The Better Leaders Better Schools Podcast | The #1 Downloaded School Leadership Show

Adam Wolfsdorf chairs the Humanities Department at Bay Ridge Preparatory in Brooklyn and teaches graduate students at NYU and Wesleyan, drawing on 26 years inside the classroom. He's the author of Teaching in the Riptide, where he names the moments educators get pulled under by something more powerful than their plan — and what to do when that happens. Outside the classroom, he spent 25 years performing professionally, including national tours of RENT and Grease.

A student kicks over a trash can, slams the door, and storms out mid-lesson. Seventeen other students sit frozen, waiting to see what the teacher does next. That moment — and the instinct to fight back in it — is what most classroom management training gets wrong. Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf has spent 26 years studying what happens when teachers refuse to match a student's energy, and why that refusal is the most powerful classroom management tool no one teaches.

🫶 What You'll Learn

• Why matching a student's outburst with your own energy guarantees you lose the room.
• How "constructive subversion" turns a disruptive moment into the most powerful lesson of the year.
• What separates teachers who do harm from teachers who do good — and it isn't classroom control.
• Why compliance is the wrong goal for both students and educators.
• How to teach students to feel a story instead of just analyze one.

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules ✅ Key Insight #1: Why Reacting to Student Outbursts Destroys Classroom Management

• What's broken: Teachers are trained to regain control the moment a student acts out, so they react instantly — and the reaction is what costs them the room.
• The shift: The strongest move is often no move at all — sitting in the discomfort of a disrupted classroom without flinching or matching the student's intensity.
• Impact: Students who provoke a reaction to feel powerful lose that power entirely once a teacher stops giving it to them — Wolfsdorf reports the student who kicked over the trash-can, never had another outburst that year.

✅ Key Insight #2: How Constructive Subversion Turns Disruption Into the Best Lesson You'll Teach

• What's broken: Teachers walk into a lesson with fixed expectations for what students are capable of, then read any departure from the plan as a problem to shut down.
• The shift: Wolfsdorf names a category he calls "constructive subversion" — student behavior that breaks from the assignment but exceeds everything the teacher hoped for, like a ninth grader's poem about her father's death disguised as a poem about vegetables.
• Impact: The student who wrote that poem has now worked with Wolfsdorf three separate times and is heading to college — a years-long relationship built from a moment he almost dismissed as off-topic.

✅ Key Insight #3: Why Compliant Students and Compliant Teachers Both Stunt Growth

• What's broken: Schools reward compliance in students and conformity in teachers, treating obedience as the marker of a "good" classroom.
• The shift: Real progress — for a student, a teacher, or a system — requires people willing to push back, because systems don't change unless they get rattled.
• Impact: Wolfsdorf points to his own students calling him out at home for thinking too rigidly, forcing him to revise his own positions in real time rather than defaulting to authority.

🎩 DR. ADAM WOLFSDORF QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"Do you understand that you are the punchline of the classroom?"

— Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

"Sometimes the student needs to give the teacher a hard time because the teacher is the one who needs to learn more than the student in that particular situation."

— Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

"There are educators who really want students to learn, and then there are educators who kind of want to torture students."

— Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

"Systems don't change unless they get rattled."

— Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

"We have to be aware that we could be a counter narrative to those destructive elements."

— Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

"Sometimes it's the case that it's the teacher even more than the student who needs the education."

— Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

"If you have the equanimity to resist, even if you're feeling it, that's a pretty powerful lesson."

— Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

🧠 Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: The next time a student pushes your buttons, pause for three full seconds before responding instead of reacting in the moment.
• This Month: Identify one student whose disruptive behaviour might actually be a "constructive subversion" worth leaning into rather than shutting down.
• This Semester: Build a feedback loop where students can call out your own rigid thinking, the way Wolfsdorf's kids challenged him at home.

