My Year of Learning: Reflecting on a Year of Supporting School Systems with Generative AI

Insights and Next Steps

Over the past year, I have been honored to support districts around the United States and Canada on their journey to implement generative AI throughout the system.  Many of those districts/boards are engaged in 4-day consulting support, but some were through summits, webinars, and keynotes.  All the consulting implementations started with a cabinet meeting to discuss the risks and possibilities and then moved on to planning and support for policies, guidelines, and frameworks.    This past year has been one of the greatest learning experiences of my career and I thought it would be important to share my learning with this community. Here's what stood out:

🌟 Dedicated Leadership: Across districts, there's a unanimous desire to harness generative AI effectively across the system. Every district leadership team showed up curious and was vulnerable through the learning process. Our leaders are committed, yet there's a notable gap: ownership of this transformative topic often remains unclaimed.  There is only one district that has dedicated support for generative AI across the many that I am working with, and we need a better model if we are going to see the true power of this emerging technology.

📜 The Policy Puzzle: In the United States we are starting to see state guidance documents, toolkits, and resources for school systems.  We have also seen a focus on ensuring that school districts work on policy.  My observations have been that policy is used as an umbrella term and districts really need help with guidelines and frameworks that support policy language. The work I am doing now is targeted at helping districts create these resources and the output has been rewarding for the system.

🚀 Beyond Teaching and Learning: While professional development initiatives are underway, it's crucial to recognize that AI's impact transcends classroom boundaries. It's about reshaping our entire educational ecosystem.  This is why when planning we must account for more than just the teaching and learning aspect of the system.  School districts should be considering the operations side of the house to ensure that everyone understands the possibilities and risks.  We also need to ensure that we don’t focus on tools training and miss the opportunity to share these tools within the vision for the school district.

💡 Educator Enthusiasm vs. Overload: Educators are excited about AI's potential. However, amidst their enthusiasm, it's also "one more thing" on their already full plates. We must balance innovation with practical workload considerations.  We must balance the desire to automate with the power to augment and allow educators and leaders to do the things that they are most passionate about helping learners grow, supporting adult learners, and running a complex system.

💪Daily Practice Supports Better Use of Generative AI: Every visit that I do starts with an exercise where the participants share what they learned since my last visit, and I share what I learned.  We then unpack the new questions that arise from that learning.  It is clear to me that folks who spend at least 10 minutes every day purposefully using the tools have a much better learning curve.  Just taking one article or research report a day and prompt engineering can lend itself to remembering to use it at other points in the day. Exercising your generative AI muscle makes a difference.

🎨 The Power of Planning and Creativity: Give educators time and space to plan and create with AI, and they will innovate in ways beyond our imagination. I have witnessed folks being vulnerable and also curious at the same time.  I’ve seen educators come up with innovative ideas and produce new resources that support all aspects of generative AI.  To say I’ve been impressed with the immense desire to understand and do the right thing would be an understatement.

As I continue this work I am constantly humbled by the hard-working, dedicated professionals in education. I am convinced that through intentional actions, thoughtful policies/guidance/frameworks, and empowering our educators to harness AI's potential responsibly and creatively AI can have a substantial impact on education. Thank you to everyone who has supported me on this path, my year of learning has been tremendous.

Richard Charles, Ph.D., GSP Advanced Learning Partnerships, Inc (ALP) Amos Fodchuk Julie Foss Michael J. Jabbour Berj Akian Paige Johnson (she/her) Chris Daugherty Kourtney Bostain Jeff Fleetwood Joe Ableidinger Chris Woehl Eric Hileman Dr. Theresa Perry Bethany Rayl Aaron Turpin, Ed.D. Andi Fourlis