When GenAI Becomes a Teaching Assistant Bridging Foundational Gaps in Teacher Education

Abstract

This article explores how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) was integrated into a teacher education course to address students’ disparate levels of lesson-planning readiness. Although the course focused on selecting and implementing effective instructional strategies, many students lacked foundational skills -- such as unpacking standards and writing cognitively rigorous learning goals -- that were essential to course success but not explicitly covered in the syllabus. Faced with limited instructional time and an asynchronous online format, the author leveraged GenAI as a "teaching assistant," designing optional modules that taught students how to use GenAI to build lesson-planning competencies. Through screencasts and guided activities, students learned to “teach” GenAI course-specific expectations and use it to generate quizzes, analyze lesson plans, and receive formative feedback. Student work demonstrated notable improvements in lesson-planning quality, suggesting that GenAI can effectively augment instruction and address persistent problems of practice in teacher preparation.