⌚️ Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 - Why reacting to outbursts destroys your classroom
• 04:13 - How to handle subversive behaviour without shutting it down
• 05:55 - Teaching a student who identified as a Neo-Nazi
• 12:50 - The ninth-grade poem that changed his perspective
• 19:20 - How schools are creating the focus crisis in kids
• 23:27 - The trash can story: a student's full classroom outburst
• 35:05 - The Harvard professor who tried to break his confidence
• 38:34 - Are good students and good teachers actually compliant
• 44:59 - The professor who taught him to feel a story
• 53:04 - Building a dream school with no limitations

👩🏻‍💻 Connect With Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-wolfsdorf-1032b5383/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamwolfsdorf/

🎧 Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com

🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has spent 30 years equipping schools through negotiated cooperative contracts that stretch every budget dollar — from furniture and tech to sustainable cleaning solutions, all from a single supplier. They helped Baldwin School District transform its entire campus while staying under budget by pairing smart design with smarter purchasing.

🎙️ See how at ODPbusiness.com/education

Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens report digs into how districts connect professional growth to staffing stability — districts that automate professional growth report easier hiring nearly 50% of the time, compared to 30% of those that don't. If you're building a campus where great educators choose to stay.

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META DESCRIPTION: Why reacting to student outbursts backfires — Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf on classroom management, compliance, and constructive subversion.

She spent six years hiding her autism diagnosis from everyone — peers, friends, even herself. Then she built a neuroscience-backed video game that's changing how neurodivergent students understand who they are.

Vanessa Castañeda Gill the founder of Social Cipher, an SEL video game platform designed by and for neurodivergent people, developed in partnership with the LEGO Foundation. Her work sits at the intersection of neuroscience research and lived autistic experience — and she's one of the few people in edtech who has both. She was diagnosed autistic at 14, went on to become a published neuroscience researcher, and turned her personal story into a scalable tool now reaching classrooms across the country.

80% of school avoidance students are neurodivergent. That single stat reframes every conversation you've been having about "disengaged" kids in your building. Your neurodivergent students aren't checking out because they don't care — they're burning out from performing normalcy in a system that was never designed for how their brains actually work. This episode is a practical roadmap for principals who want to close the gap between their inclusion vision and what neurodivergent students are actually experiencing every single day.

🤩 What You'll Learn

• Why calm corners and flexible seating aren't enough — and what neurodivergent students actually need to feel safe and stay enrolled.
• How Social Cipher uses video game mechanics to build a shared emotional vocabulary between students and teachers.
• What it looks like to lead a majority neurodivergent team — and why that's a strength, not a challenge.
• Three low-cost, high-impact classroom moves any teacher can make this week to support neurodivergent learners.
• The principle of "diagnosing a need over needing a diagnosis" — and why it matters for the undiagnosed kids already in your building.

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧠 Key Insight #1: Neurodivergent Students Aren't Disengaged — They're Exhausted from Masking

• What's broken: Schools interpret quiet compliance as success, missing that neurodivergent students spend the entire school day suppressing their natural responses to fit in — and completely collapse when they get home.
• The shift: Recognizing masking as a coping mechanism, not good behavior, and designing school environments where self-regulation is taught explicitly and practiced safely before students hit their limit.
• Impact: When schools build in structured regulation opportunities for all students — not just flagged kids — neurodivergent students stop burning out by dismissal and school avoidance rates drop.

🧰 Key Insight #2: SEL Programs Built for Neurotypical Kids Are Leaving Neurodivergent Kids Behind

• What's broken: Most SEL programs were designed with neurotypical students in mind — and when a neurodivergent student's natural coping tools (stimming, special interests, movement) aren't built into the framework, those tools get labeled as problems instead of recognized as regulation strategies.
• The shift: SEL curriculum designed by neurodivergent people, grounded in neuroscience, that treats stimming and special interests as assets and builds a shared emotional vocabulary students can actually use in the moment.
• Impact: Teachers report students using in-game language to communicate their needs in real time — "I feel like Ava right now, I need to go to my quiet space" — which means fewer outbursts, fewer evacuations, and a classroom that's actually safer for everyone.

