Evolution Stories

Dr. Marta Medved Krajnovic came to her first headship convinced that anything was possible. As a board member of Stockholm International School, she pushed to relocate the school after two decades of failed attempts, only to watch the plan collapse when a real estate partner walked away, after the move had already been announced publicly.

Marta traces what went wrong (a decision made without enough of the school's own people at the table) and what she built instead: a role dedicated to stakeholder relationships that found the school a permanent home years later. At Western Academy of Beijing, she applied the same lesson at scale, training more than 50 students, from grade five through grade twelve, to lead the school's own strategic planning conversations. WAB later won an international award, not for the strategy the process produced, but for the process itself.

Marta's takeaway: change holds when it's built systematically, with the people who'll live inside it. Students turn out to be more capable of that than most schools assume.

John Gulla spent 14 years as head of The Blake School and came away with one answer when asked what he was most proud of: not the buildings, not the campaign, but the talent he attracted and retained. It was an instinct from his first divisional role at 25 that headship confirmed.

As executive director of the EE Ford Foundation since 2013, Gulla has visited more than 780 independent schools across 43 states. What he sees at the foundation level confirms what he knew at the school level: the most meaningful change projects, from rethinking faculty compensation to launching the Mastery Transcript Consortium with a $2 million grant, share one ingredient. They require a leader willing to push on the third rail. At EE Ford, his job is to find those leaders, fund the early bets, and connect them to fellow travelers doing similar work a thousand miles away.

The hardest lesson from Blake was a seven-year effort to reform faculty compensation that met sustained faculty resistance. The insight he carries now: build the evaluation infrastructure before introducing the initiative. Sequence matters. But the deeper takeaway, confirmed across hundreds of school visits, is that the deciding variable for any real change project isn't the design. It's the courage behind it.

Before a school can pursue transformation, it has to secure its foundation. Dr. Nada Collins calls it Maslow's hierarchy for institutions: until the buses run on time and people feel safe, change leadership doesn't have a floor to stand on. That insight drove her design work redesigning physical classroom spaces to enable collaborative, data-driven instruction. Then COVID hit.

What emerged from that crisis wasn't what Dr. Collins planned. Facing an overwhelmed healthcare system, she reached out looking for hospital beds. What came back was a community health foundation built with parent physicians, delivering weekly check-ins, supplies, and native-language safety education to the school's lowest-paid employees. She didn't design it. She trusted the people she asked for help, and they built something bigger.

The lesson she carries from that: co-creation isn't a strategy you plan for. It's what happens when you stop holding everything alone and let the people around you lead.

Rand Harrington did not arrive at school leadership through a conventional path. He earned a PhD in physics, taught Tibetan monks in Dharamsala, and walked from Mexico to Canada at 18. Each experience cracked something open. By the time he took his first headship at Kent Denver School, he had a vision and the confidence to push it. What he lacked was the capacity to listen.

Between headships, he sold his house, bought a sprinter van, and drove across the country for a year. Every day, his wife Chris asked him the same question: how do you want to show up differently? That question changed everything. When he arrived at the American Embassy School of New Delhi in 2024, he showed up asking what the community needed rather than what he planned to deliver.

The shift from "I have the answer" to "I have a question" is not just a leadership posture. Harrington argues it is only possible for leaders who have been through genuine personal transformation themselves.

When generative AI hit schools, most reached for policies. Choate Rosemary Hall tried that too, and it wasn't working. Ellen Devine, Director of Studies and Chair of Choate's AI Steering Committee, describes the moment a single piece of advice changed everything: stop writing rules, write a stance.

That stance, endorsing the discerning, informed, and ethical use of AI, became the foundation for one of the more thoughtful school-wide AI approaches in independent education. In this episode, Ellen traces how her background in rhetoric and composition, her years leading curriculum change in the English department, and her work on equity and inclusion all shaped how she thinks about leading through uncertainty.

She also gets candid about the habits that can derail even well-intentioned change leaders, including the belief that force of will plus enough evidence always wins. It doesn't. But listening, she says, usually does.

What does it actually take to lead a school through a decade of transformation without losing the people along the way?

