Practical AI for School Leaders
Set the frame for your building. Keep the decisions.

For the people who are asked, from the board above and the faculty below, what the school is doing about AI. You do not need to be the expert in the building. You need to set the frame, model the habit in your own work, and keep the judgment calls where they belong. This course is the version of that job that fits a real week with a real building in it.

What it is

Six lessons, each built around something already on your desk: the writing load, your own data, the faculty meeting, the policy, the vendor in the lobby. Every lesson has real prompt text you can copy and ends with one thing to do before the next one. By the end you have a one-page policy you could defend, a card of five questions for any AI claim, and a way of working whose value you can measure for yourself: lesson 3 has you time one piece of writing and compare it against the last one you wrote from scratch, so whatever you get back is a number you checked rather than one we promised you.

What it is not

It is not a tour of products, and it does not recommend one. Tools change names every few months; the decisions in this course do not. It is not a technical course — nothing in here requires you to understand how any of it works. And it is not a case for putting AI between you and your people. The whole point is to hand over the parts of the job that were never leadership, so there is more of you left for the parts that are.

What you need

• One AI tool your district permits, on any plan. This course never asks you to choose a product and works the same in any of the well-known ones. Use whichever your district already pays for.
• Whatever your district has already published about AI — a contract, a data privacy agreement, a superintendent's memo, a board policy. Everything you write here sits underneath it, so find out what it says before lesson 1.
• Three things you have actually written and sent: a family letter, a staff memo, and a note after a hard week. Lesson 2 turns them into a description of your voice that every later lesson uses.
• One data export you already have — attendance, tardies, referrals, benchmark results — and a spreadsheet you can pivot. Lesson 4 runs on real numbers, aggregated by you.
• A plain note you can reach from your phone. Two blocks, a one-page policy, a card of five questions, and a running list of things the tool got wrong all end up living there.
• About four hours in total, spread across six lessons — lesson 6 asks for two sittings rather than one — plus the forty-minute faculty meeting lesson 5 builds.

How to work through it

In order. The sequence is not decorative: lesson 2 builds a context block every later lesson pastes in, lesson 1 ends with a rough page you rewrite properly in lesson 6, and lesson 5's three decisions become half of that page. If you only ever do two, do 2 and 6.

Pace it as one lesson a week, done with the exercise, rather than six read on a Sunday. Every lesson ends with a short exercise on your own material — your letter, your data, your staff — and the doing is the learning. A lesson read without running is one you will not use in a month.

Keep three things open: the lesson, the real thing you have to produce this week, and one note you paste into as you go. That note becomes the course's four files — the context block and voice bullets, the running things it got wrong list, the one-page policy, and the five-question vendor card — and a handful of templates in the toolkit stand behind them, ready to fill in. Keep the master copies in plain text you own, not only in a tool's settings screen, so switching products next year is a paste, not an afternoon.

The prompts live twice: inside each lesson, where every line is explained, and together in the toolkit in finished form. Read the lessons to learn why a constraint is in a prompt; use the toolkit on a Tuesday night when you want the text without the explanation. Anything in [brackets] is yours to fill in, and each lesson's worked example shows an invented leader filling them in.

Two rules hold throughout, and they are the ones your board will ask about: nothing identifiable about a student or a staff member goes into a hosted tool, and no decision you would have to defend comes back out of one.