Getting Smart Podcast

What do students want principals to know about feeling heard, and feeling safe enough to fail and try again?

Mason Pashia talks with Clare Ann Harff, executive director of MAPS Media Institute, and MAPS students Mikaela Doney and Laurel De Groot. MAPS gives young people across Montana free, professional media arts education, with studios in the Bitterroot Valley, Helena and near the Fort Belknap Indian Community, plus client projects where students make real media for their communities. Mikaela and Laurel share what they've built, what they've learned about themselves, and their advice for principals and superintendents.

📬 Free weekly newsletter: https://www.gettingsmart.com/newsletter/ 🎧 More episodes + transcripts: https://www.gettingsmart.com/podcast/ 🍎 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/getting-smart-podcast/id1017984086 · 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2cUXLWi6LxdMxihgzzTntf

Links MAPS Media Institute: https://mapsmediainstitute.com/ Education Reimagined: https://education-reimagined.org/

Ten years ago, a small team asked a wild question: could you actually pay people to learn? That question sent them around the world, and eventually to building the infrastructure behind digital credentials used by Scouts, schools, and employers everywhere.

In this episode, host Mason Pashia talks with Jacksón Smith, co-founder and CTO of the Learning Economy Foundation, about why credentials alone aren't very persuasive on their own, what it means to treat data portability as a public good, and the three verbs, collect, understand, navigate, behind their open-source app LearnCard. They also get into peer endorsements, why stories carry more weight than certificates, and LearnCard's new "Learner GPS," a Google Maps for figuring out where to go next in your education or career.

Resources

Jacksón's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksonsmithcurtis Learning Economy Foundation: https://www.learningeconomy.io/ LearnCard: https://www.learncard.com/ "Why Learner Wallets Will Fail (And How to Make Sure They Don't)": https://www.gettingsmart.com/2026/01/06/why-learner-wallets-will-fail-and-how-to-make-sure-they-dont/

What actually sticks with students twenty years after high school?

Andrew Frishman, co-executive director of Big Picture Learning and host of the new podcast The Advisory, joins Mason Pashia to talk about reconnecting with the Met High School Class of 2006. He is joined by Natasha Luigui, a Met alum, and Daniela Moraes, a current Met student in Providence, Rhode Island. They talk about advisory, exhibitions, internships, and why test scores aren't the whole picture of student outcomes.

Andrew's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewfrishman/ Big Picture Learning: https://www.bigpicture.org/ The Met High School: https://www.themethighschool.org/

For the blog Resources, you can also link Getting Smart's own Met school page: https://www.gettingsmart.com/school/metropolitan-regional-career-and-technical-center-met/

Can AI make math class more social? Britte Haugan Cheng (MenloEDU) and Ann Edwards (WestEd) of the AIMS Collaboratory join Nate McClennen to talk about how developers, researchers, teachers, and students build math edtech together, why implementation is harder than it looks, and what a network can share with the rest of the field.

Links AIMS Collaboratory: https://www.aimscollaboratory.org/ Inventory of Public Goods: https://www.aimscollaboratory.org/resources AIMS EduData: https://digitalpromise.org/initiative/advancing-innovative-math-solutions-aims-home/ BUILD: https://build.org/about/ NCTM: https://www.nctm.org/

Can AI help students connect with people instead of replacing them? What does a real PISA question look like? And why is microschool research so hard to trust?

Nate McClennen and Mason Pashia catch up on a new Christensen Institute report on building AI that connects students to people, plus a closer look at PISA, including Mason's attempt at a sample question. They also get into a new bipartisan push for an education R&D agency, what Arizona's ESA spending shows, why student motivation matters even more with AI in the picture, and a new public boarding school in Alabama. Stay for the song at the end.

Links mentioned

NEED Act reintroduction: https://www.bennet.senate.gov/2026/09/17/bennet-van-hollen-tillis-reintroduce-bipartisan-bill-to-boost-innovation-in-education/ Arizona ESA FY2026 Q3 report: https://www.azed.gov/sites/default/files/2026/06/ESA%20FY26%20Q3%20Executive%20_%20%20Legislative%20Report.pdf Prosocial Possibilities (Christensen Institute): https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publication/prosocial-possibilities/ MySky: https://newpublic.substack.com/p/meet-the-algorithm-you-can-actually Schools Have a Motivation Problem (The 74): https://www.the74million.org/article/schools-have-a-motivation-problem-ai-is-making-it-impossible-to-ignore/ The Disengaged Teen episode: https://www.gettingsmart.com/podcast/jenny-anderson-and-rebecca-winthrop-on-the-disengaged-teen/ Alabama School of Healthcare Sciences: https://alabamanewscenter.com/2025/10/20/alabama-school-of-healthcare-sciences-brings-transformative-approach-to-high-school-education/ The Hogeweyk: https://www.bethecareconcept.com/en/hogeweyk-dementia-village-hogeweyk-netherlands/

Letter grades get a lot of the blame when schools try to change how they assess learning. Two of the editors of a new book on competency-based education explain what they've seen up close.

