The rapid development and spread of artificial intelligence (AI) are currently transforming a multitude of occupational areas, and are in consequence also increasingly impacting professional activities in the field of education. Especially for school teachers, who are facing mounting challenges due to student behavior, large and heterogeneous classes, and increasing bureaucracy (e.g., Sichma & Wolf, 2023), AI not only poses new demands, but also offers a variety of opportunities to facilitate their work, in particular during lesson planning and implementation.

According to a recent pilot study, teachers are already using AI for certain professional activities like brainstorming ideas, adapting and summarizing text-based materials, and creating tasks for both formative and summative assessments (Pettera et al., 2024). However, we still know very little about how prospective teachers currently use basic and complex features of AI to particularly plan and prepare lessons. General competency models such as the Artificial Intelligence Competence Model (AIComp; Ehlers et al., 2023) describe basic AI competencies. However, there has so far been a lack of specific adaptation and operationalization of such models for concrete professional application contexts in the education sector - for example for lesson planning.

To provide empirical evidence on this issue, a qualitative study was conducted to investigate the use of AI during a planning task of a 90-minute lesson on the topic of “Coffee as a cultivated plant” by three pre-service teachers. For this purpose, a research instrument was first developed that depicts activities relevant to operationalize (levels of) AI competence specifically for the case of lesson planning on the basis of the AIComp model. It was then used during observing participants’ visible actions and analyzing their Chat history. In a subsequent qualitative content analysis, students’ activities were coded according to the dimensions of lesson planning by Klafki (2007).

The study's findings suggest that pre-service teachers mainly use AI during the conceptual phase of lesson planning, in particular to generate ideas and to methodically design their lessons (e.g., by defining learning objectives and meaningfully integrating digital media). However, more complex tasks like creating handouts or multimedia learning materials were rarely performed using AI.

The results indicate that the AI skills of trainee teachers are still limited and underline the need for further research into the causes and for targeted media didactic training in the context of teacher training. The measuring instrument used provides a suitable basis for structuring learning content. It can be used in future studies both to assess the level of knowledge and for targeted support and at the same time provides impulses for the well-founded development of an instrument for recording AI skills in this professional field.