Change Starts Here

Leaders in the education space often have similar philosophies and strategies around connection. Without this, it’s hard to develop effective school districts. Sharing her wisdom on cultivating leadership in schools, Dr. Candace Singh joined host Dustin Odham.

Dr. Singh currently serves as the Superintendent of Fallbrook Union Elementary School District. She’s also a speaker, consultant, and leadership coach. “I have a teacher’s heart and worked my way up from an instructional aide to a teacher, then a principal, and now a superintendent. I’m proud of creating an organization and culture that supports classroom teachers.”

Dr. Singh has a strong value set around what makes schools effective. The solution is effective leaders who are supported. “Relationships are the engine for improvement. There also needs to be clarity about outcomes, fronting things hard to look at, and reminding people of the forward-thinking idea of the difference they can make.”

With this focus on developing leaders, Dr. Singh is very involved in the hiring process for principals and building solid connections. “The principal is the linchpin of ensuring the most important connection between teacher and child.”

In Dr. Singh’s career, she’s completed lots of research on what the best principals do, including her doctoral work. In providing best practices, she’s adamant about every principal having an assistant principal. Once those people are in those roles, she prepares them to assume leadership positions in the future. “A principal needs a team and the knowledge the district office is here for them, not the other way around. We work for the schools.”

This is the kickoff to the second season of Change Starts Here. In order to look forward, we’re going to take a look backward by talking to a guest that Host Dustin Odham has had at the top of his list since the podcast’s inception. Dan Pink is the author of several books about creativity, business, behavior, and work, such as When: The Scientific Secrets to Perfect Timing. Odham and Pink talk about his upcoming book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, and how the power of regret can be used to make bold choices moving forward instead of remaining in our own prisons.

For Dan Pink, life is about multitudes. Most people, including Pink, are multiple things, and Dan is a husband, father, citizen, and writer. What he loves about writing is that he gets a lot of pleasure from figuring stuff out, such as “taking a tangle of material and trying to make sense of it, and bringing some clarity to it,” Pink said, “even though the process of doing that is often painful. There are moments of transcendence in the process that keep me going.”

This passion might have always been there, but Pink said he had to discover it. It wasn’t apparent from the get-go. He pursued a law degree and had an interest in politics, but he found that while working in the “belly of the beast,” that wasn’t what he wanted to do, in part, because that wasn’t who he was or aspiring to be.

“I became a writer relatively late in the sense I didn’t start writing for myself full time as my job until I was in my mid-30s,” Pink said.

Listen to hear more about how taking risks in his career led Pink to the path of becoming an author.

Get ready for Season 2 of Change Starts Here, LIVE on August 25th! Register now: https://marketscale.com/live/the-persistence-to-create-change-with-debbie-michael/

Educators have the power to change the lives of the students they work with – but they also work within a system. That means there are also opportunities to change that system to make it work better for the educators and students it serves.

That’s the mission of Geoffrey Canada, renowned thought leader, activist and advocate for education reform. Three decades ago, Canada founded the Harlem Children’s Zone, touted by the New York Times as “one of the most ambitious social-policy experiments of our time.”

According to the Harlem Children’s Zone website, the Zone was created with a clear mission – “to end intergenerational poverty in Central Harlem and lead the way for other long-distressed communities nationwide and around the world to do the same.”

That mission has been brought to life through opportunities. Early childhood, education and career programs, community outreach, wellness initiatives and more have helped provide clearer pathways toward “mobility and prosperity.”

That vision aligns with the goal Canada said he’s built his life and career around, and he spent this episode of Change Starts Here’s You First Summer Series exploring that mission with host Dustin Odham.

“I have always been passionate about trying to bring the American dream to children who grow up in places where that dream seems to have disappeared,” he said.

It might be an understatement to call today’s guest for the latest episode of Change Starts Here’s You First Summer Series impactful.

In fact, host Dustin Odham said, a meeting a full decade ago produced notes that he still has and refers to. That’s some powerful longevity.

The guest-in-question was none other than Muriel Summers, recently retired principal of the award-winning A.B. Combs Leadership Magnet Elementary School. It’s no wonder her words left an impact on Odham, as they’ve also done just that on the like of Dr. Stephen Covey and Oprah Winfrey, who invited Summers to make an appearance on her show.

Over nearly four decades in education, Summers crafted and honed an educational model used by more than 3,000 schools around the world during time spent as a classroom teacher, demonstration teacher, instructional resource teacher, assistant principal and principal.

A.B. Combs was the first leadership elementary school in the nation, and it boasts students from a whopping 64 countries.

The most important cornerstone of that global model and of A.B. Combs’ success is a simple one. Summers and her colleagues focused on students’ unique gifts, talents and strengths, not their weaknesses, building on each individual foundation to help them forge their own path toward becoming high-achieving and well-rounded members of society.

For more insights from Summers, who said she truly enjoyed and loved every single day of her career, watch the full episode now.

The Change Starts Here You First Summer Series rolls on, this time with a world-renowned speaker, thought leader and educator with a unique “skin on the wall” – transforming a floundering school into an institution of learning known the world over.

Of course, we’re speaking of Richard Gerver, whose work as headmaster of Grange Primary School over the course of just two years drew praise from the likes of UNESCO and the UK government for its ability to reshape the institution from the ground up.