🧰 Key Insight #3: Diagnose the Need Before You Wait for the Label

• What's broken: Schools gatekeep neurodivergent supports behind official diagnoses, leaving a massive population of undiagnosed students — disproportionately students of color, girls, and late-identified learners — without the tools they need.
• The shift: Design your building to meet underlying needs regardless of whether a formal diagnosis exists, because the underlying needs are real whether or not the paperwork has arrived.
• Impact: Every student who needs movement breaks, predictable routines, or permission to engage through special interests gets those things — and the students who were flying under the radar stop disappearing.

🎙️ VANESSA CASTAÑEDA GILL QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"Neurodivergence doesn't need fixing. Your approach does."

— Vanessa Castaneda Gill

"The world won't work without all kinds of minds."

— Vanessa Castaneda Gill

"It is part of my identity and part of who I am. It is not all of who I am, and it's not something that needs to be fixed."

— Vanessa Castaneda Gill

"If you are in a position of leadership, model that vulnerability. It will just allow for so much more vulnerability between your employees or your students and you."

— Vanessa Castaneda Gill

"It's really hard to tell nuanced and rich and resonant stories that kids can actually root for and feel represented by if it wasn't led by neurodivergent experience."

— Vanessa Castaneda Gill

"You can give kids all of the tools in the world to be able to learn their best with their neurodivergence. But if representation and vulnerability in sharing those experiences is not part of that, then a lot of those tools kind of go out the window."

— Vanessa Castaneda Gill

"Instead of playing it safe, we make it safe to play."

— Vanessa Castaneda Gill

🤔 Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: Identify one student in your building who is frequently labeled "disruptive" and ask a teacher who works with them to describe what happens immediately before the behavior — look for the sensory or regulation trigger underneath it.
• This Month: Pilot a 5-minute movement or sensory break built into the schedule for one class or grade level, regardless of neurotype, and gather teacher observations on how it shifts the afternoon.
• This Semester: Audit your SEL program to determine whether neurodivergent students are represented in its design — and if Social Cipher's free pilot program is a fit for your building, start one.

⌚️ Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 - The school avoidance crisis and neurodivergent students
• 00:58 - Who is Vanessa Castaneda Gill and Social Cipher
• 04:09 - What it's like to receive an autism diagnosis at 14
• 08:18 - Six years of masking and the mental health cost
• 13:34 - How Social Cipher was born in a college dorm
• 15:44 - What the Social Cipher games do for neurodivergent students
• 18:35 - The shutdown sequence and quiet space explained
• 20:42 - How schools partner with Social Cipher
• 31:45 - Leading a majority neurodivergent team
• 34:57 - Classroom strategies for neurodivergent inclusion
• 37:07 - Insights from partnering with the LEGO Foundation
• 39:32 - Marquee messages and dream campus principles
• 42:58 - The one thing every Ruckus Maker should remember

👩🏻‍💻 Connect With Vanessa Castañeda Gill

• Vanessa Castañeda Gill Website: socialcipher.com
• Link to create a free account on our platform: https://dashboard.socialcipher.com/signup
• Free month-long pilot program: https://www.socialcipher.com/pilot-program
• Free inclusive SEL resource library: https://www.socialcipher.com/sel-resources
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessacastanedagill/

🎧 Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide., never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com

🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has been a trusted partner for schools for 30 years — and they're not just filling supply orders. They help you design dynamic learning environments with tech integrations that bring lessons to life, flexible furniture that transforms any space into a collaboration zone, and sustainable solutions that teach by example. One supplier, everything you need, cooperative contract compliant.

🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education

Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report is the data every principal trying to retain great staff needs right now. Districts that use software to automate professional growth are nearly twice as likely to report improved hiring outcomes compared to those that don't — and the report breaks down exactly what's working.

