Five Strategic AI Moves School Leaders Should Make This Year
You've attended the AI presentations. You've read the breathless predictions and stern warnings. Your teachers are asking questions you can't answer, your board wants to know your "AI strategy," and every ed-tech vendor is promising their tool will solve everything.
Meanwhile, AI continues advancing whether your district has figured it out or not. Students are using it regardless of your policies. The world your graduates will enter assumes AI literacy, not AI avoidance.
The challenge is how to lead thoughtful change in an environment where the technology evolves faster than traditional educational decision-making processes can handle. You need practical moves that position your school to adapt strategically rather than react frantically, but you can’t afford to take tiny baby steps anymore.
I've distilled the essential leadership work into five moves that strike a forward-leaning but constructive tone and create the conditions for using or teaching about AI in your school, district, or college.
1. Communicate That AI Is a Really Big Deal—And Your School Takes It Seriously
Your community needs to know that you understand the magnitude of what's happening. AI isn't just another educational technology trend that will cycle through in a few years. This is a fundamental shift in how work gets done and how people’s lives are impacted,, and it will reshape every subject area and every career your students will enter.
Make this perspective visible to parents, teachers, and students. When you discuss AI in board meetings, newsletters, and staff presentations, communicate that your school is taking this seriously because it matters deeply for your students' futures.
AI poses legitimate challenges that require thoughtful navigation, avoiding it entirely would be educational malpractice. The students who graduate without understanding how to work effectively with AI will be at a significant disadvantage in work, and perhaps in assisting their lives.
This messaging shift changes how your community approaches AI discussions. Instead of debating whether AI belongs in schools, you're establishing that the question is how to integrate it thoughtfully. Instead of fearful reactions, you're creating space for strategic planning.
One big caveat. You need to use the tools a little bit. It’s not beneath you, it’s critical to get what others are dealing with. Learn a bit from a knowledgeable educator or education consultant’s help. Read influencers to see what the new AI happenings are. You don’t have to be an AI guru, but you will sound naive to parents/guardians and the school community if you’re not up to speed on what AI can do inside and outside of school. I suspect this fear of not knowing everything is causing necks to withdraw into shells, but the opposite is needed. People must know the direction you’re going even if the steering is to be determined.
2. Create Structured Peer Learning Communities with Clear Goals
Your teachers need ongoing opportunities to learn about AI together, but these can't become unstructured gripe sessions or time-wasting activities. Create regular AI learning communities where educators explore AI applications collaboratively, but set clear goals and expectations from the start.
The objectives should be that teachers will develop the ability to have substantive conversations with students about AI's capabilities and limitations, they'll understand when and how AI can support learning objectives, and they'll build practical strategies for addressing AI use in their classrooms.
These communities should focus on the practical moves that help teachers bridge AI abstinence and AI chaos, such as learning to co-explore AI questions with students rather than waiting to become experts, developing strategic AI permissions for different types of assignments, and making their own thinking processes visible to students as preparation for an AI world.
Identify the teachers in your building who are already further ahead with AI understanding and give them time and responsibility for spreading knowledge. These early adopters shouldn't just be left to figure things out alone—they should become your internal capacity-builders who can share strategies like using AI to create role-playing scenarios, practice opportunities, and learning experiences that weren't possible before.
Structure these communities around practical outcomes, not just exploration. Each session should produce something useful, like updated lesson plans that account for AI, strategies for helping students use AI appropriately, or assessment approaches that capture learning in an AI world.
3. Channel Emotional Resistance Into Productive Analysis
Your staff's emotional responses to AI—fear, excitement, skepticism, overwhelm—are completely rational, but you can't control them. Instead, put those emotions to productive use while addressing the misconceptions that fuel much of the resistance.
Deploy your natural skeptics and naysayers as your quality control team. Give them the job of developing specific criteria for evaluating whether particular AI applications actually help or hurt learning. Their critical eye becomes an asset for distinguishing between genuinely useful AI integration and flashy gimmicks that waste time. The caveat is that experimental setups need input from both naysayers and advocates or the results may not be accepted.
Much of the emotional resistance stems from invalid assumptions about what AI education requires. Many teachers, especially at lower grade levels, disengage because they assume AI education means screen time or technical training. In reality, teaching about intelligence, thinking, and learning—the core concepts that make AI work—requires no screens at all and fits naturally into every subject area.
