10 Ways Educational Leaders Can Use Generative AI (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this school leader focus, we looked at how generative AI can help school and district leaders streamline daily tasks that often clutter the calendar. Writing newsletters, preparing meeting talking points, and crafting staff updates may be manageable, but they are far from minor. When AI helps you move through them more quickly, it opens space for deeper, more intentional leadership.

Now, our focus shifts to work that is more visible and strategic. This is the work that shapes your culture, amplifies your message, and reinforces your leadership presence.

It includes creating a communication calendar that helps you lead proactively. It involves writing public-facing posts that reflect your vision. It also means responding to tough emails with clarity and empathy. These are the kinds of messages that reveal what you value and how you lead. Yet they are often rushed or delayed because they fall between more urgent demands.

In the next five use cases, you’ll see how AI can support you in showing up with greater presence, stronger precision, and more peace of mind. Each example includes a high-quality prompt that you can adapt to your school or district context right away.

Use Case #6: Building a Communications Calendar

When I think about what school leaders could enhance, proactive communication almost always makes my list. You might be reminding families about key dates, aligning staff around a new initiative, or sharing progress with your board. Too often, though, these messages are sent in response to urgency instead of being grounded in strategy. The result is communication that feels fragmented, inconsistent, and disconnected from your broader vision.

With a strong prompt, you can generate a monthly or quarterly plan in minutes. The output outlines what to say, when to say it, and who needs to hear it. This gives you a reliable structure that saves time while keeping your messaging aligned with your instructional goals.

Here is a prompt for this task:

Act as a district leader creating a communications calendar for the next two months. Include weekly message ideas for staff, families, and the school board. Align the messages with the district’s three instructional priorities: literacy growth, strong core instruction, and student voice. Include timing, message focus, and suggested tone for each audience.

This kind of prompt moves you beyond disconnected reminders and into a consistent rhythm. It helps clarify your message, reinforce your values, and bring cohesion to your communication across different groups.

Draft the calendar. Then revise the tone, add important dates, or ask AI to write message drafts for each week.

Use Case #7: Designing Vision-Aligned Social Media Posts

Social media has become one of the most visible windows into school and district leadership. Your posts do more than inform. They reflect your culture, communicate your priorities, and shape the tone of your leadership. Families, staff, and the broader community often experience your vision through what you share online. But writing posts that consistently reflect that vision, while juggling everything else, can be a real challenge.

Generative AI can support that work. While it doesn’t schedule or publish content, it can help you write posts more quickly and with greater clarity.

AI can generate sample posts that highlight student learning, celebrate staff culture, or showcase instructional priorities. When guided by a focused prompt, it helps maintain a tone that aligns with your leadership voice and goals. Instead of scrambling at the last minute, you can use social media more intentionally to shape your narrative.

Here’s a sample prompt:

Act as a principal writing a week’s worth of social media posts that align to your school’s vision of “Every student engaged, every day.” Create five posts that highlight student learning, staff culture, and family engagement. Use a tone that is warm, student-centered, and community-oriented. Include hashtags and photo suggestions where appropriate.

This kind of output gives you a content batch you can refine, personalize, and schedule. And you can do it without spending an hour wordsmithing every caption. You can also follow up with requests like:

• “Make this shorter for Twitter/X.” (I probably always call it Twitter)

• “Translate this into Spanish for our bilingual families.”

• “Add a quote from a student to make this more authentic.”

When your posts consistently reflect your school’s values and spotlight what matters most, they do more than share updates. They tell a story. With AI supporting the writing, you can tell that story more often, more clearly, and with far less strain on your time.

Use Case #8: Writing Responses to Difficult Emails

Every leader knows the feeling of staring at a tough email. It might come from a frustrated parent, a concerned staff member, or someone at the district office. Finding the right words can feel overwhelming. The goal is to be clear without sounding reactive, empathetic without becoming vague, and firm while remaining professional. All of that takes time, particularly when your inbox is already full.

With a well-structured prompt, AI can draft a response that is calm, respectful, and organized. It helps frame your message with empathy and intention. You don’t need it to speak for you. What you need is a starting point that says what matters most, without spending half an hour reworking every line.

