In this episode, Jethro Jones interviews Dr. Valerie Dehombreux, an experienced educator and school principal who recently completed her doctorate in leadership and innovation. They discuss her dissertation on the trust-based observation protocol and its application, providing valuable insights for both her work and Jethro’s own doctoral process.

• Started as a 3rd grade teacher on the white mountain apache reservation. 
• Engaging in an intervention that is solving a problem of practice. 
• You can just do stuff! Valerie adopted his book and implemented it. 
• Literature review - showed how his approach was good. 
• Chose 4 research questions because they were all important. 
• Open-ended interview questions. 
• Formative interviews along the way. 
• Mixed-methods approach. 
• Reflective conversations are so powerful. 
• How to be a transformative principal? Start talking and meeting with your teachers. 

About:
Dr. Valerie Dehombreux has been a PreK-12 educator for 27 years including 15 as a school principal and 22 years in providing teacher training and professional development. Valerie holds Arizona superintendent, principal, and teacher certifications with two endorsements: Early Childhood and English as a Second Language. In 2019 as principal of McDowell Mountain Elementary School in the Fountain Hills Unified School District, Valerie led the school community in achieving an Arizona Educational Foundation A+ School of Excellence™ award for the first time in the school’s and district’s history. In December 2024, Valerie graduated with an EdD in Leadership and Innovation from Arizona State University. It is a unique, 3 ½-year cohort program that follows the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) model where practitioners identify a Problem of Practice (PoP) in their work place settings and conduct cycles of action research to implement innovations/interventions seeking to address the PoP and to build up to the culminating experience of the final dissertation. Valerie’s action research explored formative teacher supervision’s effects on trusting administrator–teacher relationships and teachers’ professional growth.

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