One of our roles as educators is to prepare our students for their future lives, and like it or not, AI is here to stay. When thinking about our course policies (particularly those around the use or prohibition of AI) we need to make our reasoning explicit. Professors and teachers will get far more buy‑in from students if we explain why AI use is allowed, limited, or prohibited.
Over the summer I participated in an AI‑enhanced Course Redesign Institute through the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at Ohio University. I realized I needed to better address AI use in my assignments: to clearly explain how students could use it, and why. Now all major assignments include an AI stoplight, an approach inspired by a LinkedIn post from Michelle Dennis.
By explicitly explaining why they can or cannot use AI, students gain a deeper understanding of how to use it ethically, and when they’re short‑circuiting their own learning. My students appreciate the transparency, and it leads to great conversations about why AI use is appropriate or not for a given task. This approach doesn’t just educate; it engages students in critical thinking.
For major assignments, students also provide an AI statement explaining how they used AI, or stating that they didn’t. This holds them accountable and lets me find out how AI is helping or hindering their work.
I know some students still use AI when they aren’t supposed to. But my role as an educator is to help them become critical users of AI output and to use it in ethical ways that enhance their abilities. I don’t want to police their AI use or set up an adversarial relationship. By being transparent about my reasons for allowing AI and when it can help them, they learn to harness its power to enhance their learning.
Below are samples of AI stoplights I’ve used in my courses. Feel free to modify them to create your own.
Green light: lesson planning
AI use is permitted
You may use AI to help you plan your lesson. You are responsible for ensuring the reliability and validity of AI output and that it meets the assignment requirements. Include a copy of the prompts and output with your final submission: you can do this by printing the webpage as a PDF. You may also use AI to help you revise and edit. If you choose to use AI, include a statement about how you used it at the end of your lesson plan.
Sample AI statement
I used ChatGPT to help me brainstorm ideas for my paper about the Science of Reading. Once I had written my initial draft, I input it into ChatGPT and asked it to give me feedback to help me with revisions. I incorporated those revisions into my final piece.
Green light: class newsletter
AI use is permitted
You may use AI to help you write your newsletter, create images, or design the template. Canva has great AI image generation, and so does Bing Images. For text creation you can use MagicSchool AI’s Class Newsletter tool, ChatGPT, or Copilot.
You are responsible for ensuring the reliability and validity of AI output. Include a copy of the prompts and output with your final submission, and name the tool you used. If you use AI, include a reflection explaining what it did well, what it did poorly, whether you would use it again for this purpose, and anything else you learned. If you do not use AI, include a statement saying so.
Sample AI statement
I used MagicSchool AI’s Class Newsletter tool to write my initial text. It did [what it did well] well. I had to change [what you changed] because [why]. I [would / would not] use it again because [why].
Yellow light: reflection paper
AI use is limited
For this task you may use AI to receive feedback on a draft to improve spelling, grammar, and mechanics. The nature of this task is to reflect your learning throughout this course: connecting what you have learned in class, the readings, and your own experiences in the classroom. AI supercomputers are not in our university course and have not had your lived experiences.
You must include an AI statement at the end of your document explaining your use of AI, or stating that you did not use it. If you use AI, submit copies of the prompts and output with your assignment.
Sample AI statement
I used ChatGPT to help me brainstorm ideas for my reflection paper. Once I had written my initial draft, I input it into ChatGPT and asked it to give me feedback to help me with revisions. I incorporated those revisions into my final piece.
Red light: edTPA
Pearson’s guidance on generative AI and the edTPA is clear: programs should support candidates in the effective and ethical use of tools like ChatGPT when planning learning segments, but each edTPA task requires candidates to make clear connections to their direct work with their own students, reflecting original work. Originality detection software will identify duplicate or substantially similar submissions and those written by generative AI.
AI use is prohibited
Based on the statement from Pearson, you may not use AI when working on your edTPA tasks. I encourage you to use the editing tools available in Word to support correcting grammar, spelling, and mechanical errors.
Since I wrote this
The stoplights have become a permanent part of how I design assignments, and the AI statement has grown into a fuller framework. If you want the current versions, both are published free:
- My full course AI use policy: permitted uses, data privacy, academic integrity, and APA citation
- AI acknowledgment statements: the sentence frames I give students, with a worked example