Here’s a prompt for this kind of communication:

Act as a school leader responding to a parent who is upset about their child’s recent suspension. Write a message that acknowledges their concern, outlines the school’s actions, and invites continued partnership. Keep the tone calm, professional, and empathetic, and avoid overly formal language.

Once you have a draft, you can personalize it with names, details, or next steps. You can also ask for variations like:

• “Make this sound more restorative in tone.”

• “Shorten this for a quicker follow-up.”

• “Reframe this for a staff-facing version of the same message.”

Responding with thought and clarity can shift the tone of the entire conversation. When AI supports that process, it reduces the cognitive load without sacrificing care or professionalism.

The message is still yours to own. What AI offers is a way to deliver it with more balance, more consistency, and less strain.

Use Case #9: Personalizing Praise or Staff Recognition

Recognizing the work of your staff isn’t just a feel-good leadership move. It’s also a way to build culture. Praise reinforces what you want to see more of when it’s timely, specific, and rooted in your school’s values. As your team grows and responsibilities multiply, though, it becomes harder to offer personal, thoughtful recognition consistently.

With a well-structured prompt, AI can help you draft messages that are sincere, specific, and aligned with your leadership style. Whether you’re writing a handwritten note, highlighting someone in your staff email, or preparing public remarks, AI can give you a strong starting point in seconds. From there, you can personalize it to make it your own.

Here’s a sample prompt:

Act as a principal writing a note of recognition to a teacher who designed an innovative student-led learning project. Acknowledge their creativity, connect it to the school’s vision of student voice and agency, and express appreciation for their leadership. Keep the tone warm, professional, and authentic.

This approach works for many kinds of recognition. That might include a staff member who mentored a colleague, someone who led a parent night, or a custodian who went above and beyond. You can also tailor the format with quick follow-up prompts like:

• “Write this as a short staff email blurb.”

• “Make this a tweet with a photo caption.”

• “Rewrite this as a script for a verbal shout-out.”

The message still comes from you. AI simply helps you shape it more quickly. That means more people feel seen, more often, without turning recognition into one more time-consuming task. Recognition strengthens culture when it becomes part of the rhythm, not something you scramble to do. And when it’s done with care and consistency, it reminds your team that their efforts matter. 

Use Case #10: Supporting Substitute Coverage Plans

Substitute coverage can quickly become a time-consuming tangle, especially when it is a last-minute emergency. Leaders often find themselves rushing to share expectations, organize materials, and ensure consistency for students, all while trying to keep the day moving forward.

AI can generate detailed substitute plans when you give it a clear prompt. It can adjust them for different grade levels or content areas and outline key expectations for both the substitute and any supporting staff.

Here’s a prompt that streamlines the process:

Act as an assistant principal creating a full-day substitute plan for a high school English teacher. Include the day’s schedule, key instructional tasks, classroom norms, locations of materials, and emergency contacts. Use a tone that is professional, supportive, and clear to someone unfamiliar with the school.

You can refine the plan with quick follow-up requests like:

• “Make this a half-day coverage plan.”

• “Add a note for students about behavior expectations.”

• “Include an optional enrichment activity if students finish early.”

This kind of support offers more than convenience. It gives your guest teachers a clear direction and helps ensure students experience consistency, even when the day’s plans change unexpectedly.

Every absence creates a ripple in a school. With AI, you can respond faster, delegate more effectively, and maintain high expectations without scrambling for time.

Conclusion

The five strategies in this post are designed to make your leadership more visible, more consistent, and more closely connected to the culture you are building. These tasks aren’t simply administrative. They are leadership moves that influence how your school or district feels to the people within it. When you communicate your vision, respond to challenges, recognize your team, and manage logistics with care, you’re shaping more than operations. You’re shaping experience.

But when the demands pile up, these priorities are often the first to slip away.

Generative AI helps bring them back into focus. It doesn’t replace your thinking. It speeds up the process, helps you find your voice more quickly, and gives clarity to the message you want to send. That shift frees up mental space and allows you to lead with greater presence and precision.

When that time returns, so does your ability to focus more deeply on instruction, relationships, and strategic direction.

As we close this blog, consider the question:

What part of your leadership could become more consistent, or more aligned with your values, if the preparation behind it took less time?