Adapting for AI: How elementary teachers adjust their practices for an AI-integrated curriculum

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.

Chatbots have long been explored as tools to support learning, and recent advances in large language models have significantly expanded the availability of platforms for educators to author AI tutoring chatbots. Yet effective authorship demands more than writing a system prompt; it requires educators to act as learning designers, AI interaction designers, and QA engineers. In practice, however, teachers rarely fulfill these roles. Our formative study found that virtually none systematically tested their bots before deploying them to students. To address this gap, we present PromptDecipher, a system that restructures the authoring workflow around a direct correction-based interaction rather than writing abstract system prompts, teachers interact with a live chat preview and edit undesirable bot responses. An automated pipeline then analyzes the correction, proposes a targeted system prompt rewrite, and validates the change across pre-defined test scenarios. This enforces QA as a first-class activity and scaffolds teachers in roles they would otherwise skip. PromptDecipher will be deployed in an AI for Educators course enrolling hundreds of higher-education instructors. A live prototype (https://teacher-prompting.vercel.app/), an anonymized codebase (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/teacher-prompting-2EDF/), and anonymized demo (https://tinyurl.com/las-prompt-decipher-demo) are available via links in the footnote.

Large language models generate code from natural language prompts, enabling "vibe coding," which allows non-programmers to develop computational solutions. Vibe coding for teachers amplifies the value of teachers-as-designers, improving technology integration while fostering AI literacy. However, structured guidance on supporting this process is lacking. We propose GAIDE (A Guiding Framework for AI-Integrated Design for Educators), a framework that supports K-12 teachers in creating AI-powered learning technologies through vibe coding. The initial framework, built on Design Thinking and INTERACT, was validated through a CORDTRA interaction analysis of three teachers and four faculty mentors in an eight-week workshop to derive the final framework. Additionally, the qualitative analysis of pre- and post-interviews found an enhancement of teachers' AI literacy. Findings highlight the potential of learning-by-creating for professional development.