🔍 Download the full report at frontlineeducation.com/leaders

IXL's diagnostic automatically identifies knowledge gaps and gives every teacher a personalized growth plan for each student — so nobody walks into class guessing what their kids know. As students learn, IXL adapts to the right level of difficulty for each individual. Close the knowledge gaps that are holding your building.

🔍 Get started at ixl.com/leaders

META DESCRIPTION: 80% of school avoidance students are neurodivergent. Social Cipher founder Vanessa Castaneda Gill shows principals how to actually close that gap.

Jeff Meade spent 20 years building companies. Then a friend asked him one question on a hike near Mount Fuji — what makes you happy? — and he couldn't answer it. That four-hour conversation led him to Paul Quinn College in Dallas, where he now serves as Chief Innovation Officer and runs a program with one non-negotiable rule: every student, regardless of major, must start and operate a real business before they graduate. No simulations. No worksheets. Real ventures, real customers, real failure.

Every school says it wants future-ready students. Most are still teaching them how to pass tests. Jeff Meade decided that wasn't good enough — and built a venture-based learning model that turns a graduation requirement into the most practical education a student can get. If you're a school leader wondering whether entrepreneurship education belongs on your campus, this episode answers the question.

✅ What You'll Learn

• Why employers stopped wanting graduates who can pass tests — and what they're asking for instead
• How Paul Quinn structured a seed fund and advisor model so student ventures get real resources, not just pitch competitions
• Why this generation's biggest professional liability is their inability to talk to strangers — and what to do about it
• What a theoretical entrepreneurship curriculum gets wrong, and how venture-based learning fixes it
• How K–12 leaders can apply the same principles without a college-sized program

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🎯 Key Insight #1: Entrepreneurship Curriculum That Stays Theoretical Is Useless

• What's broken: Most school entrepreneurship programs teach students about business through reading, multiple choice questions, and theoretical frameworks — producing students who can define entrepreneurship but have never done it.
• The shift: Venture-based learning requires students to actually start and operate a business — finding customers, managing limited resources, pricing, pitching, and iterating on failure in real time.
• Impact: Students graduate having already been an entrepreneur, not just having studied one — and employers notice the difference immediately.

🎯 Key Insight #2: Soft Skills Are the Real Curriculum Gap

• What's broken: Leaders building entrepreneurship programs focus on funding, advisors, and curriculum structure — the infrastructure — while assuming students already have the interpersonal skills to execute.
• The shift: This generation has built entire social identities through virtual success and can have 20,000 followers on TikTok without ever sitting across from an adult in a real conversation.
• Impact: When students are pushed to talk to real people — potential customers, community members, advisors — they build the human connection muscle that no app can replicate, and one student went out to practice cold outreach and came back with an internship.

🎯 Key Insight #3: Failing Fast Has to Be Built Into the Design

• What's broken: Twelve years of traditional schooling trains students to avoid failure at all costs — honor roll, dean's list, perfect SAT prep — and that fear of failure becomes a ceiling on their entrepreneurial potential.
• The shift: Jeff flips the frame on day one: the goal is to fail big and fast, then iterate — with a soft landing built in because the stakes are learning, not rent.
• Impact: Students who learn to process failure as data rather than identity become the exact kind of adaptive, resilient thinkers that employers say they can't find enough of.

💬 JEFF MEAD QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"Students don't just study entrepreneurship, they actually do it."

— Jeff Meade

"The marketplace was telling us that they wanted a different type of student. So when I show up with this idea that every student starts a business, it's like, oh my God, you were answering sort of the prayers that we had."

— Jeff Meade

"You want somebody who thinks like this and not somebody who is trying to pass a test. That doesn't do anything for anybody."

— Jeff Meade

"I want you to fail big and fast. And that's so hard because you just graduated high school, you just took your SATs, you want to be on the dean's list. And then you walk into my class and I'm like, oh, you are going to fail so quick."

