Leah Ferguson faced a huge learning curve when she left a job in marketing to teach graphic design and digital media in a career and technical education program at The Dalles High School in Oregon. The previous teacher didn’t leave her any materials or guidance, and she had to build an entire curriculum from scratch.
Ferguson came into the role with deep understanding of graphic design and digital media when she started the teaching job four years ago, but she struggled to impart that knowledge to teenagers.
She turned to artificial intelligence for help—specifically, the public version of ChatGPT after it was released. With the help of AI, she’s been able to organize her subject matter more effectively, map out future lessons, and ensure the curriculum she is using is aligned to district, state, and industry standards.
“I spent more than 10 years working in marketing, in design and technology,” she said. “Having to write scope and sequences and lesson plans and all those things, it’s a lot for somebody who did not get a master’s in education. Being able to use AI has been a huge help.”
At the same time, it is a challenge for Ferguson to stay on top of all the changes AI is bringing to K-12 education. She had to scramble recently to update her curriculum on teaching the Adobe suite of online tools after the company added new AI features to all of its programs.
Ferguson’s experience highlights both the opportunities and challenges AI presents for career and technical education teachers. Many have had to integrate the technology into their lessons to fulfill their missions to ensure their students are career-ready and prepared to utilize artificial intelligence skills for jobs in fields such as welding, auto mechanics, health care, construction, cybersecurity, airlines—and even AI itself.
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That said, there are still plenty of CTE teachers who are resisting the integration of AI into their instruction. They’re concerned that the technology might hurt, rather than help, skill development, according to CTE educators and experts.
Even Ferguson, who has embraced AI in her work, sees the potential downsides of the technology. “It’s a constant battle, because what you don’t want to do is get lazy and complacent, which AI can make you, because it can do a lot of your thinking for you,” she said. “It’s important to recognize that AI is an assistant, not a replacement.”
Education Week reached out to six educators who work in career and technical education to hear how they are using AI in their classes. Their responses—which have been organized below into four main themes—shed light on how AI is altering their field and how the technology can help schools tackle common problems in CTE.
One big challenge is recruiting and retaining teachers as demand for CTE classes rises. In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of educators working in career and technical education, 61% said that their school’s or district’s CTE offerings had increased in the past five years, driven largely by rising student demand. Survey respondents indicated that having enough teachers was crucial to the success of their programs.
AI can be a lifeline for new CTE teachers
Many CTE teachers come straight from jobs in other fields, entering the classroom through an alternative certification program. Helping those teachers get up to speed on the pedagogical part of teaching takes up a lot of J.J. Ayers’s time as the CTE coordinator for the Little Elm Independent School District in Texas. But AI has greatly shortened that learning curve, he said.
In one case this school year, Ayers said, a newly hired CTE teacher has made the same kind of professional progress in four months that would typically take a year and half to achieve without the help of AI.
“The problem is, when you know everything about something, you don’t necessarily know where to start,” said Ayers. But AI can help with that, he said, by asking a chatbot to break down complex concepts into chunks.
“You can put yourself in your student’s shoes and go, ‘is this basic enough?’ Or ‘do I need to break it down even further?’”
Because CTE teachers typically are subject-matter experts, they know when a generative AI tool is giving them bad information, Ayers said. That level of subject-matter expertise helps them avoid some of the pitfalls of using a technology that generates a lot of inaccurate information, so-called AI “hallucinations.”
In Minnesota, new and veteran CTE teachers have been eager to adopt AI, said Lavyne Rada, the associate director of teacher recruitment and retention for the Lakes Country Service Cooperative, an education-support nonprofit that serves school districts in the region. As part of her organization’s CTE teacher induction program, they encourage new teachers to take what they know about a particular topic and use ChatGPT or Perplexity to plan backwards from there. Teachers are also encouraged to type the same prompt into different AI generative chatbot tools to see which one works best for them, Rada said.
“When do I teach safety, and when do I teach this one skill? And how do I best teach this other skill?” she said. “That has been the shift I’ve seen in the last year: Our teachers coming from industry are asking less questions about ‘what do I teach?’ and are shifting to ‘how do I best teach this skill?’ It’s much more student-focused instead of survival focused.”
