I started in the classroom. Then I kept zooming out… to the campus, the system, the strategy… because the problems I actually cared about were never confined to my four walls. These days I lead academics at the systems level, shaping how schools teach, lead, and adopt new technology. The title on the door says Chief Academic Officer. The work underneath it is mostly this: making sure the things we build for kids actually hold up when real people try to use them.
Most of my career has lived right where big technology… AI, XR, design thinking… runs into the messy reality of human organizations. I’ve led large-scale AI integration and immersive-learning rollouts, and I’ve watched enough shiny initiatives quietly collapse to know the tool is almost never the point. (Adoption isn’t impact. I have a whole talk about it.) Technology only earns its keep when it’s grounded in something human. Everything else is glitter dust.
Some of the work got noticed along the way… Administrator of the Year, San Diego County Top Tech Exec, a CUE Gold Disk, the Classroom of the Future Innovate Award. (The plaques live somewhere sensible.) I also tend to build what I can’t find: a graduate-level course on AI in education, and a full program on the legal and ethical questions educators can’t afford to wave off. And for twelve years I served on the boards of SDCUE and CALIE, most recently as Board President.
Before any of it, I served in the U.S. Army… which is where I learned that leadership doesn’t have to be sterile to be strong. I’m a Navy mom of two daughters and a genuinely terrible relaxer (the paddleboard mostly judges me from the garage).
And then there are the Land Rovers. I keep a couple of classic ones running on a mix of stubbornness and love, and most free weekends you’ll find me somewhere past the pavement… airing down, picking a line, occasionally regretting that line. People assume the off-roading is a hobby I bolted on for a tidy leadership metaphor. It’s backwards. Off-roading is where I learned the thing I keep trying to teach.
Because nothing tells you how well something is actually built like terrain that refuses to cooperate. A rig that’s flawless in the showroom can come apart on the first real climb… and so can a strategy, a system, a leader. You don’t find out what holds up under pressure until you’re under it. So I stopped trusting the version of anything that only works on flat, dry, predictable ground. Leadership, learning, the technology we hand to kids… I want to see how it does under real conditions. Off the map is where the truth lives. (It’s also absurdly fun.)
Laura K Spencer, Ed.D. 