Setting the Foundation
This is the pre-work to ensure you are ready to begin this adventure. You can find innumerable "AI readiness checklists" online, but at its most basic we feel it can be condensed to two main tasks:
Get the right people involved and invested in your WHY
Decide on your stance and practices that meet the needs of your community and your district goals
For us, a 10,000 student district, this took around 3 months.
Task Force and Key Stakeholders
As shared in the AZ State Guidance Document [link], you need a core group driving your AI Train. In the 3 months leading up to our Year 1, our group had hundreds of conversations with everyone we could in our district community, conducting a thorough needs assessment to calibrate our kickoff.
Key details and action items for our group
For our 10k student district, 3 people is a great number (our bios). We have a big-picture thinker (clouds), someone who knows everyone and how to make ideas become reality (ground), and a recent teacher who makes sure everything actually happens, in a way that students benefit (weeds).
Very first activity was a structured listening/brainstorming event for any staff who were interested, to calibrate our ideas with the need. 35 folks attended, slides and notes linked below.
Here are our slides, handout, notes, and reflections from our initial needs assessment meeting. We barely knew what we were doing, and learned so much from teachers and staff who became core parts of our planning in Year 1.
We listened to all stakeholders, read all the articles and studies we could, and as we made our plan we educated up and out to the influential voices in our district curriculum and IT infrastructure.
We focused on our cabinet, superintendent, and lead of academics. Our head of IT is on our team, but they're also key.
Educate up and out talking points & tips. Use this to prep for conversations with high-level leaders in your org. For our meeting with our Academics/Curriculum leaders...
With every conversation we honed our ideas more so that what took us 100 hours to get our heads around, we could try to teach in an hour.
The biggest concern we heard from teachers was cheating/plagiarism, so out of our "what is needed" talks we developed the AI Stoplight, a key feature of our Year 1.
Listen and adapt tips.
Policy and Practice Overview
"Do you have an AI Policy?" is one of the most common questions we have heard thrown around in Education Leadership circles since ChatGPT splashed. We want to make a distinction very clear from the start:
Policy (capital P Policy) refers to Board Policy. We have found, in conjunction with many other districts around the state, that we have not had to make any modifications to our Policy, that AI is covered thoroughly by existing Technology & Emerging Technology clauses. We look to ASBA and The Trust to deliver any recommended updates to Board Policy.
Lowercase-p-policy is very important to us. By this, we mean our stance on GenAI, our plagiarism policy, our student handbook.
Examples:
Here is our district-created plagiarism language around AI in the classroom, where it is explicit on our AI Stoplight Framework.
Students should not use Generative AI to produce or edit their work without explicit permission from the teacher, and must give credit to the AI tool for what it did. Any submission of content coming from AI without proper permission and credit will be viewed as a violation of academic integrity.
Here are screenshots of our existing student handbook language, that covers us.