Professional development is crucial in ensuring teachers can put AI to work effectively. But a recent study from Texas Tech University found that PD around AI may not be readily available in rural schools.

“The resources are limited. There is not much support out there for our rural educators,” says Nikkolina Prueitt, a co-author of the study. For rural schools to get the most out of AI, “we will need to build that knowledge base.”

Closing the Gap

AI has the potential to give rural teachers a pedagogical boost. It can provide instructional support, “like creating differentiated instruction, adapting lessons, drafting individualized education plans,” Prueitt says.

And AI can expand rural students’ understanding of the world, says Amanda Robinson, an elementary teacher at Pikeville Elementary, a Title I school in Eastern Kentucky. “AI opens the students’ horizons.”

In a rural community, AI can students to “experience new learning, outside of their communities,” said Dr. LeeAnn Lindsey, director of edtech and innovation at Northern Arizona University. But she sees rural schools struggle to embrace that potential, due in part to a lack of in-house expertise. “Our big urban and suburban school districts, they have technology integration coaches who have been diving into the AI work for the past three years,” she says. “Rural school districts often don’t.”

To help close the gap, Northern Arizona last fall led a collaborative effort to offer PD around AI in three rural school districts in the state. Each district made available its superintendent, an instructional leader, and three classroom teachers for training over the course of two and a half months.

This was action-oriented PD. “They identified problems of practice in their own classroom that they wanted to address. Some of them looked at writing skills, some looked at student engagement, some looked at relevance of their lessons,” Lindsey says.

“They learned the AI specific to the area that they wanted to address,” she adds. “Then they actually took those solutions into their classroom and collected data to find out if AI would really help them solve that problem.”

At Pikeville Elementary, Robinson gets professional training from a district learning coach, who helps teachers understand the current AI tools. “She tends to do them about twice a month, as her schedule permits, after school for about an hour. And then also she works with you one-on-one during your planning periods, if you need that,” Robinson says.

The AI training has helped improve Robinson’s instruction, she says. For example, she has leveraged her AI knowledge to develop a chatbot that helps students explore animal adaptations in certain habitats. PD around AI “gives us the opportunity to provide our students with more opportunities and more in-depth ways of thinking,” she says.

Building an AI PD Effort

However, success stories like Robinson’s are outliers. The Texas Tech paper found that a lack of professional development resources often hinders AI adoption in rural schools. While tight budgets can make it hard to mount AI training, there are ways that schools can move forward with AI training.

Prueitt says it’s important that schools use their limited resources to mount the right kind of professional development. Rather than focus on specific AI tools, PD in K-12 should focus on “AI literacy and the foundational knowledge around AI,” she says. When teachers have a firm grounding in the basics, they’ re able to evaluate the tools effectively, “and that’s where it starts to grow and to be super useful for these rural educators,” she says, adding that the Center for Innovation, Design, and Digital Learning (CIDDL) is a great resource for educators.

School leaders should also focus on the big-picture intent of that training. “Our information and decision-making landscape is changing,” says Lindsey. “Our students need to be well versed in this changing information economy and the changing workforce.” Rural schools should prepare students for work in an increasingly tech-driven economy, she says, and PD around AI should reflect that intent.

Robinson has seen first-hand the value in that approach. “In our area, our students only see the jobs that are there within our communities. As teachers introducing AI, we are giving them more opportunities to become digitally literate,” she says. “As they start looking into universities in college, we’re putting them on a level playing field, instead of leaving our children behind.”

As schools look to meet that mark, “there are programs and grants that rural districts can apply for, to be part of professional development experiences like the one we offered,” Lindsey says, noting that the training was offered was for free.

“The first step would be to look at the resources available in your state,” Prueitt says. Her institution offers free professional development opportunities to rural schools, including a recent two-day AI workshop for special educators.

State and regional education service centers can also help rural schools ramp up PD programs, Prueitt adds, and they can help those schools understand how PD can be best support teachers’ efforts to ramp up AI. That will include not just training on what AI can do in the classroom, but also instruction on how to use it appropriately.

A key question around classroom AI remains: “How do we use it ethically?” Prueitt says. The right PD will help teachers to not only make effective use of AI, but to do so “in a way that still keeps that human in the loop.”

Robinson points to ethics as a key element of professional training around AI. She had previously taught K-6 technology and now is pivoting back to teaching writing and grammar, and while she’s looking forward to more PD to get familiar with the tools, she’s also aware of the limitations.

Chatbots for example can score students’ writing based on the rubric, before assignments are handed in. But “it will not eliminate my one-on-one conferencing,” she said. Rather, the AI can give students insight into their work, “so that I can show them where we can improve on this.”