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Integrating AI into my Teaching Practice: A Reflective Approach

by Yvonneda Sanders | February 19, 2026

As a veteran teacher of over two decades, I have a deep appreciation for the way AI has changed the teaching landscape in education. Long gone are the days of struggling through scaffolding content and differentiating instruction. We are now in an age where, with specific “right” requests, you can yield infinite information in a short period of time, which is amazing! But, amazing, as we know and have seen through history, can also be a two-edge sword and AI definitely shows signs of following in the footsteps of other life-changing technological advancements that have been a great help in one area, yet brought destruction when used in another context. So our question is, how do we leverage AI use in our classrooms to help us reap the benefits from the power of the tool and not create within our school culture a generation of learners and educators that need to be remediated from the negative impact of not harnessing that power?

As a Multilingual Specialist, I use AI in my teaching practice for its efficiency in clarifying standards and dilemmas, planning instruction, and making language scaffolding more readily accessible. I use it to support the scaffolding needs of teachers on the grade level team I support. It helps me to create activities and plans that mirror content-level information, but brings in the language support that my multilingual learners need. It helps me to level texts, create summaries that enable my students to get the “gist” of the grade level text they are about to explore. It also guides me as I find resources to support specific skills and provides videos that help me to build background knowledge for a specific topic. Using AI gives me the opportunity to translate information with ease, which allows me to use my multilingual learners’ native language as an anchor for what they will be learning in English. While it also allows me to pinpoint specific challenges that are found in English language learners due to the gaps created by the structure of their native language in comparison to the target

language.

Teaching my students how to navigate AI also opens a world where they see benefits of information being literally right at our fingertips, but with all the amazing positive attributes comes a very dark side of using AI as students and as educators. That dark side is when we forget that it needs to be used as a tool that helps us to think faster and more clearly, never as the sole “thinker”. When AI is used in classrooms where students are not taught guidelines, it becomes the creator and we teach students to be chained to its creations. In this role, students do not see themselves as instrumental in the process, they simply ask a question, and blindly copy the response. They give away all creative rights in this process, and are okay with it, because the task is completed faster than it would normally take them. The same is true with educators. Many things I request AI to do now, I have done for decades. So if the power grid fails, the WiFi goes done, or the Smartboards glitch…the process still continues. I am very concerned that we are creating a generation of teachers and learners who will mirror the pandemic in 2020 and be connected by technology, even though they are face to face in a classroom.

I am not all doom and gloom, because I see and have experienced the magic AI brings into our classrooms, schools, and life. I just hope that we as the adults of this generation of learners will look at its use critically and begin to set up guardrails and boundaries that help us to reap all of its benefits and create a generation of learners who know how to command the tools that are developed today and into the future instead of being commanded by them.