Five AI Moves Teachers Should Make This School Year
You’ve dabbled in AI. Perhaps you’re not impressed. All you’ve seen is assignment after assignment of AI work rather than student work. And who has time to learn every AI update. Seems to change every day.
Breathless enthusiasm and stern warnings to ban AI are both unproductive. Despite what some tell you AI isn't going away and no amount of collective breath holding will stop that. But you do get to help people make wise decisions about it. Students are already using it whether you want them to or not.
I've whittled my advice for you to five practical moves any teacher, at any grade level, can make this year that bridge AI abstinence and AI chaos.
As with most effective change, you build from where you are with appropriate mindsets.
1. Acknowledge the Fears, But Don't Let Them Drive Decisions
I understand the inclination to avoid AI entirely. I’m pretty freaked out about where things are going too. The technology feels overwhelming, the implications are unclear, and the pace of change is exhausting. These emotions are completely rational.
But abstinence only makes you feel better. It doesn't help your students address the actual challenges they'll face. Students are encountering AI in most computer-based interactions without any adult guidance.
The abstinence-only approach in other areas—whether drugs, sex education, or technology—has consistently shown poor outcomes. Students don't need perfect AI policies; they need thoughtful adults who can help them navigate complex tools responsibly.
Start small. You don't need to revolutionize your teaching practice overnight. Try one conversation about AI with your students. Ask them what they're curious about, what they're worried about, and how they think these tools might affect their futures. Listen to their responses and use that information to guide your next steps.
2. Co-Learn AI with Your Students Instead of Waiting to Become an Expert
Stop waiting to become the AI expert in the room. You never will be, and that's actually an advantage.
The traditional teacher-as-expert model breaks down with AI because the technology changes too rapidly for any one person to master. Instead of fighting this reality, embrace it. Pick one AI-relevant question related to your subject area and explore it alongside your students.
For example, a history teacher might ask: "How do we verify information when AI can generate convincing but false historical accounts?" For that matter, “how can we verify it when humans give us information?” Work with students to test different AI tools (or human accounts), compare their outputs to primary sources, and develop evaluation strategies together. A science teacher could explore: "How do we maintain our problem-solving skills when AI can do calculations for us?" Assign some problems to be solved with AI assistance and others without, then analyze the differences in understanding and learning.
The key is making your learning process visible. When you encounter something you don't understand about AI, say so. When you make mistakes or get unexpected results, examine them publicly. Students need to see that working with AI is an iterative process that requires human judgment, not a magical solution that always works perfectly.
This approach serves multiple purposes: you're learning alongside your students, modeling intellectual humility, and demonstrating that AI competence comes from experimentation and critical thinking, not from memorizing the "right" way to use these tools.
3. Go "Meta" with Your Teaching (No Screens Required)
No, not Meta the company. Meta as in meta-thinking. The best preparation for an AI world doesn't require a single computer. It starts with making your own thinking visible to students.
You already possess one of the most valuable skills for the AI age: the ability to think about thinking. When you explain why you structured a lesson a particular way, or walk students through how you approached solving a problem, you're modeling metacognitive skills that directly transfer to working with AI.
In your next lesson, spend two minutes explaining your thought process out loud. If you're teaching math, don't just show the steps—explain why you chose this method over others, what you're paying attention to, and how you'd know if you were going off track. If you're teaching writing, describe how you're evaluating the strength of an argument, why you're restructuring a paragraph, and why you chose that pedagogy.
Students who understand how humans think strategically will be far better equipped to direct AI systems. The same skills you use to break down complex problems, set priorities, and evaluate solutions are exactly what students need to manage AI effectively. When a student can articulate why they made certain choices in their own work, they'll be better prepared to guide an AI toward useful outputs.
This isn't about AI literacy—it's about thinking and learning literacy, as described in my recent book AI Wisdom Volume 1: Meta-Principles of Thinking and Learning. But in a world where AI can handle much of the routine cognitive work, the ability to think strategically about thinking becomes the most valuable skill of all.
4. Avoid the All-or-Nothing Trap: Strategic AI Permissions
Blanket AI bans create more problems than they solve. When you tell students they can never use AI, you're creating anxiety, resistance, and missed learning opportunities.
Students worry they might accidentally cross an invisible line they can't see clearly. They're not sure what counts as "AI" when spell-check, grammar tools, and search engines all use AI technology. Most importantly, you're ignoring their natural curiosity about tools that are reshaping how knowledge work gets done.
Instead of absolute prohibitions, try strategic permissions. If your assignment is really about students learning to structure arguments, maybe allow AI to help with brainstorming and idea generation, but require human reasoning for connecting ideas and drawing conclusions. If you're teaching research skills, let students use AI to identify potential sources, but require them to verify and evaluate those sources using traditional methods.
This approach also creates natural opportunities to discuss the cognitive offloading risk: when AI handles too much of our thinking, we lose the chance to develop our own capabilities. Students who understand this trade-off will make better decisions about when to use AI assistance and when to engage their own minds.
5. Use AI to Create Learning Experiences You Couldn't Build Before
AI's real power in education isn't in grading papers or generating lesson plans—it's in creating individualized learning experiences that would have been impossible to build manually.
Those durable skills you've always wanted to teach but couldn't make time for? AI can help you create simple tools to practice them. You can now build role-playing scenarios where students practice negotiation, conflict resolution, or critical thinking with AI partners that never get tired, never judge, and can be programmed to present specific challenges.
Want students to practice job interviews? Create an AI interviewer for your career readiness class. Need students to understand different historical perspectives? Build an AI simulation where they can debate with figures from different time periods. Want to help students practice difficult conversations? Design scenarios where they work through challenging interpersonal situations.
The key is keeping human oversight in the process. You can vet the AI responses, set the parameters, and ensure the tool aligns with your learning objectives. You can even give extra credit for students who find AI errors, or use AI to suggest experiences but require you vet them first. For practice and formative evaluation, students get immediate feedback, and you get insights into their thinking processes that traditional assignments might not reveal.
These aren't replacements for human interaction—they're extensions of your teaching capacity. They let you create the kind of experiential learning that builds wisdom, not just knowledge.
These five moves won't solve every AI challenge in education, but they'll position you and your students to navigate this transition more thoughtfully. AI wisdom involves small, intentional steps that build on the expertise you already possess.
Your students need educators who can bridge the gap between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. They need teachers who can help them understand not just what AI can do, but what humans should continue doing. Most of all, they need adults who are willing to learn alongside them in a world that's changing faster than any of us can fully comprehend.
The school year is about to start. AI and the world isn't waiting for perfect policies or complete understanding. Your students need your guidance now, imperfect as it might be. That's exactly where wisdom begins.
©2025 Dasey Consulting LLC
This is so very true, Tim. I love these words of wisdom you're sharing with educators as they face a new academic year perhaps feeling even less prepared to integrate AI into their already heavy workload. Thank you for offering those 5 opportunities to make the transition to teaching in an AI world more palatable and do-able.