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How School Psychologists Can Get Ahead with AI This Summer: A 4-Step Action Plan
- Byron McClure
- Jun 2
- 9 min read
Introduction
Summer gives school psychologists something the regular school year rarely does: time to learn new skills without the constant flow of assessments, IEP meetings, and crisis interventions. As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes professional practices across fields, school psychologists face important choices. Those who build practical AI skills now will become valuable resources as these technologies become standard in educational settings.
The real challenge isn't just finding time to learn about AI, but learning in a focused way that directly improves your daily work. Many professionals feel overwhelmed by AI possibilities and aren't sure how to apply these tools within school-based ethical and legal requirements. That's why a structured approach works best.
This guide offers school psychologists a clear plan for summer skill development that prevents them from feeling overwhelmed while ensuring their time investment pays off when school resumes. By following this practical approach, you'll start the fall with a clear game plan and ready-to-use applications.
Step 1: Pinpoint Your Real-World Pain Points
Effective AI integration starts with an honest assessment of your current practice. Before exploring new technologies, carefully consider where you face the most friction in your daily work.
School psychologists handle many responsibilities, from assessment and report writing to intervention planning and consultation.
Not all tasks will benefit equally from AI assistance, so targeted analysis matters.
Set aside a few minutes for reflection. Identify 2-3 tasks that consistently take up the most time in your week. These might include scoring assessments, writing psychoeducational reports, creating intervention plans, or completing compliance documentation. Be specific in your analysis. Instead of listing broad categories like "paperwork," identify particular documents or processes that slow down your workflow.
For each time-intensive task, estimate the average hours it takes weekly. This serves two purposes: it shows where AI assistance could save the most time, and it creates a baseline to measure improvements after implementing AI-enhanced methods. Many school psychologists discover that routine tasks take far more time than they realized, revealing opportunities for significant improvements.
Next, select one high-impact task to focus on improving through AI by summer's end. Choose something that not only takes substantial time but also involves work that AI tools handle well, such as organizing data, finding patterns, or drafting standard content. By focusing on one clear objective, you'll avoid trying to do too much too quickly, which often leads to frustration and abandoning new technologies.
This focused approach ensures your AI learning has immediate, practical value rather than remaining theoretical. When school resumes, you'll be able to show concrete improvements in specific aspects of your work, providing clear evidence for the value of thoughtful AI integration. Remember, the goal isn't to replace professional judgment with automation, but to redirect your expertise toward aspects of your work that most need human insight, creativity, and relationship-building, the qualities that define excellent school psychology practice.
Step 2: Build a Fast, Practical AI Foundation
With your priority task identified, it's time to develop the basic knowledge needed to use AI effectively in your school psychology practice. Building this foundation doesn't require months of technical study, just a focused approach that emphasizes practical application in educational settings.
Start by understanding the basic differences between the AI tools available to you. Large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini offer broad capabilities that can help with various aspects of your work, from drafting reports to generating intervention ideas. Specialist tools are designed for specific functions such as assessment scoring, data visualization, or behavior tracking.
School Psych AI is a tool created by a school psychologist for school psychologists and leverages a knowledge base specific to the field of school psychology. Simply put, broad LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini are remarkable all-purpose LLMs (and each has use cases, but that's for another article), but School Psych AI was created specifically with school psychologists in mind. It comes with a 14-day free trial period, too.
It's critical to note that privacy considerations and ethical guidelines must be central to your AI foundation. School psychologists work with sensitive student information protected by FERPA and professional ethics standards. Take time to understand how different AI platforms handle data, including whether information is stored, how it might be used for model training, and what security measures exist. Importantly, School Psych AI is the only independently evaluated FERPA-approved tool for school psychologists.
