From Instructors to Thinking Facilitators:Developing teachers to Scaffold Emotional Intelligence-enhancedCritical Adaptive Thinkingin the GenAI Era

Abstract

Teachers play a critical role in scaffolding students' adaptive critical thinking, yet many may remain underprepared for this in both AI-integrated and non-AI-integrated classrooms. This paper presents a three-stage, GenAI-empowered Professional Development (PD) design within a Singapore Professional Learning Community, grounded in a refined Adaptive Critical Thinking Framework and Socratic questioning. Integrating Transcribe, M-Powering Teachers, and ClaudeAI, the study explores teachers' current facilitation practices and how AI can develop their scaffolding competencies, with the aim of elevating GenAI-empowered teacher professional development.