Exploring Teachers' Perspectives on Using Conversational AI Agents for Group Collaboration
This addresses the challenge of supporting peer collaboration in education by investigating teacher views on AI agents, but it is incremental as it focuses on qualitative insights rather than broad solutions.
The study explored teachers' perspectives on using a conversational AI agent, Phoenix, for group collaboration in K12 classrooms, finding that while it stimulated engagement, teachers had concerns about autonomy, trust, anthropomorphism, and pedagogical alignment.
Collaboration is a cornerstone of 21st-century learning, yet teachers continue to face challenges in supporting productive peer interaction. Emerging generative AI tools offer new possibilities for scaffolding collaboration, but their role in mediating in-person group work remains underexplored, especially from the perspective of educators. This paper presents findings from an exploratory qualitative study with 33 K12 teachers who interacted with Phoenix, a voice-based conversational agent designed to function as a near-peer in face-to-face group collaboration. Drawing on playtesting sessions, surveys, and focus groups, we examine how teachers perceived the agent's behavior, its influence on group dynamics, and its classroom potential. While many appreciated Phoenix's capacity to stimulate engagement, they also expressed concerns around autonomy, trust, anthropomorphism, and pedagogical alignment. We contribute empirical insights into teachers' mental models of AI, reveal core design tensions, and outline considerations for group-facing AI agents that support meaningful, collaborative learning.