All activities Professional learning
A leadership team works the ELE five-question check to craft a defensible stance on generative AI, moving past the headline fight over school AI moratoriums to decide what their own evidence, equity, and families actually require.
Districts are being pushed to pick a side: some have declared broad AI moratoriums, others are racing to put AI in every classroom. Headlines reward the extremes, but a leader's job is a defensible stance, not a slogan. This session walks a leadership team through the ELE five-question check, vision, evidence, instruction, who's left out, and families, to reason toward a position on generative AI that fits their own context. Teams weigh the real tension in the news (concerns about cognitive offloading and weaker critical thinking against the risk of banning a tool students will use anyway and widening gaps for students without support at home). The outcome is not a predetermined "teach it" answer; a time-boxed, grade-banded moratorium can be the right call for a community, as can structured adoption. What the ELEs require is that the choice be driven by evidence of learning and equity, communicated to families, and revisited, not chosen by whoever is loudest.
Hook
Open with two real-sounding headlines: a district announcing a sweeping AI moratorium, and another mandating AI in every lesson. Ask tables: "Whose community does each serve, and whose does it fail?" Draw out that both extremes can be defensible or reckless depending on context, and that a leader's accountability is to reasoning and evidence, not to the louder headline.
Facilitator noteExpect strong opinions in the room. Validate them, then redirect: the task isn't to win the debate, it's to build a stance you could defend to a skeptical board and a worried parent alike.
Explore
Teams read Handout B: four fictional districts that chose differently, a K–8 time-boxed moratorium, a high-school "teach it with disclosure" policy, an "allow for busywork, not for graded thinking" rule, and a chaotic no-policy district. For each, teams note what evidence drove it, who it helped, and who it left out. Debrief: none is perfect; each reflects a context and a set of trade-offs.
Facilitator noteThe no-policy district matters most: doing nothing is itself a choice, usually the least equitable one, because it leaves teachers and families to improvise alone.
Apply
Teams work Handout A on their own context. Vision: what is the learning we want, and where could AI help or harm it? Evidence: what will we watch to know, student work, offloading patterns, growth, not tool-usage counts? Instruction: what changes for teachers, and what support do they get? Who's left out: which students gain or lose under each option (no home access, emergent bilinguals, students with disabilities)? Families: how will we explain this so a worried parent understands? Teams must consider at least a moratorium option and a structured-use option before deciding.
Facilitator notePush teams off tool-usage metrics. "80% of teachers used the AI tool" is not evidence of learning. Keep asking: what would show student thinking improved, or didn't?
Create
On Handout C, each team writes a one-paragraph stance (what is allowed, for whom, by grade band, and why), the top two pieces of evidence they'll monitor, and a plain-language message to families, three sentences a parent would actually understand. They set a revisit date. Teams swap drafts and stress-test: could you defend this to the board? To a parent who fears AI is doing their child's thinking? To a teacher who loves it?
Facilitator noteThe family message is the integrity check. If a stance can't be explained to families in plain language, it usually isn't clear enough internally either.
Reflect
Each team shares its stance in one minute and names the hardest trade-off they accepted. Close on the ELE commitment: a leader's AI stance is judged not by how bold it sounds but by whether it is driven by evidence of learning, protects the students most likely to be left out, is understood by families, and can be revisited as the evidence changes.
Facilitator noteName that revisiting is strength, not weakness. A stance locked forever will be wrong within a year; one with a built-in review date stays honest.
The whole session runs on paper: the five-question worksheet, the printed stance scenarios, and the handwritten draft stance and family message. Leadership reasoning and discussion need no devices.
Capture the draft stance in a shared document so the full leadership team and board can see and refine it, and attach any local evidence (survey results, work samples). If several campuses meet remotely, each team can work a shared slide and compare stances live.
Does it need a screen? This is deliberately unplugged: the work is human judgment and consensus, and paper keeps the five questions, not a tool, at the center. Devices only help afterward, to share and refine the decision.
What you should be able to see or collect if it worked.
Leaders apply the five-question check to craft a defensible, equity-minded generative-AI stance grounded in evidence of learning rather than headlines about AI moratoriums.
Within two weeks, bring the draft stance to the full leadership team and one family representative for feedback, then publish the plain-language version to families in the languages they use. Calendar the revisit date now, and decide the two pieces of evidence you'll collect before then.
