AmplifyGAIN: National Capacity-Building for Trustworthy AI in Education

• In Event: Innovating K–12 Teaching and Learning with Generative AI: Insights From IES-funded National R&D Centers

Abstract

As generative AI transforms education, the AmplifyGAIN R&D Center is a national leader in building AI readiness across the K-12 sector. Through professional development, policy engagement, and open dissemination, we support educators, edtech professionals, and policymakers in adopting AI practices. Funded by a grant from the Institute for Education Sciences, our center is advancing national goals for AI literacy and workforce readiness by equipping educators to integrate AI tools into instruction, developing open-access resources for K–12 AI education, and fostering student exposure to foundational AI concepts.

A cornerstone of our leadership is our commitment to capacity building. To date, we have trained over 1,000 educators, school leaders, and early-career professionals through free monthly webinars (See Table 2 for webinar topics), professional learning communities (PLCs), and embedded resources. In partnership with the Puget Sound Educational Services District (PSESD) and the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), we offer AI-focused sessions on lesson planning, personalization, and assessment. Teachers are not just AI users but AI co-designers, contributing to technical development through our COALESCE framework (Sarkar et al., 2025). Educators and project leads have shared their work at major convenings such as AERA, NCTM, AMTE, NCSM, NCCE, the Inclusive Learning Summit, WERA, and the AI Expo, shaping discourse around AI-enhanced instruction.

At the state level, we support districts in designing AI implementation guidelines. The PI, Dr. Min Sun, serves on the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s (OSPI) advisory board, helping align AI policy with teaching standards and professional learning. Through state webinars and multi-stakeholder meetings, we engage teacher prep programs, policymakers, school leaders, and advocacy groups to collaboratively define AI’s role in education.

Nationally, our vision includes a publicly accessible platform that democratizes access to high-quality, AI-curated instructional resources. Our Innovation Science for Education Analytics (ISEA) program (https://www.amplifylearn.ai/isea/), supported by a 3-year IES grant, addresses the AI talent gap by training cohorts of fellows across academia, education agencies, and edtech sectors. With 40 fellows trained across two cohorts and two successful hackweeks, ISEA provides cutting-edge instruction on computational workflows, ethics, and educational data science. Fellows remain connected via virtual communities and structured webinars, ensuring sustained learning and impact.

Our work extends to policy, research, and dissemination. We present at national conferences (AERA, ICLS, SREE) and submit to academic journals with work published or under review at AERA Open, The Social Innovations Journal, and the Journal of Educational Data Mining among others. We prioritize transparency through a public GitHub repository with code, instruments, and research findings (https://github.com/Colleague-LessonPlan). We share tutorials, use cases, and educator videos on the Colleague AI platform, on our blog (colleague.ai/blog) and on social media. These stories highlight how teachers integrate AI into classrooms and model sustainable adoption.

By investing in training, infrastructure, and policy alignment, AmplifyGAIN exemplifies national leadership in AI-powered education – equipping educators and stakeholders to innovate responsibly.

Authors

• Shawon Sarkar, University of Washington

• Lief Esbenshade, University of Washington

• Min Sun, University of Washington

• Alex Liu, University of Washington

• Zewei Tian, University of Washington

• Kevin He, Colleague.ai

• Zachary Zhang, Colleague.ai