From Curiosity to Classroom Practice: Rethinking Assessment and Learning with AI

By:  Araceli Ponce de León Domínguez
School:  John F. Kennedy The American School Of Queretaro

AI is already shaping how our students think, so the real question is: what are we doing to shape how they think with it? What began as a moment of curiosity during an IB workshop quickly became a turning point in my professional practice. Rather than treating AI as a threat, I chose to approach it as a responsibility: to understand it, question it, and intentionally shape how it enters our classrooms. This led me to initiate an AI literacy effort in our High School, grounded in teacher professional development, classroom experimentation, and the creation of a shared AI Literacy Hub.

I started by trying to understand where to begin. The first step was not tools, but listening. I began by asking teachers how they felt about AI, what concerned them, what interested them, and what they needed. Their responses revealed uncertainty, curiosity, and a strong desire for clarity. From there, I curated research, designed focused professional development, and built a pathway that prioritized clarity over overload. As teachers began to ask practical questions: How do we implement this strategy? Where do students declare AI use? How do we evaluate fairly?, it became clear that we needed a space where this evolving knowledge could live and remain accessible. That need led me to design and build the AI Literacy Hub: a living platform, not a static repository, where resources, frameworks, and classroom experiences remain accessible and continue to grow through both research and teacher practice. What started as an individual inquiry has gradually grown into a shared professional effort.

Very quickly, this work moved from conversation to classroom practice across subjects. In IB Language and Literature, students use AI to receive rubric-based feedback on analytical writing, but the emphasis is on interpreting that feedback, revising their work, and critically evaluating the quality of the AI’s response. In IB Psychology, an AI “supervisor” was designed with strict guardrails: it refuses to generate content, enforces IB criteria, and supports only thinking, structure, and evaluation, preserving full student authorship. In MYP History, AI becomes both a tool and an object of inquiry, as students analyze how it constructs narratives, detect bias, and connect historical concepts to contemporary issues. Across these experiences, the goal is consistent: to make thinking visible, strengthen metacognition, and ensure that AI supports, rather than replaces, intellectual work. Teachers began to shift from asking “How do I prevent AI use?” to “How do I design tasks that require thinking?”

This work is now extending beyond High School. Following the completion of the MYP Personal Project, a pilot AI literacy workshop for Grade 10 students will serve as a starting point to gather evidence and inform a broader K–12 implementation. We believe AI literacy should not begin once students are already dependent on tools, but much earlier, as a progressive development of understanding, critical thinking, and ethical use. As educators, we face a defining choice: resist this transformation and risk losing relevance, or embrace it with intention and ensure that pedagogy leads technology. Our goal is to build a coherent, school-wide culture where AI amplifies learning without diminishing it.

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