How Do Teachers Create Pedagogical Chatbots?: Current Practices and Challenges

AI chatbots have emerged as promising educational tools for personalized learning experiences, with advances in large language models (LLMs) enabling teachers to create and customize these chatbots for their specific classroom needs. However, there is a limited understanding of how teachers create pedagogical chatbots and integrate them into their lessons. Through semi-structured interviews with seven K-12 teachers, we examined their practices and challenges when designing, implementing, and deploying chatbots. Our findings revealed that teachers prioritize developing task-specific chatbots aligned with their lessons. Teachers engaged in various creation practices and had different challenges; novices struggled mainly with initial design and technical implementation, while experienced teachers faced challenges with technical aspects and analyzing conversational data. Based on these insights, we explore approaches to supporting teachers' chatbot creation process and opportunities for designing future chatbot creation systems. This work provides practical insights into deepening the understanding of teacher-driven AI chatbots and AI-augmented learning environments.