Hands on the Wheel: A Human-Centered Guide to AI in the Classroom

No school asked for this. The tools showed up uninvited, and assignments that had worked for years stopped working overnight.

Hands on the Wheel is a working teacher's answer. Douglas Kiang has spent more than thirty-five years in classrooms, from kindergarten through college, and he wrote this book the way he teaches: make something first, then report honestly on what happened. The premise underneath it is simple and uncomfortable. You cannot teach what you will not touch.

Before the book says a word about what students should do, it asks you to create something of your own.

The argument moves through five parts:

Face It looks squarely at what AI has already broken, and treats it as a design problem rather than a discipline problem.

Use It puts the tool in your hands, in your subject, because the judgment you need to guide students comes only from making things yourself.

Teach It turns personal practice into classroom practice, with mechanics you can run on Monday.

Question It is the honest, hard core that most books skip, where Kiang takes on every serious objection before making his case.

Lead It is for anyone trying to move a whole faculty, where real change is bottom-up and grief usually comes before adoption.

The stories are real. A student who took one intro programming course and shipped an app for people suffering from glaucoma. A team that gave up using AI on a project because they cared too much about the person they were building it for. A colleague who tried to AI-proof the research paper she had assigned for twenty years and inadvertently made it better than ever. Kiang also shows exactly how he used AI in developing this book, because it's the clearest demonstration he can offer of the argument in practice: AI in the hands of someone who stays in charge of the work makes the work better, not lesser.

Each chapter ends with a Run It section: one concrete move for yourself, your students, and your colleagues.

For classroom teachers, department chairs, instructional coaches, and school leaders who want a clear-eyed guide, not a panic and not a sales pitch.

"Practical enough to use tomorrow, honest enough to trust."
— From the Foreword by Adam Cannon, Columbia University

About the Author

Douglas Kiang is an award-winning Computer Science and AI educator at Menlo School in Silicon Valley, with more than thirty-five years of teaching experience across independent schools at every grade level. He served on the Development Committee for the AP Computer Science Principles course and has been a Research Fellow at the MIT Teaching Systems Lab and a CS50 Teaching Fellow at Harvard University. His honors include a 2015 NCWIT Educator Award and a Hawaii nomination for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, the highest recognition the U.S. government gives K–12 teachers. He is also an Apple Distinguished Educator and a Microsoft Global Minecraft Mentor.

Douglas has keynoted and led day-long workshops at schools around the world, helping educators integrate AI in ways that keep student agency, empathy, and collaboration at the center. Hands on the Wheel is his guide to doing exactly that.

Douglas Kiang has taught for more than thirty years, at every level from kindergarten through college. He came to computer science the long way, through the liberal arts. He earned a bachelor's degree in English literature at Tufts and an Ed.M. in technology, innovation, and education at Harvard before completing a M.S. in computer science. That path shapes how he writes about AI: he approaches technology from a humanities perspective, builds with the tools in his own classroom first, then tells teachers what's real and what isn't.He is an Apple Distinguished Educator who teaches computer science and AI literacy at Menlo School in Atherton, California, where he designed the freshman AI-literacy curriculum and co-designed and taught Literature in the Age of AI. He served on the development committee for AP Computer Science Principles, a course built to widen access to the field. He has created curriculum and consulted for companies including Apple, Microsoft, and the College Board, and he speaks and consults on AI in education around the world. He writes about teaching and building at kiang.net. For speaking engagements and consulting inquiries, visit kiang.net/speaking.