The start of the school year brings a unique kind of overwhelm and exhaustion, doesn’t it? Between setting up orientation lessons, putting up displays, updating policies, and welcoming students and staff, the sheer volume of decision-making exhausts me before school even officially begins. For a long time, whenever I hit that back-to-school wall staring at a blank display plan or a half-drafted newsletter, I procrastinated those tasks, eliminated them entirely, or did the smallest amount to say that it was done.

Being the only librarian in the building comes with its pros and cons. One of the biggest downsides is feeling like I’m stranded on a desert island when my brain is totally fried. Don’t get me wrong; school librarians are incredible at networking and supporting each other, but sometimes I need a quick sanity check or display idea in five minutes, and there’s no one else on my island to talk to. Enter AI.

Living in Northern Virginia, I’m surrounded by data centers, where much of the digital cloud and AI services are hosted. I literally can’t drive two miles without passing massive, windowless gray buildings or some that are still in the process of being built. So when people talk about the cloud or AI, it isn’t abstract for me; it is a physical presence right in my backyard, running on my local power grid. (That’s another story for another day.)

Last year, I started including AI in my workflow to see if it could save me some time and energy. At first, I hated it; I wasn’t getting what I wanted from it and I was super frustrated. But once I stopped expecting it to give me completely finished products and started using it as a sounding board, everything shifted for me.

Now, I know AI can be a controversial topic in Libraryland. We think of privacy concerns, copyright infringement, environmental effects, and tech hype trying to replace human jobs – and rightfully so. So let me start by saying this: AI cannot replace a human being, and it will never replace a school librarian. That is not the intention here, either.

The goal isn’t to pretend AI is a person or outsource your job. The goal – and the mindset shift that took me months to figure out – is adopting a “co-librarian” mindset when using it. It’s treating the software like a collaborative draft space rather than a search box. I maintain total control over my work and my voice. AI is just a piece of software waiting for my instructions.

The Boundaries of AI

Knowing full well that AI is a machine, and thinking of AI as a tool in your toolbox, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when talking about its role:

  • What It Can Do:
    It’s a place where I dump rough ideas, fix awkward phrasing, format messy text, check my tone, or just get past that blank-page paralysis when I need ideas, and fast.
  • What It Cannot Do:
    It cannot care about a child, curate with cultural empathy, exercise professional ethics, understand your school culture, or replace human relationships. Period.
  • The Privacy Rule:
    Never feed it student data. Keep student names, IDs, behavior notes, and private details completely out of your prompts. Beyond being basic professional ethics, putting student info into an AI tool breaches FERPA and privacy laws.

What Changed for Me: Moving from Googling to Talking It Through

When I first tried using AI, I treated it like Google. I’d type in “give me library display ideas,” get a list of irrelevant bullets, sigh, and close the tab. The breakthrough came when I realized AI fails when you ask for a final product, but works when you treat the software like a two-way workshop.

Think about how you collaborate in real life: if a friend offers a suggestion that isn’t quite right, you don’t just walk out of the room. You talk it through. You say, “I like where you’re going, but I don’t have the budget,” or “That sounds way too formal for my middle schoolers.”

Once I started using that exact same back-and-forth process in my prompts, I finally started getting results I could actually use.

The Prompting Tricks I Swear By Now

After a few years of testing what works and what definitely doesn’t, here are the four tricks that save me the most time:

  1. I give it my exact context first. Instead of asking generic questions, I set the scene: “Act as an assistant to a solo middle school librarian. I have a $0 budget but I need new ways to…” Or, “I am a middle school librarian. Right now I’m working on…and I need your help brainstorming some ideas.” The more real-world constraints I give it, the better the output is.
  2. I aggressively push back on corporate jargon. I am always the editor-in-chief. Whenever the output sounds robotic or overly cheerful, I tell it straight out: “Rewrite this to sound casual and authentic,” or “Cut the buzzwords and make it punchy.”
  3. I dump my unformatted brain-dumps. I stopped trying to write clean, polished prompts. Now, after a chaotic day, I just paste in my scrambled, messy notes and say: “Help me organize these raw notes into a 3-step action list.”
  4. I call out impractical ideas. If an AI suggestion won’t work in my real life, I tell it straight out. I’ll say, “There’s no way all those activities will fit into a 45-minute class,” or “I don’t have time to pull all of that together. Make these suggestions way simpler.”

Being Rescued Off the Island

For me, using AI hasn’t been about giving up my voice or letting an algorithm take over. It’s simply meant that I no longer have to face a blank page alone, which is sometimes the best part of my day.

By letting a digital tool handle the initial heavy lifting of organizing thoughts and generating rough options, I get to save my actual human energy for what really matters: advocating for my program, building relationships, and being present for my students.

Now that I’ve shared how I changed my mindset around these tools, what does this actually look like in my week-to-week workflow? Stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon, where I will share 5 strategies for using AI to streamline daily admin and programming tasks.