Episode 85: Securing Legacy Through Endowment

With George Suttles

Available March 31, 2026

In a time of constant uncertainty, planning for the future of a school community can feel like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Big picture strategy and mission dominate our aspirations, but it’s the day-to-day tactical decisions that carry immediate weight. George Suttles of the Commonfund Institute joins New View EDU guest host and NAIS Vice President of Strategy, Ann Snyder, to share his insights on how financial planning can seamlessly blend the aspirational and the practical, securing the future legacies of our schools through careful stewardship of resources.

Guest: George Suttles

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I'd also be remiss if I didn't, if we didn't have this conversation in the context of the times we're in, right? And so I think a lot of institutions and independent schools aren't shielded from this, are navigating uncertainty and turbulence, both persistent and emergent. And so when I say that, I mean, you know, independent schools have been trying to wrap their arms around persistent challenges that we've been having conversations about for years.” (8:11)
• “Don't make the mistake of siloing the endowment management work with the finance committee or the investment committee without including other school leadership, right? So you mentioned the advancement office, you know, the fundraising development team, they should have a strategic seat at the table, right? Because think about it, they're going to be one of, if not, they're going to be one of, if not the most important, lever or partner that you need to engage with to grow the endowment, right? Because we're going to invest this pool of capital for long-term growth and the markets are going to do what they do, but you're also going to need to equip the advancement team with information and narrative storytelling capability around what possibilities the endowment is going to create for the institution.” (20:05)
• “So when I think about endowment building sparking a culture of philanthropy, I immediately began to think about, right, it's about legacy. It's about securing the future of an institution we all care about. And that can be connected to legacy planning as it pertains to bequests and other vehicles. So I was like, right. Like if you're not having those legacy gift conversations already, that actually might be a nice entree into beginning to have them.” (36:04)

Related Episodes: 74; 57; 38; 20; 9

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 84: Good Conflict with Amanda Ripley and Hélène Biandudi Hofer

Available March 24, 2026

Is conflict always something to be avoided? Amanda Ripley and Hélène Biandudi Hofer, journalists and trained conflict mediators, are on a mission to answer that question, and to help shift both narratives and practices around how we recognize and engage with conflict in our everyday lives. They sit down with Morva McDonald to reflect on the stories we tell, how conflict shapes everything from our news cycle to our relationships, and why we all need to develop new skills to help us move towards healthier forms of resolution. 

Guests: Amanda Ripley and Hélène Biandudi Hofer

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So with good conflict, we might have these conversations where our emotions are all over the map, but at least we're experiencing them, than just stuck in this loop of, you know, feeling revenge and wanting revenge and deep anger. But there are these flashes of surprise and good conflict when we're having these good conflict conversations. There are these moments of clarity, opportunities for humor. Who would have thought that potentially that could happen, but there are sparks of that. There's this openness to, that I mentioned, to hearing the other side. So our emotions kind of go on this roller coaster ride, but we get to a place of understanding and it's understanding something on a deeper level about ourselves, about the other person, or about the situation that we're facing.” (12:29)
• “One of the things that we work with people to identify in that map are these four fire starters, which are things that tend to really distort conflict and make things go sideways very quickly. And so one is humiliation. And another is conflict entrepreneurs. These are people who exploit and inflame conflict for their own ends. And then corruption. So when institutions aren't trusted, whether they should be or not, that's another kind of trip wire into high conflict. And then false binaries or splitting, kind of when you separate people into two camps, good and evil. So you see that in how we talk about people, right?” (17:46)
• “Oftentimes with conflict entrepreneurs, there is some kind of internal pain that just has not been dealt with, right? And they are spreading that internal pain around and around and around. And I think, to this idea of, well, my gosh, they're so destructive. How in the world do we even think about managing them? I think just recognizing first that there is some deep pain there that they are not aware of, that's a helpful first step in thinking about developing a plan to manage them.” (23:32)

Related Episodes: 80; 78; 77; 66; 64; 62

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Episode 83: Mattering LIVE Episode With Jennifer Wallace

Available January 22, 2026

What if we could unlock the secret to a life of deep connection and purpose? That’s the premise of Jennifer Wallace’s new book, Mattering. In this special live edition of New View EDU, recorded on January 15, 2026, Jennifer shares everything she has learned about the importance of mattering with NAIS President Debra Wilson.

