Preparing Teachers for AI-Enhanced Classrooms: A Competency Framework for Professional Development in the Digital Age

Abstract

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has become a disruptive event in the learning field, creating the opportunities of personalised learning, automatic evaluation, and based-on-data instructional decision-making. With the incorporation of AI-powered technologies into the education and learning processes, educators, in turn, need to acquire new skills that will enable them to make good use of those without incurring pedagogical losses and becoming ethically responsible. But, several teacher training and professional development models are yet to formally measure the incorporation of AI-related competencies into their educational courses, which leaves a gap between technological courses and teacher readiness. This paper presents a competency framework that can be used in helping teachers develop professionally to work in AI-enhanced classrooms. The study will be conceptually designed as a literature review according to the systematical review of the literature in artificial intelligence in the educational contexts, teacher digital competency models, and the emergent AI literacy models. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the relevant studies to find out major competency areas needed in the good integration of AI in the teaching practise. As the results show, AI-enhanced learning settings demand teacher preparedness which involves competition in five primary areas: AI literacy, data literacy, ethical knowledge, pedagogical evaluation, and critical assessment of AI outputs. With the help of these domains, a professional development framework is suggested that should be structured to help teacher learning institutions and educational policymakers to plan training programmes that are future-oriented. The paper opines the need to incorporate AI competencies as part of teacher education to equip teachers with current and fast-changing technology-mediated learning systems.