00:00
Welcome back to If Teachers Ruled the World. I’m Leah Cleary and we are back for another summer PD episode. If you caught last week’s episode, you know we’re spending the summer on one big question. What is actually going on with technology in schools right now and what should teachers do about it?
We kicked things off last week with the big picture — the history of one to one device programs, the role the pandemic played, and why I think the current wave of technology bans is treating a symptom instead of actually curing the disease. If you haven’t listened to the one from last week yet, I would go back and start there. I’m going to link to it in the show notes.
I also have a blog series this summer that serves as a companion to this. That takes one activity every week and takes it through a framework to decide if it should use technology or not use technology. And the one this week is about the Socratic seminar, and it’s a little more nuanced than the one last week, which was all about note taking. So I’m going to link to that in the show notes as well.
This week on the podcast, we’re pulling on a very specific thread from last week’s episode, one that I think deserves its very own conversation. Because when we talk about technology in schools, we can’t talk about it honestly without talking about artificial intelligence. And right now, a lot of schools are making a decision about AI that I honestly believe they’re going to regret.
2:58
It’s time for your teacher reality check, where we take a look at what’s happening in education policy and translate it into what it actually means in your classroom. Today’s topic: the growing movement to ban or ignore AI in schools. And my argument, which I’m going to make as carefully as I can, is this: banning AI does not protect students from it. It just means they’re going to use it without us. And guys, we’ve been here before.
3:36
Think back to the early days of social media. Schools blocked it. Districts wrote policies forbidding it. Teachers were told not to engage with it professionally. And you know what happened? Students used it anyway — at home, on their phones, without any adult guidance about how it worked, what it was doing to their attention and self-image and their sense of reality.
By the time school started having real conversations about digital citizenship, about algorithms and echo chambers, and what it means to have your entire social life mediated through a platform designed to keep you scrolling, the damage was already done. Millennials had been shaped by technology that no one in their educational lives had ever helped them think critically about. I wrote about this on my blog recently. I’m going to link to that in the show notes, because I think it gives you some practical solutions for how to teach students to use AI ethically.
But I want to say it plainly here: avoiding AI doesn’t protect students from de-skilling. Teaching AI literacy does. And I believe that avoiding it entirely is going to leave us in the same place we ended up with social media, except only faster, because AI is moving faster than anything we’ve ever seen before. And that’s saying something.
5:10
I want to give you some numbers, because the scale of what’s happening is important. According to the Digital Education Council’s 2024 Global Survey of nearly four thousand students across sixteen countries, 86% of students said they’re already using AI tools in their studies. Not some students, not students at tech-forward schools — 86% globally. And yet, according to RAND’s 2025 report on AI training in districts, by the fall of 2024, most low-poverty districts had provided AI training — compared to a very small number of high-poverty districts. RAND projected the gap would persist into the 2025-2026 school year, with nearly all low-poverty districts training teachers, while only about six in ten high-poverty districts will have done so.
The Center for Democracy and Technology finding from January of 2025 stated that two thirds of teachers said they haven’t received guidance from their schools regarding response and discipline procedures when a student is suspected of using AI to cheat. And that’s a problem.
According to Microsoft’s 2025 AI and Education report, 67% of school leaders reported that at least half of their staff has received AI training — while at the same time, 60% of educators and students reported receiving zero training. Leadership thinks the problem is solved, or well on its way to being solved. But teachers and students know that it’s not.
So we have a situation where nearly every student is using AI, but not every teacher has been given any direction on what to do about it. I talked to a lot of teachers who have no idea how to use it appropriately, how to use it ethically — and teachers need to understand that so that they can teach their students how to do it. What we have here is not a technology problem. It’s a professional development problem, and it’s a policy problem.
Because here’s what tends to happen in that vacuum: students use AI the way they’ve seen it modeled, and most of what they’ve seen is people using it to generate output very quickly — to produce something they were supposed to produce themselves. That’s the version of AI use they walk into our classrooms with. And if we don’t teach them another version, that’s the only version they’re going to know. Education Week put it plainly: “Students are using AI and will continue to do so with or without educator guidance. Teaching students about safe and ethical AI use is part of our responsibility to help them become contributing digital citizens.” And my friends, I could not agree more.
8:31
Now I want to take the opposing argument seriously, because it is not coming from nowhere. There’s been some research on what’s called de-skilling — the concern that overreliance on AI erodes the critical thinking and decision-making skills we’re supposed to be building in our students. Yale’s teaching center has documented something they call illusions of understanding, and we all know this is a real problem — where student confidence rises while actual mastery slips.
A 2024 Cengage report found that 55% of recent graduates said their academic programs had not prepared them to use generative AI tools effectively. That last one is the one that gets me. Not because AI is dangerous — although that’s a discussion for another day — but because the solution to that problem isn’t to keep students away from AI. They’re going to use AI. The solution is to actually teach our students how to use it well, how to use it ethically. They were underprepared because their schools didn’t teach them to use it thoughtfully.