Guest: Jennifer Wallace

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Researchers who study it say that after the drive for food and shelter, it is the drive, the motivation to matter, that shapes human behavior for better or for worse. So when we feel like we matter, we show up fully, we engage, we connect, we contribute. When we are made to feel like we don't matter, we can either turn against ourselves, become anxious, depressed, turn to substances to try to alleviate the pain, or lash out in anger, right? Road rage, online attacks, political extremes, these are desperate attempts to say, oh, I don't matter? I'll show you I matter.” (10:03)
• “Something like 70% of the workforce, employees are reporting feeling disengaged. The way I view disengagement through the lens of mattering is that when we feel, as individual workers, like we don't matter, for whatever reason that is, it's a painful feeling. It releases these painful neurochemicals in our brains, and to stop that, if we don't feel like we have a voice or agency, to stop it, is to disengage. That's the coping strategy that we employ.” (16:40)
• “And so what I argue in the book to leaders, again, not just school leaders, to anybody, is that mattering at work is critical. If we want to support, if we know that children's resilience rests on the resilience of the adults in their lives, and we know that adults spend the majority of their waking hours in the workplace. If we can go and make adults feel like they matter at work, that is how we can bring caregivers and parents home to their kids as their best selves, sturdy adults, so that they could act as the first responders to those kids' struggles. You cannot do it if you are constantly beaten down at your job. You cannot show up as your best self.” (52:19)

Related Episodes: 79; 78; 77; 72; 60; 54; 51

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Episode 82: The New Dream Schools

With Jeff Selingo

Available November 18, 2025

What is a “Dream School?” Almost since the college admissions process began, students have had ideas about where they dream they’ll end up after high school, and increasingly, those “dream schools” have existed on a very short list of what we think of as prestigious, name-brand institutions. But what if we’re wrong about that list? What if everything we think we know about the factors that make a college great has been misguided? Higher education expert Jeff Selingo joins host Debra Wilson for a frank discussion of what needs to change in our approach to college admissions, and his new book, Dream School.

Guest: Jeff Selingo

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I want to bring back some normalcy to high school so that not everything is about, not everything you do is about getting into college and into the right college, that you're doing things because you want to challenge yourself. You enjoy them, you want to try new things out…There's so much pressure around me to apply to a certain set of schools, and I wanna change that conversation.” (6:08)
• “The November 1 deadlines, the October 15th deadlines now, even earlier deadlines, has just moved up the entire college search process now really into the junior year. And then now what used to happen in the junior year is happening in the sophomore year. So you're not even getting through half of high school without really thinking about college.” (11:33)
• “I mean, the big unknown here, Debra, is the role of AI in the job market. What are the jobs of the future really going to be and what are they going to need? What are the skill sets they're going to need? It was pretty certain over the last 10 years that we've seen, one of the reasons why liberal arts colleges have kind of gone out of favor is because we've seen a huge shift in majors to the business and STEM because parents thought that's where the jobs were…Now parents are asking, huh, what is the, now what's the next major? And by the way, maybe this brings the liberal arts back into vogue and maybe the liberal arts institutions with their ability to have a mix of problem solving and communication and critical thinking and bring in hands-on learning to that, that might bring them back in a way that we didn't quite expect.” (34:14)

Related Episodes: 76; 74; 63; 44; 36; 29; 22

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Episode 81: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing

With Peter Nilsson

Available November 11, 2025

Right now, it may feel as though AI has changed everything about education. It has, says Peter Nilsson – but it has also changed nothing. That’s the paradox at the core of his forthcoming co-authored book, Irreplaceable: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing about Teaching and Learning. He sits down with host Morva McDonald to share what has actually changed, what hasn’t, and how his work using technology to bolster innovation in education has led him to this place.

