Paper 2: Designing Professional Learning to Support Transdisciplinary AI Adaptations

• In Event: Learning from Implementation Research: How Curriculum, Professional Learning, AI Tools and Classroom Studies Can Support AI-Literacy

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe professional learning (PL) for the Moderation Unit and how teachers across disciplines adapted the unit to fit their instructional goals.

Perspectives
Teachers rarely implement instructional materials exactly as written. Instead, they adapt lessons in service of disciplinary aims, their pedagogical commitments, and students’ lived experiences (Remillard & Kim, 2020). Adapting materials can be especially challenging when the topic—such as AI and online games—falls outside teachers’ prior expertise.

On Project X, we designed curriculum-linked PL opportunities for secondary (6th-12th grade in the US) teachers across content areas. Designing and implementing PL with history, English Language Arts (ELA), math and design thinking teachers allowed us to 1) leverage teachers’ diverse disciplinary backgrounds to consider the technical and ethical dimensions of AI literacy, and 2) create a testbed studying transdisciplinary curricular adaptations of the same unit (Authors, 2023). This approach also foregrounded real-world AI phenomena and the value of bringing multiple disciplinary lenses to address them.

Methods
We engaged seven teachers from two districts in a weeklong (32-hour) PL workshop in Summer 2024. Activities were designed to: 1) engage teachers as learners about AI; 2) reflect on how theirs and their students’ positionalities shape their experiences with AI; and 3) examine the Moderation Unit (described in Paper 1) from both teacher and student perspectives. Teachers considered how the unit’s AI literacies connected to their typical content. On the final day, they presented plans for adapting the unit to their students and schools. For this analysis, we drew on teacher slides, field notes, and video recordings from the final day to collaboratively identify patterns in their adaptation approaches.

Results
Analysis revealed three adaptation strategies: integrating, bridging, and layering. One high school history teacher planned to integrate the unit into a broader inquiry on how digital technologies reshape and preserve community life, emphasizing online spaces as vital youth communities. A middle school ELA teacher positioned the unit as a bridge between existing units on Sense of Belonging and Risks of Social Media; all these units centered on identity, bias, and belonging in digital contexts.

The most common strategy was layering discipline-specific extensions into the unit. One math teacher added a statistics activity to help students interpret confidence scores from a machine learning model. A design thinking teacher ended the unit with a student-led project addressing school-based problems. Across all adaptations, teachers maintained the curriculum’s emphasis on honoring students’ expertise in online communities and deepening critical understandings of AI and bias.

Significance
Our analyses show that the PL workshop enabled teachers to adapt an AI curriculum to meet their disciplinary goals in various ways. This provides novel insight into how AI curriculum might become embedded and adapted across disciplines and towards different learning objectives.

Authors

• Nga Hoang, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Mon-Lin Ko, University of Colorado - Boulder

• William R. Penuel, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Collette Heskett, University of Colorado - Boulder