When evaluating any AI platform, prioritize those with independent privacy verification. For example, School Psych AI has received an independent FERPA evaluation from iKeepSafe, providing third-party verification of its privacy claims. This independent assessment means privacy protections have been professionally reviewed rather than simply claimed by the company. Given the sensitive nature of student data and the professional consequences of privacy breaches, this verification should be a non-negotiable requirement for any tool you consider using.
This knowledge directly affects which tools you can ethically use and how you need to adjust your workflows to maintain compliance. Understanding these differences helps you select the right tool for each task rather than trying to make one solution work for everything.
To further help you increase your knowledge, check out School Psych AI's AI Literacy Hub, which offers resources specifically designed for school psychology contexts. This platform provides guidance on using AI tools within the constraints and requirements of educational settings. These resources can speed up your learning by focusing on applications relevant to your daily practice.
Step 3: Explore and Test on Low-Stakes, High-Return Tasks
With a solid foundation in place, it's time to move from theory to practice by testing AI tools on carefully selected tasks. This exploration phase helps you develop practical skills, identify effective workflows, and build confidence in using AI appropriately. The key is to begin with low-risk applications that offer high potential returns while minimizing risks to student privacy and data security.
Return to the list of time-consuming tasks from Step 1 and select one or two that fit well for initial AI experimentation. By starting with these lower-risk activities, you can focus on learning the technology without the added pressure of unnecessary complexity.
A good starting point is drafting emails. You can use an AI platform to help you wordsmith the perfect email. For instance, instead of struggling with how to phrase a sensitive message to a parent, you might input 3-5 key bullet points of what you want to say inside a model like ChatGPT or School Psych AI and then have the AI generate a clear draft that you can quickly personalize and send.
Here is where you can take it to the next level. Anything that any AI model gives you must be treated as a draft. That means do not take it verbatim and then send or share without reading the output. You must read the output, check for accuracy, and be on the lookout for hallucinations (when AI models make things up, go off on tangents, or straight-up get things wrong).
Once you have checked the output, you can even prompt the model to rewrite or revise in your preferred writing style. As an example, here are three prompts you can use to rewrite:
Your task is to revise this email so it is concise, professional, clinical, and matter of fact.
Revise this email so it is less clinical, free from jargon, and easy to read.
Rewrite this email and phrase it in layman's terms.
Another practical way to start is using AI to summarize information such as behavioral observation notes. You can feed AI the de-identified behavioral observation notes and then prompt it to write a summary of your notes. Here's a breakdown example of what this might look like in action:
Remove any student names or identifying info from your behavioral observation notes.
Copy your cleaned notes into the input box on your AI platform of choice.
Enter a prompt like: “Summarize this behavioral observation, highlighting key behaviors, triggers, and recommendations.”
Review the AI-generated summary for accuracy and relevance.
Edit as needed to fit the student’s context and your style.
Save the summary to your report or files.
Compare how much time the AI saved you versus writing it yourself.
Another useful example involves drafting evidence-based intervention recommendations. Many school psychologists spend considerable time researching and documenting interventions that match specific student needs. AI tools can speed up this process by generating initial drafts of intervention plans based on general concerns. You can then refine these drafts using your professional judgment to tailor recommendations to specific student contexts, developmental considerations, and available resources. This combined approach often saves significant time while maintaining, or even improving, the quality of intervention planning through access to more evidence-based strategies.
Throughout your exploration, measure impact objectively. Track the minutes saved when using AI-assisted workflows compared to your traditional approaches. Document both time savings and quality improvements in your work. These concrete metrics will help when making the case for wider adoption of AI tools within your department or school district. Many school psychologists find that even modest time savings per task can add up to several hours per week and that's time that can go toward direct student services and relationship building.
Step 4: Craft Your AI Action Plan
As summer ends, it's time to consolidate your learning and prepare for practical implementation when school begins.
This final step turns your summer exploration into a structured plan that will guide your AI integration efforts throughout the academic year.
By documenting your experiences, establishing clear protocols, and preparing to share your knowledge, you'll maximize the impact of your summer work.
