TeachingCoach: A Fine-Tuned Scaffolding Chatbot for Instructional Guidance to Instructors

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 18 Mar 2026] TeachingCoach: A Fine-Tuned Scaffolding Chatbot for Instructional Guidance to Instructors Isabel Molnar, Peiyu Li, Si Chen, Sugana Chawla, James Lang, Ronald Metoyer, Ting Hua, Nitesh V. Chawla Higher education instructors often lack timely and pedagogically grounded support, as scalable instructional guidance remains limited and existing tools rely on generic chatbot advice or non-scalable teaching center human-human consultations. We present TeachingCoach, a pedagogically grounded chatbot designed to support instructor professional development through real-time, conversational guidance. TeachingCoach is built on a data-centric pipeline that extracts pedagogical rules from educational resources and uses synthetic dialogue generation to fine-tune a specialized language model that guides instructors through problem identification, diagnosis, and strategy development. Expert evaluations show TeachingCoach produces clearer, more reflective, and more responsive guidance than a GPT-4o mini baseline, while a user study with higher education instructors highlights trade-offs between conversational depth and interaction efficiency. Together, these results demonstrate that pedagogically grounded, synthetic data driven chatbots can improve instructional support and offer a scalable design approach for future instructional chatbot systems. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.18189 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.18189v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.18189 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Isabel Molnar [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:35:53 UTC (2,728 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)