AI competency framework for teachers

🌱 Cultivating Competence in the Age of AI: A Garden of Growth

Imagine teaching in the age of AI as tending to a living, evolving garden. UNESCO’s AI Competency Framework for Teachers (2024) is the gardener’s guide—a blueprint for nurturing the skills, values, and understanding educators need to help both themselves and their students thrive in this new digital landscape.

At its heart, the framework invites educators to plant seeds of curiosity and reflection through five interconnected dimensions:

🌿 Human-Centered Mindset – the roots of teaching with integrity, ensuring AI tools are used to uplift human potential, not replace it.

🌷 Ethics of AI – the moral soil, rich with care for privacy, justice, and transparency.

🌻 AI Foundations and Applications – the practical knowledge needed to understand how AI works and how to use it wisely.

🌺 AI Pedagogy – the sunlight that helps new methods grow, showing how AI can enrich learning without overshadowing the teacher-student relationship.

🌾 AI for Professional Learning – the ongoing nourishment that fuels a teacher’s own lifelong development and collaboration with peers.

These five areas unfold across three seasons of growth:

Acquire is where seeds are planted—teachers develop AI literacy, learning its basic concepts and ethical implications.

Deepen is the cultivation stage—educators embed AI tools thoughtfully into their classrooms, promoting equity, safety, and student-centered learning.

Create is the flourishing—teachers co-design ethical AI practices, innovate with AI tools, and lead transformation in their educational ecosystems.

This framework is a checklist of skills; And, it is also  a call to grow intentionally—to root your teaching in human values while embracing the possibilities of emerging technologies. It helps educators transform not only their classrooms, but also their own roles in a changing world, becoming co-creators of ethical, inclusive, and thriving digital futures.