Teacher educators using GenAI-infused instruction to develop preservice teachers’ professional thinking: a collaborative self-study

As rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) reshape educational practice, cultivating preservice teachers’ professional thinking (PT) has become an increasingly urgent yet underexamined challenge. Although prior studies highlight the value of PT and have explored GenAI use in teacher education, little is known about how teacher educators can intentionally and pedagogically leverage GenAI to foster preservice teachers’ PT while simultaneously supporting their own professional learning. Adopting a collaborative self-study methodology, this study investigates how a team of teacher educators collectively design, enact and reflect on GenAI-infused instruction in a course aimed at developing preservice teachers’ PT. The participants in this study included five teacher educators, and 16 pre-service teachers were also involved as relevant stakeholders. Drawing on course artefacts, assessments, interviews, and reflective dialogues, the study employs an integrated mixed-methods analytic approach. Findings reveal that GenAI-infused instruction supported preservice teachers’ holistic understanding of PT, cultivated a critical, agentic, and ethically attentive stance towards GenAI use, and stimulated future-oriented pedagogical envisioning, while also reshaping teacher educators’ pedagogical judgement through ongoing reflexive co-learning. This study reconceptualises GenAI as a mediational resource for PT and offers a practice-oriented framework to guide educative, humanistic, and reflexive GenAI infusion in teacher education.