AI Guidance for
Schools Toolkit

This toolkit is designed to support education authorities, school leaders, and teachers in creating thoughtful guidance to help their communities realize the potential benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) in primary and secondary education while understanding and mitigating the potential risks.

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WHAT’S INSIDE

The Toolkit

Develop an Overall Vision:
A Framework for Incorporating AI

Inform Your Guidance:
Principles for AI Guidance

View Sample Guidance:
Guidance on the Use of AI in Our Schools

Review Existing Policies: Sample Considerations for Existing Policies

Give a Presentation: The AI in Education Presentation

Engage:
Communication with Parents, Staff, and Students

Consider:
How AI Was Used in This Toolkit

The examples and suggestions provided in this toolkit are not meant to be copied verbatim but to anchor understanding in practical examples and prompt thoughtful discussions about developing AI guidelines. The examples and sample language can be considered starting points to inform each education system’s process of responsibly shaping AI guidance, policies, and practices.

While issuing standalone guidance on AI can be an initial step, it’s also important to consider how and where it makes sense to address AI in existing policies, such as academic integrity, privacy, or responsible use policies.

Guidance and policies should be developed in accordance with an education system’s established processes, which may include a review by a policy committee, key stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents, and students), and legal counsel before seeking approval from governing bodies. Developing or updating AI education guidance could involve: adopting foundational principles, reviewing and updating existing policies, integrating AI literacy into professional development and curriculum, and gathering ongoing feedback to refine AI practices continuously.

Organized around the seven Principles for AI Guidance, this toolkit offers a high-level roadmap towards developing strong guidance and provides tools to help you get started. It offers samples, tools, and other resources to help as you execute your guidance development plans. You can use these resources to learn how different systems are approaching issues and to reflect on your plans.

POTENTIAL BENEFITS OF AI IN EDUCATION

POTENTIAL RISKS OF AI IN EDUCATION

This toolkit is designed to support education authorities, school leaders, and teachers in creating thoughtful guidance to help their communities realize the potential benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) in primary and secondary education while understanding and mitigating the potential risks.

In 2025, many educational systems still face an urgent call to provide clear, structured guidance for the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in schools, driven by widespread demand and persistent gaps in support. According to data drawn from the RAND American Educator Panel, only 18% of U.S. principals reported that their schools or districts had provided guidance on AI use, with even lower rates in high-poverty schools, where just 13% had such support compared to 25% in more affluent areas.¹ As of April 2025, only 26 U.S. States have issued guidance. While nearly one in five teachers used AI tools for instruction, the disparity in access to guidance and training reflects a systemic challenge that can stifle equitable adoption and innovation.

At the same time, 74% of students across Europe believe AI will be critical to their future careers, yet fewer than half feel their schools adequately prepare them to engage with these technologies. Nearly half worry that AI could increase inequalities among their peers.² These perceptions underscore a clear call for action: students see the value of AI but lack the foundational knowledge, skills, and institutional support to use it effectively.

This toolkit helps local and national education systems worldwide to develop guidance on the responsible use of AI, ensure compliance with relevant policies, and build the capacity of all stakeholders to understand AI and use AI effectively. The recommendations in this toolkit may also inform the early stages of developing policies and procedures, whether mandatory or voluntary.

Thoughtful and inclusive guidance development can usher in important work that teachers need to move forward.

Tutoring and personalized learning assistance

Compromised student privacy and unauthorized data collection

Operational and administrative efficiency

Perpetuating societal bias

Content development and differentiation

Plagiarism and
academic dishonesty

Assessment design and timely, effective feedback

Diminished student
and teacher agency and accountability

Aiding creativity, collaboration, and skill development

Overreliance and loss of critical thinking

Featured User Guides

Roadmaps for using this toolkit are available for your specific role.

District and School Administrators

District and school administrators, such as principals or staff development specialists, can use this toolkit to inform instructional guidance and professional development.

Teachers

Teachers can use sections of the toolkit to inform their use of AI in instruction and assessment, and how their students should or should not use AI when completing assignments.

Learn More

Education System Leaders

Education system leaders, such as school board members, local and national education leaders (e.g. ministries of education, superintendents), and directors of technology, can use this toolkit to inform the development of a vision statement, set of principles and beliefs, or a responsible use policy.

Education System Terminology

While terminology varies across countries and regions, “education system” refers to a district, regional, state, or national governing body, agency, or authority. Each entity must thoughtfully consider its own unique role in developing appropriate AI guidance and policies.

Guidance vs. Policy

Guidance is flexible, non-binding advice that offers principles and promising practices that can be adapted to various situations and updated frequently. Policy is more static and long-lasting, has undergone a formal approval process, and includes accountability.

A NOTE ABOUT

Terminology

COMMONSENSE GUARDRAILS FOR

Using Advanced Technology in Schools

Developed by the American Federation of Teachers, the Commonsense Guardrails resource outlines nine core values to guide the ethical, safe, and effective use of AI and other advanced technologies in K–12 education. It emphasizes student empowerment, educator decision-making, digital citizenship, equity, and collective responsibility.

