AI Formative Assessment Studio: Designing Socratic AI Dialogue for Learner Understanding

This one-day Intermediate CPD helps adult educators, trainers, facilitators, and learning developers strengthen Socratic facilitation with GenAI while keeping the focus pedagogical, not technical.

Participants apply Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as a structured five-step analysis (establishing independent performance, introducing graduated scaffolds, examining responsiveness to support, fading support, and testing transfer) to analyse where learners need scaffolding and design a fading continuum that moves learners from supported thinking to independent performance. The ZPD analysis is used as a practical facilitation lens; participants are not taught to measure ZPD with a tool, but to infer scaffolding needs from learner performance, responsiveness to support, and transfer. Using Paul & Elder question types and Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, they construct question sequences that prompt explanation, challenge assumptions, surface misconceptions, and check understanding.

The course will explore the Learning/Study Mode, or Guided Learning features in common GenAI platforms, where available, and develop simple AI tutors or agents to test the pedagogy in an applied practice environment.

Participants complete an individual written assignment during the course and submit it through Google Classroom, producing practical evidence they can adapt for their own adult education, training, or learning development workflow.

Together with AI Design Studio: Iterative Lesson Design for Adult Learning with GenAI, this basic programme forms the foundation of the IAL-AISG (ADAPT) series. Participants who complete both programmes will receive a joint IAL-AISG certificate.

AI tools often give answers too quickly. This CPD is positioned for educators, trainers, and learning developers who want to use GenAI to support guided thinking, not to replace facilitation or run a technical chatbot-building project. Its value lies in designing how AI should ask, prompt, pause, and hand back responsibility to the learner. Participants diagnose scaffolding needs through a structured five-step ZPD analysis, design question sequences using Paul & Elder and Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, plan fading from full support to independence, and embed lightweight formative checks that surface learner understanding. They also consider wellbeing indicators such as over-reliance, cognitive overload, and isolation, with clear pathways back to human support. The course is deliberately tool-agnostic. Participants may test their Socratic designs through peer role-play, guided-learning features, or simple AI tutor/agent prompts or configurations, but the focus remains on pedagogical quality: how the educator structures dialogue, monitors learner readiness, and keeps human support visible. Participants leave with a reusable Socratic facilitation toolkit, including a ZPD analysis, scaffolding-fading plan, question sequence, AI-assisted dialogue prompt or configuration, low-stakes formative checks, and a concise safeguards checklist.

^ Assessment: Formative Assessment(s), Assignments/Presentations/Practical Performances)

^ Completion: Upon 100% attendance and meeting Assessment requirement, learners will receive a Certificate of Completion from IAL (and other partners where applicable)