We’ve all experienced one version of the nightmare or another: you’ve been inexplicably thrown back into high school and now you’re standing in front of the class. You’re about to give a speech, but you can’t remember a word. The panic is compounded by the faces of the students staring at you, some hiding giggles and others laughing openly. Everyone but you knows what’s going on.
I have been reminded of this bad dream over the past few years. As an instructional technology coordinator at my Indigenous school, I have watched my office transform from a routine integration center to a digital confessional. Colleagues and teachers trying to deal with destabilizing technological changes slip in and close the door. Some are looking for practical technology triage or just a safe place to vent their frustrations, only to find themselves recounting a similar nightmare.
For these educators, the experience triggers a sharp wave of panic, a sudden realization that the pedagogical ground has shifted beneath their feet and they can no longer trust their own instincts or traditional technical guardrails. But what follows the panic is a deep, stabbing embarrassment.
With open and hopeful hearts, these teachers publicly praised the students’ writing, praising the hard work and growth they believed the student had shown, only to be surrounded by the giggles of their classmates who already knew the truth: the writing had been generated entirely by an AI tool.
The students succeeded technically, but learned very little, a phenomenon that Micah Miner describes unproductive success In “Beyond secondary orality.” This leaves teachers and administrators trying to respond to tools and behaviors that they do not fully understand and were never trained to use.
These isolated instances of unproductive success were not isolated classroom frustrations; They were early signals of a political vacuum that would soon overwhelm our entire school system. The challenge becomes much more complex at the school board level, where developing a formal policy requires balancing the inevitable push for AI integration with the very nuanced and often conflicting views around AI held by students and families in the native community. Before an AI policy could establish and protect clear responsibilities for employees and students Indigenous data sovereigntyStudents were already using AI tools outside of everyday school life to carry out cognitive offloading and have essays written for them.
With no official AI policy or academic honesty policy in place, teachers and administrators were forced into the awkward position of responding to what many perceived as cheating without the guidance, definitions, or training necessary to do so consistently.
The problem wasn’t just that students discovered AI before adults; It was a problem of economies of scale. As a one-person technology department, the burden of finding a solution and making high-level policy recommendations fell entirely on me. No matter how urgent the crisis, a single coordinator cannot immediately scale the resources an entire school community needs to decide what AI means, how it should be used, or how we should teach students to use it responsibly.
Schools often rely on common sense and hope that everyone comes to the same understanding. Unfortunately, AI has revealed an uncomfortable truth: common sense is often just unstated assumptions masquerading as politics. Without a shared understanding of AI usage, implementation practices, potential risks and benefits, schools risk creating inconsistent and unequal experiences for both students and teachers. This raises the question: Who decides what is sensible or what makes a decision good?
Answering this question did not require finding a perfect, ready-made solution. Ultimately, it took a small but dedicated team of school leaders, educators, and myself to build one from the ground up.
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Building a framework for common sense and community
Over the past few years, my mission has been to learn as much as possible to create our own common sense in the field of AI, based on our school’s mission to prepare our students to pass on the wisdom of our ancestors for the benefit of future generations.
My first step was to get as much information as possible from trusted sources. This led me to the International Society for Transforming Education and their AI Explorations course, which solidified my foundational knowledge of AI and machine learning and created a strong network of other professionals who were also trying to navigate without a map.
My second step was to reach out to my school’s stakeholders to ensure that the work on AI benefits from as many different perspectives as possible. As a new instructional technology coordinator in 2017, one of the first things I did when establishing my program at Indian Community School was to create a Future Ready Team, a cross-functional group of teachers, IT and administrators.
These Future Ready Team members became field experts during their two-year tenure, learning to communicate with vendors and test new software and devices. When the question of AI policy arose, it was this team that rose to the challenge and continued the research process with me.
After months of research and collaboration with the Future Ready team, my folder was overflowing with highlighted articles, ideas, notes, and how-to documents—proof that some habits from my school days in the 1990s die hard—while my computer contained an equally overwhelming collection of bookmarked tabs.
Given this deluge of data, I knew it was my job to put this research into action. The solid foundation we needed was a comprehensive AI framework, so I took the lead in developing a model that would serve as a solid foundation for knowledge building and be flexible enough to adapt to the ever-changing AI landscape.
I have personally curated and written each level of this framework to meet the specific needs of our school. This included a core policy that I developed using resources from the U.S. Department of Education, UNESCO, the Publications Office of the European Union, and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. I also designed an AI guidance for employees based on TeachAI’s AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit, revised our Responsible Student Use Policy to include AI guardrails, and created a visual traffic light for AI use in classrooms based on work done in our home state of North Carolina.
The framework also had to do more than just set expectations; It needed to help educators meet these needs by addressing critical issues such as protecting personally identifiable information, protecting intellectual property, and preserving Indigenous data sovereignty.
Policies cannot teach people anything
While these protocols were a necessary first step in securing our digital environment, a framework is only as effective as the people implementing it. Creating the policy and guidance documents was only part of the work; True equity comes from a school community’s ability to respond, especially when it has the staff, training, time, and funding necessary to put policies into practice.
Knowing that even the best advice will go unused without these resources, we ensured our framework goes beyond the rules to provide active opportunities for people to learn together, ask questions and build understanding.
Before students had access to AI tools on school devices, staff engaged in professional development to increase AI skills and confidence. Learning opportunities continued through local and state conferences, while families and community members were invited to participate in an evening of AI literacy. The aim was not simply to introduce a new technology, but to create a common basis for its responsible use. The results of this collaborative effort went far beyond regulatory compliance.
Teachers who had previously felt overwhelmed by the sudden onslaught of these tools gained the confidence to navigate them and shifted their approach from monitoring the technology to guiding how to use it.
Likewise, our collaboration with families provided parents and community members with transparent insight into the actual use of AI in the classroom. This shared clarity transformed potential fears into partnership and ensured the entire school community was aligned around a unified approach that protected students’ critical thinking while promoting academic readiness.
Lasting insights benefit everyone
Ultimately, this journey taught me that AI common sense is not something we can simply prescribe or print out. It is not neatly tucked away in a folder, no matter how many national frameworks we put together. True common sense must be built consciously through the collaborative and sometimes uncomfortable work of research, reflection and learning alongside one another.
While a policy can draw the boundaries on a map, it is the shared knowledge and trust within a school community that actually gives us the solid foundation to move forward.
At Indian Community School, this forward path is always guided by the principle of thinking seven generations ahead. It’s a fundamental reminder that the decisions we make today about AI aren’t just about managing next week’s essays or updating a student handbook. It’s about shaping students’ learning habits and critical thinking skills long after they leave us.
For schools around the world, the challenge now is to look beyond compliance. We need to close our binders, sit down with our communities, and commit to the slower, more deliberate work of building shared understanding around AI. We need to stop competing to make rules and instead start investing in the training, time and relationships that prepare our educators for whatever comes next.
https://edsurge.com/news/how-my-school-used-common-sense-and-collaboration-to-confront-ai
