With any new technology, fear often drives the first response. In schools, concerns about AI have largely focused on academic dishonesty, but leaders must help educators overcome it.
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” says Matt Frankenbery, CEO of Pitsco Education and school board president in his local school district. Most of the district’s discussions about AI focus on concerns about students cheating.
Eventually, leaders will grow comfortable with AI as they better understand its limitations. Such familiarity will make room for thoughtful regulation instead of blanket restrictions.
“Just like Google searches, for many years there was great concern about cheating,” he says. “You quickly start to learn how to live with [AI], and you start putting together strategies for utilization versus trying to restrict it.”
In the coming years, Frankenbery expects widespread AI adoption in public schools. While some leaders continue their restrictions, others will view AI as a “thought partner” for students.
Frankenbery, a former middle school teacher, values collaborative learning and encourages students to solve problems as a team. AI can play a similar role in instruction as it encourages thoughtful collaboration between technology and the user.
“In essence, AI is another team member at this point,” he says. “To be an effective team member, you have to have base-level knowledge and thought processes that allow you to banter back and forth with your teammates and AI in general.”
This “banter” plays out as prompt engineering, i.e., asking questions, refining inputs and iterating through conversations with AI. These interactions require intentional thinking, adjustment and other key cognitive skills.
Because of this, Frankenbery challenges the narrative that AI clouds students’ critical thinking skills.
“If you don’t have the critical thinking skills of how to write that prompt and how to refine it, then you’re going to struggle to use AI effectively,” he explains.
Students must follow a developmentally appropriate path toward AI literacy, Frankenbery says. Leaders must carefully introduce AI gradually at the elementary level without neglecting basic foundation skills that students must be taught, including critical thinking. By the time a student leaves high school, they should be fluent in AI.
Closing the AI divide
There’s much work to be done to ensure students and educators are confident in their AI skills. Frankenbery encourages superintendents to tap into their local businesses and industry leaders who are already using AI to maximize efficiency.
“Hopefully, you’ll have a group of teacher leaders who hear that and say, ‘OK, now how do I translate how it’s being used in local business and industry?'”
The reality, he notes, is that many future-focused companies—including his own—are already hiring people who demonstrate foundational AI knowledge.
“If you don’t have a comfort level with utilizing AI, that’s going to be a detriment to you in the interview process,” he says. “In K12 education, we can’t keep students from it. We have to get them comfortable with the appropriate uses of it.”
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