— Jeff Meade

"Students are dream chasers. They have these dreams — sometimes they may be uncomfortable sharing them, but they have these really cool dreams. And so we have the power to help them dream bigger and actualize those dreams."

— Jeff Meade

"In order for you to take it to another level and actually grow a business, you have to sit across from somebody and share your dream."

— Jeff Meade

🤗 Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: Audit your current entrepreneurship or career-readiness curriculum and identify one unit that is purely theoretical with no real-world interaction built in.
• This Month: Identify three local business owners or entrepreneurs who would come to your campus for a career-day-style conversation with students — make the ask.
• This Semester: Design one student-facing project where the deliverable is a real pitch to a real audience — parents, community leaders, local business owners — with a defined problem, a proposed solution, and a student-built case for why they're the right person to solve it.

⌚️ Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 - Schools teach compliance, not how to build anything real
• 01:09 - Jeff Meade and the Paul Quinn entrepreneur requirement
• 04:32 - The hike on Mount Fuji that changed Jeff's career
• 10:21 - How Paul Quinn cut football to fund its future
• 13:37 - What employers actually want from graduates
• 17:56 - The seed fund and advisor model supporting student ventures
• 20:34 - What venture-based learning actually means
• 24:05 - Why Gen Z struggles to talk to people in real life
• 32:31 - What Jeff tells K–12 leaders about student entrepreneurship
• 39:09 - The Babson model Jeff is rebuilding for HBCUs
• 43:10 - Jeff's three principles for his dream school

🔗 Connect With Jeff Mead

Website: jeff-meade.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffmeade

🎧 Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com

🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has spent 30 years helping school districts build environments where students actually want to show up. From flexible learning spaces to tech integration to sustainable solutions, they deliver it all from a single supplier — simplifying ordering and keeping you compliant with cooperative contracts. One school, Belago Academy, worked with ODP to create collaborative spaces so engaging that students forgot to check their phones.

🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to see what's possible.

Frontline Education's 2026 K–12 Lens Report cuts through the noise with insights from over 1,000 school leaders navigating staffing, student support, operations, and technology — all at once, all interconnected. If your district is managing multiple pressures simultaneously (and whose isn't?), this report shows how other leaders are adapting their strategies in real time.

🔍 Get the full picture at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders

IXL's universal screener identifies every student who needs intervention in 20 minutes or less — and then its adaptive learning platform automatically adjusts difficulty for each individual student as they work. Over 1 million teachers use IXL because it makes differentiated instruction something you can actually execute, not just aspire to.

🔍 Get started today at IXL.com/leaders

META DESCRIPTION: Paul Quinn College requires every student to launch a real business before graduation. Here's what venture-based learning looks like — and what K–12 leaders can steal from it.

A researcher, Edtech expert, and PhD candidate studying the intersection of AI, learning, and human experience, Kris brings a rare combination of academic rigor and real-world application to the question every principal is quietly asking: is all this technology actually helping? His work with Play Piper puts him at the front lines of how kids interact with screens — and what happens when that interaction goes wrong. Kris has been studying and speaking about screen usage in learning environments since 2013, long before most districts had a policy on the subject.

AI policy still doesn't exist in most school districts in 2026. Meta and YouTube just lost a major court case over intentionally building products harmful to kids. And the principals who bought Edtech tools during COVID are still living with implementations they never had time to design properly.

Kris returns to the RuckusCast to name the problem clearly: technology in schools is being treated as the experience instead of a tool within the experience — and that distinction is costing students more than anyone wants to admit.

🎯 What You'll Learn

• Why the Meta and YouTube court ruling matters to every principal making Edtech decisions right now
• The critical difference between simulation-based learning and actual skill development
• How COVID forced impossible implementation timelines that are still warping Edtech use today
• Why most districts still have no AI policy in 2026 — and what to do about it
• How to think about AI as a co-principal rather than a threat or a shortcut

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧰 Key Insight #1: Edtech Adoption Without Design Produces Screen Dependency, Not Learning

• What's broken: Schools are purchasing and deploying Edtech based on what's new and available, not on what produces better outcomes — and the result is students staring at screens for the majority of their learning time.
• The shift: Technology should be a tool within the learning experience, not the experience itself — the screen is one element of the world, not a replacement for it.
• Impact: When principals reframe adoption decisions around this distinction, they stop chasing shiny tools and start evaluating whether an implementation actually extends beyond what kids are staring at.

