Currently reading Kennedy et al. (2026): “The Reflect-And-Act Chatbot: Fostering Applied Professional Learning for Teachers in Challenging Environments”

Kennedy et al. (2026) motivate their study by highlighting the hugely important role that teachers play in times of geopolitical conflict and displacement, not just to meet SDG 4 “quality education”, but to support students with trauma and hardship. That means that teacher training is required at a scale that can only be met with online training.

They have developed “Co-designed Massive Open Online Collaboration“, or “CoMOOC“s, an online teacher training that focusses on “co-design, social learning and knowledge sharing in online and blended formats” (“CoMOOCs are founded on the idea that professionals, particularly those in the unpredictable settings of crisis and emergency, are best placed to respond to the challenges they face because of their intimate knowledge of their context“). However learning things in theory is only the first step that is only useful if teachers can transfer their knowledge and apply it to their classrooms. And that is where Kennedy et al. (2026) explore what role AI can play. They stress that “[t]he development of effective technological innovations must be balanced with the potential costs for society and the environment, and creating a responsible way to evidence effectiveness prior to implementation is critical to this” (I like that a lot!). They develop the reflect-and-act chatbot Rebo to help with transfer by “offering teachers an external stimulus and structured framework for reflection and planning” as well as limited feedback, and also collecting data on the process to better understand how reflection supports transfer.

Kennedy et al. (2026) then recruited teachers currently enrolled in two CoMOOCs to test a beta version of Rebo for “reflection before action” after each week of learning, on what was especially interesting and how they might use it in their own practice. It also lets participants input their email addresses if they want a reminder of their plans two weeks later (great idea!), at which point they could also have follow-up conversations with Rebo, where they were asked about how the implementation of their plan went, and what they learnt from that for the future.

Kennedy et al. (2026) have data from 108 first and 8 follow-up conversations with Rebo. They find that participants were willing to engage with Rebo and seemed to have meaningful conversations and summarise “Rebo’s responsiveness, and its potential to foster a sense of psychological safety for free expression represent significant opportunities for the chatbot to stimulate reflection.” They analyse plans according to SMART goals and find that most plans contained actions, but none contained the “realistic” dimension (which, depending on what exactly participants were asked, might not be super surprising? It does not seem that they were asked to set SMART goals or prompted for each dimension specifically, but that is the plan for the next version of Rebo). Even though only so few, the follow-up conversations seemed to be really meaningful.

Now that Rebo has proved successful, the authors plan to develop it further but in a way that does not take away teacher agency, so always asking rather than telling. “Where teachers may ask Rebo directly for advice, we will use system prompts to provide suggestions suitable for low resourced environments, with guard rails to also consult the teacher for their judgment” (and I like that they think about the “low resourced environments”!).

I really enjoyed reading this article, and the careful approach to using GenAI. There are a lot of good ideas here both for how to structure a development process but also practical suggestions, like the invitations to follow-up conversations and the guard rails around assumed resources that teachers have at their disposal. This makes me want to explore something similar for our own MOOC!

Kennedy, E., Guo, X., Kopkow, A., Littlejohn, A., & Pammer-Schindler, V. (2026). The Reflect-And-Act Chatbot: Fostering Applied Professional Learning for Teachers in Challenging Environments. Innovation and Education, 7(1), 58-85.