After more than 15 years of teaching English in higher education and
managing educational technology integration, I watched a familiar
pattern unfold with the arrival of generative AI: teachers, school
leaders, and even policymakers rushed to ask WHAT AI tools could do —
but rarely paused to ask HOW these tools should be integrated into
learning, and WHY.
In Türkiye and globally, most professional development for teachers
around AI focuses on tool demonstrations, prompt libraries, and lists
of "best apps." Teachers leave excited, but return to classrooms
without a framework to make principled, pedagogical, ethical decisions
about when AI helps learning and when it replaces it. The result is a
widening gap between AI awareness and AI competence.
I created the AIDE Framework to close this gap. By reinterpreting
ASSURE — a long-trusted instructional design model — for the AI era,
AIDE gives teachers a structured way to embed AI as a deliberate
instructional choice grounded in learning theory, ethics, and equity.
It treats AI not as a novelty bolted onto existing practice, but as a
design decision shaped by the learner, the objective, and the context.
Middle school English teachers often the first to face students
using AI for writing and translation needed this most urgently.
AIDE was designed with them, validated by experts, and built to be
adaptable across disciplines and grade levels.
In practice, AIDE has two faces that work together: a structured
professional development programme that teachers experience, and a
portable design protocol they carry back into their classrooms.
Teachers join AIDE through a four-week online programme followed by
an in-person showcase day. Each week corresponds to one phase of the
AIDE Framework and follows the same rhythm: a short conceptual input,
a worked example from real middle school English classrooms, a
guided design activity, and peer critique. By the end of the
programme, every teacher has produced a complete, classroom-ready
lesson that embeds AI with intention, ethics, and pedagogical
alignment.
After the programme, AIDE continues to live as a decision routine.
Whenever a teacher considers using an AI tool — for vocabulary
practice, writing feedback, speaking simulation, or formative
assessment — they walk through the AIDE phases before making that
choice. AI stops being a novelty bolted onto existing practice and
becomes a designed, justified part of teaching.
All AIDE materials are openly hosted online and built to be adapted
across disciplines, grade levels, and national contexts.
AIDE has spread along two tracks: a research and validation track
and a community and access track. Both are designed to feed
long-term, multi-context adoption rather than a single-cohort
launch.
On the research track, AIDE was reviewed by five field experts in
instructional design, AI in education, English language teaching,
and teacher education, using content validity indices to refine the
framework before its pilot. AIDE was then piloted with middle school
English teachers in Türkiye through a structured four-week online
programme. A full paper has been accepted for oral presentation at
ICETOL 2026 in Bremen, with further publications planned in
education technology journals.
On the community and access track, AIDE materials — including
session decks, design templates, and worked examples — are openly
hosted online so that teachers, teacher educators, and schools
beyond the original pilot can adopt or adapt them without cost. The
framework is deliberately discipline- and grade-agnostic, designed
to transfer to other subjects, ages, and contexts.
Next steps focus on training cohorts of teacher educators to
deliver AIDE in their own institutions, expanding the open-access
hub, and partnering with international networks to embed AIDE
within existing teacher development pathways.
AIDE has evolved through a design-based research process rather than
emerging as a fixed product. Early versions of the framework treated
AI integration as an extension of existing instructional design
practice. Through iterative refinement, AI integration became a
distinct, cross-cutting layer woven through every phase, with ethics,
equity, and learner agency made explicit rather than implied.
The professional development programme was also revised in response
to expert feedback. The original draft was content-heavy and
front-loaded with theory. Following expert review and pilot
observations, sessions were rebalanced toward worked examples, guided
design activities, and peer critique, with conceptual input kept
short and purposeful.
The expert evaluation rubric itself was simplified. An early version
used research jargon that was difficult for non-specialist reviewers
to apply consistently. It was rewritten to use observable,
classroom-friendly criteria that any teacher educator can interpret
without specialised training.
Each iteration has moved AIDE closer to a framework that is
theoretically sound, practically usable, and adaptable across
contexts — the three qualities the design process was built to
balance.
AIDE is openly accessible and built to be adopted at different
levels of engagement.
If you are an individual teacher, you can explore the open-access
AIDE hub, which offers session materials, design templates, and
worked examples drawn from real classrooms. You can begin by
applying the AIDE phases to one upcoming lesson where you are
considering an AI tool, using the templates to guide your decisions.
No registration or licence is required.
If you are a school leader, teacher educator, or department head,
you can use AIDE as the structure for a short, in-house professional
development series. The four-week programme is designed to be
delivered online, hybrid, or in person, and the materials can be
adapted for any subject area and grade level. Schools can run the
programme with their own facilitators, or invite trained
facilitators to lead it.
If you are a university partner, teacher education programme, or
network of schools, AIDE can be integrated into pre-service or
in-service teacher preparation. We welcome collaborations to adapt
AIDE for new languages, disciplines, or national contexts, and to
train cohorts of facilitators who can deliver it locally.
For all enquiries, partnership requests, or feedback, please reach
out through the contact information on this page or visit the AIDE
hub linked above.