Guest: Peter Nilsson

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Unlike medicine and unlike law, education is diverse in the way that it is applied in different classrooms. There isn't only one way to teach the Great Gatsby. There isn't only one way to teach Beloved. In fact, every classroom should be different in the way that it engages it because every classroom has different students. So while knowledge on Wikipedia compiles everybody's contributions to the page on physics compiled to one page, curriculum does the opposite. Curriculum doesn't compile. It disaggregates. It diversifies.” (5:22)
• “It's impossible to expect every teacher, every school, even to be able to develop the wisest, most effective responses to every change. That's just not how innovation happens. What happens is people all across networks figure out small little things. And the more those small little things can share across the network, the more any individual node on the network can have the most comprehensive, high quality, effective response to that thing.” (16:52)
• “Students now can do more, so much more than they ever could do before. Every student having something like this vision of an AI tutor is a game changer for so many reasons. But nonetheless, students will still need time. They will still need help. They will still need practice. They will still struggle to ask the right question. They will still come in confused about something. They will still need teachers to help them build confidence. Everything is changing in terms of how we do this on a human, individual level where we're interacting with a machine that is more and more like a human, but nothing is changing in that the messiness of our own human learning remains.” (22:31)

Related Episodes: 71, 69, 68, 49, 45, 31

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode from NAIS podcast Member Voices, Jackie Wolking speaks with Autumn Adkins Graves, head of St. Anne's-Belfield School (VA). In their conversation, Graves shares the importance of curiosity in the age of artificial intelligence, and how her school created a portrait of a graduate with a futurist lens. She also talks about change management and how we affirm what's working well to move things along and how we have to stop trying to control tech or dismiss it.

New View EDU will return next week with a new episode on How AI Changes Everything and Nothing, with guest Peter Nilsson.

Related Resources:

• Member Voices Podcast
• AI Resources for Schools and Educators
• Recent Episodes of New View EDU

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 80: The Future of Inclusion

With Kenji Yoshino

Available October 28, 2025

In this time of rapidly evolving law and opinion around terms like diversity, equity, and inclusion, what is the work of school leaders who believe in building stronger, more connected, more inclusive communities? Legal scholar and author Kenji Yoshino is the author of a forthcoming book called How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America. He joins host Morva McDonald to talk about the legal precedents of the past, the shifting culture of the present, and the strategies that can secure the future of equitable practice.

Guests: Kenji Yoshino

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I think lawyers are actually terrible at lots of things, but we're actually rather good at saying, yes, we disagree, but you're not my enemy, right? You're my debate opponent, and you're actually my friend on the other side. And so let's actually behave as if, let's carry ourselves in that way and let the best ideas win.”
• “I think that the younger generation has a greater understanding not of who they are, but, or not just of who they are, but also the skills that are going to be needed for us to survive, much less thrive, in a multicultural society that is much more global, much more diverse. And so the capacity to speak across difference, to work across difference, to bond across difference is going to be a critical skill for us going forward. And that's the set of skills that are embodied within DEI.”
• “So the question I always ask is like, it's really easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and to get blown back and forth as the pendulum swings back and forth, right? But rather than doing that, like just sit in your values and think five years from now, who will I want to have been in this moment when everyone was telling me like cave or do this or do that? Like what is the kind of values based decision that I can make here that will make me proud of myself five years from now, rather than proud of myself tomorrow or proud of myself next week?”

Related Episodes: 77; 66; 64; 62; 37; 30; 17; 7

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 79: The Disengaged Teen

With Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop

Available October 21, 2025

Why do so many students seem to lose their love of learning when they reach adolescence? Is there something about the way we approach school for this age group that leads to greater disengagement and apathy? And how can we change our systems, and the ways we relate to teens both in and out of school, to help support their development and flourishing? Authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop join host Debra Wilson to talk about their book The Disengaged Teen, and what they recommend to parents and educators in the age of rapidly evolving AI.

