Teachers Need a Role in AI Adoption

Federal funding and school technology plans are pushing AI into classrooms quickly. Teachers are often asked to implement those decisions before they have had enough time to decide how the tools should fit their teaching.

What Happened This Week

On May 13, the U.S.¹²

On May 5, the University of Washington released a study interviewing 22 teachers in Aurora Public Schools, a district investing heavily in Google's Gemini and MagicSchool.³⁴

What These Stories Have in Common

Teachers can see both sides of AI more clearly than most policy documents. It can remove repetitive work and create more time for students, but it can also reduce professional judgment when a product begins making instructional decisions for them.

Koan starts from a simple premise. The final answer is no longer a reliable measure of learning. Schools need to understand how students reached that answer and whether the work made them more capable.

What Schools Can Do

Schools should involve teachers before choosing a platform, not only after the contract is signed. A useful pilot should ask teachers what they need to understand about student learning and whether the tool gives them that information.

AI adoption works better when teachers help define the problem before anyone buys the solution.