As of July 1, 2025, 26 US state departments of education have released GenAI guidance documents (1). Though possibly a bit biased because I contributed to the work, I feel like Delaware’s guidance is unique because it is both practical and comprehensible while still being broad and non-prescriptive. It also issues a clear call for educator training around GenAI(2). At the meeting, I felt immense pride in the team’s accomplishment but I couldn’t help but wonder “what next?” Specifically, I was stuck on a simple question: how can the teachers I serve use this guidance to transform their practice?
“To hope for a technical fix for any problem that does not also involve social and cultural measures is to pursue an illusion.” – Arnold Pacey. The Culture of Technology. MIT Press. 1985.
Over the past two years since the launch of ChatGPT, my conversations with educators and administrators center on, or orbit around, the massive gravitational pull that Generative AI has enacted on our educational systems. GenAI has rapidly been marketed to teachers, explicitly and implicitly, as the solution to the problems they’ve been facing for their entire careers.
Conversely, the force of GenAI – as well as the very real and oft overlooked environmental and social impacts of the technology – has been so intense that some educators feel powerless over GenAI’s gravitational pull and cite it as a contributing factor to very serious decisions to leave the education profession entirely.
In the 10ish months since our state released guidance, educators and students in our district have been given access to five very powerful Generative AI tools for little to no cost with varying levels of staff training from vendors. Here’s a quick look at the nearly half-dozen GenAI powered features or models within our preexisting contracts:
- PearStart (PearDeck Learning): Creates aligned lesson-to-assessment packages from AI or teacher-generated lesson plans, generating interactive Pear Deck slides, Pear Practice review sets, and Pear Assessment tests in moments. Includes built-in PII detection and safety flags.
- PowerBuddy (PowerSchool Schoology): Native LMS integration that helps teachers create materials within Schoology and enables student chat support in “Socrative” (reflective) or “Research” modes. Features teacher oversight with 60-day chat review and email alerts for flagged conversations.
- Canva Magic (Canva Education): Full premium licensing including their Generative AI Suite provided free to K-12 partner districts as part of Canva’s campaign to connect with the education market.
- Gemini (Google): Google’s flagship LLM provided free to all Google partner districts, offering advanced language model capabilities for educational use.
- NotebookLM (Google): Google’s GenerativeAI tool for research and note-taking, also provided free to all Google partner districts alongside Gemini.
“Even on a practical level, some projects fail to get more than half way to solving the problems they address, and end up as unsatisfactory technical fixes, because important organizational factors have been ignored. Very often the users of equipment and their patterns of organization are largely forgotten.” – Pacey, 1985
These five tools represent a variety of GenAI solutions to a range of problems, and each incorporates various organizational factors referenced by Pacey. PearStart, for example, helps teachers start by creating a fully aligned stack of resources that spans from lesson to assessment. Teachers can still edit, modify, differentiate, and rearrange the output as they see fit for the needs of their students. Equally important, PearStart has safety considerations baked in – such as flags to users if potentially sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) is detected as an input. End users – teachers in this case – clearly had input in the process of developing this tool.
While these tools all address real challenges faced by educators, the true transformative power of GenAI lands in its ability to disrupt the “patterns of organization” mentioned above. As Dee Lanier and Ken Shelton posit in, “The Promises and Perils of AI in Education”, the true transformative power of GenAI can only be unearthed when the social and cultural dimensions of PK-16 education shift to “center student voices, foster community partnerships, and embrace a spirit of iterative co-creation.”
To get more educators closer to that point, and to begin the first attempt at answering my earlier question: “how can the teachers I serve use this guidance to transform their practice?” I developed two courses for all Delaware educators, that are aligned to our state’s GenAI Guidance, as well as the ISTE Standards for Educators. These courses cover:
- Basics of how GenAI functions, including benefits, risks, and drawbacks;
- A review of data protection laws & intellectual property to ensure the safe use of the technology in practice.
Currently, I’m developing a third course with the goal of helping educators see how the technology can accelerate transformation away from less agile systems and practices in education towards more responsive and meaningful learning experiences.
I’ve also been given the opportunity to offer these courses to anyone, anywhere right here at www.edadaptive.com/courses. If you’d like to check them out, please do. We’re all in this new reality together, and transformation can’t happen by picking the right app or GenAI tool alone. That’s why these courses are designed to help educators move beyond the hype and build sustainable, meaningful AI integration practices through a strong foundational understanding of the technology.
I plan to keep publishing content bi-weekly here on the site, and I also launched a Substack where I’ll be posting these in a newsletter format a few days early – subscribe to People+Machines here: https://substack.com/@jeffkilner. Finally, if you found this worth your time & attention, be sure to share.
Be well. 🤙🏻
Jeff
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