Guests: Jenny West Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We also heard a lot that it was, parents often figured out things weren't going well when it really kind of blew up. So engagement is a continuum. And some of the behaviors we see early on that we can kind of shrug our shoulders and say, that's just, you know, teens being teens, right? To sort of bring that negative construct in. And some of it is, for sure. Like I don't want to freak out parents unnecessarily, but sometimes seeing those behaviors continuously and not digging into them then was like, kids get to a point where they're telling themselves, there's no point. I'm not going to try at anything. And it's because they failed a test and didn't want to tell anyone or didn't know how to ask for help.” (15:31)
• “We argue in the book that we need to make a shift from what we call the age of achievement, where through no fault of anybody inside the system, virtually every education system around the world, just how it has been designed from eons ago, is about ranking and sorting. Otherwise, we wouldn't have grades. Do you know what I mean? We wouldn't have that. That is the core. The purpose really was, ages ago, of funneling up into higher ed. How do you select? And so we're saying we are definitely seeing the strains on that design.” (31:24)

Related Episodes:76; 71; 63; 60; 59; 51; 40; 31

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 78: The Power of Transcendent Thinking

With Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Available October 14, 2025

“What does it mean to be a self-actualizing, fully integrated, socially contextualized human being in this new world order? And how would we design opportunities…to help a young person develop not just what they know now, but to potentiate in ways that change who they could become?”

Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang returns to New View EDU to share the work she and her team at USC CANDLE are doing to answer these, and other, deeply provocative questions about the science of teaching and learning. Her new research hones in on a specific type of cognitive process, which she terms “transcendent thinking.” And as Mary Helen explains during this conversation with Debra Wilson, transcendent thinking may be the key to unlocking long-term developmental outcomes for students.

Guest: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So what we have here is this incredible suggestion that when kids dispositionally engage with complex, curious, deep thinking about big ideas. Not only are they deeply engaged by that, but they are physically and functionally growing their capacity to think in ways that over time produces a neural substrate that supports wellbeing. So we're actually growing a robust brain that enables us to be well, to manage in relationships, and to feel good in our own skin and to develop identities that transcend that are about big ideas and purpose and values.” (18:21)
• “What we show is that teaching well is not more work, it's different work. It's work in which you really engage with the thought patterns, what it feels like for these students to be thinking. What are their emotions about here? Are they having emotions about, you know, the amazing power of right triangles to help us, you know, sort of understand the geometry of the world and how powerful it feels to really engage in that kind of mathematical thinking? Or are they having emotions about, yay, I did it, I'm done. Or, boo, I didn't, and now I'm freaking out because I'm going to flunk, right? Because when the emotions are mainly about those outcomes, what we're finding is that the school is not promotive of development in the same way. It may be promoting quote unquote learning, maybe, but in the service of what? What are you going to use that learning for?” (33:33)

Related Episodes: 75; 72; 69; 59; 58; 47; 35

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 77: Dignity-Affirming Leadership in Schools

With Jason Craige Harris

Available October 7, 2025

At a time when conflict and polarization feel like an unrelenting fact of life, how can we build stronger, kinder school communities where everyone feels seen, known, and valued? That’s one of the pervasive questions facing school leaders right now, and one that Jason Craige Harris is ready to help us answer. He joins Morva McDonald for a conversation about refocusing our leadership practices to center human dignity, and why he feels that reframe is so vital to our continued wellbeing.

Guest: Jason Craige Harris

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We have to engage in a bit of a listening tour to hear how people are experiencing their cultural reality.  And one of the reasons why is because our brains are storytelling factories. And in the absence of information given to us, whenever we detect gaps, we create, right? We fill it with our own sort of assumptions. And those assumptions, I'm not saying they're automatically wrong, but they're not automatically right most of the time.” (6:58)
• “For a long time in my work, I framed things in terms of what I was against. Like I had a really clear idea of like, I don't want exclusion. I don't want assimilation. I don't want violence. I'm not even sure I really want tolerance. And so my whole imagination was defined by being anti- forces that were debilitating and dehumanizing. And at some point I realized, gosh, like, I'm not sure I've spent much time trying to thickly describe the world that I want, like what I'm fighting for versus what I'm fighting against...Let's just say that if exclusion somehow disappears, if racism disappears, if whatever -ism it is disappears, then will we no longer have purpose?” (19:15)
• “I worry that some of our school communities, because of the desire to avoid controversy and division, and the complexities that come with grappling with challenging human issues, like the desire to avoid crisis, then leads some toward a kind of superficial peace, a sort of superficial consensus.” (25:16)

Related Episodes: 67; 66; 64; 37; 30; 15; 13

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.