13 AI Ideas for School Leaders to Try
The best way to make sense of AI is to use it.
So much of the discourse around AI in education right now focuses on student and teacher use (and misuse). To start 2024, I thought I’d offer some practical entry points relevant to the role of school administrator. I continue to believe that the most important work all members of a school community can do right now is to develop their AI curiosity, literacy, and empathy. Administrators hold significant decision-making power when it comes to AI, and I encourage them to learn alongside students and teachers as they consider those decisions.
For the activities below, you can use almost any chatbot at the free level. Some will work better with a paid subscription or a specialized tool. If you’re accustomed to using ChatGPT, this is a good moment to explore other options (Perplexity, Claude, Bing, etc.). All of these activities require what people seem to be calling “a human in the loop”: your prior knowledge and experience, critical thinking, creativity, and familiarity with your own needs and context will contribute to the quality of the output.
13 Things School Administrators Can Try with AI
Editing support. Ask AI to clarify your writing or someone else’s. Be sure to specify what kind of support you’re looking for (grammar, tone, complexity, etc.). For example: “Read this email I [received/wrote]. Tell me what you think I am [being asked/asking someone] to do.”
Critique your own thinking. Tell AI an idea you have and ask it to elaborate, to present counter or alternative arguments, to identify missing perspectives or points of view, or to generate questions you should anticipate once you share your idea.
Support more effective hiring and onboarding. Share a job description and information about your school with AI and ask it to generate questions a candidate might have in an interview. Have it evaluate and revise your job descriptions for clarity, bias, or appeal. Use AI to develop shared rubrics for candidate evaluation based on your hiring criteria. One of the first exercises I did with ChatGPT was ask it to generate questions a new hire might have. How many of us have prepared great answers to these questions?
![[User] Pretend to be a new teacher at a private high school. You have no teaching experience, but you have had other jobs before. You're teaching English. I'm the principal. Can you ask me some questions you might have? [Response] Hello Principal, I'm excited to join the team at this prestigious high school as an English teacher. While I have not had formal teaching experience, I am confident in my ability to connect with students and facilitate their learning. However, I have a few questions to ensure a smooth transition and to be better prepared for my new role: Could you provide me with a copy of the school's curriculum and the specific learning objectives I should be focusing on for my English classes? Are there any specific teaching methodologies or philosophies that the English department adheres to that I should be aware of? What resources, such as textbooks, digital platforms, or supplementary materials, are typically used in our English classes? Do you have a mentorship program or professional development opportunities for new teachers to help me improve my teaching skills and familiarize myself with school policies and procedures? How are lesson plans and grading structured in the English department? Are there any specific guidelines or templates I should follow? Can you tell me more about the students I'll be teaching? What are their general skill levels, interests, and backgrounds? Are there any school-wide or department-specific initiatives, such as clubs or competitions, related to English that I should be involved with or support? How do you handle classroom management and discipline at the school, and are there any specific policies I should be aware of? What is the preferred method of communication with parents, and are there any guidelines on how often I should provide updates on their child's progress? Finally, can you share any advice or best practices that have proven successful for new teachers at this school?](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2877ee17-cb14-40d2-9da2-9029d9a61d13_1047x1175.jpeg "[User] Pretend to be a new teacher at a private high school. You have no teaching experience, but you have had other jobs before. You're teaching English. I'm the principal. Can you ask me some questions you might have? [Response] Hello Principal, I'm excited to join the team at this prestigious high school as an English teacher. While I have not had formal teaching experience, I am confident in my ability to connect with students and facilitate their learning. However, I have a few questions to ensure a smooth transition and to be better prepared for my new role: Could you provide me with a copy of the school's curriculum and the specific learning objectives I should be focusing on for my English classes? Are there any specific teaching methodologies or philosophies that the English department adheres to that I should be aware of? What resources, such as textbooks, digital platforms, or supplementary materials, are typically used in our English classes? Do you have a mentorship program or professional development opportunities for new teachers to help me improve my teaching skills and familiarize myself with school policies and procedures? How are lesson plans and grading structured in the English department? Are there any specific guidelines or templates I should follow? Can you tell me more about the students I'll be teaching? What are their general skill levels, interests, and backgrounds? Are there any school-wide or department-specific initiatives, such as clubs or competitions, related to English that I should be involved with or support? How do you handle classroom management and discipline at the school, and are there any specific policies I should be aware of? What is the preferred method of communication with parents, and are there any guidelines on how often I should provide updates on their child's progress? Finally, can you share any advice or best practices that have proven successful for new teachers at this school?")
