AI Policy for Schools: Practical Guide for Teachers

Is your school scrambling to figure out an AI policy? Are your teachers feeling overwhelmed in all the AI craziness? AI is exploding into classrooms, and without a plan, it quickly becomes chaos.

I know because I'm a classroom teacher. It doesn't have to be that way. Let me help you come up with some effective AI policies in your classroom and in your school.

I'm Aaron Makelky, and this is part two of a series called the AI Teacher Toolkit, which is going to help teachers to be effective in the post AI world. How do we move from AI chaos to AI clarity in your classroom? It starts with a framework.

🎥 If you prefer to watch: the YouTube version

🎧 If you prefer to listen: the Podcast version

To make creating effective AI policy manageable, I break that process down into four key parts:

1. Policy
2. Skills
3. Tools
4. Applications

This framework will help you introduce AI to your students, use it effectively, and not be dependent on any tools.

Step One: Policy

What's my responsibility as a teacher now that AI is here?

The biggest thing I want you to take away on AI policy is that it's not just one blanket rule. Effective policy comes in layers. I think of a hierarchy:

State ➡️ District ➡️ School ➡️ Your Classroom (Syllabus)

Let's do an example. Does your state in 2025 currently have AI guidelines? It's a flip of a coin because 25 states do, and 25 states don't.

A lot of teachers that I talked to didn't even know their state gave guidelines. Of all the stuff in your state's guidelines, here's the most important thing: How should students be using AI?

Here's what Wyoming says:

"To prepare all students for the AI rich future, it is imperative that they all learn about AI and have opportunities to learn with AI."

AI is really an equity thing. All students should be learning to use this. Why does that matter? If somebody comes at me and says, "How come you're teaching my kid AI?", I say, "Well, have you read my state's guidelines? Because I'm following that guidance."

Guidelines are not mandates. However, if the person questioning knows more than a bunch of experts, I'd love to hear their side of the story. It protects me in my classroom practice.

The Big Three

Now, I can't help you with your district and schools policies, but most of them have the big three: FERPA, CIPA, and COPPA. What do those mean? You have to protect students' identities online. They shouldn't be sharing their name, address, phone number, or email. Your school district has to have a way to filter harmful content from the AI tools. With COPPA, don't have students sign up for accounts if they're not over 13. You can ask AI companies, "Are you guys CIPA and COPPA compliant?"

Most teachers I work with say, "I don't have any policy on AI." A lot of them are just leaving it up to the schools and even the individual teachers to figure out. If you're in that boat, here's my advice if you're in an AI vacuum: Ask your administrator, does the lack of policy mean I can't touch the AI topic, or does the lack of policy mean I can responsibly start doing these things?

Most educators recognize in 2025 we should have AI guidelines, at least at the school level. But a lot of us don't. You're probably just going to be responsible for your syllabus and classroom policy first. Let's focus on that, because it's what you have the most control over. How do I handle that in my own classroom? My state has guidelines, so I follow them pretty much word for word. I use the term shall. Students shall share links. Students shall include a disclaimer statement.

The big takeaway for you as the person in charge of your classroom policy is don't be using one flat, static policy. You can't be saying "no AI" in 2025. You can't be saying "AI's okay for everything" in 2025. You should be specific. You should explicitly label assignments with which level of AI, if any, you can use.

If you say "no AI," think about what you're excluding: spellcheck, Grammarly, Google Search, voice typing. How many students have an IEP that lets them do voice to text? If you want to fight federal law and say no AI, good luck. Know what you mean when you say no AI, and know what you mean when you say AI is okay.

Transparency: Citing AI Use

The final aspect of AI policy is, how are you going to address transparency?

What not to do: Please don't have kids cite the AI tool. That's like citing a library.

What you should do instead: Make your students turn in links to their chat logs. I started it in 2024, and it's totally changed the use of AI in my classroom.

No matter how a student uses AI, they turn in a link to that chat log. It gives you x-ray vision into their head. What were they thinking? What content did they know? What did they not know?

Here's an example of a student just using AI to copy and paste ideas. How do I know? They had to turn in a link to that chat.

                                                        This student doesn't understand the content

Here's an example of a student who really knew what they were doing. I can go through and tell.

Please, try it with your students, and you will be blown away.

What does all this mean for me as a teacher? We have to change. Not the fundamentals, not the content, but some of the skills and tools.

We have to learn how to incorporate those into our classroom.

The only alternative is let your students keep spamming your submissions with AI generated slop. Can we please stop doing that?

I'm Aaron Makelky. Thanks for joining me in building an effective AI policy for your school and classroom. Check out my link, I'll give you samples of syllabi, the integration scale, and lesson plan ideas. 

If you have any questions on AI policy, put a comment. I'd love to hear those. You can also send me a DM. 

See you in the next installment of the AI Teacher Toolkit series, where we're going to be discussing AI skills to teach your students.

🎥 If you prefer to watch: the YouTube version

🎧 If you prefer to listen: the Podcast version