Since the outbreak of Covid-19, the Chinese government has issued strict policies for school operations. To meet the demands of normal school schedule while at home, teachers have been required to provide fully online classes regardless of their previous experience. Understanding and describing the authentic challenges teachers face during the wholly online learning and teaching period may not only allow stakeholders to make more informed decisions about subsequent practices, but also provide timely lessons for primary schools in other regions combating similar challenges. The present study was a phenomenological study, in which 26 Chinese primary school teachers were interviewed and provided photos that represented their typical online teaching experience. The essence of the study was “cautious adaptation,” and four themes were identified, including unpreparedness, concerns for at-risk students, constant change and diversity. Relevant issues and implications were discussed especially pertaining to technological innovation and advancement.

Cognitive offloading—delegating cognitive work to external tools—is basic to human cognition, but generative AI (GenAI) amplifies it radically: entire cognitive products can now be produced on request. This sharpens a question about agency over one’s own thinking: when cognition is habitually offloaded, does its product still feel like one’s own? We surveyed 239 pre-service teachers, operationalizing the felt loss of cognitive ownership as concern over the erosion of teaching-design subjectivity (TSC)—the metacognitive appraisal that AI-assisted work is not genuinely one’s own and that independent capacity is declining. Guided by the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, we tested whether AI anxiety/fear of missing out (affective) and impulsivity (self-regulatory) relate to this concern through behavioral GenAI dependency—habitual offloading. In a structural equation model with bias-corrected bootstrapping, dependency strongly predicted TSC and partially mediated the effect of AI anxiety; impulsivity raised dependency but showed a suppression pattern (a positive indirect effect offset by a null total effect), and the model explained 35% of the variance in the concern. Habitual offloading—that is, GenAI dependency—rather than generic AI use, accompanies the metacognitive loss of cognitive ownership.