The Better Leaders Better Schools Podcast | The #1 Downloaded School Leadership Show

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  Why Getting Answers From AI Is Hurting Your Leadership with Bill Renner 16.09.2026 53мин

  Currently in his eleventh year of school administration and his twenty-fifth in education, Bill Renner has run the full course through the Ruckus Maker system — the Mastermind, one-on-one coaching, and now Digital Danny. A middle school principal transitioning back to his first love, elementary, he's spent this year applying what each stage taught him about slowing down instead of reaching for the fastest answer in the room. He's also working on a book, currently titled Lead with Heart, Build with Purpose, and Serve with Joy, drawn from his own journals. School principal Bill Renner has used every tier of the Ruckus Maker system — the Mastermind, one-on-one coaching, and now Digital Danny. In this episode, he breaks down why fast answers from AI chatbots are quietly making leaders worse, and what changed when he learned to slow down before changing anything at a brand-new school. 💟 What You'll Learn Why treating AI like an answer machine can quietly make you a worse decision-maker. How to slow down and ask better questions before changing anything at a new school. Why giving your staff a "permission slip" to slow down changes how they show up. How to actually measure whether you're leading with joy instead of guessing at it. What separates the Mastermind, 1-on-1 coaching, and Digital Danny — and when to use each. 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧠 Key Insight #1: Why Instant AI Answers Lead to Mediocre School Leadership Decisions What's broken: Principals turn to AI chatbots for fast answers and start believing every idea the tool hands back is brilliant. The shift: A tool that asks better questions instead of supplying instant answers forces principals to actually reason through a decision first. Impact: Plans get executed with more ownership and better results because the leader has genuinely thought them through, not just accepted the first answer. 🧠 Key Insight #2: Why New Principals Should Ask Before They Change Anything What's broken: Experienced principals arrive at a new school with solutions already picked out, based on what worked somewhere else. The shift: Slow down and ask staff what they're proud of and where they feel stuck before changing a single thing. Impact: Staff spoke more openly once the notepad and devices disappeared, surfacing context a rushed transition would have missed entirely. 🧠 Key Insight #3: Why Giving Staff a "Permission Slip" Changes How They Show Up What's broken: Administrators push staff with deadlines and demands, expecting speed and compliance by default. The shift: Give staff explicit permission to slow down or push back — the same kind of permission a parent signs off on for a school trip. Impact: The room visibly relaxed, and staff started extending that same permission to each other. BILL QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "There has to be more to this leadership thing than just survival." — Bill Renner "Leaders, they don't need to prove that they have every answer. We just need to be willing to reflect, ask different questions, and continue to grow." — Bill Renner "Every day isn't joyful, but every day has joy." — Bill Renner "I gave them permission to slow things down. In this fast-paced society, we're all interconnected one way or another." — Bill Renner "When I go to Digital Danny, I'm doing deep work — breaking things down to get to the raw of what exactly am I doing and why am I doing it." — Bill Renner 🫶 Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Ask one staff member the question Bill used at his new school — "What's something we should never change here?" This Month: Give your staff one explicit "permission slip," written or spoken, to slow down or say no to something on their plate. This Semester: Build a weekly three-things-that-went-well journal, like Bill's, into your own routine to measure joy instead of guessing at it. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why 32 suspensions in one day killed his joy 04:33 - From hemming and hawing to joining the Mastermind 11:19 - Comparing Mastermind, 1-on-1 coaching, and Digital Danny 16:14 - The real difference between coaching and consulting 18:33 - The permission slip story that changed his staff meetings 22:41 - Using Digital Danny to plan a return to elementary school 24:58 - Why Digital Danny told him to slow down first 28:29 - Why arriving with curiosity beats arriving with answers 36:10 - Why ChatGPT makes you feel like a genius 37:52 - Digital Danny vs ChatGPT: heart surgeon or primary care doctor 44:19 - The leadership book inspired by a fellow Mastermind member 47:05 - How to actually measure joy as a principal 51:25 - The one thing every Ruckus Maker should remember 🔗 Link to the Transcript: Here 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🫶 Today's RuckusCast in Partnership With: IXL IXL's adaptive platform finds every student's knowledge gaps, adjusts difficulty as they learn, and gives you a dashboard showing exactly where growth is happening. 🔎 Over 1 million teachers use it — get started at https://ixl.com/leaders ODP Business Solutions ODP Business Solutions has supplied schools for 30 years — converting dead computer labs into STEAM centers, stocking multiple campuses, upgrading whiteboards to interactive displays — all from a single supplier through cooperative contracts. 🔎 Learn more at https://odpbusiness.com/education Orchard Orchard gives every student a personalized career action plan and scores readiness across 8 dimensions — a number you can take to your board. 🔎 See how it works at https://betterleaders.orchard.careers/ Kids First Education Kids First Education builds professional learning around your district's priorities, your data, and your classrooms — not pulled off a shelf — and 98% of educators walk out ready to use what they learned. 🔎 Partner with them at https://kidsfirst.llc/leaders
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  Why Student Behavior Won't Change Until the Adults Do 12.09.2026 48мин

  Student behavior changed when the adults did: 25 discipline calls a day dropped to about one. Here's the adult-first work behind it. School discipline problems don't start with the kids. Sarah spent years answering 20 to 25 walkie calls a day for escalated students. Tokens, red-light-green-light charts, taking away recess — external systems trying to fix an internal issue. Then she started doing the work on herself first. Ten days into opening a brand-new school this fall, she hasn't answered 12 calls total. Jill Molli has taught Conscious Discipline for 25 years, and she names the leap most principals never make. They'll regulate themselves for a kindergartner. They won't do it for the teacher who yells in the hallway but posts good test scores. Sarah Sicht did it with teachers, parents, and her own superiors. At her previous school, a 100% free-and-reduced-lunch building, that produced zero teacher turnover and a move from the bottom 10% of the state to the top 10% of Title I schools with the same kids and no redistricting. Jill also breaks down SAFE, the four-domain framework Conscious Discipline built by studying principals like Sarah: Sustained leadership, Adult regulation, Foster community, Engaged classroom. It's the spine of the Elevate conference, where Danny is keynoting the S.   REGISTER FOR ELEVATE Elevate is Conscious Discipline's conference in Orlando this October. Sessions are labeled by S.A.F.E. domain, so you go straight to what your campus needs. Danny, Jill, and Sarah will all be there.    Sign yourself up, sign the team up: https://elevateteacherconference.com/ ⌚️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - From 25 walkie calls a day to one 04:12 - What Sarah believed about kids before Conscious Discipline 07:09 - Willingness beats waiting for a reason to change 09:11 - Hurt doesn't only show up in Title I schools 10:32 - Building the soil with a brand-new staff 14:39 - The hardest part is doing it with adults 17:49 - Why leading alone gets hard 23:24 - What COVID taught Sarah about connection 26:55 - Lowest 10% to top 10% with the same kids 28:32 - The two questions every staff member asks 36:17 - Where the SAFE framework came from 38:32 - Breaking down the SAFE framework 46:09 - The one thing: it's adult first  
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  How to Make Better Decisions Without More Information with David Samuelson and Mary Call Blanusa 09.09.2026 47мин

  Leading the Alliance for Decision Education's work to make decision science part of core curriculum are David Samuelson, the organization's Executive Director, and Mary Call Blanusa, its Director of Public Policy. Samuelson spent his career leading digital transformation at national associations before turning to teaching students and school leaders the skills to navigate uncertainty — the same skills, he says, that make a good sailor in unpredictable water. Blanusa brings two decades of education policy and philanthropy experience, including co-designing decision-making courses with state systems like the Tennessee Board of Regents. Together they're building the research, courses, and district partnerships that treat decision making as a teachable skill, not an innate trait. A principal ignored a direct order from central office — and made the right call anyway. This post breaks down the decision-making process that got him there: how to turn gut feelings into percentages, separate good decisions from good outcomes, and keep your judgment sharp as AI takes over more of the thinking for you. 🧲 What You'll Learn How to turn vague words like "maybe" and "highly likely" into percentages your whole team agrees on. Why judging decisions by their outcomes alone will wreck your team's confidence in a good process. The weight-and-rate framework David and Danny used to decide whether to defy a district directive. Why decision-making skills now show up explicitly in 41% of job postings nationally. What "don't give your agency to an agent" means for how you use AI in your building. 🖊️ Breaking Down the Old Rules 👀 Key Insight #1: Why Vague Language Kills Good Decision Making What's broken: Leaders use words like "maybe" and "highly likely" as if they mean the same thing to everyone in the room. The shift: Assign an actual percentage to the word — "highly likely" might be 95% to one person and 80% to another — so the team is agreeing on a number, not a vibe. Impact: A goal like "highly likely to graduate 95% of students" only works as a shared commitment once everyone has agreed on what "highly likely" actually means. 💟 Key Insight #2: How to Separate Decision Quality From Outcomes What's broken: Principals get judged — and judge themselves — on how a decision turned out, not on how it was made. The shift: Evaluate the process (the options you considered, the criteria you weighted, the probabilities you assigned) as a separate question from whether things happened to work out. Impact: A slow, evidence-based call — like keeping two struggling teachers in place with more support instead of transferring them — can be the right decision even before you know how it ends. 💡 Key Insight #3: Why AI Makes Decision-Making Skills Non-Negotiable What's broken: Schools are handing students and staff more AI tools without teaching the judgment to question what those tools produce. The shift: Treat decision making and media literacy as explicit, teachable skills — how to ask AI for the counterfactual, spot a confirming answer, and decide what to hand off to an agent versus what to keep for yourself. Impact: Decision-making skills already appear explicitly in 41% of job postings nationally, and hiring managers treat them as table stakes even where they aren't listed. 🎧 DAVID & MARY QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Don't give your agency to an agent. Keep your agency and choose what you want to give an agent to do. And that is empowering." — David Samuelson "Your life depends on your decisions." — Mary Call Blanusa "The process used correctly is always going to be better than the process not used at all." — David Samuelson "The quality and success that you experience in life comes down to two things: luck and the quality of your decisions. You can't change luck, but you can always improve the quality of your decisions." — Mary Call Blanusa "Stop and think. When in doubt, stop and think with curiosity." — David Samuelson 🚵‍♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Run the words-to-probabilities exercise at your next leadership meeting — have each person put a number on "highly likely," "maybe," and "unlikely," then compare answers out loud. This Month: Take one decision you've been circling and run it through the weight-and-rate process — name your top three criteria, like academics, culture, and training, and score each option against them. This Semester: Build a shared, written definition of "what's best for kids" with your leadership team so the phrase can't be used as a one-person trump card. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - The decision to defy central office 03:26 - David's sailing certification built decision agency 07:13 - Why decision paralysis freezes school leaders 10:47 - The science behind high-stakes decision making 14:48 - The words-to-probabilities exercise explained 18:12 - Why best for kids needs a shared definition 19:43 - Weight and rate your decision criteria 23:31 - Kahneman's System 1 vs System 2 thinking 25:10 - Annie Duke on process versus outcome 33:24 - Why AI makes decision skills more urgent 39:01 - Inside the Alliance's district partnership model 44:45 - Closing lightning round with David and Mary 💻 Connect With Alliance for Decision Education 🌎 Website: https://alliancefordecisioneducation.org/ 💟 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AllDecisionEd 👩🏻‍💻 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alldecisioned/ 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alldecisioned/posts/?feedView=all 📝 Read Transcript here Report: Decision Skills in the Workforce New course on Decision Making: https://alliancefordecisioneducation.org/on-demand-learning-course/ Weight and Rate tool and instructions Decision Skills in the Workforce" report highlights (Mary referenced the report during the interview) Probability worksheet here. 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🫶 Today's Ruckuscast Partners IXL IXL's adaptive platform finds every student's knowledge gaps, adjusts difficulty as they learn, and gives you a dashboard showing exactly where growth is happening. Over 1 million teachers use it 🔎 Get started at https://ixl.com/leaders ODP Business Solutions ODP Business Solutions has supplied schools for 30 years — converting dead computer labs into STEAM centers, stocking multiple campuses, upgrading whiteboards to interactive displays — all from a single supplier through cooperative contracts. 🔎 Learn more at https://odpbusiness.com/education Orchard Orchard gives every student a personalized career action plan and scores readiness across 8 dimensions — a number you can take to your board. 🔎 See how it works at https://betterleaders.orchard.careers/ Kids First Education Kids First Education builds professional learning around your district's priorities, your data, and your classrooms — not pulled off a shelf — and 98% of educators walk out ready to use what they learned. 🔎 Partner with them at https://kidsfirst.llc/leaders  
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  Fred Holmes on Why He's Never Missed a Wednesday Mastermind 02.09.2026 39мин

