Making the Case for Policy Planning around Generative AI

Part 2 for Applying a Response Framework to a Timely Topic

The Brief Case 📚→💼→📈→📊

[Fred] Moulton never hired out what he knew needed to be emergent. If students were unwell and isolated, he didn’t start new programs or add curricula or hire new directors; he reminded the community of its values. If health, nor love of learning or human decency, didn’t emerge from the system, he redirected the community’s focus back to the mission, reminded teachers of their agency and responsibility in the developmental process, and asked how he could help. He knew that adding complexity to an already-stressed system is never the answer.

Brent C. Kaneft reflecting on the leadership legacy of Fred Moulton

Policy should mitigate risk for your school and create clarity for your workforce and community. As such, annual policy reviews are typically a standard part of each year for a school’s administration. A crisis or opportunity, by definition, is a big enough deal that it should trigger a special policy review, whether on cycle or off. Relative to the opportunity of Generative AI, we see three possible outcomes after such a review:

1. Schools need to write brand new policy.

2. Schools need to make minor adjustments to existing policy — a word, phrase, or paragraph here or there.

3. Or, schools need to build collaborative understanding around existing policies — no changes necessary.

If your first instinct relevant to Generative AI is to rewrite your school policies, it is likely that your policies were too specific or too vague to begin with. You will want to approach any rewrite, including small tweaks, with that in mind. Your policies have to survive contact with reality, and reality rarely sits still for long.

That’s why we prefer — and hope you find yourself in — the third category. A school should not need to redefine its boundaries and rules whenever something unexpected happens. To put a Moulton spin on it, we don’t recommend writing new policies for what should be emergent from your existing policies.