Everyone's Using AI. Almost No One's Leading It.

FIELD NOTE #002 · 📍 Destination: AI Leadership · Get Clear

Ashley Springs, Ed.S. — Founder, Defining My Way Academy

AI is already in your school. Do you have a plan?

📍Current Reality

Three teachers. Same new platform. Three completely different versions of how it's supposed to work by week two.

I've watched that exact scene play out more times than I can count, across 200-plus schools — new curriculum, new systems, new anything. Someone rolls it out with real enthusiasm. A handful of people run with it their own way. By month two, nobody remembers who was supposed to own it. I spent years watching this pattern up close, long before AI was the word everyone was using — and every single time, the tool wasn't the problem. The absence of a plan was.

AI is moving through your building the same way right now — arriving faster than any plan for it. Whether anyone's leading that use is a different question entirely, and it's the one most schools haven't actually answered yet.

🔄Missed the Turn

Here's where it goes sideways. One person pastes a student's information into a chatbot without thinking twice, because nobody ever told them not to. Someone else won't touch AI at all — not out of principle, just because they're not sure what's allowed and don't want to guess wrong. A third person has quietly built an entire workflow — meeting prep, family communication, data summaries — that nobody else on the team even knows exists. Ask three staff members what the school's AI policy is, and you'll get three different answers, each delivered with total confidence.

Sound familiar? It should. This is the exact same pattern schools have lived through with every new initiative, just moving faster this time because the tool is in everyone's pocket already, not waiting on a training calendar.

Nobody here did anything wrong, exactly. They just didn't have anywhere to look. Good intentions. No shared direction. And when leadership hasn't drawn the lines, individual judgment quietly becomes the policy — one decision at a time, with nobody actually deciding anything.

💡New Information

A recent SchoolCEO report puts a number on exactly this pattern: 97% of surveyed school leaders and communicators have personally experimented with AI tools. But 69% say their district still doesn't have a formal AI policy. RAND's separate national research lands in nearly the same place — by spring 2025, only 45% of principals reported having school or district guidance on AI use.

Different studies. Same gap: AI use is moving faster than AI leadership. That should worry a leader more than the technology itself. The real, functioning "policy" in most schools right now isn't a document — it's whatever two dozen individual people happen to be doing today, and it can change tomorrow without anyone noticing.

Here's the distinction that actually matters. Using AI means someone in your building found a tool that helps. Leading AI means your team knows which tools are approved, what should never be entered into one, where human judgment has to stay in the room, and who to ask when they're not sure. One of those is happening in your school right now, whether you've decided it should or not. The other one takes a leader choosing to build it.

So if I'm sitting with a team somewhere in that 69%, I'm not asking which AI tool to buy. I'm asking three things: Where is AI already showing up in the work? What decisions need shared expectations right now? Who owns the next conversation?

That's the real starting point — not because leaders don't care, but because nobody ever handed them a place to start.

🧭Next Right Move

That's the gap the AI Guidance Starter Pack was built to close. Not a compliance document. Not legal advice. Real starting language your leadership team can actually adapt together — guiding principles, staff expectations, a family letter, a 30-day plan to roll it out — so the first conversation isn't also the hardest one.

I built it because I've watched this same gap play out with a dozen other initiatives before AI ever entered the room, across every kind of school I've supported. I got tired of watching leaders figure it out the hard way, after something had already gone wrong and everyone was asking who was supposed to be watching this.

That's the whole reason Defining My Way: School Leadership exists — not to make you an AI expert, but to make sure your school isn't running on twenty different versions of "responsible use" that nobody actually chose.

You still have time to lead this, before inconsistency becomes the system. The question isn't whether AI is already in your building. It already is. The question is whether you're going to be the one who decides what that looks like, or the one explaining, later, why nobody did.

Start leading AI with clarity. Check out the AI Guidance Starter Pack at definingmyway.com.