  Over two decades in Memphis-area schools will teach you how to spot a leader who's still growing. Fred Holmes — known inside the Ruckus Maker Mastermind as the Velvet Hammer — started as a science teacher in Shelby County Schools, moved through teacher leadership and an assistant principalship, ran his own building as principal in Arkansas, and is now back in Memphis Shelby County Schools as a Professional Learning Communities coach, building leadership capacity district-wide. He's been a Ruckus Maker since the Mastermind's earliest days, joining during his first principalship and never missing a Wednesday since. Find him inside the Ruckus Maker community at betterleadersbetterschools.com Most AI tools will give you a confident answer whether or not it's actually true. Fred Holmes, a longtime Ruckus Maker and Memphis-area school leader, breaks down why he trusts his AI coach for principals — Digital Danny, built exclusively for school leadership — with his highest-stakes conversations, and why a decade-old peer Mastermind still shapes how he leads today. 🖊️ What You'll Learn Why generic AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini can't replace a coach trained specifically for school leadership. How Fred rehearses high-stakes conversations with his AI coach before he has them in real life. The four jobs a real AI coach for principals should actually do. Why Fred still shows up to the same Wednesday Mastermind after nearly a decade. How to use your commute to get mentally ready to lead, instead of scrolling. 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🫶 Key Insight #1: Why Generic AI Tools Fail as an AI Coach for Principals What's broken: Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini answer every question with total confidence — even when they don't actually know — because they're trained on everyone's data instead of built for school leadership. The shift: An AI coach for principals should be trained exclusively on real school leadership coaching, refuse to train on your private conversations, and say "I don't know" instead of guessing. Impact: Fred trusts it enough to bring real, sensitive workplace situations to it — the kind he'd never run through a general AI tool. 🧲 Key Insight #2: How to Rehearse a High-Stakes Conversation Before You Have It What's broken: Principals walk into tough conversations — an underperforming direct report, a political conflict with a supervisor, a hard parent call — without a sounding board, and the wrong tone can make everything worse. The shift: Fred talks through the exact conversation with his AI coach first, testing language and thinking through the other person's perspective before he ever says a word out loud. Impact: He shows up calm and confident, because he's already rehearsed the hardest part before it happens. 🚀 Key Insight #3: Why an AI Coach Still Can't Replace a Weekly Peer Mastermind What's broken: Isolated leaders assume an always-on AI tool is enough support — but the loneliness of leadership doesn't disappear because there's an app on your phone. The shift: Fred pairs his AI coach with a live, weekly Mastermind of peer principals, using one as a thought partner and the other as human accountability. Impact: Nearly a decade later, he still hasn't missed a Wednesday. 💡 FRED HOLMES QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "It's refreshing, it's renewing, it's empowering. It's where the loneliness of leadership disappears." — Fred Holmes "I already know where this is going. He's going to say, put it on the calendar." — Fred Holmes "Digital Danny just cuts through that noise, gives the signal." — Fred Holmes "I have this calmness and this peace. But also I have the confidence because I had that conversation." — Fred Holmes "If you're getting better, then your school is going to get better." — Fred Holmes ♟Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Open your AI coach — or a blank doc if you don't have one yet — and talk through the one high-stakes conversation you've been avoiding this week. This Month: Build a 10-minute reflection or coaching routine into your commute instead of starting your day on your phone. This Semester: Find or start a weekly peer Mastermind where other leaders push you the way Fred's Wednesday group pushes him. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why Fred never misses a Wednesday Mastermind 04:57 - Fred's journey to Memphis PLC coach 06:16 - Why Digital Danny was a level up 08:31 - The four jobs Digital Danny does for principals 11:01 - How Fred uses Digital Danny every morning 14:40 - Using Digital Danny before tough conversations 18:17 - What surprised Fred most about the tool 22:00 - Why Fred trusts Digital Danny over ChatGPT 25:18 - Inside the private Ruckus Maker Club 33:16 - The legacy behind the Ruckus Makers community 34:29 - How Fred found Mastermind through Google 37:53 - Fred's parting advice to Ruckus Makers 🔗 Connect With Fred Holmes 📝 Read trascript here 🌍 Website: https://betterleadersbetterschools.com/ 🔗  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederick-holmes-carpediem/ 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com Today's Ruckuscast Partners Orchard gives every student an actual career-readiness score — a real number you can hand your board instead of a vague hope. It's built by a founder who watched his own dad drift through a career he hated and decided kids deserve better than that. 🔎 See what Orchard built at BetterLeadersOrchardCareers.com ODP Business Solutions has spent 30 years turning ordinary campuses into learning environments students actually want to be in — furniture, tech integration, and sustainable builds, all from a single supplier so procurement isn't a nightmare. They helped Belago Academy build collaborative spaces so engaging students forgot to check their phones. 🔎 Start at ODPbusiness.com/education IXL's universal screener identifies which students need intervention in 20 minutes or less, then its adaptive platform adjusts to the right difficulty for every single student automatically. Over a million teachers already trust it to make differentiated instruction possible without adding hours to their week. 🔎 Get started at IXL.com/leaders Kids First Education exists to put the reason you became a leader — the kids — back at the center of your job, with coaching and support built specifically for school and district leaders. 98% of educators who work with them say they left ready to use what they learned that same week. Learn more at KidsFirstLLC.com/leaders  
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  Why Principals Won't Delegate (And What It's Costing Them) with Naphtali Hoff 26.08.2026 38мин

   Dr. Naphtali Hoff trains school leaders and teachers to perform at their best without running themselves into the ground. A former educator and school leader himself, Dr. Hoff now coaches and trains school leaders on management, productivity, and delegation across the country. He's the author of three books, and his newest, Becoming the Delegating School Boss, is the one most relevant here — it helps school leaders clear their plates and empower their teams. Dr. Naphtali Hoff joins the Ruckuscast to break down why so many principals resist letting go, and what it actually takes to build a team you can trust. Every principal has felt it: the sense that if they left the building for a day, something would fall apart. That's not a compliment — it's a delegation problem, and it's quietly running good leaders into the ground. This episode breaks down why school leaders won't let go, and the exact framework for handing off real work without losing control of it. 🤯 What You'll Learn Why most delegation "excuses" are unexamined fears, not facts, and how to name yours honestly. How to use the Eisenhower matrix to sort your task list into do, defer, delegate, and delete. Why chasing perfection instead of excellence is quietly costing you time and staff trust. How Ken Blanchard's ABCD trust model tells you who's actually ready to take something off your plate. The one low-risk, low-stakes task every principal should delegate first. 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 📚 Key Insight #1: Why School Leaders Treat Delegation Excuses Like Facts What's broken: Principals tell themselves "I don't have the time to train someone" and treat it as an immovable truth instead of an excuse. The shift: Naphtali Hoff reframes these as excuses, not myths — challenges to work through, not facts to accept. Impact: Leaders who name the excuse for what it is stop waiting for the "right" moment and start handing off real work now. 💡 Key Insight #2: The Eisenhower Matrix Every Principal Needs for Delegation What's broken: Without a system, urgent tasks crowd out important ones, and everything ends up back on the principal's desk. The shift: Sort every task into do, defer, delegate, or delete — and treat quadrant three as your standing delegation list. Impact: Principals free up hours each week for the visioning and instructional leadership work only they can do. 🧲 Key Insight #3: Why Perfection Is Costing Principals Trust, Not Building It What's broken: Leaders hold their team to a personal standard of perfection that almost no one else shares or notices. The shift: Aim for excellence, hand off the outcome, and let go of controlling every small detail along the way. Impact: Staff step up faster, and the principal gets back the hours they were burning on edits nobody asked for. 🧠 NAPHTALI HOFF QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Excellence really should be the goal, because perfection is the enemy of progress." — Naphtali Hoff "Delegating is not abdicating." — Naphtali Hoff "Their standard of good enough is probably a lot lower than your standard of excellence." — Naphtali Hoff "If I leave the building, there's going to be chaos unfolding. That means I have not done a very good job in delegating." — Naphtali Hoff "You have to realize what is it that I'm uniquely gifted at and capable of, and what can I empower other people to do?" — Naphtali Hoff 🧩 Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Pick one recurring task — a newsletter, a weekly email, an observation schedule — and hand it off with a clear outcome instead of a script. This Month: Run a two-week activity log of everything you do, then sort each task into do, defer, delegate, or delete. This Semester: Move one staff member through Blanchard's four stages — directing, coaching, supporting, delegating — until a real piece of your job is permanently theirs. ⏳ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - The warning sign you're the campus bottleneck 03:02 - Naphtali's delegation disaster as a new headmaster 06:17 - The excuses school leaders use to avoid delegating 08:12 - Why excellence beats perfection in delegation 09:49 - Building trust with the ABCD model 13:50 - Using the Eisenhower matrix to audit your tasks 16:49 - Ruthlessly cutting energy-draining tasks each quarter 22:03 - What leaders should never delegate away 23:23 - Situational leadership and the four stages of delegating 25:00 - How to choose who to delegate to 27:30 - The first low-risk delegation win to try 33:30 - Keeping delegation sustainable when it gets hard 🫶 Connect With Naphtali Hoff 🌍 Websites: impactfulcoaching.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/naphtali.hoff Twitter: https://twitter.com/impactfulcoach LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naphtalihoff/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/naphtalihoff/ 📚 Books: Becoming the New Boss, Becoming the Productive Boss, 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🤝 Today's Ruckuscast Partners Most kids "think about" their future. They take a quiz, grab a brochure, and name three careers they saw on TV. That's not a plan. Orchard helps every student build a real, personalized career action plan, with an AI buddy named Orchie guiding the way. Explore careers. Compare paths. Take the next step this week. 🔎 Show your students what's possible → https://betterleaders.orchard.careers/ For 30 years, ODP Business Solutions has helped schools swap tired classrooms for spaces students actually want to walk into. Smart boards, flexible furniture that turns any room into a collaboration zone, and tech integrations that bring lessons to life — all from one supplier, with easy access to cooperative contracts so procurement doesn't slow you down. Innovative school leaders use them to simplify ordering and streamline budgeting while staying compliant. 🔎 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to redesign your learning spaces. Teachers who say "I taught it, they should have learned it" are missing the diagnostic data to actually close the gap. IXL automatically identifies each student's knowledge gaps and builds a personalized growth plan around them, so teachers walk into class knowing exactly what students know and don't. The platform adjusts difficulty in real time as students learn, making differentiation automatic instead of another task on your plate. 🔎 Get started at ixl.com/leaders Kids First Education was founded by career educators, not consultants, and it shows in how they work. They partner with PreK-12 districts to deliver instructional coaching, leadership development, and curriculum support built on collaboration, reflective planning, and shared problem-solving — not theory. Whether you lead one building or an entire district, their team meets yours where it is. 🔎 See how they can support your school at kidsfirstllc.com  
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  Why Your Anti-Racist PD Isn't Actually Changing Anything with Dr Abby C. Emerson 23.08.2026 47мин

