District leader insights: Dr. Tamekia Brown

The conversation about technology in K-12 schools often focuses on access. How much screen time is appropriate? Which platforms are safe? Do phones belong in classrooms at all? Dr. Tamekia Brown, an administrator in Waco ISD, believes the more important question goes deeper: what is the technology actually doing to the learning?

It’s a challenge playing out in districts across the country. As AI tools have become easier to access, some students are using them to generate responses instead of developing their own thinking. The writing looks polished, but the underlying skill is not there. Whether it gets noticed depends on how equipped the teacher is to recognize it.

Teachers who are savvy will quickly say, this is not your voice. Teachers who are not savvy say, “I’ve done a great job of teaching.”

Dr. Brown is not pointing to a failure of individual teachers. She is pointing to a gap in preparation that districts need to address. In Waco, that work started with leadership. The district’s chief of technology brought administrators together and focused on their own work first, not student work. He walked them through a familiar task: drafting mid-year evaluation feedback.

Using observation notes and lesson examples, he demonstrated how an AI tool could support the process, not by writing the feedback, but by helping surface the right questions before the conversation. The tool acted as a thinking partner, helping administrators identify data patterns and walk into meetings ready for a more focused, evidence-based discussion.

The approach was intentional. Before asking educators to use technology with students, you have to show them why it’s worth using. Modeling does that in a way mandates cannot. Each administrator then brought that experience back to their staff. The rollout was deliberate. District leadership to administrators, administrators to teachers, teachers to students.

People don’t know what they don’t know,” Brown says. “Modeling is how you change that.

That same idea shows up in how Dr. Brown approaches instruction. Students start with what she calls paper-pencil thinking. They work through a task on their own before any tools are introduced. Then AI is brought in, not as a replacement, but as a point of comparison. Students look at their own work next to what the tool produces, using a shared rubric to understand the difference. The comparison is the instruction.

Hopefully my product is better quality, because I’ve been able to identify the gap in what I’ve done, how it was enhanced, and now when I do it again, it will enhance what I’m able to do.

Dr. Brown is clear that there is still progress to make. “Our district is innovative in the sense that we’ve been open to the journey,” she says. “But there is still a way to go to get to scale.”

That gap between early adoption and system-wide change is one many district leaders will recognize. What Waco has made clear is where the responsibility sits.

The question was never whether students would use the tools available to them. The question is whether districts are willing to build the conditions where technology pushes students to think more, not less. That work starts with leadership, and then it moves through every layer of the organization until it reaches the classroom. It does not happen any other way.

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About Dr. Tamekia Brown