Overview

The session needed to serve teachers with a wide range of AI familiarity, from skeptical non-users to daily ChatGPT users, without assuming a shared starting point, and to balance practical skill-building with critical reflection on risk and ethics.

Audience: K-12 pre-service and in-service teachers

Format: In-person or hybrid, 8–15 participants.

Duration: 75 minutes.

Technology used: PowerPoint

Design rationale

The session was built around a deliberate progression: awareness → understanding → hands-on practice → critical reflection → application.

• Start where teachers already are. The session opened with an informal survey and a discussion prompt ("How does AI make you feel?") before introducing any content. This helped surface existing attitudes and usage so the rest of the session could meet teachers where they were, rather than assuming a blank slate.

• Build shared literacy before asking for judgment. A plain-language "what ChatGPT is / what it isn't" segment came before any discussion of benefits or risks, so teachers had a working mental model to reason from rather than forming opinions on a tool they didn't yet understand.

• Move from understanding to doing. Once teachers had a baseline, the session shifted into hands-on practice: creating accounts, trying structured prompts, and working through a prompt-engineering framework (context, clear question, examples, relevant information, plain language, format) so teachers left with a transferable skill.

• Hold critical reflection alongside enthusiasm. Benefits (tutoring, 24/7 access, personalization) were paired deliberately with a dedicated segment on ethical risks, such as privacy, bias, surveillance, and autonomy. I focused on including a discussion prompt built around a real example of an AI chatbot interacting with a minor, to keep the session from reading as uncritical tech promotion.

• End in application. The session closed with brainstorming what responsible AI deployment looks like for teachers, and a hands-on policy-creation activity. This helped move participants from "I understand AI" to "I can act on this in my own classroom/district."

Materials Developed

• Materials Developed

  (co-developed with my facilitation partner)

  • Full session slide deck (39 slides), including discussion prompts, a prompt-engineering framework handout embedded in-slide, and a set of ready-to-use ChatGPT prompt templates for lesson planning and role-play practice

  • A structured hands-on activity sequence for first-time ChatGPT use (account creation → guided prompts → grading/rubric exercise)

  • A policy-creation activity framework for participants to draft classroom/district-level AI guidelines

Outcome & Reflection

If I ran this session again, I would build in more time for the policy-creation activity, since teachers seemed to want to go deeper than the session allowed. Specifically, I would dedicate time to writing syllabus language teachers could use in their classes.