  She studies why anti-racist professional development in schools so often fails to change how teachers actually treat students — and what works instead. Dr Abby C. Emerson is an assistant professor of Childhood Education at Hunter College, CUNY, where her research spans anti-racist and abolitionist teacher education, restorative justice, and the critique of whiteness in educational spaces. She's been named National Association for Multicultural Education's Critical Teacher of the Year, and this fall she releases her book, From Anti-Racism to Professional Learning for Liberating Schools, with Harvard Education Press. Most schools running anti-racist professional development hit the same wall: teachers learn the theory, reflect on their own bias, update a unit — and the discipline data doesn't move. Dr. Abby C. Emerson studied schools across New York City to find out why, and she found the fix isn't another workshop. It's handing the mic to students. 📚 What You'll Learn Why the three most common anti-racist PD strategies rarely change discipline outcomes How one high school's student-led equity committee exposed teacher bias that surveys never could Why "call-out culture" undermines anti-racist work faster than it builds it How to communicate proactively with parents before backlash starts Why breaking curriculum change into small, sequenced steps outperforms sweeping overhauls 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧠 Key Insight #1: Why Anti-Racist Professional Development Doesn't Change Discipline Data What's broken: Schools run PD on structural racism, individual reflection, and curriculum revision, then assume the culture has shifted. The shift: Track whether discipline outcomes actually move — not whether teachers can articulate the theory. Impact: Educators reported updating their curriculum while the same students kept getting pulled out of class for the same behavior, because the PD never reached school-wide policy. 🧠 Key Insight #2: The Student Voice Committee That Exposed Teacher Bias What's broken: Adult-only equity committees rely on surveys and self-report — data teachers can rationalize away. The shift: One high school trained students on its equity committee to collect, analyze, and present discipline data directly to staff, with no teacher in the room. Impact: Teachers only reversed their denial when white students said out loud that Black classmates were being punished for the exact same behavior they weren't. 🧠 Key Insight #3: Why Call-Out Culture Kills Anti-Racist Progress What's broken: PD that turns into "gotcha" policing — correcting language, catching mistakes in real time — makes people defensive and shuts the conversation down. The shift: Build the relationship first: one-on-one conversations, patience, and space for staff to say when they don't feel great about the PD. Impact: Principals who built trust before pushing change kept staff in the work, instead of losing them to resistance or resignation. 🗣️ DR. ABBY C. EMERSON QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Racism is not just about a couple bad apples, but that racism is a systemic structural piece that impacts all of us." — Dr. Abby C. Emerson "Education and teaching can be used as a tool to really challenge inequality in all its forms." — Dr. Abby C. Emerson "That relationship piece is more important than calling people out." — Dr. Abby C. Emerson "That sort of policing of each other was ultimately really detrimental." — Dr. Abby C. Emerson "I really tried to get ahead of the conversation so families knew it was coming home." — Dr. Abby C. Emerson 🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Schedule one 15-minute conversation with a teacher who's pushed back on equity work, and just listen before you respond. This Month: Pull last semester's discipline data broken out by race and share it with your leadership team before your next PD session. This Semester: Launch a student equity or student voice committee that collects and presents its own data directly to staff. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Cold open: the data that shocked teachers 02:47 - Introducing Dr. C. Abby Emerson 04:04 - The PD disaster that sparked her research 06:24 - Why teacher time is too precious to waste 09:35 - Three patterns in anti-racist PD across NYC schools 12:11 - How teachers respond to learning structural racism 16:31 - Why call-out culture backfires in PD 18:08 - Facing political backlash after 2020 23:37 - The hardest work: individual self-reflection 26:25 - Curriculum revision, one unit at a time 29:47 - Two critiques: discipline gaps and individualized PD 37:55 - How a student voice committee changed a school 42:47 - Rapid-fire: marquee message and dream school principles 🤝 Connect With Dr. Abby C. Emerson 👩🏻‍💻 Website: https://www.abbyemerson.com/ 🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/abby-emerson-edd-4a387a55 📕 Book: (From Antiracism to Abolition: Professional Learning for Liberating Schools - https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9798895571170/from-antiracism-to-abolition/ )  🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🫶 Today's RuckusCast Partners Most kids "think about" their future. They take a quiz, grab a brochure, and name three careers they saw on TV. That's not a plan. Orchard helps every student build a real, personalized career action plan, with an AI buddy named Orchie guiding the way. Explore careers. Compare paths. Take the next step this week. 🔎 Show your students what's possible → https://betterleaders.orchard.careers/ ODP Business Solutions has been a trusted partner for schools for 30 years, handling everything from pencils to projectors so your team stops scrambling for supplies every August. They'll help you turn a tired computer lab into a STEAM innovation center, keep multiple campuses stocked and stocked sustainably, or upgrade from whiteboards to interactive displays — all through one supplier with access to cooperative contracts that simplify ordering and keep budgets compliant. 🔎 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to learn more. IXL helps over 1 million teachers differentiate instruction in 20 minutes or less using real-time, data-informed insight — and gives Ruckus Makers a dashboard to track student progress and growth at every level, with reports you can customize to what matters most to your school. It's how data-informed decisions actually get made at scale, not just talked about. 🔎 Get started at ixl.com/leaders Kids First Education was founded by career educators and partners with Pre-K through 12 districts and schools to deliver instructional coaching, leadership development, and curriculum support built on collaboration and reflective planning. Whether you lead a single building or an entire district, they meet your team where they are with a relentless focus on what's best for kids. 🔎 Learn more at kidsfirst.llc
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  Why the "Conveyor Belt" Career Model Is Failing Kids with Corey Kossack 19.08.2026 49мин

  Building AI tools that replace one-size-fits-all personality tests with real career plans is what got Corey Kossack into K12 education. He's the founder and CEO of Orchard, an AI-powered career counseling platform for schools, and Aspireship, an employee upskilling platform — work born from watching his own father cycle in and out of a job he hated for years. Kossack has spent his career helping people who want to help themselves climb toward ambitious goals, and Orchard is the result: an AI career counselor named Orchie, paired with real interviews from working professionals across hundreds of occupations. For Ruckus Makers wrestling with overworked counselors and an outdated career-readiness playbook, that's the credential that matters. Most schools still run career readiness on a conveyor belt: next grade, next test, college, then hope for the best. Corey Kossack argues that model was built for a workforce AI has already started dismantling — and he's built a system for what comes after it. This is the episode for any Ruckus Maker rethinking what career readiness actually means right now. 🧐 What You'll Learn Why the "conveyor belt" model of career prep breaks down the moment AI starts reshaping entire job categories The four stages of school transformation — conveyor belt, simulation, mentor, and venture mode — and what each looks like in practice Why personality tests give students false certainty instead of real career readiness How AI tools like Orchard's Orchie can support overworked counselors instead of replacing them What it actually takes to build career connections into daily instruction instead of treating it as an extra 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 📚 Key Insight #1: The Conveyor Belt Career Readiness Model Is Broken What's broken: Schools push students through a fixed path — next grade, next test, college, career — built for a stable workforce that no longer exists. The shift: Replace single-path thinking with a system built on exploration, mentorship, and venture (real-world doing) woven into the curriculum instead of bolted onto it. Impact: Students leave school with an actual plan and multiple explored pathways, instead of a deterministic label like "you're an engineer." 📚 Key Insight #2: Personality Tests Give False Certainty, Not Career Readiness What's broken: Traditional interest inventories are deterministic — one survey tells a student exactly what they'll be, and it's often wrong. The shift: AI-driven exploration lets students search by criteria — "an innovative tech career for creative people" — instead of getting boxed into a single job title. Impact: Students can compare pay, pathways, and requirements across a dozen careers at once instead of fixating on one narrow "good job." 🚀 Key Insight #3: AI Career Coaching Should Back Up Counselors, Not Replace Them What's broken: School counselors are overworked and can't possibly know the full breadth of occupations that exist today, especially as AI reshapes the job market in real time. The shift: Tools like Orchard's Orchie generate a personalized student action plan in under 20 seconds, freeing counselors to focus on relationship and guidance instead of research. Impact: Counselors gain a resource that scales their impact instead of one more task piled onto an already impossible list. ✍️ COREY KOSSACK QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "If you're using the conveyor belt method at your school to prepare kids for the future, you are failing your students." — Corey Kossack "That conveyor belt method was built to produce a stable workforce. A workforce that's now gone." — Corey Kossack "Your students don't need to take a personality test telling them what they will one day be." — Corey Kossack "Don't fall into your future. Climb to it." — Corey Kossack "Why do we put it all on counselors? Why does it all have to be on counselors?" — Corey Kossack "How would you possibly expect a counselor to know all of these things?" — Corey Kossack "College is not the destination. It is a step in the journey." — Corey Kossack 🚵‍♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Pull up the episode's example of an overlooked career — like clinical operations for pharma trials — and share it with one counselor or teacher today. This Month: Sit down with your counseling team and map where your current career-advising process relies on a single deterministic test instead of open-ended exploration. This Semester: Build at least one explicit career connection into a core academic course, so students see how the subject maps to real occupations as part of the curriculum, not an add-on. ⌚️Episode Timestamps 00:00 - The conveyor belt method is failing students 03:26 - Corey's origin story: why his dad hated his job 06:15 - Why AI urgency is reshaping career readiness now 08:51 - A marketing team goes from five reports to zero 09:58 - Trades, GTM engineers, and chasing "the one thing" 12:27 - Why no one fully understands real career options 15:35 - The problem with deterministic personality tests 18:10 - Conveyor belt, simulation, mentor, and venture mode 28:54 - Inside Orchard: meeting Orchie, the AI career counselor 33:24 - Comparing pay and pathways across a dozen careers 35:58 - Building a personalized action plan in under 20 seconds 42:46 - Why this supports counselors instead of replacing them 44:29 - Corey's marquee message and dream campus principles 🎧 Connect With Corey Kossack Website: https://[email protected]/, aspireship.com Follow on social: linkedin.com/in/coreykossack 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners Most kids "think about" their future. They take a quiz, grab a brochure, and name three careers they saw on TV. That's not a plan.  Orchard helps every student build a real, personalized career action plan, with an AI buddy named Orchie guiding the way. Explore careers. Compare paths. Take the next step this week. 🔎 Show your students what's possible → https://betterleaders.orchard.careers/ ODP Business Solutions has spent 30 years helping school districts build learning environments students actually want to be in. They helped Belago Academy replace disengaged classrooms with collaborative spaces, tech integration, and flexible furniture that changed how kids learn — not just where they sit. You get it all from one supplier, which means simpler ordering, easier budgeting, and access to cooperative contracts that keep you compliant. 🔎 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to see what they can build for your campus. IXL's universal screener identifies which students need intervention in 20 minutes or less — no guesswork, no wasted class time. Its adaptive learning platform, used by more than 1 million teachers, automatically adjusts to each student's exact level, so differentiation stops being a heavy lift. 🔎 Get started at IXL.com/leaders Kids First Education was founded by career educators who partner with Pre-K through 12 schools and districts to deliver instructional coaching, leadership development, and curriculum support built on real classroom experience. Their approach runs on collaboration, reflective planning, and shared problem-solving — all pointed at one outcome: better decisions for kids. Whether you lead one building or an entire district, they meet your team where it is. 🔎 Learn more at kidsfirst.llc
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  Experiential Education: Why Your Lesson Plan Is Failing Students 12.08.2026 49мин

  Phil Brown trains educators to build the kind of learning moments a curriculum can't schedule. As an experiential and adventure education trainer at High 5 Adventure Learning Center, he's guided everyone from Iraqi high schoolers working through conflict resolution to NHL players from the Boston Bruins and Calgary Flames through experiences designed to stretch — not break — them. He also serves on the board of the Association for Experiential Education and hosts the podcast Vertical Playpen, where he digs deeper into the theory and practice behind this work. Most principals have sat through a lesson that went exactly as planned and taught nobody anything. Phil Brown has the opposite story: a day where nothing went as planned, and it became the most important teaching moment of his career. This episode is about what happened in between — and why experiential education, not another curriculum map, might be the fix your campus actually needs. 🫶 What You'll Learn Why following student curiosity can outperform even the best-designed lesson plan How the comfort zone, stretch zone, and panic zone model applies to staff and students alike Why "connection before content" isn't a soft skill — it's the fastest path to real learning What Kolb's experiential learning cycle looks like in a real classroom Why experiential education has a marketing problem, not a results problem 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules ✅ Key Insight #1: Why Rigid Lesson Plans Kill Real Learning What's broken: Principals and teachers design lessons with locked agendas, tight timelines, and predetermined outcomes — then treat any deviation as a distraction. The shift: Follow the student's natural curiosity, even when it means abandoning the plan entirely. Impact: Phil scrapped an entire day's ropes-course curriculum to follow a student's question about a pine cone — and it became the most connective, most talked-about day of the entire program. 📚 Key Insight #2: Why Connection Before Content Changes Classroom Outcomes What's broken: Educators rush into curriculum before earning trust, assuming content delivery is the job and connection is a nice-to-have. The shift: Build genuine connection first. Content moves faster once trust exists. Impact: Groups who bond before instruction absorb content faster and take more risks, because they trust the adult guiding them enough to be honest when something's too much. 🚀 Key Insight #3: The Comfort Zone, Stretch Zone, and Panic Zone Every Leader Should Know What's broken: Educators assume "pushing kids out of their comfort zone" is automatically good — and push straight into panic without realizing it. The shift: Real growth happens in the stretch zone, not the panic zone. The goal is productive struggle, not overwhelm. Impact: Students who trust their leader will self-advocate the moment they're nearing panic — instead of shutting down or disengaging silently. 🗣️ PHIL BROWN QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Find the pine cone. That just really means to be open to students' natural curiosity and follow it." — Phil Brown "Connection before content." — Phil Brown "It's the same thing with that supervisor who says, my door is always open — you know full well that door is not open." — Phil Brown "When in doubt, give them your heart." — Phil Brown "The only thing that you learn when you panic is, hell no, I don't want to do it again." — Phil Brown "Your aim is not to be childish, but be childlike." — Phil Brown 🚵‍♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: The next time a student or teacher asks an off-topic question, stop and follow it for five minutes instead of redirecting back to your agenda. This Month: Build one intentional "connection before content" activity into your next staff meeting, before any agenda item gets introduced. This Semester: Pick one entrenched schedule block — a 42-minute period, a PD day — and redesign it around Kolb's cycle: experience, reflect, apply, act, instead of a fixed lesson plan. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why rigid lesson plans block real learning 05:01 - Bringing Sunni and Shiite teens to Vermont 07:25 - Planning ropes courses the students didn't need 08:49 - The pine cone question that changed everything 12:20 - Using Ubuntu cards to build connection 14:20 - Why connection must come before content 15:23 - Kolb's experiential learning cycle explained 20:13 - The three components that make it adventure 26:37 - Comfort zone stretch zone and panic zone 29:34 - Why trust determines how far students stretch 35:59 - Why schools were built for the industrial age 38:11 - Selling experiential education to administrators 44:38 - Phil's message for every school marquee 47:47 - Find the pine cone the final takeaway 🔗 Connect With Phil Brown 👩🏻‍💻 Website: https://high5adventure.org/ , https://www.aee.org/ 👉 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/phil-brown-high5 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com Today's RuckusCast Partners Still scrambling for supplies like it's 1999? ODP Business Solutions has been the trusted supply partner for schools for 30 years — from restocking eight campuses with sustainable, scalable solutions to redesigning a tired computer lab into a full STEAM innovation center. Everything comes from one supplier, which means simpler ordering, streamlined budgeting, and easy access to cooperative contracts. 🔎 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to see what they can build for your district. IXL isn't just a teacher tool — it's a leadership dashboard. Ruckus Makers use IXL to put a finger on the pulse of student performance, drilling down to individual growth and customizing reports around what matters most to their goals. 🔎 Get started at ixl.com/leaders Kids First Education was founded by career educators who partner with Pre-K through 12 schools and districts to deliver instructional coaching, leadership development, and curriculum support built on collaboration and real classroom data — not theory. Whether you lead a single building or an entire system, they meet your team where it is. 🔎 Learn more at kidsfirst.llc META DESCRIPTION: Experiential education beats lesson plans. Learn how connection-before-content and stretch zones drive real student engagement.  
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  The Learning Model That Turned a Dropout Into the Class Speaker with Jenny Curtin 09.08.2026 42мин

