We’ve all lived it. The nightmare where you’re back in high school, standing at the front of a classroom, mouth dry. You’re supposed to speak. You have nothing to say. Faces stare. Some laugh. Some hide smiles. You freeze.
That panic feels familiar again.
At my Indigenous school, I work as the instructional technology coordinator. My office used to be for tech support. Now? It’s a digital confessional. Teachers slip in, close the door, and vent. They’re drowning in destabilizing tech. They want triage. They want to know if their instincts are still valid.
They’re not.
The ground has shifted.
Unproductive success is winning without learning.
A teacher praises a student essay. It’s beautiful. It shows growth. Then the class giggles. The student knew it was fake. It was written by an AI tool. The student got the grade. The student learned nothing. Teachers feel exposed. They trusted the work. It was a lie.
Micah Miner calls this unproductive success in “Beyond Secondary Orality.” We have students technically passing while intellectually stalling. Meanwhile, the adults have no training. No map. No policy.
At Indian Community School, this wasn’t just a classroom annoyance. It was a policy vacuum. The board needed to draft rules. But how? Balancing integration with the Native community’s views on AI is delicate. We need to protect Indigenous data sovereignty. We need accountability.
Before we could do that? Kids were already offloading cognition. Essays done outside school hours. By machines.
We had no honesty policy. No AI guide. Just a lone tech coordinator—that’s me—holding up the entire building.
You can’t scale common sense from one person’s desk.
Schools like to rely on “common sense.” They assume everyone knows what reasonable means. They’re wrong. Common sense is just unspoken bias dressed up as policy. Without clarity on risk or benefit, schools create chaos. Who decides what’s right? Who draws the line?
There was no perfect package waiting for us.
We built our own.
Building on Common Ground
My job was simple: learn everything, then teach it. The mission is preparing students to carry ancestral wisdom forward. So we couldn’t just copy a generic corporate memo.
Step one: Read. I joined the International Society for Transforming Technology for their AI course. It gave me basics on machine learning. More importantly, it connected me with other people also guessing in the dark.
Step two: Ask the people.
Since 2017, I’ve run the Future Ready Team at Indian Community School. It’s a cross-functional mix. Teachers, IT staff, administrators. They rotate in. They learn the tech. They pilot the tools.
When AI hit, this team stepped up.
Months of work. My physical binder exploded with notes, highlighted articles, guidance docs. Old habits die hard, even in the cloud age. My computer? A graveyard of bookmarked tabs. Overwhelming.
Data overload requires action, not just accumulation.
I designed a framework. It had to be flexible. The landscape changes too fast for static rules. I curated the layers. I used resources from the U.S. Dept of Education. UNESCO. The European Union Publications office. Wisconsin Dept of Public Instruction.
But I didn’t just paste them.
I adapted staff guidance using the TeachAI Toolkit. We revamped student acceptable use policies to include AI guardrails. I even built a visual “stoplight” for classrooms, based on work from North Carolina. Red. Yellow. Green.
It wasn’t enough to say “don’t cheat.” We had to address intellectual property. PII. Indigenous data rights.
Rules Don’t Teach Anything
Here’s the trap: a framework is useless without the people to run it.
You can write a beautiful policy. Put it on the wall. Then watch it gather dust. True equity isn’t in the document. It’s in the capacity of the staff. Do they have time? Training? Money? If not, the policy fails.
We refused to just hand out rules. We focused on shared learning.
Before students got access, teachers got professional development. Not a one-day workshop. A shift in mindset. From policing screens to guiding purposeful use. Local conferences followed. State ones.
Then came the families.
An AI Literacy Night. No jargon. Just transparency. What does this actually look like in a classroom? Why are we using it?
The anxiety dropped. Replaced by partnership.
Policy draws the line. Trust keeps you on the road.
Teachers who once feared AI started seeing its utility. They stopped policing. Started coaching. Families understood the value. We protected critical thinking while building academic readiness.
It worked because we didn’t skip the hard part. The human part.
The Slow Work
We learned a few things.
AI common sense cannot be mandated. It can’t be printed on a sheet and emailed out. Even with every national framework stacked on my desk.
Common sense must be built. Intentionally. Collaboratively. Often uncomfortably.
At Indian Community School, we think seven generations ahead.
Those aren’t empty words. The choices we make today shape habits long after these kids graduate. It’s not about next week’s essay. It’s about their minds. Their critical thinking. Their future.
Most schools rush. They chase compliance. They build walls of rules.
Maybe that’s the wrong move.
Close the binder. Sit down with your community. Invest in time. Relationships. Training. The slower path.
What comes next is unknown. The rules won’t save you. People will. Or maybe they won’t.
