Current trends indicate that integrating artificial intelligence into education is essential. As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) becomes an irreversible trend in the educational process, teachers must leverage GenAI to truly serve educational goals. Specifically, teachers can explore scenarios and strategies for effectively utilizing GenAI in three areas: improving efficiency, promoting development, and maintaining ethical boundaries.

1. Improving Efficiency: Optimizing the Entire Teaching Process with GenAI

The most apparent role of GenAI is to help teachers reduce workload and increase efficiency, freeing them from burdensome administrative tasks and allowing them to focus more on comprehensive student development.

First, teachers can use generative AI to efficiently handle repetitive tasks such as data organization, meeting minutes, and assignment statistics, thus freeing up more time and energy for core educational work like value guidance. Additionally, GenAI can quickly generate teaching materials such as images, mind maps, knowledge cards, micro-course scripts, and evaluation rubrics, significantly reducing the time spent on resource creation and improving lesson preparation efficiency. This is currently the most common way frontline teachers use generative AI.

Second, GenAI can assist in generating classroom exercises, alleviating the burden of repetitive design tasks. Teachers often struggle with designing differentiated and varied practice questions. By inputting specific knowledge points, question types, and difficulty levels into the GenAI platform, they can choose to generate new questions or retrieve past exam questions. It is important for teachers to professionally review and assess the generated or retrieved questions to ensure they align with educational goals and standards. Additionally, adjustments should be made based on students’ actual levels, with modifications or reorganization as necessary for classroom practice or homework.

Finally, GenAI empowers interdisciplinary teaching, a scenario where it can be deeply beneficial. Unlike individual teachers limited to a single subject background, GenAI has powerful knowledge integration capabilities, providing teachers with interdisciplinary knowledge links, case materials, and teaching design ideas. Teachers can build a dedicated “interdisciplinary teaching agent” by first establishing a subject knowledge base that categorizes curriculum standards, textbooks, personal lesson plans, and teaching reflections. Based on this, they can generate and continuously optimize the dialogue logic of the agent using the GenAI platform, allowing it to create learning tasks and activity designs with interdisciplinary perspectives. Once the agent is established, teachers can generate interdisciplinary inquiry tasks based on teaching goals and content, implementing them in the classroom after assessing and adjusting based on student learning conditions. Importantly, teachers can continuously feed back the learning outcomes generated in class and their teaching reflections into the agent’s knowledge base, creating a feedback loop of “use-accumulate-optimize-reuse” that enhances teaching.

2. Promoting Development: Empowering Teacher Professional Growth with GenAI

The leap in teacher professional growth often occurs through deep reflection and discussion about classroom experiences. GenAI can not only assist teachers with daily teaching tasks but also serve as a cognitive partner for post-class professional development, helping them transition from experience reliance to evidence-driven practices.

GenAI aids in classroom diagnostic analysis, shifting from intuition-based assessments to evidence-based evaluations. Unlike traditional peer evaluations that rely heavily on personal experience, teachers can upload classroom recordings to the GenAI platform to obtain analysis reports covering dimensions such as teaching structure, behaviors, strategies, and outcomes, which they can then interpret alongside their teaching intentions. It is crucial to note that GenAI provides the analytical groundwork, but the professional interpretation by teachers is what gives educational significance to the data.

GenAI supports collaborative teaching research, moving from passive reception to active inquiry. Having only classroom analysis reports is insufficient; teachers need to engage in deep discussions around specific teaching segments. For instance, during teaching research, teachers can use GenAI as a cognitive partner, asking precise and probing questions to analyze classroom phenomena, gather practical evidence, and achieve teaching improvements. In simple terms, teachers can adopt a “thick-thin questioning” strategy with GenAI, focusing on specific teaching segments and following a logical chain of questioning: “What happened → What was good/bad → What evidence is there → Why → What teaching patterns were discovered?” This approach deepens their understanding of classroom dynamics.

In this process, teachers remain the primary questioners, while GenAI provides data analysis, evidence retrieval, and multi-role perspective support, collaboratively achieving a deeper understanding of teaching from phenomena to essence.

GenAI helps teachers crystallize insights from fragmented perceptions into continuous growth. Insights gained during post-class reflections can easily fade over time if not organized. GenAI can assist teachers in structuring core viewpoints from their research into practical knowledge, generating mind map-style research notes that include teaching design logic, effective teaching methods, and improvement suggestions. Teachers can then supplement and refine these notes to create a knowledge accumulation that aligns with their cognitive styles. Furthermore, as multiple research sessions accumulate, GenAI can help teachers build a dynamically updated “personal professional growth knowledge base,” allowing them to visualize and trace their teaching practices over time, identifying areas for improvement and effective practices to maintain.

3. Maintaining Ethical Boundaries: Avoiding Technological Alienation

The premise of effectively utilizing GenAI is to maintain ethical boundaries. No technology can replace the crucial role of teachers in emotional guidance, value shaping, and thought stimulation. Therefore, teachers must adhere to three key boundaries throughout the application of GenAI.

First, maintain the technological boundary. Teachers should clearly define the division of labor between humans and machines, allowing GenAI to handle auxiliary tasks such as information retrieval and resource organization, while retaining control over creative teaching activities like task design and classroom interaction. Additionally, teachers should guide students to develop a healthy understanding of human-AI collaboration. For example, in the classroom, they can advocate for a “think before use” rule, encouraging students to think independently before using GenAI to expand their ideas or optimize their expressions.

Second, maintain the value boundary. In critical educational moments involving value guidance and emotional care, teachers should retain a leading role. For instance, when students express family issues or growth dilemmas in their writing, GenAI may recognize emotional tones, but decisions about whether to hold a follow-up conversation, contact parents, or provide appropriate care and encouragement in feedback are value judgments that only teachers can make. The warmth of education always comes from humans, not machines.

Third, maintain the ethical boundary. On one hand, teachers need to approach the content generated by GenAI with caution, rigorously reviewing and correcting it to ensure compliance with curriculum standards and subject-specific norms; on the other hand, teachers must protect the privacy of personal and student data, avoiding uploading unapproved or non-anonymized materials to external GenAI platforms.

In this age of rapid technological advancement, teachers are compelled to continuously learn, reflect, and innovate. They need to actively embrace new technologies and explore innovations in education. When teachers become adept at using generative artificial intelligence, they can find a new balance between efficiency and warmth in education.