  Jenny Curtin partners with schools and districts across New England on behalf of the Barr Foundation, where she helps build and scale Transformative Learning Experiences — rigorous, project-based units developed with partner Springpoint that pull students out of the classroom and into courtrooms, communities, and real business ventures. Her work runs on a philanthropic value most funders don't practice: taking the long view, and staying with schools through the slow, unglamorous work of actual change. A student named Buddha dropped out of high school after years of disconnected, irrelevant coursework — and became his graduation class speaker after enrolling somewhere that taught differently. Jenny Curtin of the Barr Foundation joins the show to explain the model behind that turnaround, and why most school transformation efforts stall before they ever reach a kid like him. 🫶 What You'll Learn Why "taking the long view" beats chasing the next quick fix in school reform How to design school changes around your most marginalized students first What a Transformative Learning Experience unit actually looks like in practice Why community with other school leaders is what sustains multi-year change efforts 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧠 Key Insight #1: Why School Transformation Requires Slowing Down First What's broken: Schools chase quick fixes and bolt-on programs instead of questioning their actual purpose and vision. The shift: Leaders take the long view — slowing down to investigate vision, gather empathy interviews, and study other school models before acting. Impact: Change becomes sustainable enough to survive leadership turnover instead of collapsing the moment its champion leaves. 🧠 Key Insight #2: Why Centering Marginalized Students Redesigns the Whole School What's broken: Most school redesign starts from the average student and treats the most marginalized students as an afterthought. The shift: Design at the margins first — build for the students least served by the current system, then let that design benefit everyone. Impact: A school that centred a disconnected, disengaged dropout re-enrolled him — and he graduated as class speaker. 🧠 Key Insight #3: Why Project-Based Learning Beats Traditional Coursework What's broken: Traditional coursework asks students to check a box for a diploma without connecting it to their real lives. The shift: Transformative Learning Experiences put students in real courtrooms for moot trials, real neighbourhoods for gentrification photography projects, and real business plans built with math skills. Impact: Students report a deeper sense of their own potential, and even early-adopter teachers say the model shifted what they believe is possible for kids. 🎧 JENNY CURTIN QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "The silver bullets that are always coming on the scene for education are a trap." — Jenny Curtin "We're not interested in people just adding more decorations onto an existing cake." — Jenny Curtin "If we aren't ever designing at those margins of who isn't being served well, we're never going to get to those young people." — Jenny Curtin "There's like many different, beautiful high school models that can exist that do not have to look all the same." — Jenny Curtin "We're not interested in making marginal changes to make things marginally better for young people." — Jenny Curtin ✍️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Pull up your school's current improvement plan and circle every initiative that's a bolt-on program rather than a rebuilt foundation. This Month: Shadow three students who are least served by your current model and document what they actually need. This Semester: Pilot one project-based, community-connected unit — like a moot court trial or a local-issue investigation — with a single grade or department. 🚀 Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why there are no quick fixes in education 03:28 - Buddha's story: from dropout to class speaker 08:18 - Why the system wasn't built to serve every student 10:38 - Centering the most marginalized students first 12:10 - The cake analogy: stop decorating, start re-baking 14:35 - What taking the long view actually means 19:33 - Why school leaders need community, not isolation 26:09 - Inside Transformative Learning Experiences: Students in the Law 28:31 - Taking learning beyond the school walls 30:40 - How project-based learning shifts staff mindset 33:26 - How high-impact leaders sustain change over years 37:23 - Jenny's marquee message and three principles for a dream school 💌 Connect With Jenny Curtin Website: https://www.barrfoundation.org/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jennycurtin 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🫶 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has been the behind-the-scenes partner for schools for three decades — not just competitive pricing, but negotiated cooperative contracts that stretch every dollar. They helped Baldwin School District overhaul its entire campus without blowing the budget, combining smart design with smarter purchasing. From essential supplies to cutting-edge tech to flexible furniture, it's one supplier instead of ten separate headaches. Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to see what they can do for your district. Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report makes one thing clear: retention, not just hiring, is what determines staffing stability. Districts running structured, automated professional growth software report easier hiring nearly half the time — compared to just 30% of districts without it. If you're building a campus where great educators actually want to stay, this report is your blueprint. Get it free at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders IXL kills the guesswork in lesson planning — teachers get ready-made, standards-aligned lessons built for exactly what their textbooks already cover. Add daily insight into student performance and teachers can adjust instruction before a gap becomes a pattern. Your teachers get the tool, your students get the growth. Start at IXL.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: Barr Foundation's Jenny Curtin on why real high school transformation starts with slowing down, not adding another program.
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  Why Firing Yourself Might Be Your Best Leadership Move 05.08.2026 41мин

  A principal and coach based in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, this episode's guest flips the usual format and turns the mic on Danny Bauer instead of the other way around. He brings the same coaching lens to the conversation that he uses inside the Better Leaders Better Schools Mastermind, where he works alongside other school leaders on the exact challenges this episode covers. His questions push Danny past the usual talking points and into the mechanics of building a leadership vision that doesn't depend on him. Most principals think the answer to burnout is working harder. Danny Bauer argues the opposite — that in an AI-accelerated world, grinding is the least effective thing a school leader can do, and the real work is learning to fire yourself from the things you love most. 🧠 What You'll Learn Why treating leadership like a grind is now the least effective strategy in an AI-accelerated world How to test whether your storytelling actually lands — instead of assuming it does Why Danny deliberately fired himself from the mastermind he built The reason narrowing an AI tool's focus makes it more useful, not less How to think about your leadership across a 50-year or 200-year timeline 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules ✅ Key Insight #1: Why Most Principals Are Bad at Storytelling and Don't Know It What's broken: Principals assume they're strong communicators because staff nod, laugh, and lean in — but that's compliance to the boss, not honest feedback. The shift: Test the story on people with zero reason to fake interest — strangers or students — and if they don't smile and lean in, the story isn't working yet. Impact: Deliberately practiced storytelling turns abstract goals like "student engagement" into a moment staff actually remember, repeat, and act on. 💚 Key Insight #2: Sustainable School Leadership Means Firing Yourself From What You Love What's broken: Most leaders equate their own importance with holding onto every program, room, and decision they built. The shift: Danny intentionally handed away the mastermind he built to other coaches to run it, testing whether what he'd built was real or was always just about him. Impact: The mastermind got better and more sustainable once more people owned it — proof that a vision built to outlast its founder is stronger than one that depends on him. ✅ Key Insight #3: The Best Leadership Tools Get Narrower, Not Broader What's broken: Most AI tools, and most PD, try to be everything to everyone — trading depth for a wider audience. The shift: Danny narrowed Digital Danny's training down to his core frameworks — entry plans, automatic school tools, coaching conversations — instead of everything he's ever written. Impact: A narrower, specialist tool outperforms general-purpose AI for a principal working a specific problem, the same way a specialist coach outperforms a generalist consultant. 🎧 DANNY BAUER & DAN WATT QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "You might be the biggest bottleneck in your organization, not because you're incompetent, but because you're holding on to everything you're really good at." — Danny Bauer "What would happen if you disappeared tomorrow? Would your vision sustain, or would it collapse because it was always about you, not the system you built?" — Danny Bauer "Do you realize that most of what you're doing is all made up?" — Danny Bauer "If you don't like the game, change the rules, make up a new game." — Danny Bauer "The leader is the chief opportunity and bottleneck to every organization." — Danny Bauer "Tell it to strangers, and if they don't smile and lean in, you suck at storytelling." — Danny Bauer "Think of the context of a school leader that hopes their vision is a collective one and not solely theirs." — Dan Watt 🚵‍♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Tell your best "leadership story" to someone with zero context — a stranger, a student, anyone with no reason to fake interest — and watch whether they actually lean in. This Month: Pick one responsibility you're gripping tightly and hand it fully to someone else on your team, then watch what happens without you in the loop. This Semester: Map out what your school, program, or team would need to survive and thrive if you left tomorrow — then start building toward that, on purpose, before you're forced to. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why grinding harder is now a dead model 04:40 - The sleeping teacher story that changed everything 09:40 - Why most leaders are garbage storytellers 14:02 - Inside the rebuilt Digital Danny and automatic school tools 18:50 - Why narrowing the niche beats ChatGPT and Claude 21:14 - Trading the grind for play and creative rediscovery 24:24 - The false belief that grinding is the only choice 25:44 - Reframing leadership as a game with rules you can change 30:42 - The empty cup metaphor for overflowing leaders 32:00 - How improv unlocks fearlessness in leadership 34:48 - Firing himself from the mastermind he built 38:17 - Building toward a 50-year or 200-year legacy 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🫶 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has been the behind-the-scenes partner for schools for three decades — not just competitive pricing, but negotiated cooperative contracts that stretch every dollar. They helped Baldwin School District overhaul its entire campus without blowing the budget, combining smart design with smarter purchasing. From essential supplies to cutting-edge tech to flexible furniture, it's one supplier instead of ten separate headaches. Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to see what they can do for your district. Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report makes one thing clear: retention, not just hiring, is what determines staffing stability. Districts running structured, automated professional growth software report easier hiring nearly half the time — compared to just 30% of districts without it. If you're building a campus where great educators actually want to stay, this report is your blueprint. Get it free at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders IXL kills the guesswork in lesson planning — teachers get ready-made, standards-aligned lessons built for exactly what their textbooks already cover. Add daily insight into student performance and teachers can adjust instruction before a gap becomes a pattern. Your teachers get the tool, your students get the growth. Start at IXL.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: Danny Bauer on why grinding harder fails school leaders, and how firing yourself from what you love builds a vision that outlasts you.
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  Why Your Equity Work Isn't Closing the Gap with Zaretta Hammond 29.07.2026 46мин

