Who Are You Becoming? AI, Identity, and Education with Sandra Jin

Education
Written By Lydia Kumar

Season 3, Episode 37 of Kinwise Conversations · Hit play or read the transcript

Who Are You Becoming? AI, Identity, and Education with Sandra Jin
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Who Are You Becoming? Sandra Jin on AI, Agency, and the Choices That Shape Us

Sandra Jin has spent nearly a decade at Leading Educators designing professional learning at the intersection of pedagogy, student agency, and technology. As Senior Director of Innovation and AI Strategy, she leads national initiatives, including the RAISE Collaborative and the AI Schools Collaborative, that help school teams and rural districts use AI in ways rooted in what they actually believe about teaching and learning.

This conversation moves through Sandra's origin story (a classroom teacher in DC, a mom of three, a daughter whose diagnosis of selective mutism taught her everything she knows about advocacy and belonging), into practical frameworks for teachers and principals, into the surprising advantages of small rural districts, and ultimately back to the question Sandra returns to again and again: who are you becoming through how you use AI? It's a question that works at every level: for kindergartners with stickers, for superintendents building strategic plans, and for everyone in between.

Key Takeaways for K-12 Leaders

Emotional weight is the real starting point. When educators resist AI, it's rarely about the technology itself. There's fear of the unknown, uncertainty about expertise, and grief over the parts of the job that felt most meaningful. Understanding what's underneath that reaction changes the entire conversation.

The VATT framework gives teachers a "why." Leading Educators uses a simple lens to help educators make decisions about technology: does this AI use help you do more, do better, or do new? Having that language moves teachers from compliance to conviction.

One rural teacher's lesson shows what AI can actually do. A STEM teacher at Holbrook USD was worried AI would erode students' thinking. She designed a lesson where students had to defend their work to an AI bot and then evaluate the bot's response, using AI to increase cognitive lift, not replace it.

Rural districts have a structural advantage. Low bureaucracy, high trust, and superintendents with direct line of sight into classrooms means momentum that would take months in a larger system can happen in weeks. Sandra's RAISE Collaborative confirmed that rural districts are ahead.

Data infrastructure is unglamorous but foundational. AI has become a mirror for years of patched-together systems. The practical path forward: start where data is already clean, build small, and expand from there.

The question scales. Whether it's a kindergartner deciding if they want AI to be their coach, checker, modeler, or doer — or a district deciding whether a tool aligns with their portrait of a graduate, the question is the same: is this drawing the picture more clearly, or pulling you away from it?

From the Classroom to National Work: Sandra's Story

Lydia Kumar: Sandra, I'm so excited to have you here today. To start, tell us a little about your story and how you ended up working in AI and education.

Sandra Jin: I am the Senior Director of Innovation at Leading Educators. I was a teacher before. I taught in Washington, DC for about seven years, and then I've been at Leading Educators for almost ten years now. I joined the innovation team about three years ago and really dove into the AI work almost right when I joined.

The thing that brought me into this work originally is that I really love being with people, with students, with adults, and designing spaces that make people feel like they can co-own something. That collective ownership piece is really important to me.

A lot of it came from my daughter, who has a diagnosis of selective mutism. Working with her therapists for multiple years taught me so much about building the muscle of self-advocacy and agency … how hard it is to advocate for yourself, and how critical it is to create that space of belonging for yourself and for other people. I translated a lot of that into how I think about what students need, what all people need and deserve. And AI is just another one of those tools we have in our toolkit toward that aim.

The Emotional Weight Underneath AI Resistance

Lydia Kumar: You talked about creating spaces of belonging where people feel safe. There are profound differences in how people view AI some are excited, some are scared. Have you seen a relationship between feeling safe and the ability to learn something this new and potentially frightening?

Sandra Jin: There's so much emotional weight to AI. If you think of it only as a technical initiative being thrown at you, it's easy to be dismissive of people's reactions, pro or against. But when you understand the nuances underneath it, there are so many more ways to connect.

There's fear of the unknown. There's uncertainty: I have decades of expertise in this content area, and now I have a sense of who am I now as an educator? The nuances of lesson planning are so important to who I am as a teacher, and potentially that's being taken away. If you understand the sense of identity and belonging wrapped up in that, you can have a much more meaningful conversation and find out how to leverage AI in ways that protect and enhance those things, rather than replace them.

The Holbrook STEM Teacher: Protecting Cognitive Lift

Lydia Kumar: Can you share an example of someone who navigated that fear and came out on the other side?

Sandra Jin: There was a teacher from Holbrook USD, one of the rural districts in our RAISE Collaborative, who was really passionate about protecting students' thinking and making sure students were holding the cognitive lift. She was genuinely concerned about AI doing the thinking for students.

So knowing that was her priority, she designed an instructional strategy built around it. She taught middle school STEM, and students were designing a pulley system. They generated their ideas, presented their plan, got peer feedback, and then went in front of a Gemini-built bot to defend their decisions. Then they had to evaluate the bot's response, decide what to revise, what not to revise, and why.