Start by thoroughly documenting your successful approaches from the pilot phase. Create a personal reference guide that captures effective prompt formats that produced the best results for specific tasks. For example, you might note that assessment summary prompts work best when they include specific instructions about developmental considerations and strengths-based language. If you are using School Psych AI, you can use the saved prompts feature, which allows you to easily save your favorite prompts.
Be sure to document common problems you encountered and the solutions you developed. Perhaps you found that certain types of behavioral data needed additional context to generate useful AI interpretations, or that particular formatting approaches produced more consistent results. This documentation turns your individual experiences into transferable knowledge that can benefit both your future work and colleagues who follow your path.
Turn Summer Learning into Team Benefits
As you prepare to return to school, consider how you might share your knowledge and newly developed skills with colleagues. Prepare a brief, 15-minute demonstration that shows practical applications of AI in school psychology workflows. Focus on concrete examples that address common pain points experienced by your team members.
Educate your team: Prepare a 10-minute back-to-school overview of AI benefits, boundaries, and next steps. Focus on concrete examples that address common pain points experienced by your colleagues. Offer to mentor a colleague on their first pilot task, which reinforces your own learning while building institutional knowledge.
Stay connected: Join an AI community, such as the School Psych AI Facebook Group follow trusted thought leaders, and even set a calendar reminder for a September progress review. This accountability checkpoint provides an opportunity to refine processes, identify new integration opportunities, and address unexpected challenges.
Summer checkpoint: Finish a brief slide deck or handout you can present at the first staff meeting. This simple deliverable helps you organize your thoughts while creating a resource others can reference.
By positioning yourself as a knowledgeable AI resource within your school community, you can help shape how these technologies are integrated into educational practices. Your school staff and administrators will have questions about AI applications in education, and your informed perspective can help guide implementation in ways that prioritize student welfare, privacy protection, and educational values.
Finally, schedule a checkpoint for late September to review your implementation progress. This planned evaluation provides an opportunity to refine processes based on real-world application during the busy school year, identify additional opportunities for AI integration, and address any unexpected challenges that emerge. By building this reflection point into your calendar now, you ensure that your AI implementation remains dynamic and responsive rather than becoming a static, one-time effort.
Conclusion
Summer provides school psychologists with a unique opportunity to develop AI literacy and implementation skills that will enhance their practice throughout the academic year. By following this structured four-step approach, pinpointing real-world pain points, building a practical AI foundation, testing low-risk applications, and crafting an implementation blueprint, you can turn AI from an abstract technological concept into a concrete set of tools that improve your professional effectiveness.
By targeting specific pain points in your current practice, you ensure that every hour invested in AI skill development yields practical benefits. The focus on privacy, ethics, and professional boundaries throughout the process safeguards student confidentiality and maintains the integrity of your practice. And by documenting your experiences and preparing to share your knowledge, you extend the impact of your learning beyond your individual practice to benefit your broader school community.
As you begin this process, remember that the goal isn't to replace the human elements of school psychology practice but rather to enhance them. By using AI to handle routine tasks and provide initial drafts of standard documentation, you free up valuable time and mental energy for the aspects of your work that most benefit from human insight, empathy, and relationship-building. The most successful AI implementation will be one that amplifies rather than diminishes the uniquely human contributions you make to student well-being and educational success.
Your next step is to begin with foundational learning through resources like the AI Literacy page offered by School Psych AI, subscribing to the School Psych AI YouTube channel, and then selecting your first low-risk pilot project based on the pain points you've identified. By the time school resumes in the fall, you'll be equipped not just with theoretical knowledge but with tested workflows, documented time savings, and practical applications ready to implement.
Remember that the School Psych AI team is here to help and serves as an ongoing resource as you implement these new approaches in your practice.
Written by Dr. Byron M. McClure. Follow School Psych AI across all social media platforms and check out our website to learn more about how we can support you!
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