  Zaretta Hammond has spent her career pushing school leaders past feel-good equity language and into the instructional core, where the real gaps live. Her latest book, Rebuilding Students' Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice, names a pattern she calls cognition redlining — the quiet, well-intentioned way schools underdevelop the thinking capacity of historically marginalized students. She's the author behind Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, a text already sitting on most instructional coaches' shelves. Districts have poured billions into equity work for three decades, and the outcomes for Black, brown, Indigenous, and linguistically diverse students haven't moved. Zaretta Hammond says that's not a funding problem or an effort problem — it's a cognition problem, and most principals have never been trained to see it. 🫶 What You'll Learn Why most equity initiatives never touch the instructional core The real difference between information processing and executive function — and why leaders confuse the two What cognition redlining looks like inside a compliance-driven classroom How to introduce a new instructional practice without teachers abandoning it in six weeks Why treating teachers as "personal trainers of cognition" changes everything about instructional leadership 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🎯 Key Insight #1: Cognition Redlining Is Blocking Your Equity Work What's broken: Schools chase equity through better relationships, high-quality materials, and effort — while the instructional core keeps underdeveloping students' actual thinking capacity. The shift: Treat teachers as the personal trainer of a student's cognition — coaching and assessing, not doing the thinking for them. Impact: Students move from being managed through lessons to actually building the learning power that raises achievement. 💥 Key Insight #2: Information Processing Is Not Executive Function What's broken: Leaders default to teaching study skills, binder organization, and time management, assuming that builds understanding — it doesn't. The shift: Explicitly teach students how to turn new, random information into meaning-laden, usable knowledge — a distinct skill from staying organized. Impact: Students stop being "dutiful" task-completers and start being able to close their own knowledge gaps without a teacher hovering every ten minutes. 🚀 Key Insight #3: Scaling Change Requires the First Pancake What's broken: Leaders launch new practices school-wide, all at once, out of urgency — then abandon them within weeks when they don't take. The shift: Start with a small band of willing teachers, let the first attempt be imperfect, make adjustments, and expand concentrically over time. Impact: Practices actually take hold instead of becoming one more initiative teachers quietly wait out. 🗣️ ZARETTA HAMMOND QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Getting students through the lesson doesn't build their learning power. That's the trap." — Zaretta Hammond "The personal trainer doesn't do the push-ups for you. They assess you, design a program, and coach you through the obstacles." — Zaretta Hammond "Be closer to hearing students talk about their understanding. Not their look-busyness." — Zaretta Hammond "Information processing is not the same as executive function. An organized binder won't get you conceptual understanding." — Zaretta Hammond "Change takes a dip before it levels off. That first pancake is bad, but you don't shut the kitchen down." — Zaretta Hammond "You let go of one bar and hang in the air before you grab the other. If leaders can't hold that space, people go back to what wasn't working." — Zaretta Hammond "Instructional leadership is not instructional management. A pacing guide is management — a personal trainer gives you skills for outside the hour." — Zaretta Hammond "You have to set up a culture of errors before you ask students to struggle. Mistakes are data." — Zaretta Hammond 🚵‍♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Ask three students in one lesson to explain their thinking out loud instead of just showing you the answer. This Month: Audit one schoolwide practice — like turn-and-talks or sentence starters — and ask whether it builds understanding or just looks busy. This Semester: Pilot one new cognition-building practice with a small group of willing teachers before rolling it out to the whole building. ⏰ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why equity efforts keep missing the mark 05:05 - Naming cognition redlining in schools 07:25 - How equity work quietly lowers the bar 09:38 - What learning power actually means 13:46 - Measuring learning power instead of test scores 16:28 - Why compliance is baked into school DNA 20:17 - What true cognitive independence requires 26:26 - The seductive shortcuts that derail real change 30:00 - The first pancake theory of scaling change 31:58 - The Costco lesson on how change spreads 34:31 - The liminal space leaders must hold 40:38 - The brain science behind real progress 42:08 - Instructional leadership vs instructional management 44:52 - Zaretta's message for every school marquee 🔗 Connect With Zaretta Hammond Website: https://ready4rigor.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zaretta-hammond-2b122ba/ 🎙️ Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🫶 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has spent 30 years helping schools move from whiteboards to smart boards. They don't just deliver supplies — they design dynamic, flexible learning spaces from a single supplier, so ordering and budgeting stay simple while you stay compliant with cooperative contracts. 🔎 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to see what's possible for your campus. Staffing stability isn't about filling seats — it's about keeping great people from burning out. Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens report found that districts using structured, automated professional growth tools report meaningfully easier hiring than those that don't. 🔎 Download the full report at frontlineeducation.com/leaders Over 1 million teachers already rely on IXL to stop guessing what their students know. Its diagnostic automatically flags each student's knowledge gaps and builds a personalized growth plan, adjusting difficulty in real time as they learn. 🔎 Get started today at IXL.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: Zaretta Hammond on cognition redlining, closing the learning power gap, and what real instructional equity looks like for principals.  
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  The Real Reason Principals Burn Out (And How to Fix It): Adorable Red Hats with Dan Watt 22.07.2026 52мин

  Running an elementary school in rural British Columbia hasn't stopped this Ruckus Maker from building an indoor worm farm, growing hydroponic lettuce, and taking a self-funded year off to reset — proof that a principal's personality is not a distraction from the job. Dan Watt is a Mastermind Coach inside the Ruckus Maker community and a recurring co-host of the Ruckuscast, known for turning "pay yourself first" into a leadership philosophy that's kept him energized four years into the role. Joining him is Mitch Weathers, CEO and author of Executive Functions for Every Classroom, whose work on entry plans and executive functioning has become required reading for school leaders trying to build systems that actually stick. Find them both at betterleadersbetterschools.com. Principal burnout doesn't start with too many emails — it starts the moment you decide the job requires you to leave your actual personality at the door. This episode is an Adorable Red Hats reunion where two veteran school leaders make the case that worm farms, hydroponics, and paying yourself first aren't distractions from leadership — they're the thing that makes it sustainable. 📚 What You'll Learn How bringing real hobbies into your building turns staff and students into willing "conspirators" instead of compliant bystanders. Why "pay yourself first" works as both a financial strategy and a burnout-prevention system for principals. What a self-funded sabbatical actually looks like, and how to plan one even without full district support. How the Harada Method turns a single big goal into a flexible daily practice instead of another thing to fail at. Why trying to please every stakeholder is the fastest way to lose the ones who matter most. ✍️ Breaking Down the Old Rules ☝ Key Insight #1: Why Bringing Your Personality to School Prevents Principal Burnout What's broken: Principals believe professionalism means suppressing personal interests to look serious and in control. The shift: Ruckus Makers build hobbies like worm farms and hydroponics directly into the school day and invite students, staff, and families in. Impact: A classroom of second graders now runs a full worm-composting system, a school secretary bought her own home worm bin after watching it happen, and a principal four years into the role reports feeling joyful instead of burned out. ☝️Key Insight #2: The "Pay Yourself First" Framework for Principal Wellness What's broken: School leaders wait for the district to hand them time off or wellness support, and it rarely comes on its own. The shift: Treat rest like a budget line — reduce your income by a set percentage for a few years to fund a planned sabbatical, the same way businesses run "Profit First." Impact: One principal banked a full year of paid leave after three years of reduced income, came back four years later still sustainable in the role, and never had to choose between burning out and quitting. ☝️Key Insight #3: Why the Harada Method Beats a Rigid Self-Care Routine What's broken: Traditional self-care plans demand daily perfection — miss one gym day and the whole system feels like it failed. The shift: The Harada Method sets one long-term "super goal" surrounded by a flexible menu of daily habit options instead of a mandatory checklist. Impact: Leaders report steady forward progress on wellness goals without the guilt spiral that kills most New Year's-style resolutions by February. 🫶 DANNY BAUER, DAN WATT & MITCH WEATHERS QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Most school leaders think professionalism means leaving their personality at the door." — Danny Bauer "The best schools aren't run by heroes. They're run by leaders who know how to enroll conspirators." — Danny Bauer "It becomes the work. It makes the work sustainable because folks are having fun showing up." — Dan Watt "It's a human system and it's prioritizing human well being." — Dan Watt "When I write those newsletters on Sunday, I try to write them with a smile on my face." — Dan Watt "Are we prepared to lessen the amount of content we teach in order to provide more meaningful learning experiences that have a greater chance of leading to deeper learning, increased storage and long term memory, and the acquisition of new skills?" — Mitch Weathers "If school leaders put into action the entry plan carefully outlined in this book, the stress they are used to carrying into the school year will vanish." — Mitch Weathers 🚵‍♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Pick one personal hobby you've been keeping separate from work and find five minutes today to bring a piece of it into your building. This Month: Draft a "pay yourself first" plan — even a small one — mapping how many months of reduced spending would fund a real break from the job. This Semester: Build your own Harada-style template: one super goal, a ring of supporting pillars, and a flexible daily habit menu you check instead of chase perfection on. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why professionalism doesn't mean losing your personality 04:24 - The Adorable Red Hats reunion kicks off 05:36 - Dan Watt's self-funded year-long leave story 09:29 - Bringing hobbies back into the building 12:41 - Inside the classroom worm farm and compost system 17:33 - Enrolling conspirators instead of managing compliance 19:47 - Pay yourself first, financially and figuratively 24:55 - Figuring out what actually fills your cup 26:09 - The Harada Method and the Resilient Leader program 33:29 - Why trying to please everyone backfires 39:54 - Dan Watt on rediscovering his mojo 42:27 - Mitch Weathers on his new book and tour 48:02 - Closing takeaways on joyful leadership 🔗 Connect With Dan Watt & Mitch Weathers 👩🏻‍💻 Mitch Weathers Website: organizedbinder.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mitchweathers 👩🏻‍💻 Dan Watt: Website: https://www.danwattcoaching.ca/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danwatt57 🎙️ Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🫶 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has been the trusted supply partner for schools for 30 years — and they've moved way past pencils and paper. Want to turn a tired computer lab into a STEAM innovation center, or upgrade every classroom from whiteboards to interactive displays? Their team designs it, and you order it all from a single supplier with access to cooperative contracts that simplify budgeting and keep you compliant. ⚡️ Learn more at ODPbusiness.com/education Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens report tracked how professional learning design connects to staffing stability across districts — and the findings are a wake-up call for anyone planning next year's PD calendar. Districts with structured, individually targeted professional growth report easier hiring; nearly half of districts using software to manage that growth say hiring has gotten easier, compared to just 30% of districts that don't. ⚡️ Download the full report at frontlineeducation.com/leaders IXL is the adaptive platform teachers already trust to make differentiated instruction simple — and for Ruckus Makers, it does even more. Its dashboard gives school leaders a real-time pulse on student performance, drillable down to the individual student, with reports you can customize to whatever matters most to your building. ⚡️ Get started today at ixl.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: Why principal burnout starts with hiding your personality at work — and how pay yourself first and the Harada Method fix it.
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  3 Easy Ways to Build Your Confidence This Summer Before School Starts 19.07.2026 17мин

  Confidence as a principal isn't something you're born with — it's something you build. I've been asking new Mastermind members and Digital Danny users why they're signing up, and I keep hearing the same thing: they're working on their confidence. Most won't say it out loud. Most think their doubt means they're not cut out for this. That's the pattern I'm noticing. Here are three concrete practices — starting with a 90-second daily routine — that transform how you show up next year. You'll stop questioning every decision. You'll start trusting your gut. You'll lead like you mean it. THINK THROUGH YOUR NEXT LEADERSHIP MOVE https://myprincipalcoach.com — your AI-powered principal coach, available 24/7. ⌚️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - Cold open: Building confidence with an unconventional story 01:57 - Why so many principals struggle with self-doubt 03:41 - Method 1: The EPS Journal for a 90-second daily boost 05:17 - How the EPS Journal builds your personal highlight reel 07:02 - Method 2: Watch the language that sabotages your confidence 08:47 - Common self-sabotaging phrases principals use 10:42 - Method 3: Stop leading in isolation 12:42 - Why doing leadership alone is holding you back 14:25 - Digital Danny: Your AI-powered principal coach 15:25 - The Mastermind: Weekly support and peer mentorship 16:19 - Options to build confidence this summer CONNECT & CONTINUE WHENEVER YOU ARE READY, HERE'S 3 WAYS TO HELP YOU DO SCHOOL DIFFERENT: Start chatting with Digital Danny: https://myprincipalcoach.com/ Apply to the mastermind: https://betterleadersbetterschools.com/mastermind Email to work 1-on-1 with Danny: [email protected] 
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  The CEO Who Gets 91% Teacher Retention Without Tenure with Pablo Villavicencio 15.07.2026 50мин

