AI Literacy Faculty Playbook

Teaching AI Judgment, One Habit at a Time.

How to Use This Playbook

Start where it makes sense.

You do not need to teach all five BE behaviors at once, create a separate AI literacy unit, or become an expert in every new AI tool. Use this playbook to identify where AI-related judgment already intersects with the learning happening in your course.

Faculty Guide · Practical Application

This Is a Toolkit

This playbook is designed to be used, not simply read from beginning to end. The five BE behaviors provide a shared language for AI literacy, but how you use them should depend on your course, your students, and the learning you are trying to accomplish.

You might focus on one behavior for a particular assignment, reinforce several across a course, or return to the same behavior as students encounter increasingly complex situations.

You remain the expert on your discipline, your course, and the expectations students need to meet.

Start with the Behavior That Fits

Begin with the BE behavior that connects most naturally to what your students are already doing.

BE Safe: When students need to think about privacy, data, tool limitations, or appropriate use.
BE Honest: When authorship, attribution, transparency, or academic integrity matters.
BE Critical: When students are evaluating AI-generated information, evidence, sources, or claims.
BE Responsible: When students need to make intentional choices about whether and how AI should be used—and take ownership of the result.
BE Reflective: When students are considering how AI affects their thinking, learning, skill development, or professional growth.

Look for the Learning Opportunity

Teaching AI literacy does not necessarily mean adding another assignment. The BE behaviors can often be incorporated into work students are already doing.

Add one question to an existing discussion.
Include an AI-related decision point in an assignment or activity.
Ask students to explain why they trusted, questioned, used, or rejected AI output.
Use a brief journal or reflection to make students' decision-making visible.
Coach a BE behavior through feedback when an opportunity naturally appears.
For students who don't use AI, adapt the prompt to ask about that decision. Reasoning about when not to use a tool is AI literacy too.

The goal is not simply to tell students what they may or may not do with AI. The goal is to help them practice the judgment behind those choices.

Meet Students Where They Are

The BE Framework describes AI literacy as developmental. Students build these habits through repeated opportunities to encounter them, practice them, receive feedback, and eventually apply them more independently.

Introduction

Building Awareness

Introduce the behavior by name and help students recognize where it appears in their learning. Awareness is the goal.

Exploration

Practicing with Support

Give students opportunities to practice the behavior in different contexts with guidance, feedback, and reflection. By the end of Exploration, students apply the behavior in most situations with reasonable consistency, even if they still need prompts in unfamiliar ones.

Application

Using Judgment Independently

Ask students to apply the behavior more independently and transfer their judgment to new tools, situations, and professional contexts.

Progression is developmental, not linear. The appropriate stage depends on the student, task, tool, stakes, and course context.

Each stage on the BE pages lists where it is typically emphasized. These are examples, not placements: a student in a program course may still be at Introduction for a behavior no one has named for them yet.

Use Each BE Page as a Resource

Start with the Purpose if you want to understand the judgment behind the behavior.
Use the Developmental Progression to consider what the behavior might look like at different stages of student learning.
Use the I Can Statements to make the behavior concrete and student-centered.
Look at Habits in Practice for observable examples of what developing judgment might look like.
Browse Where This Fits Naturally and Blackboard Ultra Quick Wins when you want practical ways to incorporate the behavior into existing instruction.
Use the Student Reflection Prompts when you want students to examine their own choices and learning.

One Good Place to Start

Choose one assignment, activity, or recurring student challenge.

Ask yourself

Where are students already making a decision about AI—and what kind of judgment would help them make that decision better?

Then choose the BE behavior that best fits. You do not have to redesign your course to begin teaching AI literacy. Sometimes one well-placed question is enough to start.

When You're Ready to Build

This playbook is for understanding the behaviors and how students grow in them. When you're ready to build one into a course, the BE the Change workbook walks you through it. It helps you write your AI Course Policy, revise one assignment around one behavior, plan checkpoints for the term, and prepare for conversations with students about AI.

Reference

Two appendices sit at the end of the playbook. Appendix A shows how each BE behavior maps to the DEC AI Literacy Framework. Appendix B shows how the playbook lines up with OCTC’s college-wide framework, including how assessment works.