Generative AI in K-12 Classrooms: A Midyear Implementation Report

Despite emerging use in Indonesian classrooms, there is limited large-scale, teacher-centred evidence on how AI is used in practice and what support teachers need, hindering the development of context-appropriate AI systems and policies. To address this gap, we conduct a nationwide survey of 349 K-12 teachers across elementary, junior high, and senior high schools. We find increasing use of AI for pedagogy, content development, and teaching media, although adoption remains uneven. Elementary teachers report more consistent use, while senior high teachers engage less; mid-career teachers assign higher importance to AI, and teachers in Eastern Indonesia perceive greater value. Across levels, teachers primarily use AI to reduce instructional preparation workload (e.g., assessment, lesson planning, and material development). However, generic outputs, infrastructure constraints, and limited contextual alignment continue to hinder effective classroom integration.

Generative AI (GenAI) is entering K-12 classrooms, but its default culture does not always fit local teaching. Existing accounts either treat this misfit as macro-level structural bias or examine it through single-case studies; neither captures how much work teachers must do to make outputs usable across tasks. This exploratory, theory-building qualitative study introduces cultural distance, the gap between GenAI's default cultural repertoire and the situated demands of teachers' practice. Through interviews with 30 K-12 teachers who frequently use GenAI, 10 each from South Africa, Taiwan, and the United States, we identified three levels defined by the effort teachers invested and whether it yielded a usable output: low (minor edits), mid (sustained prompting and revision), and high (structural gaps rooted in unsupported languages, undigitized knowledge, or policy filters that no teacher effort can close). We present cultural distance as a promising framework requiring further examination and draw implications for designers, policymakers, and educators.

Despite the widely recognized potential of AI in education, most prior work has focused on individualized student assistance. In contrast, the majority of educational practice worldwide still takes place in collective classroom settings. To enable researchers to study AI assistance in collective teaching, we introduce Edustories, a dataset of 1,492 teacher-written case studies describing real elementary and high-school classroom situations involving challenging student behavior, pedagogical interventions, and their outcomes. Among many other applications, Edustories enables evaluating LLMs' ability to predict the success of teacher interventions, crucial for providing practicing teachers with useful feedback. Comparing the latest models from four language-model families against expert assessments, we find that current models fall short of human expertise in predicting classroom outcomes; the strongest models reach 58% accuracy compared to 64% of human experts. This gap highlights both the limitations and the emerging potential of AI as assistants for practicing teachers.