  Leading a 25-school network to a 96% graduation rate and 91% staff retention — with zero tenure protection — takes more than good policy. It takes a leader who has lived the exact inequity his schools now solve for. Pablo Villavicencio grew up in East LA, where his own neighborhood school graduated less than half its students, and only got a real shot at a quality education because his parents falsified an address to send him to a school 30 miles away. He carried that lesson through Teach For America, a school closure in Harlem, and five years as a founding high school principal in the Bronx before landing back in the exact Los Angeles community he grew up in — this time as CEO of Alliance College-Ready Public Schools. Find Alliance's work at laalliance.org. Teacher retention is the number every superintendent claims to be working on and almost none can move. Pablo Villavicencio's network sits at 91% retention across every employee group, without tenure, while running 25 schools and a 96% graduation rate in some of LA's highest-poverty neighborhoods — and in this episode, he breaks down exactly how belief, not policy, got him there. ✍️ What You'll Learn Why "all kids can learn" has to function as infrastructure, not a mission statement, before it changes anything How to build a wraparound services model that pairs academic teacher teams with therapists and social workers What actually drives teacher retention without tenure protection How to keep 25 schools aligned to one vision without creating a siloed bureaucracy Why redefining "college ready" to include community advocacy and wellness changed Alliance's outcomes 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🚀 Key Insight #1: Why School Culture Change Starts With a Belief System, Not a Policy What's broken: Most school systems write "all students can learn" on a banner and call it culture work, while the master schedule, staffing model, and discipline systems tell students something else entirely. The shift: Villavicencio treats the belief that every kid can learn as an operating system — it has to show up in the master schedule, the staffing model, and the wraparound services, or it isn't real. Impact: Alliance's 25 schools graduate 96% of students and get 89-93% to college-ready status, compared to roughly 49% graduation and 59% college-ready rates at neighboring LAUSD schools. 🚀 Key Insight #2: The Wraparound Services Model That Turns Around Low-Performing Schools What's broken: Teachers are left to diagnose whether a struggling student is "lazy" or dealing with something deeper, usually alone and without the information to know the difference. The shift: Villavicencio built "kid talk" teams that pair content teachers with therapists and social workers — partnering with outside organizations for family therapy — so root causes get surfaced instead of guessed at. Impact: At the high school Villavicencio founded in the Bronx for English language learners, the first graduating class hit 66% graduation from a starting point of 10% — climbing to an 88% six-year graduation rate. 🚀 Key Insight #3: How to Hit 91% Teacher Retention Without Tenure What's broken: Most systems either get good at attracting talent or good at retaining it — rarely both — because they never build a stable, consistent container people trust enough to stay in. The shift: Alliance runs focus groups across every school, shares the real narrative of what staff are facing, and refuses to place value judgments on how different generations of teachers experience the same problem. Impact: Alliance holds 91% retention across every employee group in a sector where turnover is the norm — with no tenure protections in place. 🎙️ PABLO VILLAVICENCIO QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "You have to believe, deeply believe, that all kids can learn." — Pablo Villavicencio "Equity to me is not about fairness. It's about making sure kids get what they need in order so that they're successful." — Pablo Villavicencio "We have 91% retention across all employee groups in Alliance. It is not common in the educational space." — Pablo Villavicencio "Large bureaucracies or large systems will never fully get the results that are needed for hyper community, like for local context, because those closest to the impact that you're hoping to have are not at the decision-making table." — Pablo Villavicencio "You have so much power, you have such a high locus of control." — Pablo Villavicencio "You have to be talking to your teachers and your kids on a regular basis. You have to be in relationship, you have to have a pulse on the ground." — Pablo Villavicencio 🚵‍♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Ask three staff members the same open question Villavicencio uses in his focus groups — "Tell me what's good, then tell me what's bad" — and just listen. This Month: Run a "kid talk" style meeting where content teachers and support staff (counselors, social workers) sit down on the same struggling students and name the root cause together. This Semester: Pilot one structural change to protect planning time — Alliance is testing 8-12 additional hours a week at seven of its schools — and track whether it moves retention or instructional quality. ⏰ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why Pablo's parents falsified an address for school 03:53 - Immigrant roots and the path to UC Berkeley 05:18 - First teaching job in a Harlem sixth grade classroom 11:51 - Building a high school from a 10% to 66% graduation rate 13:55 - Joining Alliance and eventually becoming CEO 15:58 - Alliance's 96% graduation rate versus LAUSD's 49% 17:48 - College readiness numbers and a 3.5x persistence rate 21:19 - Keeping 25 schools aligned without going siloed 22:43 - The planning time experiment seven schools are running 25:28 - Leading five generations of teachers with shared values 35:18 - Hitting 91% retention with zero tenure protection 43:57 - Inside the wraparound services model built on kid talk 46:55 - Pablo's final message on locus of control and belonging 🔗 Connect With Pablo Villavicencio Website: https://laalliancefoundation.org/ 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has spent 30 years equipping schools through negotiated cooperative contracts that stretch every budget dollar — from furniture and tech to sustainable cleaning solutions, all from a single supplier. They helped Baldwin School District transform its entire campus while staying under budget by pairing smart design with smarter purchasing. 🎙️ See how at ODPbusiness.com/education Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens report digs into how districts connect professional growth to staffing stability — districts that automate professional growth report easier hiring nearly 50% of the time, compared to 30% of those that don't. If you're building a campus where great educators choose to stay. 🎙️ The full report is free at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders IXL eliminates the guesswork in lesson planning with ready-made plans aligned directly to your textbooks and state standards, so teachers spend less time building and more time teaching. Daily performance insights let teachers adjust instruction before a small gap becomes a big one. 🎙️ Get started at ixl.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: How Alliance CEO Pablo Villavicencio hit 91% teacher retention and a 96% graduation rate — without tenure. A belief-driven leadership model.  
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  Why Your Tutoring Program Is Quietly Failing Students With Aly Murray 13.07.2026 49мин

  Building a tutoring nonprofit that now serves 25,000 students a year — with a vision to reach millions — required someone who'd lived the exact gap she was trying to close. Aly Murray grew up a low-income student raised by a single immigrant mother, moved through a string of Title 1 schools, and felt firsthand what it's like to navigate homework and college applications without support at home. She left a trading job at JP Morgan eight years ago to build Upchieve, a nonprofit offering free, 24/7 human tutoring and college counseling to every Title 1 middle and high school student in the country. Her work is backed by a Gates Foundation-funded study comparing human and AI tutoring, and Upchieve now partners with schools, districts, and CMOs at a cost of about 50 cents per tutoring session. Most school tutoring programs run from 3 to 5pm — and that single design choice quietly locks out the students who need help the most. Aly Murray, founder of the nonprofit Upchieve, built a 24/7 human tutoring program instead, and the data on why AI can't replace it yet might surprise you. 📚 What You'll Learn Why the standard after-school tutoring program design quietly excludes the students who need it most What a Brookings Institute report reveals about grades, identity, and college enrollment Why Upchieve's founder built a 24/7 human tutoring model instead of scaling with AI What a Gates Foundation-funded study found when students had access to both AI and human tutors How much it actually costs a school to close its tutoring gap 💥 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🚀 Key Insight #1: Why Your After-School Tutoring Program Is Built to Exclude Kids What's broken: Drop-in, after-school tutoring assumes every student has a ride home, free time, and no caregiving responsibilities. The shift: Upchieve makes human tutoring available 24/7, matching a student to a live tutor in about two minutes — so support meets students wherever and whenever they actually need it, including 3am calculus. Impact: Upchieve gets over a third of students at partner schools using the platform regularly, a usage rate most after-school tutoring programs never come close to. 🚀 Key Insight #2: The Data Says Tutor the Middle, Not Just the Bottom What's broken: Most tutoring programs target only the lowest-performing 10-20% of students who are actively failing. The shift: Brookings Institute research found that once you control for academic preparation, over 70% of the college enrollment gap between low-income and high-income students disappears — meaning the biggest leverage sits with the "middle majority" of B and C students, not just the students at risk of failing. Impact: Small, consistent tutoring shifts a student's grades and, more importantly, their identity as "a student who's good at school" — which is what actually predicts whether they enroll in college. 🚀 Key Insight #3: Human Tutoring Still Beats AI Tutoring — And the Research Proves It What's broken: Schools are defaulting to AI tutoring because it looks cheaper and easier to scale than finding enough human tutors. The shift: In a Gates Foundation and Microsoft Research-funded study, less than 20% of students with access to both a human and an AI tutor ever tried the AI tutor once, and more than 92% of all tutoring sessions in the study were human-only. Impact: Students overwhelmingly chose — and stuck with — human tutors, because the motivational effect of a real person saying "I'm rooting for you" is what actually drives learning outcomes. 📣 ALY MURRAY QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Tutoring is completely misunderstood and, in fact, undervalued as a tool that schools should be using to drive outcomes for their students." — Aly Murray "If you don't offer transportation after tutoring, you're going to lose all the kids who depend on the school bus to get home. I was one of those kids." — Aly Murray "There are enough humans to provide human tutoring to every student that needs it." — Aly Murray "When presented with a choice between an AI tutor and a human tutor, students overwhelmingly choose the human tutor." — Aly Murray "Anytime you have a one-on-one pairing of a student and a tutor and they get enough hours of tutoring, it works. It improves learning outcomes. It always works." — Aly Murray "Things can be not fun, but still worth doing." — Aly Murray "How can I, as a leader, claim to care about students' upward mobility if my staff are not making a living wage?" — Aly Murray 🚵‍♀️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Pull your after-school tutoring attendance numbers and identify how many of your neediest students are missing simply because of the time slot. This Month: Calculate what a per-session cost like Upchieve's 50 cents would run your school and compare it against your current after-school tutoring spend. This Semester: Pilot a 24/7 or after-hours human tutoring option for your Title 1 students and track weekly usage against your current drop-in numbers. ⏰ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why after-school tutoring quietly fails students 04:01 - The student story that changed Aly's approach to tutoring 06:04 - Aly's own path through Title 1 schools as a low-income student 09:49 - The Brookings data linking grades to college enrollment 14:06 - Why Upchieve is built exclusively for Title 1 students 17:34 - How 24/7 human tutoring actually works behind the scenes 23:55 - Human tutoring versus AI tutoring head to head 26:57 - The Gates Foundation study on student tutor preference 34:08 - Reframing the story you tell about your campus 37:40 - How schools partner with Upchieve and what it costs 42:00 - The three principles of Aly's dream school 48:06 - The one thing every Ruckus Maker should remember 🫶 Connect With Aly Murray 🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alymurray 👩🏻‍💻 Website: upchieve.org 🎙️ Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🫶 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has been the trusted supply partner for schools for 30 years — and they've moved way past pencils and paper. Want to turn a tired computer lab into a STEAM innovation center, or upgrade every classroom from whiteboards to interactive displays? Their team designs it, and you order it all from a single supplier with access to cooperative contracts that simplify budgeting and keep you compliant. ⚡️ Learn more at ODPbusiness.com/education Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens report tracked how professional learning design connects to staffing stability across districts — and the findings are a wake-up call for anyone planning next year's PD calendar. Districts with structured, individually targeted professional growth report easier hiring; nearly half of districts using software to manage that growth say hiring has gotten easier, compared to just 30% of districts that don't. ⚡️ Download the full report at frontlineeducation.com/leaders IXL is the adaptive platform teachers already trust to make differentiated instruction simple — and for Ruckus Makers, it does even more. Its dashboard gives school leaders a real-time pulse on student performance, drillable down to the individual student, with reports you can customize to whatever matters most to your building. ⚡️ Get started today at ixl.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: Aly Murray of Upchieve on why after-school tutoring fails low-income students, and the research behind 24/7 human tutoring that works.  
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  Why Reacting to Student Outbursts Destroys Your Classroom with Adam Wolfsdorf 08.07.2026 54мин

  Adam Wolfsdorf chairs the Humanities Department at Bay Ridge Preparatory in Brooklyn and teaches graduate students at NYU and Wesleyan, drawing on 26 years inside the classroom. He's the author of Teaching in the Riptide, where he names the moments educators get pulled under by something more powerful than their plan — and what to do when that happens. Outside the classroom, he spent 25 years performing professionally, including national tours of RENT and Grease. A student kicks over a trash can, slams the door, and storms out mid-lesson. Seventeen other students sit frozen, waiting to see what the teacher does next. That moment — and the instinct to fight back in it — is what most classroom management training gets wrong. Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf has spent 26 years studying what happens when teachers refuse to match a student's energy, and why that refusal is the most powerful classroom management tool no one teaches. 🫶 What You'll Learn Why matching a student's outburst with your own energy guarantees you lose the room. How "constructive subversion" turns a disruptive moment into the most powerful lesson of the year. What separates teachers who do harm from teachers who do good — and it isn't classroom control. Why compliance is the wrong goal for both students and educators. How to teach students to feel a story instead of just analyze one. 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules ✅ Key Insight #1: Why Reacting to Student Outbursts Destroys Classroom Management What's broken: Teachers are trained to regain control the moment a student acts out, so they react instantly — and the reaction is what costs them the room. The shift: The strongest move is often no move at all — sitting in the discomfort of a disrupted classroom without flinching or matching the student's intensity. Impact: Students who provoke a reaction to feel powerful lose that power entirely once a teacher stops giving it to them — Wolfsdorf reports the student who kicked over the trash-can, never had another outburst that year. ✅ Key Insight #2: How Constructive Subversion Turns Disruption Into the Best Lesson You'll Teach What's broken: Teachers walk into a lesson with fixed expectations for what students are capable of, then read any departure from the plan as a problem to shut down. The shift: Wolfsdorf names a category he calls "constructive subversion" — student behavior that breaks from the assignment but exceeds everything the teacher hoped for, like a ninth grader's poem about her father's death disguised as a poem about vegetables. Impact: The student who wrote that poem has now worked with Wolfsdorf three separate times and is heading to college — a years-long relationship built from a moment he almost dismissed as off-topic. ✅ Key Insight #3: Why Compliant Students and Compliant Teachers Both Stunt Growth What's broken: Schools reward compliance in students and conformity in teachers, treating obedience as the marker of a "good" classroom. The shift: Real progress — for a student, a teacher, or a system — requires people willing to push back, because systems don't change unless they get rattled. Impact: Wolfsdorf points to his own students calling him out at home for thinking too rigidly, forcing him to revise his own positions in real time rather than defaulting to authority. 🎩 DR. ADAM WOLFSDORF QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Do you understand that you are the punchline of the classroom?" — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf "Sometimes the student needs to give the teacher a hard time because the teacher is the one who needs to learn more than the student in that particular situation." — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf "There are educators who really want students to learn, and then there are educators who kind of want to torture students." — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf "Systems don't change unless they get rattled." — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf "We have to be aware that we could be a counter narrative to those destructive elements." — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf "Sometimes it's the case that it's the teacher even more than the student who needs the education." — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf "If you have the equanimity to resist, even if you're feeling it, that's a pretty powerful lesson." — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf 🧠 Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: The next time a student pushes your buttons, pause for three full seconds before responding instead of reacting in the moment. This Month: Identify one student whose disruptive behaviour might actually be a "constructive subversion" worth leaning into rather than shutting down. This Semester: Build a feedback loop where students can call out your own rigid thinking, the way Wolfsdorf's kids challenged him at home. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Why reacting to outbursts destroys your classroom 04:13 - How to handle subversive behaviour without shutting it down 05:55 - Teaching a student who identified as a Neo-Nazi 12:50 - The ninth-grade poem that changed his perspective 19:20 - How schools are creating the focus crisis in kids 23:27 - The trash can story: a student's full classroom outburst 35:05 - The Harvard professor who tried to break his confidence 38:34 - Are good students and good teachers actually compliant 44:59 - The professor who taught him to feel a story 53:04 - Building a dream school with no limitations 👩🏻‍💻 Connect With Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-wolfsdorf-1032b5383/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamwolfsdorf/ 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has spent 30 years equipping schools through negotiated cooperative contracts that stretch every budget dollar — from furniture and tech to sustainable cleaning solutions, all from a single supplier. They helped Baldwin School District transform its entire campus while staying under budget by pairing smart design with smarter purchasing. 🎙️ See how at ODPbusiness.com/education Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens report digs into how districts connect professional growth to staffing stability — districts that automate professional growth report easier hiring nearly 50% of the time, compared to 30% of those that don't. If you're building a campus where great educators choose to stay. 🎙️ The full report is free at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders IXL eliminates the guesswork in lesson planning with ready-made plans aligned directly to your textbooks and state standards, so teachers spend less time building and more time teaching. Daily performance insights let teachers adjust instruction before a small gap becomes a big one. 🎙️ Get started at ixl.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: Why reacting to student outbursts backfires — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf on classroom management, compliance, and constructive subversion.  
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  Why Your Neurodivergent Students Are Disappearing with Vanessa Castañeda Gill 01.07.2026 45мин

