How teachers work with AI to create computing lessons for classrooms

From Instructional Intent to Classroom-Ready Lessons: Investigating Teacher-AI Collaboration in Lesson Authoring for Secondary Computing Education

Human-Computer Interaction

Summary

Designing classroom lessons is a complex task where teachers decide what to teach and how students will learn. This paper looks at how secondary computing teachers use AI tools to help create and adjust lessons. The authors found that teachers carefully choose which parts of lesson creation to give to AI while keeping final control to ensure lessons fit their students' needs. Working with AI also helps teachers think more clearly about their teaching goals. The study resulted in a model explaining this teamwork and suggestions for building better AI tools for lesson planning in computing education.

What this means in practice

  • For educational software developers: Build AI lesson planning tools that let teachers keep control while helping organize and customize computing lessons based on student needs.$Commercial implications: Enables creation of commercial AI-assisted lesson authoring platforms targeted at secondary school educators in computing.
  • For instructional designers: Use insights about teachers' negotiation with AI outputs to design lesson templates and workflows tailored for computing education contexts.

Authors

Tahreem Yasir, Wenbo Li, Deniz Ozturk, Yasitha Rajapaksha, Dmitri Droujkov, Xiaoyi Tian, Tiffany Barnes

Abstract

Generative AI is increasingly studied as a tool for supporting lesson authoring; the creation and adaptation of classroom materials, yet little is known about how it should fit into secondary computing teachers' subject-specific practices. We conducted two complementary qualitative studies with eight secondary computing teachers: focus groups examining existing authoring practices and a think-aloud study using LessonBuilder, a structured AI-supported lesson authoring system, as a research probe. We found that teachers' instructional intentions developed through creating, inspecting, and adapting materials, while teachers selectively delegated tasks to AI and retained responsibility for judging classroom readiness. The think-aloud sessions further showed how examining AI-generated materials prompted teachers to clarify and refine their intentions, making authoring an ongoing negotiation between what teachers intended and what the AI produced. In the context of computing lessons, classroom readiness also involved considering how programming materials and supporting guidance matched students' understanding and intended learning goals. We synthesize these findings into a conceptual model explaining how teachers coordinate instructional intent, AI assistance, and judgments of classroom readiness during lesson authoring. We derive design recommendations for supporting this coordination while preserving teacher control and addressing computing-specific authoring needs.
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