Nate McClennen and Rebecca Midles talk with Bill Zima (Director of Implementation, Marzano Academies) and Michelle McCann (Professional Development Associate, Marzano Resources). Bill and Michelle are two of the four editors of Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation, and Nate and Rebecca co-wrote a chapter in it. They talk about what competency-based education means, why it's so hard to implement well, and where letter grades fit in. Each guest also shares one sentence of advice for any school or district leader thinking about making the move.

Resources

Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation: https://www.amazon.com/Competency-Based-Practices-Successful-Implementation-competency-based/dp/1965768024 Marzano Resources: https://www.marzanoresources.com/books-videos.html FullScale: https://www.fullscalelearning.org/

Live from the Uncharted Learning Summit in Chicago, Victoria Andrews and Shawnee Caruthers reflect on a community built around one big idea: entrepreneurship is for everyone.

Through conversations with alumni, teachers, district leaders, and volunteers, they explore how Uncharted Learning's programs help students discover who they are, not just what they can build. You'll hear from a member of the very first cohort, a teacher who resigned and then got her passion for teaching back, a director whose former middle schooler is now a CEO and policy advocate, and a community champion who makes it all possible for teachers. Victoria and Shawnee also dig into the joy of pitch night, the lessons in rejection, and why word of mouth from students is the strongest endorsement a program can get.

Featured voices: Mika Chang, Connor Boundy, Alan Carranza, Paula Chilton, Ida Pascal, Megan Gordon, Triana Williams, Susan Hohlman, Jason Roemer, and Jackson Greenstone

Links

• Hear all 14 full interviews from the summit: https://www.gettingsmart.com/podcast/live-at-the-uncharted-learning-summit-why-entrepreneurship-is-for-everyone/
• Bring Uncharted Learning to your school or community: https://www.unchartedlearning.org/contact

A K-8 district isn't supposed to have a high school. Bostonia Global built one anyway, and rethought what high school could look like in the process.

In this episode, Rebecca Midles talks with Nerel Winter (CEO of Bostonia Global), Johanna Simko (Principal of Bostonia Global High School), and David Rios (a Bostonia Global alumnus) about designing an in-district dependent charter high school from scratch, one built around competency-based learning, a K-12 "world of work" curriculum, and an advisory model where every adult in the building is also a mentor.

They talk through what it actually took to hire and train teachers for a school unlike anything else in their district, how they built a transcript that speaks to both universities and employers, and what David's own path, from a bilingual K-5 program to a UC Riverside campus, looks like from the inside.

A school in Singapore just spent over $600 million reimagining what a classroom should be, and it's not what you'd expect.

Mike Posthumus, learning design principal at Fielding International, walks through how Singapore American School rebuilt its campus around a real learning model instead of the traditional "cells and bells" classroom design, and why that distinction changes everything about how kids actually learn. He also shares how a much smaller, budget-friendly version of the same idea transformed a public school district in Cranston.

The job of "principal" has quietly become impossible, one person expected to coach every teacher, be the expert in every subject, set the vision, and be present in the community, all at once.

In this episode, host Nate McClennen talks with Dr. Lindsay Whorton, president of the Holdsworth Center and author of "A New School Leadership Architecture," about why the traditional principal role has become unsustainable, and what school systems can do instead. Lindsay has worked with 89 school districts across Texas, growing the Holdsworth Center from just 7 districts since 2017, and lays out a four-level leadership framework built to redistribute the workload without losing accountability.

They get into why 80% of principals still believe they're solely responsible for coaching every teacher in their building, despite an unrealistic span of control, what a real case study of this framework looks like in practice, and how school leaders can start figuring out what only they can actually do.

Guest Links

Lindsay's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-whorton-9685aa26/ The Holdsworth Center: https://holdsworthcenter.org/