What Can a Century of Scholarship on Teacher Professional Development Teach Us About Equipping Today’s STEM Teachers to Use GenAI Effectively and Ethically?

This chapter draws on a century of scholarship on teacher professional development (PD) to suggest ways to equip STEM teachers to use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) effectively and ethically. After situating today’s challenges within a long historical trajectory of teacher learning, the chapter identifies seven elements of effective PD—content focus, active learning, peer collaboration, modeled practice, expert coaching, ongoing reflection, and sustained duration—and illustrates how each can be reimagined in light of GenAI. It then highlights five features essential for implementation—organizational backing, professional engagement, pedagogical catalysts, system synchrony, and deictic adaptation—that determine whether PD efforts succeed. The chapter concludes with a framework that is suggestive rather than prescriptive, raising frontier questions about how PD may need to evolve alongside GenAI’s rapid development.