All activities Professional learning
Leadership teams role-play the planning meeting for a campus-wide platform rollout and discover that the questions that matter most come after "should we buy it?"
A principal wants every department on a new learning platform with a built-in AI writing-feedback feature, starting in six weeks. In this tabletop, each participant takes a stakeholder role, including an eighth grader who reports that the feedback panel does not work with her screen reader, and the table must reach a rollout decision while timed injects keep arriving. The debrief turns the conversation into the five-question check from the updated ELEs: What is the vision? What evidence will guide us? What changes in instruction? Who might be left out? How will families understand the change? Technology purchases are easy to announce. Rollouts that improve learning start with those five questions.
Hook
Hand out Handout A and give people three minutes to read it silently. Then ask: "If this memo landed in your inbox Monday, what's the first question you'd ask?" Collect four or five questions aloud without judging them. Say: "Hold those. For the next half hour, you are not yourself. You're the people this memo affects."
Facilitator noteEarly questions are usually about cost, training time, and logins. That is normal. Notice whether anyone asks about student learning or who might be left out. You'll return to this in the debrief.
Explore
Deal one role card to each person at the table. Everyone reads their card, then writes on the back of the memo: one thing my role needs from this rollout and one worry my role would raise. Each person introduces their role in one sentence, in character: "I'm Dani, I'm in eighth grade, and I use a screen reader."
Facilitator noteAssign the Principal card to someone who is not the most senior person at the table. It changes the conversation.
Practice
The Principal runs a 20-minute planning meeting with one goal: decide whether the rollout goes forward on the memo's timeline, changes, or pauses. Stay in role. At minute 5, read Inject 1 (Dani's email) aloud to the room. At minute 10, read Inject 2 (the neighborhood social media post). At minute 15, read Inject 3 (the vendor's reply). Each table must respond to each inject before moving on.
Facilitator noteWalk the room. If a table rushes past Dani's email, ask the Principal: "What will you tell Dani on Monday?" If a table debates the AI feature only in terms of cheating, ask the Privacy Officer what the vendor does with student writing.
Apply
Step out of role. Each table fills in Handout C together: for each of the five questions, what the memo already answers, what evidence is still missing, and a specific next step with an owner. The table then writes its decision in the bottom row: go, go with conditions, or pause, with the conditions spelled out.
Facilitator notePush for evidence of learning, not evidence of use. "90% of teachers logged in" is a usage number. "Students revise their drafts more and the revisions are stronger" is a learning claim you could collect evidence for.
Debrief
Each table shares its decision and the single missing piece of evidence that most shaped it. Ask the room: "Which role changed your table's mind?" Then ask the Dani players: "Did your table treat your report as evidence or as a complaint?" Finally, return to the Hook questions and ask how many were about learning.
Facilitator noteName the pattern out loud: the screen-reader report is exactly the kind of feedback a pilot is supposed to surface. A rollout that pauses to fix it is working as designed.
Transfer
Each person names one real initiative on their campus (a platform, a device policy, an AI pilot, a new assessment tool). On an index card or the back of Handout C, they write a one-sentence vision that names the instructional problem it solves, and the answer to "Who might be left out?" Pairs swap and ask one follow-up question.
Facilitator noteIf someone can't name the instructional problem, that is the most useful thing they'll learn today.
This activity is designed to run on paper. The memo, role cards, injects, and organizer are all printed, and the injects are read aloud by the facilitator. Movement comes from table rotation: in a longer session, have the Dani and Family players rotate to a new table for a second 10-minute meeting and see whether a fresh table responds differently.
In a virtual session, send role cards privately through chat or breakout room messages and paste injects into each breakout room at the timed intervals. Each table fills a shared copy of Handout C, and the facilitator displays all tables' decisions side by side in the debrief. If your district already uses a platform with an AI feature, you may substitute its name, but keep Dani's accessibility report in the scenario either way.
Does it need a screen? This one is better unplugged: the learning is in the conversation, the role-taking, and the pressure of timed injects. A shared digital organizer earns its place only in the debrief, when seeing every table's decision and evidence gaps side by side reveals patterns across the room.
What you should be able to see or collect if it worked.
Leaders test an AI platform rollout against five questions, including a student's screen-reader barrier, so tool adoption serves every student's learning.
Before your next technology rollout meeting, send the five questions to the planning team in advance and ask one student and one family to review the plan. Bring their feedback to the meeting as evidence, and record the decision and its conditions where staff can see them.