![[User] Pretend to be a new teacher at a private high school. You have no teaching experience, but you have had other jobs before. You're teaching English. I'm the principal. Can you ask me some questions you might have? [Response] Hello Principal, I'm excited to join the team at this prestigious high school as an English teacher. While I have not had formal teaching experience, I am confident in my ability to connect with students and facilitate their learning. However, I have a few questions to ensure a smooth transition and to be better prepared for my new role: Could you provide me with a copy of the school's curriculum and the specific learning objectives I should be focusing on for my English classes? Are there any specific teaching methodologies or philosophies that the English department adheres to that I should be aware of? What resources, such as textbooks, digital platforms, or supplementary materials, are typically used in our English classes? Do you have a mentorship program or professional development opportunities for new teachers to help me improve my teaching skills and familiarize myself with school policies and procedures? How are lesson plans and grading structured in the English department? Are there any specific guidelines or templates I should follow? Can you tell me more about the students I'll be teaching? What are their general skill levels, interests, and backgrounds? Are there any school-wide or department-specific initiatives, such as clubs or competitions, related to English that I should be involved with or support? How do you handle classroom management and discipline at the school, and are there any specific policies I should be aware of? What is the preferred method of communication with parents, and are there any guidelines on how often I should provide updates on their child's progress? Finally, can you share any advice or best practices that have proven successful for new teachers at this school?](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2877ee17-cb14-40d2-9da2-9029d9a61d13_1047x1175.jpeg "[User] Pretend to be a new teacher at a private high school. You have no teaching experience, but you have had other jobs before. You're teaching English. I'm the principal. Can you ask me some questions you might have? [Response] Hello Principal, I'm excited to join the team at this prestigious high school as an English teacher. While I have not had formal teaching experience, I am confident in my ability to connect with students and facilitate their learning. However, I have a few questions to ensure a smooth transition and to be better prepared for my new role: Could you provide me with a copy of the school's curriculum and the specific learning objectives I should be focusing on for my English classes? Are there any specific teaching methodologies or philosophies that the English department adheres to that I should be aware of? What resources, such as textbooks, digital platforms, or supplementary materials, are typically used in our English classes? Do you have a mentorship program or professional development opportunities for new teachers to help me improve my teaching skills and familiarize myself with school policies and procedures? How are lesson plans and grading structured in the English department? Are there any specific guidelines or templates I should follow? Can you tell me more about the students I'll be teaching? What are their general skill levels, interests, and backgrounds? Are there any school-wide or department-specific initiatives, such as clubs or competitions, related to English that I should be involved with or support? How do you handle classroom management and discipline at the school, and are there any specific policies I should be aware of? What is the preferred method of communication with parents, and are there any guidelines on how often I should provide updates on their child's progress? Finally, can you share any advice or best practices that have proven successful for new teachers at this school?")
In general, AI can be useful for evaluating and supporting key systems and processes in many nonacademic arenas at school.
Prepare for a difficult conversation. This is less about taking advice from AI and more about creating an opportunity for yourself to actively prepare and reflect in advance of a challenging interaction. Provide AI with the scenario (do not provide personal information) and be specific about what you want to process: timing, location, content, tone, etc.
Make communications more accessible and multimodal. To transform text into multimedia content, use a text-to-speech tool like Eleven or a video generation tool like HeyGen, both of which can also translate communications into many different languages. Apps like HandTalk can translate to and from American Sign Language, and apps like SeeingAI support visually impaired people.
Review and analyze documents. In my consulting work I often find school leaders wrestling with many different documents: absorbing them, analyzing them, making connections across them, and resolving incongruities. ChatGPT-4 can read both links and uploaded files. Perplexity, Claude, and ChatPDF can read uploaded files. In all cases, you can ask AI to provide summaries, highlight essential action items, locate themes and inconsistencies, and raise questions.
Generate and discuss scenarios. Examples and case studies are always a valuable way to move a conversation from abstract to concrete. AI can generate scenarios based on your goals. For example, you could train AI on case studies like Harvard’s “Confronting Challenges” for principals and have it generate new case studies in a similar style that are related to issues you’re facing at your school.
Plan better meetings. I feel so strongly that meeting design and facilitation is an underestimated competency for school leaders. In the same way we encourage teachers to use AI to plan lessons, leaders can provide AI with the topic, audience, and design constraints for a meeting (timing, location, number of people, etc.) and ask it to create a detailed agenda that incorporates effective meeting strategies (equitable participation, internal processing time, a station rotation, visible thinking protocols, peer-based learning, etc.).
Create meeting summaries and transcripts. AI tools like Fireflies and Otter (among others) not only transcribe conversations, but can summarize them, measure talk time of participants, and take notes. These resources—AI-generated or not— are useful for follow-up and for those who can’t attend live.
Test your knowledge. If you’re about to run a meeting or present about a certain topic, use AI to ask you questions to test your knowledge. Prompt it to ask easier or more difficult questions based on its initial output. Ask it to explain the topic to you as if you were in fifth grade.
Analyze data. Data processing is one of AI’s superpowers. You can share sizable amounts of data via attachment or copy/paste, data like survey results, narrative comments or recommendation letters, spreadsheets, etc. Ask AI to summarize, identify patterns and gaps, or recommend action items. If nothing else, AI can be helpful in cleaning up and structuring messy data. I found a good explanation among these helpful short videos from cpa.com. Note: it’s always a good idea to scrub personal information from any data you upload into AI. Check on your school’s policy on using proprietary information with cloud-based tools and find out if and how your chosen chatbot uses data to train its model.
