WYOMISSING, Pa. — Penn State Berks will host a workshop titled “Designing critical thinking assessments in the Age of AI: Prompt and context engineering workshop” on Tuesday, May 12, from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Gaige Technology and Business Innovation Building, room 244. The workshop is designed for K-12 educators. Participants who complete the full event will receive five hours of ACT 48 credit. The event is free, and breakfast and lunch will be provided. Registration is required by 5 p.m. on April 30.
The workshop is supported by the Presidential AI Challenge through Community-based Partnerships (DCL NSF 25-036) under the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded project, “Enhancing Critical Thinking in Introductory Programming through Artificial Intelligence and Socratic Metacognitive Inquiry-based Learning Environment (SMILE),” Grant No. 2518611.
The “SMILE” workshop is designed to help K-12 educators use artificial intelligence effectively and responsibly in their teaching. It will introduce practical prompt-engineering strategies that help educators use large language models as reliable teaching assistants for generating lessons, scaffolded materials and consistent feedback. The workshop also will guide K-12 educators in designing AI-enhanced assessments that strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills through Socratic questioning, reasoning-focused tasks and structured thinking stages.
Workshop agenda
8:30–9 a.m. — Breakfast and introduction to SMILE
9:30–11:30 a.m. — Morning session: Prompt engineering to turn the LLM into a reliable teaching assistant
Participants will learn how to use simple templates to get clear, classroom-ready outputs on the first try; apply “verify and refine” prompts to reduce AI mistakes; generate lesson ideas, examples and checks for understanding efficiently; create scaffolded and on-level options without rewriting materials; keep activities aligned with learning objectives and required skills; produce consistent criteria and student-friendly feedback language; and add privacy and bias guardrails to support safe, inclusive materials.
11:30 a.m.–noon — Networking lunch
Noon–2 p.m. — Afternoon session: Designing assessments and exercises that build critical thinking in the age of AI
This session will explore how to use Socratic questioning as a practical framework for scaffolding and evaluating critical thinking through the SMILE framework; move from answer-focused tasks to reasoning-focused assessments; design custom GPTs that guide students to clarify, analyze, justify and reflect; and use structured thinking stages to make student reasoning more visible and assessable.
Space is limited, and so final participants will be selected from the applicant pool through a fair process that aims to achieve balanced representation across school districts, institutions and subject domains in alignment with NSF guidelines.
For more information, visit the website or contact Abdullah Konak, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State Berks, at AUK3@psu.edu