Now, Gerver is doing what he told so many of his students to do. He’s following his own ambition to help people across the world expand their perception of their own potential, and he’s doing it through a commitment to exploring “the links between great leadership, human potential, change and innovation.”

Gerver and Odham dove into how to continue pouring into students in the face of challenging scenarios, understand the “why” behind their behaviors to help them overcome personal inhibitors in the way of their potential, and leading by concerning yourself primarily with the needs of the people you’re leading.

The duo also talked about the benefits of not feeling guilty for “turning off,” as self-care and time to recharge is critical for educators looking to hit the ground running during the return of in-person education this fall.

Watch the full episode to hear more of Gerver’s leading insights.

The past year brought an educational landscape and challenges the likes of which educators have never encountered. That means that, in addition to the normal wear and tear of a year spent at the front of a classroom of head of a district, many educators are more worn down than usual as summer draws on.

However, there’s no slowing down now. The fall semester promises even more firsts and another unique experience, and it’s critical that educators use this summer break to find contentment, happiness and a chance to recharge.

Change Starts Here host Dustin Odham got some help in this task from guest Valerie Alexander, a world-renowned author and speaker and expert on happiness and inclusion.

She has authored “Happiness as a Second Language” and several other popular books on happiness and success, and she is a globally recognized speaker on the topics of happiness in the workplace, unconscious bias and the advancement of women.

The most challenging thing about being happy, perhaps, is that it isn’t our first language –at least for many of us. It takes many conscious decisions to work toward happiness, just as it does to achieve anything else.

“If you grow up in a house where nobody spoke Greek, you wouldn’t expect to wake up one day and just start speaking Greek,” Alexander said. “But, if you wanted to learn Greek, you could do it.”

The Change Starts Here podcast and host Dustin Odham, FranklinCovey Education thought leader, have already heard from one son of the esteemed Stephen R. Covey – but, on this episode, another joins the educational fray.

Stephen M.R. Covey, Covey’s eldest son, New York Times bestselling author, thought leader and key agent in the growth of FranklinCovey into a truly global agent of change, joined Odham to talk about his impactful career, key principles that guide his life and interactions with others, and more.

First and foremost, Covey is a husband, father and grandfather. However, professionally, he said that one word encapsulates his general aim to leave the world better than he found it – trust.

“I am an advocate and a champion for trust and for building high-trust relationships, high-trust teams and high-trust cultures as a way of elevating all of society,” Covey said. “I think we need more trust in the world. … I feel like we’re operating increasingly in a world of declining trust.”

That lack of trust quickly snowballs and perpetuates itself, Covey said, leading to an abundance of caution, suspicion and guardedness. That means it that it’s critical to find ways to break the cycle and engage in activities that build trust between individuals, teams, organizations and more.

The good news, though, is that trust is also contagious. Trust and confidence in one another create more of the same.

“We need to counteract a world of distrust by creating outcomes of high-trust,” Covey said. “Being a model of trust and a mentor of trust … inspires me. That makes me want to get up every day and be a catalyst to help create more trust in our world.”

There isn’t a child on the planet incapable of achieving their dreams, according to Salome Thomas-EL – they just need someone “crazy about them.”

On this episode of FranklinCovey Education’s Change Starts Here, host Dustin Odham welcomed “Principal EL” to the program to share his core beliefs about love, belief, perseverance, courage, overcoming adversity and more.

In addressing over 100,000 educators, parents, students and community members throughout his time speaking, Principal EL has endeavored to help audiences think deeply and critically about how we can change the culture of education, foster environments that cater to students’ tremendous potential, and build resilience in our children.

“I love making an impact on the lives of young people and adults,” he said. “As a kid, myself, I was supported by teachers – many of them who did not look like me. … Helping us achieve our dreams.”

The impact of those teachers, particularly in helping students overcome barriers to success and difficult family and community environments, moved EL to become an educator himself. As he puts it, it’s about telling kids, “You can be me, because I was once you.”

Environments that inspire hope can be developed in myriad ways, including one that may not immediately come to mind – chess. Professor EL has led and overseen many championship chess teams, all made up of students who found something to drive them toward community, self-improvement, discipline and more.

The Change Starts Here podcast and host Dustin Odham went right to the source for this episode, the first to feature a superintendent, inviting Dr. John Jungmann of Springfield Public Schools to the program to share his wealth of insights.

Jungmann has served Missouri school districts for decades, including seven years at SPS, and has dedicated that time to helping engineer what he calls a “student-focused, future-driven” education system.

That illustrious career in administration officially came to an end May 21, when Jungmann gave his final graduation speech as a superintendent of a Missouri school system. For all that time spent molding young minds, Jungmann said his career got its start in a rather simple way.

“I was inspired to be a teacher by teachers,” he said. “I’m the last of six kids in a traditional, small-Southwest-Missouri-town family, the first to go to college, and I went to college purely because teachers told me I could and I should.”

Jungmann shared the stories of three educators in particular – an innovator, an encourager and a truth-teller you’ll meet in the full episode – who helped shape his path to education.

The duo also got into the less-glamourous aspects of leadership aspirations in administration, which often comes alongside family moves and tough decisions, and into Jungmann’s next chapter post-retirement from the SPS superintendent role.