6 Strategies for Increasing School-wide Adoption of AI

Lulu Gao | lulu@flintk12.com

Jan 3, 2025

Person leading a horse to water looking at a horizon with a setting sun and the giant word "AI" on the horizon.

In working with schools, our team frequently gets asked by admins how teachers can be inspired to use Flint and how they can realize the full extent of its capabilities. Edtech tools are notoriously underutilized and hard to implement in schools, with this 2023 Unesco report claiming, “In the United States, an average of 67% of education software licences were unused and 98% were not used intensively.“ You can lead a horse to water but can’t force it to drink, right? Getting teachers to use and love Flint was our team’s biggest focus of 2024, and in this post, we will share how many school leaders have shared and helped in pushing towards that goal.

We will cover 6 of the most common and successful strategies for teacher adoption that our team has seen implemented. Many of these tips have come from case studies done with schools that have great usage, and many come from anecdotes we’ve heard in our many check-ins with schools. Our hope for this article is for it to be a grounding resource, with a more specific and extensive discussion about this topic occurring during our admin-centered campfire session on January 7th, 2025.

1. Introduce simple uses first

Just like with any tool or skill, the more teachers use AI, the better they will get at using AI. When starting to learn an instrument, most don’t begin by playing Beethoven’s "Symphony No. 5”. Plus, not all your teachers have the same baseline of technology or AI understanding. Let your teachers know that they don’t have to start their use of Flint with the most perfect or engaging activities. The introduction to Flint can involve more simple tasks first to get teachers familiar with the tool’s capabilities and limitations. As the Director of Digital Integration and Innovation, Matt Scully from Providence Day has commented that “this isn't just a super search engine” and his focus has been on helping teachers “transition from transactional interactions to conversational interactions” has been their biggest focus.

Teacher-facing AI can help make student-facing AI feel less scary. Here is an example of Woodward Academy’s email to faculty explaining how Flint was chosen on the basis of safety and can be used in a teacher-facing way. Emphasizing how Flint is more secure than other AI platforms and more powerful with its expanded features to support math, data visualization, image generation, etc. can help teachers understand the benefit of using Flint as their AI tool of choice. They can “Talk to Flint” in the bottom right of their homepage and get quick AI help with anything from brainstorming lesson plans to writing feedback/comments to analyzing data. Seeing how AI can help them and their work first can show them AI’s ability to personalize learning for their students.

Screenshot of where "Talk to Flint" can be found in the product, which is in the bottom right of the homepage.

How you communicate these possibilities with teachers can vary too. The Kinkaid School created a “menu” for acceptable AI use by teachers. Wesleyan School designed their AI policy to show different levels of AI use, from independent study and generation all the way to transformation. These are just two examples we’ve seen of how schools have laid out the options for teachers, allowing them to choose their own AI adventure.

Kinkaid’s Generative AI Acceptable Usage Menu and Wesleyan’s AI Policy

2. Frame the initial experience for teachers as an experiment

Many of the administrators we’ve talked to have framed Flint as an “experiment” or “playground”, encouraging teachers to try out low-stakes, just-for-fun activities first and use those to get the hang of using Flint and learn how to work around the areas of growth AI still possesses. Julian Cochran, Technology Coordinator at Durham Academy, said in our case study with them, “Some [teachers] were hesitant about AI, so we focused on creating a safe environment where they could explore, make mistakes, and learn without feeling pressured. That’s been key to getting more teachers on board and comfortable using Flint in their classrooms.” They don’t have to have students use Flint activities immediately, but playing around with Flint can help them see how AI might be used in a variety of ways.

Encourage teachers to check out templates. Show them the use cases for their specific subject (Math, English, Science, Social Studies, etc. links found on our website). Build examples with them. At a recent Lunch and Learn at The Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Tai Hart, who teaches Design Thinking in the Lower School and was in charge of the session, had built a variety of activities for teachers to try out from the students’ POV before walking them through how to build similar experiences for their classes. This model of building examples for teachers to see the student experience has been popular across our partner schools.

3. Dedicate time for teachers to explore

Time is teachers’ most valuable resource and they have to be choosy with how they spend it. There’s rarely enough free time to commit to exploring a new tool, especially if they’re not sure how it will help their job or their students. Setting aside time for teachers to explore Flint alongside the guidance of someone who can work with them and inspire them can be a game changer for adoption. Professional development sessions, Lunch and Learns, and one-on-ones can all play into this. It will take time and consistency for teachers to fully incorporate Flint into their work. Most schools have used a mix of these three.

For professional development: strategies with implementation of any other tool also apply here. Don’t overload them with information on features or capabilities. Your aim is to inspire them to want to give Flint a shot and get creative, not to train them to be able to speak to the ins and outs of the product. Facilitating PD in a way to have time for them to play in the product can also increase engagement and breaking teachers into subject groups or grades to share ideas and show them tangible examples can make sure you’re both introducing the product to them effectively and giving them time to explore.

For Lunch and Learns: we’ve heard about these either being themed based on use case, subject, or grade level. By having these drop-in sessions where teachers can come share what they’re trying or learn more about Flint from the ground up, teachers can work using Flint into their busy schedules. With the smaller group also, you can have more specific conversations with teachers and get more insight into how people are viewing and using AI across the faculty.