Not only was she protecting cognitive lift, she was increasing it. Instead of just asking "how do I use AI faster," she asked: what do I want to be true about the learning experiences I create, and how do I use AI as a lever toward that?

The VAT Framework: More, Better, New

Sandra Jin: At Leading Educators, we use a framework called the VAT: the Value of Technology on Teaching. It asks: does this AI use help you do more (freeing time for what matters), do better ( transforming instruction to be more effective), or do new (taking a leap that wasn't possible before)?

If you're clear on which you're trying to accomplish, you can measure effectiveness more clearly and be more intentional in your approach.

What Principals Get Wrong and the Data Problem Nobody Talks About

Lydia Kumar: Where do you see school leaders getting lost when it comes to leading AI initiatives?

Sandra Jin: There are so many conflicting pulls. Teachers are being marketed at around the clock on social media. There's pressure from boards and communities to show what you're doing. And underneath all the excitement, there's a less glamorous question nobody wants to ask: what are the conditions you need to build to actually sustain and scale any of this?

AI has become a mirror for a lot of challenges schools have put bandaids on. Data living in Salesforce, and also a Google spreadsheet, and also a sticky note on the back of a laptop. When you're trying to get AI to organize everything, you realize that all of this is completely disorganized. The same tool that transforms one school can do nothing or actively harm another, and the difference isn't the tool. It's the conditions: the rollout, the timeline, the alignment to instructional vision, the training, the ongoing support.

The RAISE Collaborative: Why Rural Districts Lead

Lydia Kumar: Tell me about the RAISE Collaborative and what you've learned.

Sandra Jin: The first round was in the fall, with seven rural districts in Arizona and Texas. We worked with them in small cycles to test AI-enabled instructional strategies grounded in their own instructional vision: what do they want to be true for their students, what are their biggest challenges, and what AI-shaped solutions might help?

We had a hunch that rural districts would be a great place to test, and it was confirmed. They're small, nimble, resourceful, and innovative. We saw powerful shifts even in seven or eight week cycles. One school moved into piloting across all their schools. Another launched an AI champions mentoring program for their teachers.

The structural reason it works: in the RAISE Collaborative, each team was required to include the superintendent or assistant superintendent alongside teachers. The district leader had direct line of sight into classrooms. Because they were all shaping the same priorities together, there was no buy-in struggle. The momentum that would take months in a larger system — with all those layers, happened in weeks.

In our next round, we're extending to 12 weeks, expanding to six regions, and then selecting 10 districts to move into a year-long scaling collaborative. The question we're pursuing: what are the concrete enabling conditions that allow this work to scale effectively, and what can we share across the field?

The Career Day Lesson: Who Are You Becoming?

Lydia Kumar: You mentioned your three kids are all in elementary school. How does being a parent shape your perspective on this?

Sandra Jin: I signed up for Career Day partly out of guilt — I'd dropped the ball on so many end-of-year things — but also because I was seeing my kids and their friends using ChatGPT in ways that made me think. My son's friends were texting each other AI-generated photos of themselves. But they were uploading pictures of themselves, and I had a lot of thoughts about that.

So I built five activity stations around one question: who am I becoming through how I use AI?

The main one gave students scenarios. Your math homework is confusing: do you have AI break it down step by step, do you do the problems first and then have it show you what you missed, or do you just have it tell you what's on the test? For a writing assignment: do you brainstorm with it, get feedback on a draft, ask for a model paragraph, or have it write the whole thing? Each option matched a pattern: do you want AI to be your coach, your checker, your modeler, or your doer?

After they placed their stickers, we talked about it. You notice where you lean, but that's not the only choice. Maybe you lean toward having AI do everything. That's natural — it's easier. But if you're also thinking about what kind of learner you want to become, you might make a different choice.

I think the same question applies to educators. It's not "how do I grade faster." It's what kind of teacher do I want to be? Someone who preserves critical thinking? Someone who builds deep relationships? How does AI support that portrait? Because every use of AI will either draw that picture a little more clearly — or pull you away from it.

Hope and Concern: The Ground Is Moving

Lydia Kumar: What gives you the most hope when you think about the future of AI in education? And what sparks the most concern?

Sandra Jin: A lot of my recent work has been in workforce development spaces. And I've been able to see jobs transforming in real time in a way that's only one step removed from K-12. What I see isn't just job descriptions changing. Ut's the pace and frequency of that change. The ground is moving beneath our feet constantly.

So it's not enough to update our standards to include AI literacy and call it done. Because six months later, do we update again? If that cycle never ends, then the real question is: is there an opportunity to rethink the whole paradigm of schooling? Can we figure out how to be nimble enough to flex with whatever comes next, so students aren't graduating into a workforce that's already made their learning outdated by the time they've crossed the stage?

Guest Bio

Sandra Jin is the Senior Director of Innovation and AI Strategy at Leading Educators, where she leads national initiatives to integrate AI-enabled practices into student-centered systems. A former DC classroom teacher with seven years in the classroom, Sandra is a 2025 EDSAFE Women in AI Fellow and the architect behind programs including the RAISE Collaborative and the AI Accelerators. She holds an M.Ed. from George Mason University.

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