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The technology giant flew 70 educators to its California headquarters to learn about its AI products — and how to persuade skeptical colleagues to use them.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Sitting in an atrium on Google’s campus, a group of K-12 educators imagined the worst response they could receive when they tried to persuade their colleagues to use artificial intelligence.
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They pictured a veteran English teacher who was still upset that cursive is no longer taught. Perhaps she would yell that AI is “just another shiny tech fad.” What’s next, she might ask — robots teaching kids how to read?
The educators asked Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, for advice and soon had a role-playing plan. They would win over this skeptical English teacher by explaining what generative AI could do for her: create classroom materials for phonics lessons, reducing what would normally be hours of work to just two minutes. The key, the educators agreed, was to avoid getting into an argument or letting this AI critic unload all her fears uninterrupted.
“Well, it’s not cursive, but it did save me an hour of typing tonight,” they predicted the English teacher would eventually reply.
Seventy teachers and school technology directors selected for their interest in Google’s education technology products traveled to the company’s headquarters last week for a free two-day training program on how to use AI — and how to urge their colleagues to use it, too. The Google Educator Series is part of the company’s long-standing effort to put its products in schools, and this training signaled the company’s growing focus on AI.
Most of the attendees said their colleagues back home were “cautiously curious” about AI. In the breakout session that included the role-playing exercise, the training’s leaders suggested responding to resistance by focusing on “pain points” and how Google’s tools, including Gemini and NotebookLM, an AI research assistant, could solve them.
“It’s not as scary if you’ve taken something off of my plate versus giving me a new thing that I have to then go out and learn,” Winston Roberts, director of an AI initiative at ISTE+ASCD, a nonprofit education group that worked with Google to develop the training, told educators from a stage.
The guidance on overcoming pushback reflects the increasingly hostile public sentiment toward AI as an expanding grassroots movement of parents demands less reliance on computers in schools. In the month before the training, Pope Leo XIV urged more regulations to slow AI adoption, college graduates booed ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other commencement speakers when they promoted AI, and one of the country’s largest teachers unions called for limits on AI and screen time in elementary schools.
AI is playing a larger role in classrooms: Some states already require schools to provide AI instruction, universities are paying millions to provide chatbots for students, and the federal government is prioritizing AI in education grants. But recent surveys found most teachers have not received guidance on how to use AI in their work.
Jennie Magiera, global head of education impact at Google, said in an interview during the training that teachers and students are going to continue using AI more as it advances. She said Google wants to train as many teachers as possible so they can “harness the power” of AI and “use it for good.”
Some teachers at the training said they were glad to have the chance to learn about the rapidly evolving technology rather than being left to figure it out themselves.
Karen Compton, an English teacher at a middle school in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, said that AI rarely came up in her classroom last year but that it’s “all over the place” now and she had to figure it out quickly. AI is a part of students’ vocabulary — they refer to things they think aren’t real as AI — and she feels a responsibility to make sure they know what they’re talking about.
“If a student’s running in the hallway, you don’t take away the hallway — you teach them the proper behavior for the hallway,” Compton said. “And I think this mimics that in the same way.”
In May, Google rolled out free online training modules on its AI tools for K-12 administrators and educators, and college faculty members, with guidance about creating study guides, crafting lesson plans and analyzing where students are getting stuck.
The training materials describe Gemini as “an engine for high-quality instruction” to do the “heavy lifting” for designing classroom lessons. “As an educator, this shift moves you into the role of a ‘learning conductor,’” one slide states. Google plans to release additional modules monthly starting in September to capture developments in the technology.
“It’s really, really important that we use it,” Joseph South, chief innovation officer for ISTE+ASCD, the nonprofit group working with Google, said of AI at last week’s training. “We can’t just ignore it, we can’t ban it, we can’t keep it out of our schools — that’s not gonna prepare us for the future.”
Google has offered training in its products for teachers for two decades, before it began promoting its Chromebook operating system as a way for school districts to provide a laptop for every student. Chromebooks now dominate the education technology market.
In an undated presentation, Google described its presence in schools as a way to build a “pipeline of future users,” according to internal company documents revealed in court that NBC News first reported on in January.
Additional internal records, unsealed in court filings in February, indicate that Google has long considered how AI could be used in schools. A 2018 presentation about keeping Google at the top of the education technology space said schools wanted more “Personalized Learning” and “Adaptive Content” and identified machine learning and AI as major trends it could seize upon.
“Educators are sitting on a growing goldmine of data,” the presentation said, but they needed help organizing and making sense of it. If Google designed ways for schools to use student data, it would set “the stage for us to reinvent the education system through data.”
A Google spokesperson previously said that the heavily redacted internal documents released through court filings “mischaracterize our work” and that the company has responded to schools’ demand for its products.
Magiera, a former Chicago public school teacher, said her goal in the recent training is to show educators how Google’s products can transform their jobs.
“What we’re bringing AI here to do is to help create new pathways to overcome the obstacles that you’ve been facing and to create ways to reach new goals that you never dreamed possible with your learners,” she said. “It’s not going to be easy; I’m not trying to be naive about it. The probability that educators will be able to make that opportunity a reality is greatly increased when we give them training and support.”
Speakers at the training emphasized that humans should always stay involved with any AI use and that technology shouldn’t replace teachers. They focused instead on how a teacher could use Gemini to create a comic strip that explains how greenhouse gases trap heat, for example, or how elementary school children could use AI to generate more realistic depictions of their ideas than they are capable of drawing.
Casey Cuny, a high school English teacher in a Los Angeles suburb, described asking his students to debate their takeaways from readings — like the concept of “doublethink” from “1984” by George Orwell — with Gemini before discussing them in class.
“It’s the best discourse I’ve seen in years on some of these Socratic seminars I’ve been running in my classes,” he said. “It does push the thinking when used intentionally and strategically. And remember that I’m still using teaching methods — I’m not just putting it on the AI and walking away.”
As the educators left the Googleplex to return to their school districts, they knew they would face challenges in evangelizing for AI. Parents in many states are forming groups to protest AI in schools, and in some places, they’re winning. But Mike Amante, a technology teacher in New Hartford, New York, said the training equipped him to show skeptics how AI could be beneficial to learning — not just for cheating.
“They may not like it, but I don’t think that’s going to change things,” he said. “The naysayers are not going to stop it.”
Tyler Kingkade is a national reporter for NBC News, based in Los Angeles.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC
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