The Human Side of AI Adoption in Schools
The Center for Creative Leadership recently published a short piece on AI and leadership that is worth reading. Its central claim is that the constraints on AI adoption within organizations are human, not technical, and that the leadership capabilities required to address them are familiar—we have seen this before—and relational—it involves humans working with other humans. That thesis applies particularly well to independent schools.
Schools are not ordinary organizations. Faculty exercise considerable authority over what happens in classrooms. Parents pay tuition and hold strong views about the education they expect for their children. Boards are alert to anything that threatens institutional identity. When a head announces an AI initiative, all three constituencies notice at once, with each group hearing something different and each feeling entitled to a say. Under those conditions, the temptation is to issue an operational response — a policy, a committee, or an approved list of tools — and to treat the matter as handled. But that response will likely fail because it overlooks the leadership work required to effect change.
CCL names four leadership capabilities that AI adoption demands: leading people through change, thinking strategically, building trust across silos, and supporting collaboration that draws on collective knowledge. Each one, however, exposes a weakness in how schools have historically managed major change.
The first is the capacity to lead faculty through their real-time experiences with AI’s disruptive potential. AI is an identity threat to many teachers. The craft of teaching is precisely the craft that generative AI complicates. A head who frames AI as a workflow improvement will lose the faculty lounge within a week, because AI seems especially threatening to what so many teachers hold dear. The work is to acknowledge what is being unsettled and to make room for skepticism alongside curiosity.
The second is calculated patience. Boards want a position. Parents want reassurance. Faculty want stability. The pressure to assume a definitive position is significant, and the cost of doing so prematurely is also high. The technology is moving faster than any policy cycle. A school that publishes a confident AI position in one academic year will likely be rewriting it the next year, and again the year after that. The posture that pays off is the capacity to revise without appearing to flail.
The third is building enough trust in leadership that faculty are willing to speak openly and candidly about their work. In most schools, AI use is already widespread and unevenly distributed. Some teachers use these tools thoughtfully. Some use them warily. Some refuse on principle. Without a setting where that range is visible and discussable, the school accumulates quiet experiments that never inform one another and quiet resentments that never surface. Edwin Friedman would recognize this pattern. Anxious systems pull leaders toward reassurance, and reassurance forecloses the honest exchange the school needs. The head's job is to stay calm amid others’ anxieties.
The fourth is recognizing that the people who know the most about teaching are not always the people who know the most about the tools, and that the school's capacity to learn depends on bringing those two groups into the same conversation. Veteran teachers understand pedagogy in ways the administrative team does not. Younger faculty often understand the technology in ways their senior colleagues do not. The faculty meeting that brings those two bodies of knowledge into contact with each other is more valuable than any outside workshop.
None of this is specifically about technology. Instead, it is the ordinary work of school leadership, carried out under conditions that are no longer ordinary. What it requires of administrators is an unusual composure: not the confidence that the right answer has been identified, but the confidence that the school can hold an unsettled question productively while the answer slowly comes into view. In the end, the schools that come through the next several years in good shape will not be the ones with the most polished AI policies. They will be the ones whose leaders did the human work that technology always makes necessary.