The practical strategies that help teachers navigate AI thoughtfully don't require becoming tech experts: acknowledging fears without letting them drive decisions, co-learning with students instead of waiting for perfect understanding, making thinking processes visible (which requires no screens), using strategic permissions rather than blanket bans, and creating new learning experiences that build wisdom alongside knowledge.
My experience consistently shows that people become less black-and-white about AI when they become more informed about how it actually works. Create opportunities for teachers to understand AI's capabilities and limitations without requiring them to use AI tools immediately. Knowledge reduces anxiety and enables more nuanced decision-making.
Address the workload reality directly. Teachers are already stretched thin, and adding something new feels overwhelming. Remove barriers by clarifying that not every AI lesson needs to map to existing state standards—AI literacy is too important to wait for standards to catch up. Give teachers permission to integrate AI concepts because the content matters for students' futures, even if it doesn't fit neatly into current frameworks. Often that can be done while teaching an existing learning objective.
4. Implement Agile Strategy Cycles, Not Crisis Planning
Traditional educational planning cycles—annual strategic plans, yearly curriculum reviews, static policies—are too slow for the AI era, and crisis-driven reactions are too chaotic and often ill-informed. You need iterative decision-making processes that can respond to rapid technological change while maintaining institutional stability.
Establish regular AI strategy cycles where a small, cross-functional team (teachers, administrators, perhaps students) reviews what's working, what's not, and what needs to change. This is about building systematic responsiveness into your organizational culture, so that change is expected. The only question is “what change?”
Each cycle should focus on specific, measurable questions: Which AI applications are actually improving learning outcomes? Where are teachers struggling with implementation? What new capabilities have emerged that might serve our students? What policies need adjustment based on real experience?
The goal is creating institutional agility. This requires building comfort with experimentation and accepting that some initiatives will need modification or abandonment.
Document what you learn in each cycle and share insights with peers and other schools. The educational community will benefit from leaders who can articulate what works, what doesn't, and why. For that matter, every school is working on this issue. You can develop partnerships with other schools in the AI space, so that scarce expertise has greater impact.
5. Track Progress Through Implementation, Not Just Test Scores
Your current assessment metrics probably weren't designed to capture the kinds of learning that matter most in an AI world, and you don't need to wait for the state or a Provost to articulate new measures. Focus on tracking implementation indicators that show whether your AI initiatives are actually changing how teaching and learning happen.
Monitor practical questions: Are teachers moving beyond AI abstinence and AI chaos toward strategic permissions (i.e., allowed students to sometimes use AI for some purposes)? When students ask about using AI for assignments, can teachers engage thoughtfully rather than defaulting to blanket yes-or-no answers? Are teachers making their thinking visible to students—explaining their problem-solving processes and decision-making strategies that transfer directly to working with AI?
AI can also have a big impact on your operations. Assistance for complex scheduling that eats time of high-level people and gives a popsicle headache. More frequent or targeted (e.g. multi-lingual) communications. AI that can crawl learning management systems and analyze how and what students are being taught will become increasingly important for understanding educational effectiveness. Those tools can identify patterns in curriculum delivery, gaps in student understanding, and opportunities for instructional improvement that human observation might miss. You not only need to seek change; you need to measure progress toward those specific goals.
Track whether your teachers are implementing the practical strategies that bridge AI avoidance and AI overwhelm: co-learning with students instead of waiting to become experts, going "meta" with their teaching by making thinking processes visible, and using strategic AI permissions rather than all-or-nothing policies.
Also measure your institutional progress. What percentage of your teachers can have substantive conversations with students about AI's capabilities and limitations? Are teachers creating learning experiences they couldn't build before, using AI to develop role-playing scenarios and practice opportunities for students?
The key is focusing on implementation indicators that show real change in classroom practice rather than inputs like "number of AI tools purchased" or "hours of AI training completed."
These five moves won't solve every AI challenge your school faces, but they'll position you to navigate this transition strategically rather than reactively. The goal isn't to get AI implementation "right" immediately—it's to build the organizational capacity for thoughtful adaptation as the technology continues evolving.
AI development isn't slowing down for perfect policies or complete understanding. Your school community needs your leadership now, imperfect as your knowledge might be. Maybe you’ve been keeping your head down because teachers and schools are dealing with a lot and you are waiting for it to “settle down.” It’s not going to settle down. As a leader, the most important steps are about establishing attitudes and mechanisms for change. Strategic thinking is the wisdom to act thoughtfully in the face of uncertainty.
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