Explore AI’s multimodal capabilities. In ChatGPT-4 or other transcription tools, you can upload audio files for transcription (excellent if you conduct frequent classroom observations or meetings and want to record and keep track of your thoughts), and then use AI to help you turn those thoughts into polished writing. You can take a picture of a space and ask it to redesign or improve it. I shared a picture of my home office and asked ChatGPT-4 to provide suggestions on organization and book storage. It read the photo almost flawlessly and made logical suggestions: some generic, some I had not thought of.
Personalize it. When teachers ask me how to start with AI, I often ask, “What’s a teaching problem you’re trying to solve?” Even if AI can’t provide you with a perfect solution, the act of engaging in dialogue on a professional challenge can often clarify that challenge and spark your own imagination when it comes to devising strategies to address it, not unlike a conversation with a coach. Use AI to work on something that matters to you. What’s a leadership challenge you’re facing right now? What’s a leadership skill or topic you want to learn more about?
Prompting Tips
Don’t overthink your initial prompt. I have found it more efficient and effective to start with a short, clear prompt and then refine the output by nudging and coaching AI through dialogue. I often find the dialogue clarifies for me what I really need from AI.
When uploading docs or sharing links, ask AI to verify that it understands the shared resource by summarizing it first.
After AI provides ideas, ask it to explain its reasoning. I find this can get it to generate even more detail and perspectives.
If AI makes an error, tell it to correct it. Better yet, simply tell it you spot an error and see if it can find and correct it.
Don’t be afraid to re-prompt if you don’t like the answer.
Be wary of bias, stereotyping, misinformation, and hallucination. If AI recommends specific people, places, or resources, Google them to verify they actually exist.
Here are OpenAI’s prompt engineering tips.
Ethan Mollick offers two pathways to prompting.
Lance Eaton has a great summary of 26 prompting tips from a recent research paper by Sondos Mahmoud Bsharat, Aidar Myrzakhan, and Zhiqiang Shen.
Reflective Questions
What do you think of the output? What prompting strategies are you learning as you refine it?
In what way did AI do good work for you? Where did you find you had to intervene or fill in gaps?
What potential applications do you see for your team?
Does your experience change your thinking about student and teacher use of AI? How so?
What would need to be true in order for AI to fulfill its potential for your school?
What is one thing you will commit to trying with AI after this initial experimentation?
Remember, the goal at this stage is to develop curiosity, literacy, and empathy. If you are a leader who is encouraging exploration of AI at your school, modeling exploration yourself can be motivating for others and also equips you to have informed conversations and make informed decisions about AI.
I’m so curious about how others are thinking about this. How are you using AI in a leadership context?
Upcoming Ways to Connect with Me
Speaking, Facilitation, and Consultation. I’m currently planning for spring and summer here in the northern hemisphere (April to August 2024). In addition to working with schools and nonprofits on AI, I facilitate retreats for leadership teams and boards, lead workshops on learner-centered pedagogy and assessment, and consult on strategic initiatives (Portraits of a Graduate, academic program design, etc.). If you want to learn more my work, reach out for a conversation at eric@erichudson.co or take a look at my website.
Online Workshops. I’m thrilled to continue my partnership with the California Teacher Development Collaborative (CATDC) with two more online workshops. Join us on March 18 for “Making Sense of AI,” an introduction to AI for educators, and on April 17 for “Leveling Up Our AI Practice,” a workshop for educators with AI experience who are looking to build new skills. Both workshops are open to all, whether or not you live/work in California.
Conferences. I will be facilitating workshops at the Summits for Transformative Learning in Atlanta, GA, USA, March 11-12 (STLinATL) and in St. Louis, MO, USA, May 30-31 (STLinSTL). I’m also a proud member of the board of the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (ATLIS) and will be attending their annual conference April 7-10.
Links!
“These words paint a picture of a certain kind of leader, one who cares deeply about human beings, who is as attentive to culture as to structure, and who has the bravery to transform a school from its familiar form into something that is uncertain but potentially more compelling.” Jal Mehta on the future of school leadership.
EdWeek surveyed 500 teachers and found about 37% of them use AI. The reasons teachers gave for not using it are varied and interesting.
I just discovered Maria Popova’s lovely summary of Oliver Sacks’ thoughts on consciousness, which anticipated ChatGPT almost 30 years before it existed.
I wonder what it would look like to “force students to use AI” in the same way Joel Heng Hartse forced students to cheat. I appreciate this assignment and how students approached it.
Are AI tools like the Rabbit and its “Large Action Model” the future of mobile devices, or are they just another example of what Cory Doctorow calls “stupid bubble money”?
Anne Helen Petersen did an interesting interview with author Devorah Heitner on surveillance culture among parents and schools: “How Much Should I Track My Kid?”
Monday, January 15, is Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in the United States. I often re-read his short 1947 piece, “The Purpose of Education.”
I have used AI for learning planning. Also, to use focus question on content and standards for my department.
Some spot on ideas here!