ASSESSING READINESS

And Tracking Development of Generative AI Use

The Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) worked in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a useful tool, the K-12 Generative AI Readiness Checklist, to support school systems in determining their readiness to use AI in education. Building on that checklist, CoSN and CGCS added developmental levels (emerging, developing, mature) with descriptions to use in tracking implementation. The resulting K-12 Gen AI Maturity Tool also includes a 7th domain: Academic AI Literacy Readiness.

A responsible use policy, also known as an acceptable use policy or technology use policy, describes the terms and conditions of technology use in an educational institution. These existing policies should be updated to ensure all users use AI tools safely and appropriately. For more information, see Setting Conditions for Success: Creating Effective Responsible Use Policies for Schools.

DEVELOPING

Responsible Use Policies

Predictive AI tools, such as streaming service recommendations and online shopping recommendations, use data about past behaviors to identify patterns and forecast things we might want or do in the future. For example, they can analyze patterns in student data to forecast outcomes such as being on track for graduation.

Generative AI tools, such as large language models, are trained on massive amounts of data to recognize patterns and relationships between words, images, sounds, code, etc. They use those relationships to generate new, original outputs customized to users' prompts.

Want to Learn More About AI?

Download the AI in Education Presentation slides to customize your own presentation for others.

Review the What is AI?
one-pager from TeachAI’s policy resources.

See AI 101 for Teachers from Code.org, ETS, ISTE+ASCD, and Khan Academy.

Explore ISTE+ASCD’s AI resources, including Bringing AI to Schools: Tips for School Leaders.

Agentic AI tools, such as scheduling assistants, can operate autonomously to pursue goals and carry out tasks. They don’t just analyze or generate information; they act on it. For example, a scheduling assistant might proactively rearrange students’ study plans or automatically coordinate parent-teacher conferences based on real-time changes. Agentic AI tools are continuously trained on new information, update their strategies, and autonomously take further actions, closing the loop between “intelligence” and “action.”

Note: Many commercial products combine multiple AI approaches, not purely “one technique.” The application (e.g., adaptive tutoring, resource management) is often designed based on which AI method—or combination—best addresses the need. Additionally, AI is not always presented as a standalone product and is increasingly offered as a built-in feature shaping how platforms function, making it harder to monitor, govern, and explain.

Educational Technology tools provide opportunities to integrate AI into³:

Instructional materials
Assessment and feedback
Teacher professional learning
Instructional strategy and pedagogy support for teachers
Social tools
Student support

THINGS TO NOTE

Types Of AI Tools Used in Schools

Go Deeper: Engage with Examples of Guidance and Policies
Educational Leadership in Artificial Intelligence is a dynamic and growing field

The toolkit illustrates potential approaches rather than definitive models while providing examples of AI guidance from local, state, and national education systems. As you move through the toolkit and develop your own guidance plans, you may also want to review and consider several unique resources from TeachAI and other organizations.

See existing guidance documents: Visit teachai.org/policy-tracker for links to AI in education guidance from countries and U.S. states.

Find U.S. school district guidance: The Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) created an AI Early Adopters database highlighting school district-level guidance from the 2024-25 school year.

About TeachAI

Authors of AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit (2023)

Advance policies to support AI in education: Visit TeachAI’s Foundational Policy Id eas for AI in Education for informational briefs, policy ideas and presentation materials.

Access a growing list of resources and tools from other organizations: See more resources at teachai.org/policy-resources.

Guidance for AI in Education: A Landscape Overview

This resource, completed in March 2025, provides an overview of emerging themes in official guidance documents from around the world. The themes highlighted in this report are: centering the purposes of education, ensuring equity in AI integration, protecting privacy and security in AI integration, cultivating AI literacy, teaching academic integrity in the AI world, and establishing continuous evaluation and improvement. You will find narrative overviews and illustrative examples, as well as tools and resources that may be useful as you develop your guidance documents.

Learn More

TeachAI brings together education leaders and technology experts to assist governments and education authorities in teaching with and about AI. The initiative is led by Code.org, ETS, the International Society for Technology in Education, Khan Academy, and the World Economic Forum and advised by a diverse group of 100+ organizations, governments, and individuals. TeachAI’s goals include increasing awareness, building community and capacity, and guiding policy.

This toolkit was first released in 2023 and updated in 2025, following analysis of the existing guidance landscape. The 2025 update also sharpens our focus on important issues, shares new and useful resources, and provides differentiated support for new and returning users.

We thank Alan Coverstone for drafting the updates and Tara Nattrass for her content and editorial review. We appreciate the valuable feedback provided by the authors of the 2023 toolkit and the TeachAI steering committee.

We thank Christian Pinedo and Emma Doggett Neergaard (aiEDU), Bree Dusseault (Center for Reinventing Public Education), Dr Valerie Truesdale, and the National Parents Union for their contributions.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. We’re excited for you to use and adapt it.

Suggested citation: TeachAI (2025). AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit. Retrieved from teachai.org/toolkit. [date].

Pat Yongpradit, Pam Vachatimanont, and Charlotte Dungan, Code.org
Keith Krueger and Pete Just, Consortium for School Networking (CoSN)
Pati Ruiz, Digital Promise
Beth Havinga, European EdTech Alliance
Alix Gallagher and Benjamin Cottingham, Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE)
Jim Larimore, Strategic Advisor