  She spent six years hiding her autism diagnosis from everyone — peers, friends, even herself. Then she built a neuroscience-backed video game that's changing how neurodivergent students understand who they are. Vanessa Castañeda Gill the founder of Social Cipher, an SEL video game platform designed by and for neurodivergent people, developed in partnership with the LEGO Foundation. Her work sits at the intersection of neuroscience research and lived autistic experience — and she's one of the few people in edtech who has both. She was diagnosed autistic at 14, went on to become a published neuroscience researcher, and turned her personal story into a scalable tool now reaching classrooms across the country. 80% of school avoidance students are neurodivergent. That single stat reframes every conversation you've been having about "disengaged" kids in your building. Your neurodivergent students aren't checking out because they don't care — they're burning out from performing normalcy in a system that was never designed for how their brains actually work. This episode is a practical roadmap for principals who want to close the gap between their inclusion vision and what neurodivergent students are actually experiencing every single day. 🤩 What You'll Learn Why calm corners and flexible seating aren't enough — and what neurodivergent students actually need to feel safe and stay enrolled. How Social Cipher uses video game mechanics to build a shared emotional vocabulary between students and teachers. What it looks like to lead a majority neurodivergent team — and why that's a strength, not a challenge. Three low-cost, high-impact classroom moves any teacher can make this week to support neurodivergent learners. The principle of "diagnosing a need over needing a diagnosis" — and why it matters for the undiagnosed kids already in your building. 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧠 Key Insight #1: Neurodivergent Students Aren't Disengaged — They're Exhausted from Masking What's broken: Schools interpret quiet compliance as success, missing that neurodivergent students spend the entire school day suppressing their natural responses to fit in — and completely collapse when they get home. The shift: Recognizing masking as a coping mechanism, not good behavior, and designing school environments where self-regulation is taught explicitly and practiced safely before students hit their limit. Impact: When schools build in structured regulation opportunities for all students — not just flagged kids — neurodivergent students stop burning out by dismissal and school avoidance rates drop. 🧰 Key Insight #2: SEL Programs Built for Neurotypical Kids Are Leaving Neurodivergent Kids Behind What's broken: Most SEL programs were designed with neurotypical students in mind — and when a neurodivergent student's natural coping tools (stimming, special interests, movement) aren't built into the framework, those tools get labeled as problems instead of recognized as regulation strategies. The shift: SEL curriculum designed by neurodivergent people, grounded in neuroscience, that treats stimming and special interests as assets and builds a shared emotional vocabulary students can actually use in the moment. Impact: Teachers report students using in-game language to communicate their needs in real time — "I feel like Ava right now, I need to go to my quiet space" — which means fewer outbursts, fewer evacuations, and a classroom that's actually safer for everyone. 🧰 Key Insight #3: Diagnose the Need Before You Wait for the Label What's broken: Schools gatekeep neurodivergent supports behind official diagnoses, leaving a massive population of undiagnosed students — disproportionately students of color, girls, and late-identified learners — without the tools they need. The shift: Design your building to meet underlying needs regardless of whether a formal diagnosis exists, because the underlying needs are real whether or not the paperwork has arrived. Impact: Every student who needs movement breaks, predictable routines, or permission to engage through special interests gets those things — and the students who were flying under the radar stop disappearing. 🎙️ VANESSA CASTAÑEDA GILL QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Neurodivergence doesn't need fixing. Your approach does." — Vanessa Castaneda Gill "The world won't work without all kinds of minds." — Vanessa Castaneda Gill "It is part of my identity and part of who I am. It is not all of who I am, and it's not something that needs to be fixed." — Vanessa Castaneda Gill "If you are in a position of leadership, model that vulnerability. It will just allow for so much more vulnerability between your employees or your students and you." — Vanessa Castaneda Gill "It's really hard to tell nuanced and rich and resonant stories that kids can actually root for and feel represented by if it wasn't led by neurodivergent experience." — Vanessa Castaneda Gill "You can give kids all of the tools in the world to be able to learn their best with their neurodivergence. But if representation and vulnerability in sharing those experiences is not part of that, then a lot of those tools kind of go out the window." — Vanessa Castaneda Gill "Instead of playing it safe, we make it safe to play." — Vanessa Castaneda Gill 🤔 Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Identify one student in your building who is frequently labeled "disruptive" and ask a teacher who works with them to describe what happens immediately before the behavior — look for the sensory or regulation trigger underneath it. This Month: Pilot a 5-minute movement or sensory break built into the schedule for one class or grade level, regardless of neurotype, and gather teacher observations on how it shifts the afternoon. This Semester: Audit your SEL program to determine whether neurodivergent students are represented in its design — and if Social Cipher's free pilot program is a fit for your building, start one. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - The school avoidance crisis and neurodivergent students 00:58 - Who is Vanessa Castaneda Gill and Social Cipher 04:09 - What it's like to receive an autism diagnosis at 14 08:18 - Six years of masking and the mental health cost 13:34 - How Social Cipher was born in a college dorm 15:44 - What the Social Cipher games do for neurodivergent students 18:35 - The shutdown sequence and quiet space explained 20:42 - How schools partner with Social Cipher 31:45 - Leading a majority neurodivergent team 34:57 - Classroom strategies for neurodivergent inclusion 37:07 - Insights from partnering with the LEGO Foundation 39:32 - Marquee messages and dream campus principles 42:58 - The one thing every Ruckus Maker should remember 👩🏻‍💻 Connect With Vanessa Castañeda Gill Vanessa Castañeda Gill Website: socialcipher.com Link to create a free account on our platform: https://dashboard.socialcipher.com/signup Free month-long pilot program: https://www.socialcipher.com/pilot-program Free inclusive SEL resource library: https://www.socialcipher.com/sel-resources Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessacastanedagill/ 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide., never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has been a trusted partner for schools for 30 years — and they're not just filling supply orders. They help you design dynamic learning environments with tech integrations that bring lessons to life, flexible furniture that transforms any space into a collaboration zone, and sustainable solutions that teach by example. One supplier, everything you need, cooperative contract compliant. 🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report is the data every principal trying to retain great staff needs right now. Districts that use software to automate professional growth are nearly twice as likely to report improved hiring outcomes compared to those that don't — and the report breaks down exactly what's working. 🔍 Download the full report at frontlineeducation.com/leaders IXL's diagnostic automatically identifies knowledge gaps and gives every teacher a personalized growth plan for each student — so nobody walks into class guessing what their kids know. As students learn, IXL adapts to the right level of difficulty for each individual. Close the knowledge gaps that are holding your building. 🔍  Get started at ixl.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: 80% of school avoidance students are neurodivergent. Social Cipher founder Vanessa Castaneda Gill shows principals how to actually close that gap.  
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  Why Every Student at This College Must Launch a Business- With Jeff Meade 24.06.2026 46мин

  Jeff Meade spent 20 years building companies. Then a friend asked him one question on a hike near Mount Fuji — what makes you happy? — and he couldn't answer it. That four-hour conversation led him to Paul Quinn College in Dallas, where he now serves as Chief Innovation Officer and runs a program with one non-negotiable rule: every student, regardless of major, must start and operate a real business before they graduate. No simulations. No worksheets. Real ventures, real customers, real failure. Every school says it wants future-ready students. Most are still teaching them how to pass tests. Jeff Meade decided that wasn't good enough — and built a venture-based learning model that turns a graduation requirement into the most practical education a student can get. If you're a school leader wondering whether entrepreneurship education belongs on your campus, this episode answers the question. ✅ What You'll Learn Why employers stopped wanting graduates who can pass tests — and what they're asking for instead How Paul Quinn structured a seed fund and advisor model so student ventures get real resources, not just pitch competitions Why this generation's biggest professional liability is their inability to talk to strangers — and what to do about it What a theoretical entrepreneurship curriculum gets wrong, and how venture-based learning fixes it How K–12 leaders can apply the same principles without a college-sized program 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🎯 Key Insight #1: Entrepreneurship Curriculum That Stays Theoretical Is Useless What's broken: Most school entrepreneurship programs teach students about business through reading, multiple choice questions, and theoretical frameworks — producing students who can define entrepreneurship but have never done it. The shift: Venture-based learning requires students to actually start and operate a business — finding customers, managing limited resources, pricing, pitching, and iterating on failure in real time. Impact: Students graduate having already been an entrepreneur, not just having studied one — and employers notice the difference immediately. 🎯 Key Insight #2: Soft Skills Are the Real Curriculum Gap What's broken: Leaders building entrepreneurship programs focus on funding, advisors, and curriculum structure — the infrastructure — while assuming students already have the interpersonal skills to execute. The shift: This generation has built entire social identities through virtual success and can have 20,000 followers on TikTok without ever sitting across from an adult in a real conversation. Impact: When students are pushed to talk to real people — potential customers, community members, advisors — they build the human connection muscle that no app can replicate, and one student went out to practice cold outreach and came back with an internship. 🎯 Key Insight #3: Failing Fast Has to Be Built Into the Design What's broken: Twelve years of traditional schooling trains students to avoid failure at all costs — honor roll, dean's list, perfect SAT prep — and that fear of failure becomes a ceiling on their entrepreneurial potential. The shift: Jeff flips the frame on day one: the goal is to fail big and fast, then iterate — with a soft landing built in because the stakes are learning, not rent. Impact: Students who learn to process failure as data rather than identity become the exact kind of adaptive, resilient thinkers that employers say they can't find enough of. 💬 JEFF MEAD QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "Students don't just study entrepreneurship, they actually do it." — Jeff Meade "The marketplace was telling us that they wanted a different type of student. So when I show up with this idea that every student starts a business, it's like, oh my God, you were answering sort of the prayers that we had." — Jeff Meade "You want somebody who thinks like this and not somebody who is trying to pass a test. That doesn't do anything for anybody." — Jeff Meade "I want you to fail big and fast. And that's so hard because you just graduated high school, you just took your SATs, you want to be on the dean's list. And then you walk into my class and I'm like, oh, you are going to fail so quick." — Jeff Meade "Students are dream chasers. They have these dreams — sometimes they may be uncomfortable sharing them, but they have these really cool dreams. And so we have the power to help them dream bigger and actualize those dreams." — Jeff Meade "In order for you to take it to another level and actually grow a business, you have to sit across from somebody and share your dream." — Jeff Meade 🤗 Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Audit your current entrepreneurship or career-readiness curriculum and identify one unit that is purely theoretical with no real-world interaction built in. This Month: Identify three local business owners or entrepreneurs who would come to your campus for a career-day-style conversation with students — make the ask. This Semester: Design one student-facing project where the deliverable is a real pitch to a real audience — parents, community leaders, local business owners — with a defined problem, a proposed solution, and a student-built case for why they're the right person to solve it. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Schools teach compliance, not how to build anything real 01:09 - Jeff Meade and the Paul Quinn entrepreneur requirement 04:32 - The hike on Mount Fuji that changed Jeff's career 10:21 - How Paul Quinn cut football to fund its future 13:37 - What employers actually want from graduates 17:56 - The seed fund and advisor model supporting student ventures 20:34 - What venture-based learning actually means 24:05 - Why Gen Z struggles to talk to people in real life 32:31 - What Jeff tells K–12 leaders about student entrepreneurship 39:09 - The Babson model Jeff is rebuilding for HBCUs 43:10 - Jeff's three principles for his dream school 🔗 Connect With Jeff Mead Website: jeff-meade.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffmeade 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has spent 30 years helping school districts build environments where students actually want to show up. From flexible learning spaces to tech integration to sustainable solutions, they deliver it all from a single supplier — simplifying ordering and keeping you compliant with cooperative contracts. One school, Belago Academy, worked with ODP to create collaborative spaces so engaging that students forgot to check their phones. 🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to see what's possible. Frontline Education's 2026 K–12 Lens Report cuts through the noise with insights from over 1,000 school leaders navigating staffing, student support, operations, and technology — all at once, all interconnected. If your district is managing multiple pressures simultaneously (and whose isn't?), this report shows how other leaders are adapting their strategies in real time. 🔍 Get the full picture at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders IXL's universal screener identifies every student who needs intervention in 20 minutes or less — and then its adaptive learning platform automatically adjusts difficulty for each individual student as they work. Over 1 million teachers use IXL because it makes differentiated instruction something you can actually execute, not just aspire to. 🔍 Get started today at IXL.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: Paul Quinn College requires every student to launch a real business before graduation. Here's what venture-based learning looks like — and what K–12 leaders can steal from it.  
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  Why Your Edtech Is Failing Students (And What to Do Instead) with Kris Rockwell 17.06.2026 44мин

