Artificial intelligence has prompted no shortage of debate in schools, much of it centred on the risks and unintended consequences, from pupil misuse to AI-generated correspondence landing in leaders’ inboxes.
But I’ve become increasingly interested in a different side of the story. Perhaps the most overlooked impact of AI is how it is enabling teachers to engage more confidently in conversations about school improvement.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed a steady increase in colleagues approaching me with proposals for new initiatives, pilot projects and ideas to improve school life.
Some of these proposals focus on teaching and learning, others on wellbeing or enrichment. Almost all arrive in a polished format, with clear objectives, implementation plans and success criteria.
AI helps staff develop proposals
At first glance, this might sound like yet another unintended consequence of generative AI.
After all, if every member of staff can produce a convincing proposal in minutes, surely leaders are destined to spend even more time working through suggestions that ultimately can’t happen. Curiously, my experience has been almost the opposite.
I’ve always tried to create a culture where colleagues feel comfortable suggesting improvements. The arrival of AI hasn’t changed that.
What it has changed is the frequency of those conversations. Rather than seeing this as a burden, I’ve started treating each proposal as the beginning of a professional dialogue. Very few ideas receive an immediate yes, and, equally, very few receive an outright no.
Starting the conversation
Instead, I ask questions.
How would this affect workload? Which existing initiative would we replace with this one? Have you considered budget? How would success be measured? What happens if the member of staff leading the project leaves next year? Is this something we should trial first? And so on.
These aren’t questions designed to catch people out, but the same questions that middle and senior leaders wrestle with every time they try to introduce change.
The interesting part is what happens next. Teachers often return a week later with a revised proposal. Sometimes they’ve recognised problems that weren’t immediately obvious. Sometimes they’ve strengthened the implementation plan.
Occasionally, they’ve decided themselves that the idea isn’t quite ready. More often than not, the final proposal is considerably better than the original. Even when we don’t proceed, the conversation that takes place still has value.
New ideas in action
So what does this look like in practice? One example came from an early career teacher who noticed that while we do excellent work developing creativity and expression in younger pupils’ writing, handwriting skills could sometimes be overlooked, with weaker habits carried into higher year groups.
With the help of AI, he developed a proposal for a pilot scheme, focusing on regular short practice, more explicit teaching of letter formation and fluency, and simple ways to monitor progress over time.
After reviewing his proposal and discussing implementation together, the school agreed to support the pilot. For me, the most significant outcome was seeing a teacher become empowered to move from identifying a problem to engaging with the process of leading change.
Understanding the process
One of the enduring frustrations in school leadership is that decisions can appear deceptively simple from the outside. Staff understandably wonder why a seemingly good idea hasn’t been adopted, or why change takes months rather than weeks.
By engaging teachers in discussions about implementation, rather than simply accepting or rejecting their proposals, I’ve found that they’ve gained a much deeper appreciation of that complexity.
The conversation becomes less about persuading leaders to approve an idea and more about collaboratively refining it until it’s genuinely workable.
Ironically, AI may be helping to bridge this gap between classroom teachers and school leaders.
Generating ideas has never been the difficult part of school improvement. Schools are full of creative, thoughtful professionals. The real challenge has always been turning good ideas into sustainable practice.
AI lowers the barrier to sharing those ideas, which inevitably means school leaders will receive more of them.
Embracing the change
We can choose to see that as another administrative headache, or we can use it as an opportunity to develop colleagues’ understanding of how change really happens.
If our response is simply to dismiss AI-assisted proposals because they were easier to write, we’ll miss an opportunity. If, instead, we treat them as the start of a conversation, we may find ourselves developing not only better initiatives but also better leaders.
That feels like an AI story worth telling.
Adam McRoy is the headmaster of Cogdel Cranleigh School Changsha, in China. He has more than 20 years of experience in international education
