Abstract:

This paper reports a qualitative self-study of a teacher educator’s integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in a secondary and elementary teacher preparation program. Situated within the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, the study investigates how targeted professional development can shift an educator’s stance from AI skepticism, grounded in concerns about academic integrity and cognitive engagement, toward the intentional, ethical use of AI to support teaching and assessment.
The study draws on reflective journals kept across an academic year, artefacts from course redesign, and samples of pre-service teachers’ assignments and lesson plans.

These data were thematically analysed to examine:
(a) how the educator’s beliefs and practices evolved,
(b) how AI was embedded in course activities and assessments, and
(c) how pre-service teachers engaged with AI as a learning and planning tool.

Findings indicate that sustained participation in an AI-focused professional development community enabled the educator to move beyond a deficit view of AI toward designing tasks that require critical prompting, evaluation of AI-generated output, and explicit discussion of ethical use. Pre-service teachers reported increased confidence in using AI for planning and differentiation, while also demonstrating greater awareness of issues related to plagiarism, bias, and transparency. Analysis of lesson plan artefacts suggests that structured opportunities to iterate between human-designed and AI-assisted planning deepened students’ understanding of key components of effective instruction.

The paper concludes by outlining design principles for integrating AI into teacher education: aligning AI tasks with UDL principles, foregrounding critical and ethical use, and leveraging professional development communities to support educators’ ongoing inquiry into their practice.

Keywords:

Technology, artificial intelligence, teacher education, Universal Design for Learning, academic integrity, innovation in education.