Since the release of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Foundation Model (2022), the push and pull of advancing innovation vs fears over bias, copyright, and even the existential risk of Artificial General Intelligence, have dominated public discourse. More recently, as the body of available usage data has increased and enough time passed to carry out empirical research, concerns in education have evolved to include the ways people are working with Generative AI (GenAI), and particularly its effect on student and teacher learning (Bastani et. Al, 2024), critical thinking (Gerlich, 2025), and agency (Lepage & Collin, 2024). 

We wished to explore whether GenAI’s abilities could be repurposed to create engaging experiences for teacher professional development, contrasting with the ubiquitous tangible outputs of content like activity and lesson plans, and materials. When GenAI systems are free to generate content, they de facto do the ‘thinking’, as they are generating the ‘ideas’, and can undermine teacher development by removing crucial opportunities for critical thinking and professional growth. Septiani, Kostakos, & Romero (2023) identify six levels of creative engagement with AI, from ‘Passive consumer’ to ‘Expansive learning supported by AI’, and in their review of 41 studies using AI in education find none which do not rely on such content generation. 

Agency is at the centre of teacher professional development (e.g. Lepage & Collin, 2024; Chinn and Lamb, 2024), and we turned to Malderez's (2015; 2024) Systematic Informed Reflective Practice (SIRP) teacher mentoring protocol, in combination with Hobson’s (2016) ONSIDE mentoring framework as an exemplar safe, supportive, contextual and empowering environment for agentic teacher experiences. GenAI is a unique candidate for a technology assuming a mentoring role, as it can serve as an always-listening dialogic partner, one that can dynamically generate and adapt critical thinking questions based on context and need, without placing itself in the driver’s seat.

Collaborating with pre-service teachers (PSTs) from Saints Cyril & Methodius University, N. Macedonia, and following standard Agile development practices of incremental changes based on regular feedback (What is Agile? 2024), the result: an application called “Noticing”, winner of the 2024 British Council ELTons Award for Innovation in the Use of Technology. It sits between users and Foundation Models and scaffolds mentoring experiences, each with the goal of helping teachers feel more prepared, be it in activity, lesson/unit planning, materials development, post-lesson reflection like SIRP, and classroom investigations. Each talk in this two-part symposium discusses the integration and (eventual) adoption and control of AI through Noticing in unique national contexts, spanning three continents (Europe, Asia, Oceania). Each addresses the affordances of Noticing-like applications for teacher professional development, charting one potential way forward of the evolving use of GenAI in education.

We will illustrate (1) both the need for such an intermediate application layer, or ‘middleware’, between teachers and GenAI, and the goodness-of-fit of SIRP as an exemplar, whenever the purpose is agentic AI experiences for professional development; (2) how lesson planning in Noticing supports deep thinking in PSTs, fuelling their identity and agency development and building their resilience; (3) the challenges of adoption, especially for those with existing experiences of using GenAI, the reasons for those challenges and ways to mitigate them in a PST context; (4) how Noticing effectively supports PST development, especially when used in conjunction with a good quality human mentor (see Malderez, 2024), for post-lesson reflections; (5) that regular use of Noticing reduces net germane load, even when introduced to PSTs mid-term; and (6) that the benefits of reflection with Noticing for international students go beyond development and support, aiding their acculturation into foreign contexts by allowing them to take ownership of their learning.

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