Prompting for pedagogy? Australian F-10 teachers’ generative AI prompting use cases

This study explores the generative artificial intelligence (GAI) prompting practices of Australian primary and secondary educators in the first year following the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Following a brief training workshop on prompting GAI for pedagogical purposes, 38 teachers uploaded 252 prompts they deemed ‘pedagogically useful’ and 19 rated as ‘pedagogically poor’ via an online form. Out of the participating teachers, 35 also joined a semi-structured interview discussing how they integrated GAI into their daily teaching. The prompt data reveal teachers’ GAI use cases span the development of instructional tasks, enhancing creativity, defining, explaining and/or summarising concepts and texts, differentiation of instructional materials and content for students of varying proficiency, assessment-related tasks and administrative and organisational tasks. Thematic analysis of interview data reveals teachers’ perceptions of prompting GAI for expanding ideas and approaches, designing assessment-related tasks, modelling students’ use of GAI, and personal (non-teaching) applications. Overall, the findings provide empirical insights into what primary and secondary educators are prompting GAI for, how and why they are doing so, and how this is linked to teaching in schools in Australia.