GenAI as virtual peer: Reporting on the outcomes of a novel assessment task in a teacher education unit

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as a collaborative tool in assessment offers transformative potentials for learning and teaching. Planning for learning and teaching is a teacher activity that has traditionally involved collaborations between peers that support the development of new knowledge and professional learning (Munthe & Conway, 2017). This professional activity requires a response to diverse student need that draws upon scholarly approaches to teaching and learning.

In this presentation we share a novel assessment strategy for Master of Teaching students studying in the unit 'Teacher as Planner, Assessor, & Reporter' that leverages GenAI as a virtual peer to support connections between theory and practice for beginning teachers who are learning to plan, and learning to evaluate other’s plans. Our presentation shares insights from the assessment, and in particular its transformative potentials and challenges.

The formative assessment task co-designed by the authors reflects what students will be doing as teachers in the future. Students are asked to use a GenAI tool, CoPilot, to design a lesson sequence. Students engage with an adapted PAIR template (Acar, 2023) to support responsible use of the GenAI as part of the task. Students use the PAIR template to record a plan for prompting Copilot with detail around the pedagogical concerns for planning in their own context (year level/specialisation). Students complete the template as they experiment with the AI, providing prompts and critiquing those prompts, evaluating the GenAI output, and considering further prompts. By engaging with AI in a structured, closed enquiry format, students tackle their own predefined problems and craft innovative lesson plans relevant to their own context of learning and teaching. This process includes the development of prompts, iterative experimentation, and reflective critique.

This presentation shares the successes and limitations of implementing GenAI in the assessment task to support ethical, responsible, and meaningful use of GenAI. In doing so, it highlights the role of AI in reshaping educational landscapes and fostering adaptability among educators and learners. Insights from student experiences with AI as virtual peer will be shared to underscore the transformative impact of AI on higher education.