Introducing the Value Add of Technology for Leadership (VATL) Framework

While classroom-centered AI discourse has generated new insights about its potential within learning, systemic AI decision-making remains much murkier.

The AI Governance Gap

Beyond the classroom level, AI impacts core enterprise functions: governance, operations, talent, and infrastructure. And often, leaders make fast, high-stakes decisions about those systems without a shared framework to guide them. Districts now manage more than 2,700 distinct edtech tools each year, and 80% are prioritizing generative AI implementation. Yet very few have a shared way to evaluate what any of it should accomplish beyond the classroom.

That’s why Leading Educators built the Value Add of Technology for Leadership (VATL) framework. It is a research-based companion to the instruction-focused Value Add of Technology on Teaching (VATT) framework we recently updated for the AI era.

Our team has worked alongside real leaders to refine our thinking, identify overlaps and gaps in existing guidance, and work toward nimble, essential practices. Let’s briefly explore your new go-to resource.

The VATL offers leaders a responsive, repeatable framework for evaluating technology decisions–not just for what a tool can do, but for what it should accomplish across an entire system. We organized the framework around the same progression of value we identified in the VATT:

• Do More — increase capacity and extend reach without changing the nature of the work
• Do Better — strengthen the quality and effectiveness of existing decisions and practices
• Do New — enable ways of thinking and operating that weren’t previously possible

Value is expressed across thematic areas of leadership decision-making through practical moves. Those moves are organized into three Areas of Impact—Governance and Ethics, People and Capacity, and Infrastructure and Resources—so every decision has a clear home.

Most importantly, the guidance is not set in stone. We offer VATL as living guidance and an invitation for collaboration in public. As we rapidly learn alongside leaders, the guidance will continue to adapt and evolve.

Building a Discernment Practice

The Value Add of Technology for Leadership framework works in two distinct but connected ways.

First, it provides leaders with the decision architecture they need for the technology they are directly responsible for, including procurement, governance, capacity mapping, and AI readiness. Too often, leaders make these high-stakes decisions reactively and in isolation. VATL brings structure and shared criteria to that process. It also addresses concerns that live at the operational level, including data privacy and student safety, before they become classroom-level problems.

Take academic integrity as an example. A “Do More” move might centralize student drafts and revision history so teachers can see how their students’ work actually developed. A “Do Better” move flags where an assignment’s design itself invites AI shortcuts, so teachers can strengthen the task before assigning it. A “Do New” move reimagines the task entirely—building it around reasoning and authentic student voice while making the old integrity question beside the point. The same progression holds for procurement, data governance, and every other decision the VATL covers.

Second, it creates a shared language across the system, aligning with the field’s attention on system coherence. When technology decisions are made only at the classroom level, system-wide coherence cannot be established. 

VATL changes that dynamic. When leaders and educators work from the same framework and language, conversations about AI implementation become more aligned and intentional. A superintendent evaluating a district-level procurement decision and a teacher evaluating a classroom tool can engage with the same questions from their own unique vantage points and actually understand each other.

The Promise

One district leader shares:

The VATL helps me look beyond purely technical decisions; it forces me to anchor decisions across specific human-centered areas. And that’s important, because humans have to be at the center of everything we do with any tech tool.”

Another adds:

I really count on the VATL to create the structure and framework that’s going to allow for us to step out and look more to a 30,000 foot view of where we need to be.”

When the Value Add frameworks work concurrently, they empower leaders to make critical, coherent, and research-backed decisions. Shared language and readily understood AI implementation benchmarks center student learning in the classroom, so each student can thrive.

In an ideal state, teachers generate frequent evidence in the classroom using the “Do More, Do Better, Do New” schema from VATT. Leaders use that evidence for procurement and governance decisions grounded in instructional reality.

Classroom-level decisions to adopt, adapt, or abandon a tool signal where technology adds value. VATL helps leaders translate those classroom-level signals into system-level strategy. Ultimately, VATL supports ongoing decision-making regarding governance boundaries, data privacy, and professional learning that enable responsible classroom AI use.

An Invitation

The Value Add of Technology for Leadership is not a stagnant framework or a fixed, single-use checklist. We at Leading Educators created the VATL as an invitation to collaborate publicly with the promise to evolve the guidance as we learn alongside the leaders who use it.

VATL is also one of our clearest examples yet of Leading Educators’ commitment to building future models through research translated into a field-facing tool that systems can use today, not just a promise for tomorrow.

We hope you’ll join us in using VATL to better understand the present and future possibilities yet to be seen.