Leveraging AI for Teacher Professional Development

Teacher professional development (TPD) is essential for improving teaching quality and student learning, yet across the Global South most TPD programmes remain centralized and standardized, with limited capacity to respond to the diversity of teachers’ contexts, identities, and learning needs. This lack of customization constrains the relevance and effectiveness of large‑scale TPD, creating a persistent tension between reaching teachers at scale and delivering professional learning that is contextually appropriate, inclusive, and pedagogically robust.

This project supports the development and pilot of the Teacher Professional Development Course Customizer (TPDCC), a human‑centred, AI‑supported web application that seeks to enable ministries of education, teacher education institutions, and other providers to adapt existing TPD courses for defined teacher cohorts at scale. Designed to operate at the institutional and system level, the TPDCC embeds gender equality and social inclusion principles, prioritises human oversight, and is suited to low‑connectivity contexts. Building on FIT‑ED’s extensive Global South networks, the project will generate practical tools and evidence on the responsible use of generative AI in education systems, with the potential to strengthen TPD provision across institutions collectively serving approximately 250,000 educators.