In this episode of Evolution Stories, Christian Talbot sits down with Mark Pingetore, Head of School at the American School of Barcelona, to explore what 17 years of leading change in an international school really looks like, including the lessons that only came through getting things wrong first.

Mark traces his path from progressive education circles in New York City, working alongside Deborah Meier at Central Park East, to founding Tompkins Square Middle School, to leading ASB through a period of extraordinary growth. He reflects on a change effort in his early years at ASB that stalled not because the goal was wrong, but because he misread the culture, the law, and his own certainty. The shift from building a legal case to asking better questions turned out to be one of the most important moves he made as a leader.

The conversation also covers ASB's five-year growth plan from 2014 to 2018, when the school grew from roughly 600 to nearly 1,000 students, built four major facilities, and dramatically expanded its academic and extracurricular programs. Mark reflects on what made that period work, including a board that focused on the future instead of the day-to-day, clear KPIs revisited annually, and leaders at every level who had genuine ownership of their work. He also names what it cost: staff who felt stretched past their limit, and a five-pillar plan that should have been three.

This episode is essential listening for school leaders navigating the balance between vision and capacity, between pushing for change and protecting the people doing the work.

Lauren Jones started as a special education teacher because she wanted to change outcomes for kids other people had written off. That conviction shaped everything, including her tenure as head of school at the International School of Kigali, where she rebuilt the school's support team, replaced principals with teacher leaders, and made inclusion the central focus of the school's identity.

In this episode, Lauren and Christian Talbot move through the full arc of change leadership: a scholarship program that launched with thorough research and still missed the mark, three curriculum and arts initiatives that transformed the school's connection to Rwandan culture, and the practical reality of building consensus without waiting for unanimity.

Lauren's through line: inclusion is a justice issue, and resources are not just money. Attention, relationships, energy, and time come first. The leaders who get that right are the ones who move change forward and make it last.

What turns a school building into a place where students truly flourish?

In this episode of Evolution Stories, Christian Talbot sits down with Dr. Brian Kelly, Head of School at Carol Morgan School in the Dominican Republic, to explore how physical space and school culture work together to drive meaningful change.

Dr. Kelly shares the thinking behind Carol Morgan's new Arts, Innovation, and Dining Center, a space designed intentionally around student flourishing, and traces his own path into education and school leadership.

The conversation digs into the challenge every leader faces: how to meet the accelerating pace of change with genuine innovation while building a culture of collective efficacy. Dr. Kelly reflects on a pivotal realization, that leaders don't need to have all the answers, and that their real work is elevating the people around them to catalyze change together.

This episode is essential listening for leaders thinking about how the spaces they build and the cultures they foster can bring out the best in students and staff alike.

What turns a school building into a place where students truly flourish?

In this episode of Evolution Stories, Christian Talbot sits down with Dr. Brian Kelly, Head of School at Carol Morgan School in the Dominican Republic, to explore how physical space and school culture work together to drive meaningful change.

Dr. Kelly shares the thinking behind Carol Morgan's new Arts, Innovation, and Dining Center, a space designed intentionally around student flourishing, and traces his own path into education and school leadership.

The conversation digs into the challenge every leader faces: how to meet the accelerating pace of change with genuine innovation while building a culture of collective efficacy. Dr. Kelly reflects on a pivotal realization, that leaders don't need to have all the answers, and that their real work is elevating the people around them to catalyze change together.

This episode is essential listening for leaders thinking about how the spaces they build and the cultures they foster can bring out the best in students and staff alike.

What really motivates people to change?

In this season finale episode of Evolution Stories, Christian Talbot sits down with bestselling author Dan Pink to unpack decades of research on motivation, leadership, timing, regret, and the future of human skills.

Drawing from his work in Drive, When, To Sell Is Human, and The Power of Regret, Dan explains why traditional reward systems often fail in schools and organizations, why autonomy and purpose outperform control, and how leaders can avoid the trap of under-communicating change.

The conversation also explores the science of breaks and timing, why regret can improve decision-making, and what educators must prioritize as AI transforms how knowledge is created and distributed.

This episode is essential listening for leaders navigating complexity, uncertainty, and wise change.