  A researcher, Edtech expert, and PhD candidate studying the intersection of AI, learning, and human experience, Kris brings a rare combination of academic rigor and real-world application to the question every principal is quietly asking: is all this technology actually helping? His work with Play Piper puts him at the front lines of how kids interact with screens — and what happens when that interaction goes wrong. Kris has been studying and speaking about screen usage in learning environments since 2013, long before most districts had a policy on the subject. AI policy still doesn't exist in most school districts in 2026. Meta and YouTube just lost a major court case over intentionally building products harmful to kids. And the principals who bought Edtech tools during COVID are still living with implementations they never had time to design properly. Kris returns to the RuckusCast to name the problem clearly: technology in schools is being treated as the experience instead of a tool within the experience — and that distinction is costing students more than anyone wants to admit. 🎯 What You'll Learn Why the Meta and YouTube court ruling matters to every principal making Edtech decisions right now The critical difference between simulation-based learning and actual skill development How COVID forced impossible implementation timelines that are still warping Edtech use today Why most districts still have no AI policy in 2026 — and what to do about it How to think about AI as a co-principal rather than a threat or a shortcut 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧰 Key Insight #1: Edtech Adoption Without Design Produces Screen Dependency, Not Learning What's broken: Schools are purchasing and deploying Edtech based on what's new and available, not on what produces better outcomes — and the result is students staring at screens for the majority of their learning time. The shift: Technology should be a tool within the learning experience, not the experience itself — the screen is one element of the world, not a replacement for it. Impact: When principals reframe adoption decisions around this distinction, they stop chasing shiny tools and start evaluating whether an implementation actually extends beyond what kids are staring at. 🧰 Key Insight #2: COVID-Era Implementation Timelines Broke Edtech Design What's broken: Transitioning a course from in-person to online properly takes months — sometimes a year — but COVID forced schools to make that shift in three to four weeks, and those broken implementations carried through. The shift: Acknowledge that what most schools are running isn't intentional digital learning design — it's emergency triage that never got fixed. Impact: Principals who name this legacy honestly can audit their current edtech stack against what was designed with intention versus what was deployed in crisis mode. 🧠 Key Insight #3: AI Is a Tool for Handling the Curriculum — Not for Replacing the Human Leader What's broken: Principals are either avoiding AI entirely or offloading judgment to it — neither approach produces better schools. The shift: Let AI handle the curriculum structure, the data, the content scaffolding — and use the human leader for exactly what AI cannot do: the relational, social, and emotionally intelligent work of building a school community. Impact: A principal who co-leads with AI this way gets leverage on administrative and instructional tasks while protecting the irreplaceable human elements that retain teachers and engage students. KRIS QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "The idea that Silicon Valley is defining how humans will interact in the future is the most perverse thing that's ever happened in the history of society." — Kris Rockwell "Trinity does not learn how to fly a helicopter. She learns how to simulate a helicopter. She has no idea how to fly a helicopter once she's unplugged from that experience. So in that realm, what we're doing is looking at the simulation and saying, well, this is the future of learning. But it's not." — Kris Rockwell "What's being put into the system directly feeds what is coming out of the system." — Kris Rockwell "Code is becoming philosophy rather than engineering at this point." — Kris Rockwell "If I'm the co principal, I'm focusing on the human elements and how to make these things functional and how to make sure that the critical thinking is there." — Kris Rockwell "Ensure that it is a tool and not the tool. Ensure that those things that the kids have access to extend beyond what they're staring at." — Kris Rockwell 🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Audit one Edtech tool currently in use on your campus and ask whether students are staring at it for the majority of the time — if yes, identify one way it could be a gateway to an offline or physical experience instead. This Month: Draft a one-page AI use framework for your campus that answers two questions: what will we use AI to handle, and what will remain exclusively human. This Semester: Identify every Edtech implementation that was adopted during COVID emergency conditions and evaluate each one against the question Kris named: is this designed with intention, or are we still running triage? ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Silicon Valley is defining how kids learn 04:15 - Meta and YouTube court ruling unpacked 07:25 - The "new and shiny" edtech trap 09:13 - Simulation vs. actual learning (the Matrix problem) 13:03 - Why COVID broke edtech implementation 19:17 - How China vs. the West frames AI differently 28:06 - Most districts still have no AI policy in 2026 30:26 - Code is becoming philosophy, not engineering 39:21 - How to co-principal with AI 43:11 - The one thing every Ruckus Maker should remember Connect With Chris 👩🏻‍💻 Follow Kris Rockwell: Website: www.playpiper.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/krisrockwell Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StartWithPiper X: https://x.com/StartWithPiper Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startwithpiper YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PlayPiperLLC TikTok: @play.piper 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com 🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners ODP Business Solutions has been a trusted partner for schools for 30 years. They don't just drop off supplies — they'll help you design a STEAM Innovation center, keep multiple buildings stocked and compliant, and streamline ordering across your entire district through a single supplier with cooperative contract access. However you want to advance, they've seen it and solved it. 🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to learn more The staffing crisis isn't over — it's just shifted. Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report found that districts with structured, targeted professional learning are nearly twice as likely to report easier hiring than those without. The data is in: professional growth that extends beyond onboarding builds the culture that retains teachers before the year even starts. 🔍 Download the full report at frontlineducation.com/leaders IXL gives school leaders what teachers already love: an adaptive platform that handles differentiated instruction and delivers dashboards that let you drill down to individual student growth in real time. Make data-informed decisions that move the needle on student growth goals. 🔍 Get started today at ixl.com/leaders META DESCRIPTION: AI policy is missing in most districts. Edtech is failing students. This episode breaks down why — and how principals can lead differently.  
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  How to Turn Around a Failing School: Real-Time Coaching That Works 10.06.2026 46мин

  Eight years ago, Chad Weiden walked into one of South Carolina's most underperforming elementary schools — a campus so low-rated that the state took it over, failed to fix it, and handed it back to the district. He just turned it into a good school. The strategy for school turnaround he used wasn't a new curriculum, a fresh initiative, or a culture retreat. It was building beacons of excellence on every team and coaching teachers in real time, in the moment, while students were in the room. Weiden spent nearly three decades building and leading schools across Chicago and South Carolina, including turning around Meeting Street Burns Pre-K through second grade from "unsatisfactory" to "good" on the state report card — in one of the most underserved communities in the state. He's a principal who understands that every child can learn and that the system, not the child, is what needs fixing. Find him on LinkedIn to follow his work. School turnaround is one of the most searched and least understood challenges in school leadership. Most principals know they need to fix culture — what they don't know is which two or three instructional moves actually move the needle. This episode answers that question directly, from a principal who lived it in real time in a school the system had already given up on. 🤩 What You'll Learn Why building one beacon teacher per team matters more than trying to develop everyone at once How to implement real-time instructional coaching — in the moment, mid-lesson — and get teachers to crave it instead of fear it The vulnerability framework you must unpack before jumping into a teacher's classroom Why joy is not performative and what it actually looks like in a high-expectation school How the paradox of high expectations and deep love for students coexist — and why low expectations are never kindness 🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧠 Key Insight #1: School Turnaround Starts with One Beacon Per Team, Not Everyone at Once What's broken: Principals in turnaround schools try to develop every teacher simultaneously and end up moving no one. The shift: Identify and build one beacon teacher per grade-level team who sets the standard, holds the expectation, and shows colleagues what great looks like when the principal isn't in the room. Impact: Once a beacon is in place, a second strong teacher develops faster — and within a few years, the entire team performs at a high level because the standard is visible every day. 🧠 Key Insight #2: Real-Time Coaching Builds Better Teachers Faster Than Any Post-Observation Debrief What's broken: Most instructional feedback arrives as an autopsy — a sit-down debrief days after the lesson, long after the muscle memory has hardened. The shift: The principal enters the classroom as a co-teacher, intervenes the moment an instructional error occurs — modeling, adjusting, coaching in real time — the same way elite athletes are corrected mid-rep, not after the game. Impact: Teachers start craving the feedback because they feel the improvement immediately; confidence builds in the room, students re-engage, and the principal's classroom presence shifts from evaluative to transformative. 🧠 Key Insight #3: Joy in School Is Not Performance — It's the Small Moments That Make Learning Stick What's broken: When 53% of students are disengaged, schools respond with programs, pep rallies, or initiatives — and teachers interpret any call for joy as a demand to become entertainers. The shift: Joy lives in small moments — a student nerding out on a text, spotting an algebra pattern in geometry, owning a goal that feels meaningful — not in performative enthusiasm that burns teachers out. Impact: Campuses that build joy into the academic experience — through growth, celebration, and belonging — create environments students don't want to leave and teachers don't want to quit. 🗣️ CHAD WEIDEN QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST "I had to build a beacon of a teacher on each team. One beacon of what the bar should be — because when you leave, they're really holding the expectations. They're showing other people what it looks like." — Chad Weiden "Act like the school is your classroom. Every classroom is my classroom, and when I walk in, I'm going to co-teach with you. That's how we built really great teachers really quickly — that system of real-time coaching." — Chad Weiden "There's nothing better when you get feedback that helps you feel more effective or confident. You start to crave it. And once people realize this is going to make your job easier — not tomorrow, right now — they're like, okay, this is weird, but dang, that was helpful." — Chad Weiden "To truly love a child is to hold that child to the highest expectation possible. To not love a child is to lower the expectation. I really lived in black and white — what I've deeply changed my mind about is I embrace the paradox." — Chad Weiden "Joy isn't big joy. Joy is in small moments — nerding out in a text with a kid, seeing them light up over a pattern they've spotted. That's joy. It's not performative. Because performative is exhausting and you can't do it every moment of every day." — Chad Weiden "The system is perfectly designed to get the results that it has." — Chad Weiden "Let kids do the work. Teachers hold the learning, hold the modelling — we're talking too much. Let kids do the work. They're ready." — Chad Weiden 🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge Ready to implement? Start here: Tomorrow: Walk into one classroom with the explicit intention to co-teach for five minutes — not to observe, but to intervene and model in real time if you see an instructional gap. This Month: Identify the one teacher on each grade-level team who is closest to beacon status and invest your heaviest coaching hours there first, rather than spreading yourself evenly. This Semester: Build a vulnerability framework with your staff — naming real-time coaching as a school norm during onboarding, modelling receiving feedback publicly yourself, and making the four beliefs explicit: it's okay to fail, it's okay to not know everything, it's okay to ask for help, and we are in this together. ⌚️ Episode Timestamps 00:00 - The real lever behind student disengagement 07:18 - Chad's turnaround story in South Carolina 10:22 - The three moves that drove results 11:05 - Building a beacon teacher on every team 12:26 - Real-time coaching defined and how it works 15:18 - How to introduce real-time coaching without fear 21:06 - Why every educator should take an improv class 30:07 - Joy and growth as the engine of school turnaround 39:16 - What Chad changed his mind about in education 42:57 - Danny on firing yourself from your own organization 44:29 - Marquee message: Let kids do the work 👩🏻‍💻 Connect With Chad Weiden Website: https://berkeleycharter.org/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-weiden-99a31878/ 🎧 Listen & Subscribe Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show. 🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com. 🎙️ Today's Ruckuscast Partners ODP Business Solutions has been a trusted partner for schools for 30 years — and they're not just a supplier, they're a strategic advantage. They give districts access to negotiated cooperative contracts that maximize every education dollar, and they proved it by helping the Baldwin School District transform an entire campus while staying under budget. From essential supplies to cutting-edge technology to flexible furniture, they're your one-stop shop to do school different. 🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to get started. Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report makes the retention argument in hard numbers: districts that manage professional growth with software are nearly twice as likely to report easier hiring — 47% versus 30%. If you're serious about building a campus where great educators want to stay, this report is the data behind the strategy. 🔍 Download the full K12 Lens Report at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders. IXL takes the guesswork out of what teachers do next. Ready-made lesson plans aligned to textbooks and state standards, plus daily student performance insights that let teachers adjust instruction before a gap becomes a problem. It's the kind of instructional support that turns real-time coaching from a principal strategy into a school-wide system. 🔍 Start today at IXL.com/leaders. META DESCRIPTION: School turnaround principal Chad Weiden shares the real-time coaching system and beacon teacher strategy that took a failing school to good-rated in South Carolina.