For one-on-ones: some of the most active school leaders have been opening up their schedules and booking time with individual teachers to share about how to use Flint. This has a narrower reach compared to the two options above, but the goal is to have these conversations to have compounding effects as word of mouth spreads and individual teachers share amongst themselves.

4. Target cheerleaders within different departments

As mentioned in the last section, word of mouth is key to getting consistent and sustainable usage of Flint. Hearing from fellow teachers about their success and creativity is the most compelling argument for giving Flint a try. Sparking that word-of-mouth chain can be very deliberate from a school leader’s perspective. As Allison Berry from Wesleyan said, “Knowledge within their department is really the biggest thing. And so, in any project I work on, that's how I try to get the excitement going for something new in the school: target a few and then hope those few become the cheerleaders for it.”

Created using Dalle-3:Teachers chatting about AI, Flint, and activities in a teacher’s lounge.

From what we’ve seen, some of this has involved creating diverse AI task forces/working groups within which many departments and grade levels are represented and have a say in how the school adopts AI. Other schools have used approaches more like Allison’s where the school leaders worked one-on-one with teachers who have the potential to become AI experts and “cheerleaders” in their departments. They can become the people others turn to for advice or inspiration and who will continue to experiment with new applications of AI in and out of the classroom, so your role is to inspire them first and provide them with the support and resources needed for them to continuously propel their use of Flint forward.

5. Train the students too

From protecting their privacy to playing the role of a good tutor and encouraging inquiry and refusing to blatantly do work for students, Flint is built to support productive student use of AI. Training students to use Flint to help them study, research, and master skills can show and inspire teachers to understand how AI works and how it can benefit learning as well. At the end of the day, teachers spend most of their time interacting with students. If they hear their students buzzing about how Flint is helping them, they’d be interested in understanding it themselves.

This, of course, needs to come with clear guidelines and expectations. Brophy College Preparatory, one of our partner schools with the highest usage, wrote early on their website about how acceptable AI use is an extension of their academic ethics policy. Wesleyan School printed their policy and posted it up in every classroom for students to see, and they encouraged teachers to use a cover sheet to show exactly what level of AI usage is ok for specific assignments. Merion Mercy Academy created Generative AI Guidelines outlining examples of proper and improper use and also gave suggestions on how to craft a good prompt.

Merion Mercy Academy’s proper vs improper use of AI and “CREATE” guidelines for prompting

Some schools took this a step further and set up student AI committees. Brophy Prep’s has 80+ students who volunteered. Mica Mulloy, their Assistant Principal for Instruction and Innovation, says, "Those conversations are consistently some of the best AI conversations I have. What I told them was that I can't imagine us as a school making significant policy and practice decisions on a tool like this without actively talking to students. Because it's a tool that’s for school, it's about the kids, right?” Their student committee has done everything from having students create templates to help each other study for AP exams to making videos and presentations about how to use Flint to share with teachers. Our team is continually impressed by the students’ eagerness to use AI for good and creativity in how they use and share about Flint.

6. Collaborate and continue conversations

From our case study with Providence Day, Matt describes how “teachers who have been super successful in using AI have partnered with our EdTech team and the EdTech team has helped them go to the next level and really grow” while teachers on their own just “clicked the button at the bottom and just started” and came back with claims that Flint didn’t do what they wanted it to do. “They’re missing the whole power of the tool,” Matt says.

A common theme throughout all the strategies above is an emphasis on collaboration and conversation. Just like how many preach about how teaching is rooted in the connection between teacher and student and how AI will only strengthen that, school leaders should aim to strengthen the relationships between them and their faculty when it comes to rolling out AI. It’s important to work with teachers continuously, check in on them, ask their thoughts on the platform, and hear about their successes and struggles. This acts as not only a reminder for the teachers to re-engage with tools like Flint but also helps you learn what tools, processes, and ideas are playing out well and can be shared with others at the school.

And, this can happen at all steps of the rollout. From McDonogh School, Director of Educational Technology Aisha Bryant noted how she would check in with their core group of pilot users and how eventually they became a “think tank” for how they would roll Flint out to the whole school. Aisha worked really closely with Ned Courtemanche, the Department Chair for History, who hosted open discussions with teachers and really made their concerns heard. Together, they worked at making sure all teacher questions and concerns would be addressed and are still organizing continued learning in the form of Lunch and Learns themed around different applications brought up by faculty members.

Concluding thoughts

Each school is different, one may have more top-down initiative and another may be brimming with grassroots enthusiasm. The most common success stories involve a mix—some organized establishment of expectations and time to play combined with some fostering of individual curiosity.

Our goal is to provide some ideas and options for you to explore. With AI being such an enigmatic frontier, we’ve seen school leaders both lean on their expertise in working with teachers and embrace a bit of the unknown. Not all the strategies above will make sense for your school’s organization, faculty culture, or academic schedules, but we encourage you to try a bunch of ideas and see which one sticks.

No matter what you decide to do next, just know our team is here to help if needed. Feel free to reach out to our Head of Teacher Experience, Lulu Gao, at lulu@flintk12.com if you have further questions or just want a sounding board to plan your school’s next steps for increasing adoption. Also, don’t forget to attend or watch the recording for the admin session on January 7th, 2025 (event page linked here).