Administrators and teachers will collaborate to determine how AI is used in classrooms, and teachers will play a critical role in monitoring the impact of AI tools on students and learning.

Administrators should share clear guidance for teacher roles and practices. A letter to staff can accompany guidance to help summarize and outline their specific roles and responsibilities. Issuing such guidance is most effective when coupled with professional development. This is an example for illustrative purposes and should be customized.

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Dear Teachers and Staff,

Artificial intelligence (AI) can transform our schools in exciting ways, but we must also mitigate the risks. Below are a few examples of responsible and prohibited uses of AI. Throughout the rest of the school year, we will be providing ongoing PD opportunities.

Examples of Responsible Uses of AI

Student Learning

  • Aiding Creativity: Students can harness generative AI to spark creativity across diverse subjects, including writing, visual arts, and music composition.
  • Content creation and enhancement: AI can help generate personalized study materials, summaries, quizzes, and visual aids, help students organize thoughts and content, and help review content.

Teacher Support

  • Assessment Design and Analysis: AI can enhance assessment by creating questions and providing standardized feedback on common mistakes. Teachers will ultimately be responsible for evaluation, feedback, and grading, including determining and assessing the usefulness of AI in supporting their grading work. AI will not be solely responsible for grading.
  • Content Differentiation: AI can assist educators by differentiating curricula, suggesting lesson plans, generating diagrams and charts, and customizing independent practice based on student needs and proficiency levels.

Responsible use of AI in the classroom may vary. For example, AI may only be appropriate for some graded assignments. I encourage you to discuss AI use with your students. 

Examples of Prohibited Uses of AI

Student Learning

  • Bullying/harassment: The use of AI tools to create deepfakes, manipulate media, or impersonate others for bullying, harassment, or any form of intimidation is strictly prohibited. All users are expected to employ these tools solely for educational purposes, upholding values of respect, inclusivity, and academic integrity at all times.
  • Plagiarism and cheating: Students and staff should not copy from any source, including generative AI, without prior approval and adequate documentation. Students should not submit AI-generated work as their original work. Teachers will be clear about when and how AI tools may be used to complete assignments and restructure assignments to reduce opportunities for plagiarism. Existing procedures related to potential violations of our Academic Integrity Policy will continue to be applied.

Teacher Support

  • Bias: AI tools trained on human data will inherently reflect societal biases in the data. Risks include reinforcing stereotypes, recommending inappropriate educational interventions, or making discriminatory evaluations, such as falsely reporting plagiarism by non-native English speakers. Staff and students will be taught to understand the origin and implications of bias in AI, AI tools will be evaluated for the diversity of their training data and transparency, and humans will review all AI-generated outputs before use.  
  • Diminishing student and teacher agency and accountability: AI technologies will not be used to supplant the role of human educators in instructing and nurturing students. AI is a supporting tool to augment human judgment, not replace it. Teachers and staff must review and critically reflect on all AI-generated content before use.

We will continue to ensure that data privacy and security are top priorities and will continue to approve software according to updated policies that include AI. Staff and students are prohibited from entering confidential or personally identifiable information into unauthorized AI tools, such as those without approved data privacy agreements. For more information, please read our complete guidance [insert link] on using AI in education, which includes a sample student agreement for AI in the classroom.​ We will also be providing ongoing PD opportunities throughout the school year.

Sincerely,

[Name]

[Title]

End of Example Resource

Sample Letter to Staff  on the Use of AI​

AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit © 2023 by Code.org, CoSN, Digital Promise, European EdTech Alliance, and PACE is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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