Now, my blog post “AI in the Classroom: Ethical Use Is a Skill. Are We Teaching It?” gives you some solutions and some examples of how I teach my students to use AI ethically. So I encourage you to head to my website — it’s leahcleary.com/ai-in-the-classroom — and you can see some practical examples. I’ll link to it in the show notes as well.
But I also wanted to acknowledge a meaningful voice from the classroom on the other side. A teacher writing for Edutopia made the case that banning AI in her English class gives students — particularly students from historically marginalized backgrounds — the space to develop their own authentic voice, to trust that their perspective has value. That is a valid argument and I one hundred percent respect it.
There are absolutely contexts and assignments where keeping AI out of the room is the right pedagogical call. But that’s a teacher making a deliberate instructional choice for specific students and specific goals. That’s completely different from a district or a state deciding that AI doesn’t belong in schools at all. One of those is teaching. The other is just hoping the problem goes away. And it’s not going anywhere.
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Here’s the part of this conversation that keeps me up at night, and I don’t think it gets enough attention. When schools ban AI — particularly schools in underfunded districts where bans are more likely to be strictly enforced — students from lower-income families fall further behind. Because the students in the wealthier districts, and the students with access to personal devices and home internet, they’re going to keep using AI. For better or for worse, they’re going to keep refining their skills. They’re going to enter the workforce with AI literacy that their peers in under-resourced schools never got the chance to develop.
We’re potentially creating an all-new digital divide. Except this one isn’t about who has a Chromebook. It’s about who’s been taught to use the most significant technological shift of our lifetime responsibly and effectively. According to Gallup, AI use at work nearly doubled between 2024 and 2025. The students sitting in our classrooms right now are going to graduate into a workforce where AI literacy is not optional. And if the students who most need our guidance are the ones whose schools have decided to pretend AI doesn’t exist — we failed them.
12:58
So what do we do instead? I want to give you a framework, because I think this is where the conversation often stalls. We know banning it isn’t the answer, but “just use it ethically” isn’t specific enough to be useful at all. Here’s the distinction I’ve been using in my own classroom and writing about on my blog, and it’s simple enough to explain to students directly.
Unethical AI use is using AI to create — to generate the product you were supposed to produce yourself. The essay, the analysis, the response. Ethical AI use is using AI to help plan, to get feedback, to edit, to augment, to make your own thinking stronger. That distinction matters. And here’s the key move that teachers have to remember: you have to model it. You have to model ethical AI use and point it out. Explicitly. Show students what it looks like when you use AI and when you don’t.
I showed my freshmen the version history of a presentation I’d built. I’d written all the content myself — you could see it in the history. And then I used the built-in AI feature in Google Slides to make the slides more visually appealing. Their reaction told me everything. They said most of their teachers probably use AI and they can tell, but won’t admit it — and then forbid them from using it at all.
I’m not here to judge anyone, but the policy landscape is inconsistent. Administrators are sending mixed messages and teachers are doing their best in a situation nobody fully prepared them for. But that story from my freshmen is worth thinking about — because if we’re using AI and hiding it, we’re not just missing a modeling opportunity. We’re telling students that AI is something you do in secret. That’s the exact opposite of what they need to learn. Transparency is part of ethical AI use. For us and for them.
15:17
Here’s where I land on all of this. The question isn’t whether our students are going to use AI. They already are. The question is whether they’re going to use it with guidance, with a framework, with a teacher who has modeled what thoughtful and ethical use looks like — or whether they’re going to figure it out on their own, the same way they figured out social media on their own. We know how that story ended.
Teachers aren’t just content deliverers. We’re the adult in the room when the biggest shifts happen. And this is one of those big shifts. What we do right now — how we respond to AI in our classrooms, in our schools, in our professional practice — that’s going to matter for a very long time. Don’t let the policy pendulum make that decision for you.
16:17
Next week we’re going to shift into more practical territory. I’m going to take the framework — the five questions that I’ve been taking activities through on my blog — and I’m going to explain each one of those questions to you. We’re going to go through it because I think it’s a very useful framework to decide whether you should or shouldn’t use technology for a particular activity.
16:40
And don’t forget — I want to hear from you. I’m collecting voice recordings from teachers about your experiences with technology in the classroom. I want to hear it. The good, the complicated, the “I have no idea what I’m doing.” All of it.
If you want to send me a voice recording, go into a quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone and let me know what your experiences with technology have been like in the classroom. One to two minutes, and it might make it onto the show by the end of summer. Just be sure to email it to me at leah@leahcleary.com. I’ll also put that in the show notes for you with instructions.
You all have a great week. Get some rest if you’re already out for summer break. If you’re not, it is almost here. Have a wonderful week. I’ll see you next time.
