptions changed over the course term. As such, this qualitative case study focused on preservice teachers’ critical analysis of AI-generated lesson plans to understand the extent to which they could identify strengths and deficiencies in these lesson plans. Participants were enrolled in a primary mathematics methods course at a university in the western United States and over the course of a 15-week period, preservice teachers engaged in analyzing, critiquing and planning lessons using traditional resources, to further understand fundamental lesson planning elements, as well as lessons generated from educational AI tools. Preliminary results show that preservice teachers feel comfortable using educational AI tools to develop lessons but the majority of the preservice teachers were unable to routinely identify strengths or aspects of the lessons that were too vague, underdeveloped, or not aligned to learning outcomes. This suggests they lacked proficiencies with lesson planning in general but also in how to leverage educational AI tools to develop more engaging, inclusive and differentiated lessons. This presentation will discuss the implications of this study and provide strategies for integrating AI into teacher preparation courses and how to support preservice teachers to critically evaluate AI-generated lesson plans.

Keywords: Preservice teachers, AI tools, lesson planning.