Rapid advances in AI can be hard to keep up with
CTE teachers face a double whammy when it comes to the evolution of AI: not only do they have to keep up with rapid advances in AI, they also have to stay abreast of how AI is changing the skills they need to teach students.
As a measure of how quickly AI is changing her job, Ferguson said her introductory courses are sometimes out-of-date within a year or two, putting students in a difficult spot when they move into more advanced courses.
“I have kids right now who are juniors … and they’re like, ‘we didn’t cover this in my intro course.’ And I’m like, ‘they didn’t have it back when you were a freshman two years ago,’” she said. “It is definitely uniquely challenging because I almost have to spend two or three weeks reviewing for my intermediary and advanced courses because there’s been so many changes even since last year.”
However, CTE teachers are also uniquely positioned to adapt to those changes. Most teachers or programs in those subjects have advisory boards made up of industry professionals and community members to help teachers stay current while they’re in the classroom.
Diane Waite, a business and marketing educator in Mounds View Public Schools in Minnesota, has been leaning on her advisory board for guidance on how she should incorporate AI into her instruction.
After one of her advisory board members who is an executive at General Mills—and a former student of Waite’s—came to her with concerns that local high school students weren’t learning enough about AI in school, they worked together to develop an introduction to AI series.
The series, which Waite embeds in all of her classes, goes over the ethical use and crediting of AI, the limitations created by the data AI tools are trained on, and the basics of writing prompts.
“We showed them how to add onto a prompt. We showed them how to really narrow down and get data from a prompt. We showed them how to do advanced prompts, and how to put tone into a prompt,” she said. “We learned that students weren’t as versed about how to use AI not only effectively, but ethically.”
AI helps CTE teachers stay agile
While AI can create challenges, it’s also a powerful tool to help CTE teachers remain adaptable and current, said Rada.
“If a teacher doesn’t have that exact skill set of this new industry that’s coming into town, they can use AI to figure out, what are the skills that are needed and how could they teach that to students,” she said. “It really helps with that flexibility in addressing the local community need. Instead of trying to find a textbook that maybe talks about it but was published 10 years ago—and how much of it is still relevant?”
As is the case for their colleagues who teach traditional academic subjects, generative AI tools can help CTE teachers brainstorm, differentiate instruction, create grading rubrics, plan lessons, write emails, do paperwork, create classroom content, and draft letters of recommendation—that last task being one that CTE teachers have to do often.
The technology can even help teachers simulate job interviews for their students.
Jason Van Nus runs the work-based learning program for the Lowndes County Schools in Georgia. While he uses AI to create content and help with assessments, he’s found it most helpful in conducting mock interviews with students.
Using SchoolAI, Van Nus creates customized generative AI chatbots that give students questions based on their area of focus—whether it’s welding, accounting, engineering, or another pathway. Instead of arranging for students to do mock interviews with members of the community, Van Nus said, he can focus on recruiting industry partners to come to the job fairs he organizes.
“That’s how I use it with students, and it’s been super, super effective for me,” he said.
Many CTE teachers say using AI to do their jobs better is no longer an option
Simply put, for students to be ready to take on technical jobs after high school, they need more than just industry certifications—they need a familiarity with how to use AI in their respective fields.
By the nature of their jobs, CTE teachers have had to be early adopters—and even advocates—for using the technology in schools, said Rada. That sometimes puts them at odds with other educators and even school policies—thrown together quickly in reaction to rapidly growing use of AI—that banned students from using the technology in school.
“I saw a lot of CTE teachers in their districts taking the lead on using these tools so [students] are ready for the workforce,” she said.
Some educators are skeptical of AI’s place in career and technical school settings. Much like teachers of traditional academic subjects, they have concerns that the technology could be used inappropriately and in ways that water down or undercut knowledge and skill development.
Van Nus, for one, said there’s definitely an array of different views toward the technology among his district’s CTE teachers. But the way he sees it, AI isn’t just a handy personal assistant for overworked educators, it’s now a critical component of CTE instruction.
“If they’re using AI in the professional world, I’m doing [students] a disservice if I’m not embracing it and teaching them how to use it ethically,” he said. “I can’t say my kids are career-ready when they leave my program if I haven’t taught them how to use AI.”
