Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping education, yet school teachers face challenges integrating fragmented AI tools, balancing innovation with ethics, and maintaining academic integrity. While the potential of GenAI to enhance pedagogical efficiency and innovation can be found in the literature, the adoption of such tools by teachers remains hindered by challenges including reliability, subject-specific constraints, and ethical concerns. This study addresses a critical need to better understand how school educators perceive and adopt integrated GenAI platforms, particularly in light of their potential to automate repetitive tasks, foster personalized learning, and support pedagogical innovations. With the rise of integrated GenAI platforms like GoodClass.ai, which offer pre-prompted tools for lesson planning, question generation, and assessment, there is a pressing need to explore how educators engage with these technologies and the barriers they face in leveraging them effectively.

This study investigates teacher adoption of the integrated GenAI platform GoodClass.ai through semi-structured interviews with school teachers. Each participant varied in teaching domain, years of experience, curriculum focus, and instructional needs. The study captures their motivations, challenges, and visions for ideal AI tools to enhance their teaching practices. Findings reveal that while teachers recognize the significant potential of GenAI to improve productivity, such as automating administrative tasks and generating tailored question banks, they remain cautious due to subject-specific limitations, inconsistencies in AI-generated outputs, and time constraints in balancing between teaching loads and mastering these tools. For example, the English teacher noted GenAI’s strength in generating nuanced questions yet highlighted its struggle with complex literary analysis. Similarly, the Mathematics and Physics teachers appreciated features like quiz generators and rubric creation but expressed concerns about the accuracy of AI in advanced problem-solving and diagram generation.

This study offers initial insights into the adoption of GenAI in secondary education, emphasizing the importance of addressing usability, reliability, and ethical concerns to foster broader acceptance among educators. It underscores the diverse needs of teachers across disciplines, pointing to the necessity of co-creating integrated GenAI platforms that are reliable, ethical and user-friendly. By identifying barriers such as time limitations and reliability concerns, the study provides actionable recommendations for school administrators and developers to refine GenAI platforms and promote their broader acceptance.

The seminar will present our findings in sequence by addressing three questions: 1) How should we prepare our students for the future? 2) How should educators leverage new AI-powered pedagogies? 3) What should educators focus on?