I mold AI, AI doesn’t mold me/
We had a minimum day coming up. That means a compressed schedule, a tired staff, and — if you lead a school with any awareness at all — the quiet logistical stress of team members doing mental math about childcare pickup times while trying to pay attention in professional development.
I've been in education long enough to know that's real. And I've been a leader long enough to know that ignoring it doesn't make it go away.
So this time, I decided to do something different. I let AI help me take care of my people.
The Process: Survey First, Build Second
Before I designed a single slide, I surveyed my staff. A simple five-question pre-training survey: What AI tools have you used? How often? What for? And — most importantly — what are your biggest questions and concerns?
Then I scanned the completed forms and fed everything into NotebookLM.
What came back was remarkable. NotebookLM ingested the survey data alongside four curated source documents and generated a comprehensive, ready-to-deploy training package: a slide deck with staff insights already embedded, flashcards, a quiz, an infographic, a tailored report, and — this is the part that changed everything — an audio overview.
The Audio Overview Is Not a Gimmick
This is where Human-First AI Leadership stops being philosophical and gets practical.
On minimum days, some staff need to leave early to pick up their children. That's not a failure of commitment. That's a parent doing exactly what a parent should do. But historically, it has meant one of two things: professional development gets watered down to fit the schedule, or staff members quietly miss content and carry the guilt of it afterward.
The audio overview solved this.
Staff who needed to leave early could listen to the full training on their drive home, during a walk, or after bedtime routines wound down. The training traveled with them. The content wasn't lost. And that invisible tax — the one that falls disproportionately on caregivers — was reduced.
That's what it means to lead with AI in a human-first way. Not using technology to do more to your staff. Using it to do more for them.
What the Training Actually Covered
Because I started with a survey, the slide deck wasn't generic. It reflected my team's reality.
Staff Insights — 75% of our staff are already using AI regularly or sometimes. ChatGPT leads adoption. Lesson planning, image creation, and writing emails are the top use cases. The training didn't open with "here's what AI is." It opened with "here's what you're already doing."
Privacy & Data Security — FERPA and HIPAA compliance framed around one golden rule: If you wouldn't post it on a classroom bulletin board, don't type it into an AI tool. Simple. Sticky. Immediately applicable.
Smart Prompting — Concrete examples of working with AI without exposing student information. Replace names with "Student A." Replace specific diagnoses with anonymized context. The power of AI doesn't require sacrificing confidentiality.
Human-First AI Strategy — A framework for letting AI handle repetitive tasks so educators can stay focused on what only humans can do: judgment, empathy, and relationships. We talked about rapid lesson differentiation, fact-checking AI outputs, and staying in the driver's seat.
The Bigger Leadership Lesson
Here's what I want school leaders, directors, and administrators to sit with:
The way you structure professional development is a statement about what you value.
If your training assumes everyone can stay late, has no competing caregiving responsibilities, and learns best by sitting in a room watching slides — you're not designing for your actual staff. You're designing for an imaginary one.
AI gives us a real opportunity to change that. Audio. Asynchronous access. Personalized pacing. These aren't just conveniences — they're equity tools.
I surveyed my team, used AI to build the training, then used AI to make that training accessible to every person on my staff — including the ones who needed to leave at 2:15.
That's not a workaround. That's leadership.
When you design professional development — or any team experience — whose needs are you unconsciously leaving out, and what would it look like to build with those people in mind from the start?