Laura K. Spencer, Ed.D., is Chief Academic Officer at Elite Academic Academy, a non-classroom-based public charter network in Southern California and a keynote speaker and consultant on technology, leadership, and AI adoption in schools. A U.S. Army veteran who learned to read terrain at nineteen, she has spent more than twenty-five years leading in K-12, from the classroom to the cabinet, and has built a first-in-the-nation 1:1 take-home technology program. Her book, Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions, arrives Winter 2026. Learn more at laurakspencer.com.
Every tool you adopt makes something easier to do badly. Most schools find that out too late.
Years ago, I bought clickers. Hundreds of them.
Little remote-control-looking devices, one per student, so every child could punch in an answer to a question on the teacher’s display and I could watch the results come in live. I was certain they would change the classroom. Formative assessment, instant, for everyone, all at once.
The only thing they changed was how much room I had left in the storage closet… which is to say, none, because nobody used them.
They were not bad devices. They did exactly what the box promised. I had bought a capability and called it a strategy, and I never asked the questions that would have told me, before the purchase order, that the answer was no. Every school has a version of that closet.
Twenty-six years in this work, classroom to cabinet, has taught me one thing about those closets. The problem is almost never the technology. It is the decision that came before it.
I spend a fair amount of time off-road, and there is a rule out there you learn early. You read the terrain before you drive it. You stop, you get out, you walk the line, you look at what the ground will do under weight. The drivers who skip that step are the ones you spend your afternoon towing out.
Adoption works the same way. Before a tool ever touches a classroom, or an office, four questions decide whether it strengthens the school or adds to the pile. They are not a scoring rubric (nobody needs another rubric). They are a conversation you have before the purchase order, with the people who will have to live with the choice.
What is it for?
Start with the honest version, not the marketing version. Every product promises the same three things… save time, raise achievement, personalize learning. So ask instead what specific problem, in your building, this is meant to solve. Name it in a sentence a teacher would recognize. If you cannot, you are not solving a problem. You are acquiring a feature.
Artificial intelligence has made this question harder, not easier. The tools are capable of almost anything, which is why “it can do so much” has become the most common non-answer in the room. Capability is not purpose. A tool that does everything usually turns out to be for nothing in particular, and the schools that buy it end up organizing their work around the software instead of the other way around.
What does it strengthen?
Good tools make people better at the work that matters. A reading platform should strengthen a teacher’s ability to see who is struggling and why, and to do something about it sooner. An assessment tool should strengthen a team’s ability to have an honest conversation about what students know.
So ask what human capacity grows because this exists. Be specific about whose capacity, and at what. If the most honest answer is that the tool mostly strengthens a vendor’s dashboard, or an administrator’s ability to generate a report nobody reads, keep walking. Technology that strengthens the adults closest to students is worth the disruption. Technology that strengthens the system’s view of itself rarely is.
What does it replace?
Every adoption is a substitution, whether or not anyone says so out loud. Something has to leave to make room. Sometimes that something is a stack of paperwork, and good riddance. Sometimes it is a conversation, a judgment call, a moment of productive friction that was doing quiet work.
The discipline here is simple. Name the thing being replaced, out loud, before you decide. Then choose, on purpose, whether you are willing to lose it. A grading tool might replace hours of low-value marking, which is a gift. It might also replace the moment a teacher notices a pattern in a student’s mistakes, which is not a gift. The danger is rarely that a school replaces the wrong thing. It is that a school replaces something valuable without ever noticing it was there.
What does it allow to be done poorly?
This is the question people skip, and it is the one that matters.
Every tool lowers the cost of some behavior. That is the point of a tool. But it lowers the cost of the behaviors you do not want just as reliably as the ones you do. A feedback platform that makes comments instant also makes it effortless to send feedback no one will read. An AI writing assistant can strengthen a struggling writer who is stuck on a first sentence, and it can just as easily let a capable student skip the exact thinking the assignment existed to produce.
I watched this happen with a real-time grade portal. The idea was transparency. Parents would see every score the moment it posted, no surprises. Hard to argue with.
Within a semester, teachers had stopped entering the low formative grades. Not laziness… self-preservation. A 4 out of 10 on a Tuesday practice quiz now triggered a parent email by dinner and a meeting by Friday, so the honest in-progress grades disappeared. The gradebook filled with the safe ones. The tool did exactly what it promised, and it also taught a whole staff to stop showing their work. Nobody decided that on purpose.
By the time anyone traced it back to the portal, a year of grades had already lost their meaning. That is how this question fails you. Quietly, and after the fact.
Which is why you ask it early. Name what the tool will let people stop doing well, and put the guardrail up before it ships, not in the meeting after it broke something.
We put these questions to work on an AI pilot across the network where I serve. They did not tell us to say yes or no. That was never their job. They told us what to watch, what to protect, and what we would have to teach adults to do differently before the tool ever reached a student. The answer to “what does it allow to be done poorly?” shaped our training long before any results came in, and it is the reason I trust what we are building.
That is the shift I would offer any leader staring at a demo and a discount that expires Friday. The technology is not the strategy. The thinking you do before you adopt it is. The vendor has done their homework on why you should buy. Your job is to do the homework on whether it belongs in your school, and the four questions are how you show your work.
The tools will keep coming, faster than any adoption committee can meet. The schools that stay upright through the next decade will not be the ones with the biggest budgets or the newest platforms. They will be the ones that learned to stop at the edge, get out, and read the terrain before they drove onto it.