National survey tracking of teacher AI professional development over the past several years shows a genuinely striking trend: the share of teachers reporting at least one formal training session on using AI in their work has climbed substantially, more than doubling within about a year in some tracking periods, reflecting how rapidly districts have scaled up training investment as AI adoption has accelerated. This growth is real and worth acknowledging as a genuine sign of institutional response, not just individual teacher initiative.

Despite that growth, the same tracking data consistently shows a meaningful share of teachers nationally still report having received no formal AI training at all, even as informal, self-directed exploration has grown considerably faster than formal district-provided training. Teachers who haven't received training most often cite two specific reasons in open-ended survey responses: a lack of clear district guidance on what's actually appropriate, and simply having other, more pressing instructional priorities competing for limited professional development time.

This gap between rapid growth and persistent incompleteness matters for how schools plan their own training this year. A district that assumes AI training is now broadly "done" because national averages have improved substantially risks leaving a real subset of its own staff without the foundational guidance they need, particularly newer teachers or those in schools where informal peer-to-peer AI knowledge-sharing hasn't taken hold as strongly.

Where the remaining gap concentrates

Survey data breaking training access down by school and teacher characteristics suggests the remaining gap isn't evenly distributed. Newer teachers, teachers in under-resourced schools with less dedicated professional development budget, and teachers in subjects outside the most AI-adoption-forward areas tend to report lower training access than the national average would suggest. This unevenness is worth attending to specifically, since a genuinely useful district-wide AI policy depends on training reaching the staff members least likely to have sought it out independently, not just the early adopters already comfortable experimenting on their own.

• Check your own school's AI training coverage specifically, not just the encouraging national trend, since access varies considerably
• Prioritize training reach for newer teachers and less AI-adoption-forward departments, where gaps tend to concentrate
• Address the two most commonly cited barriers directly: unclear guidance and competing time priorities
• Distinguish formal, structured training from informal self-directed exploration when assessing your staff's actual readiness
• Build training around specific instructional tasks, including grading support, rather than generic AI orientation alone

What teachers say would actually help

Beyond raw training hours, survey responses point to a specific and consistent request from teachers: clear, concrete guidance on what's appropriate for specific instructional tasks, rather than general orientation sessions covering AI concepts broadly. A teacher who understands, at a high level, how a language model works but has never received guidance specific to, say, using an AI-assisted grading tool within their own rubric, still faces a real, practical gap that broad AI literacy training doesn't close on its own.

This points toward a useful design principle for districts planning professional development this year: pairing broad AI literacy sessions with task-specific follow-up training, grading tools, lesson planning support, communication assistance, each covered concretely rather than folded into one general AI orientation that tries to cover everything at once and ends up equipping teachers for none of it deeply.

The trend worth watching going forward

If the past two years' growth trajectory continues, formal AI training will likely reach a clear majority of teachers nationally within the next year or two. The more important question for individual schools isn't whether that national trend continues, but whether their own specific training investment reaches every teacher who needs it, with the task-specific depth that general orientation alone doesn't provide.