🧰 Key Insight #2: COVID-Era Implementation Timelines Broke Edtech Design

• What's broken: Transitioning a course from in-person to online properly takes months — sometimes a year — but COVID forced schools to make that shift in three to four weeks, and those broken implementations carried through.
• The shift: Acknowledge that what most schools are running isn't intentional digital learning design — it's emergency triage that never got fixed.
• Impact: Principals who name this legacy honestly can audit their current edtech stack against what was designed with intention versus what was deployed in crisis mode.

🧠 Key Insight #3: AI Is a Tool for Handling the Curriculum — Not for Replacing the Human Leader

• What's broken: Principals are either avoiding AI entirely or offloading judgment to it — neither approach produces better schools.
• The shift: Let AI handle the curriculum structure, the data, the content scaffolding — and use the human leader for exactly what AI cannot do: the relational, social, and emotionally intelligent work of building a school community.
• Impact: A principal who co-leads with AI this way gets leverage on administrative and instructional tasks while protecting the irreplaceable human elements that retain teachers and engage students.

KRIS QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"The idea that Silicon Valley is defining how humans will interact in the future is the most perverse thing that's ever happened in the history of society."

— Kris Rockwell

"Trinity does not learn how to fly a helicopter. She learns how to simulate a helicopter. She has no idea how to fly a helicopter once she's unplugged from that experience. So in that realm, what we're doing is looking at the simulation and saying, well, this is the future of learning. But it's not."

— Kris Rockwell

"What's being put into the system directly feeds what is coming out of the system."

— Kris Rockwell

"Code is becoming philosophy rather than engineering at this point."

— Kris Rockwell

"If I'm the co principal, I'm focusing on the human elements and how to make these things functional and how to make sure that the critical thinking is there."

— Kris Rockwell

"Ensure that it is a tool and not the tool. Ensure that those things that the kids have access to extend beyond what they're staring at."

— Kris Rockwell

🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: Audit one Edtech tool currently in use on your campus and ask whether students are staring at it for the majority of the time — if yes, identify one way it could be a gateway to an offline or physical experience instead.
• This Month: Draft a one-page AI use framework for your campus that answers two questions: what will we use AI to handle, and what will remain exclusively human.
• This Semester: Identify every Edtech implementation that was adopted during COVID emergency conditions and evaluate each one against the question Kris named: is this designed with intention, or are we still running triage?

⌚️ Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Silicon Valley is defining how kids learn

04:15 - Meta and YouTube court ruling unpacked

07:25 - The "new and shiny" edtech trap

09:13 - Simulation vs. actual learning (the Matrix problem)

13:03 - Why COVID broke edtech implementation

19:17 - How China vs. the West frames AI differently

28:06 - Most districts still have no AI policy in 2026

30:26 - Code is becoming philosophy, not engineering

39:21 - How to co-principal with AI

43:11 - The one thing every Ruckus Maker should remember

Connect With Chris

👩🏻‍💻 Follow Kris Rockwell:

• Website: www.playpiper.com
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/krisrockwell
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StartWithPiper
• X: https://x.com/StartWithPiper
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startwithpiper
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PlayPiperLLC
• TikTok: @play.piper

🎧 Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com

🤝 Today's RuckusCast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has been a trusted partner for schools for 30 years. They don't just drop off supplies — they'll help you design a STEAM Innovation center, keep multiple buildings stocked and compliant, and streamline ordering across your entire district through a single supplier with cooperative contract access. However you want to advance, they've seen it and solved it.

🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to learn more

The staffing crisis isn't over — it's just shifted. Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report found that districts with structured, targeted professional learning are nearly twice as likely to report easier hiring than those without. The data is in: professional growth that extends beyond onboarding builds the culture that retains teachers before the year even starts.

🔍 Download the full report at frontlineducation.com/leaders

IXL gives school leaders what teachers already love: an adaptive platform that handles differentiated instruction and delivers dashboards that let you drill down to individual student growth in real time. Make data-informed decisions that move the needle on student growth goals.

🔍 Get started today at ixl.com/leaders

META DESCRIPTION: AI policy is missing in most districts. Edtech is failing students. This episode breaks down why — and how principals can lead differently.

Eight years ago, Chad Weiden walked into one of South Carolina's most underperforming elementary schools — a campus so low-rated that the state took it over, failed to fix it, and handed it back to the district. He just turned it into a good school. The strategy for school turnaround he used wasn't a new curriculum, a fresh initiative, or a culture retreat. It was building beacons of excellence on every team and coaching teachers in real time, in the moment, while students were in the room.

Weiden spent nearly three decades building and leading schools across Chicago and South Carolina, including turning around Meeting Street Burns Pre-K through second grade from "unsatisfactory" to "good" on the state report card — in one of the most underserved communities in the state. He's a principal who understands that every child can learn and that the system, not the child, is what needs fixing. Find him on LinkedIn to follow his work.

School turnaround is one of the most searched and least understood challenges in school leadership. Most principals know they need to fix culture — what they don't know is which two or three instructional moves actually move the needle. This episode answers that question directly, from a principal who lived it in real time in a school the system had already given up on.

🤩 What You'll Learn

• Why building one beacon teacher per team matters more than trying to develop everyone at once
• How to implement real-time instructional coaching — in the moment, mid-lesson — and get teachers to crave it instead of fear it
• The vulnerability framework you must unpack before jumping into a teacher's classroom
• Why joy is not performative and what it actually looks like in a high-expectation school
• How the paradox of high expectations and deep love for students coexist — and why low expectations are never kindness

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧠 Key Insight #1: School Turnaround Starts with One Beacon Per Team, Not Everyone at Once

• What's broken: Principals in turnaround schools try to develop every teacher simultaneously and end up moving no one.
• The shift: Identify and build one beacon teacher per grade-level team who sets the standard, holds the expectation, and shows colleagues what great looks like when the principal isn't in the room.
• Impact: Once a beacon is in place, a second strong teacher develops faster — and within a few years, the entire team performs at a high level because the standard is visible every day.

🧠 Key Insight #2: Real-Time Coaching Builds Better Teachers Faster Than Any Post-Observation Debrief

• What's broken: Most instructional feedback arrives as an autopsy — a sit-down debrief days after the lesson, long after the muscle memory has hardened.
• The shift: The principal enters the classroom as a co-teacher, intervenes the moment an instructional error occurs — modeling, adjusting, coaching in real time — the same way elite athletes are corrected mid-rep, not after the game.
• Impact: Teachers start craving the feedback because they feel the improvement immediately; confidence builds in the room, students re-engage, and the principal's classroom presence shifts from evaluative to transformative.

🧠 Key Insight #3: Joy in School Is Not Performance — It's the Small Moments That Make Learning Stick

• What's broken: When 53% of students are disengaged, schools respond with programs, pep rallies, or initiatives — and teachers interpret any call for joy as a demand to become entertainers.
• The shift: Joy lives in small moments — a student nerding out on a text, spotting an algebra pattern in geometry, owning a goal that feels meaningful — not in performative enthusiasm that burns teachers out.
• Impact: Campuses that build joy into the academic experience — through growth, celebration, and belonging — create environments students don't want to leave and teachers don't want to quit.

🗣️ CHAD WEIDEN QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"I had to build a beacon of a teacher on each team. One beacon of what the bar should be — because when you leave, they're really holding the expectations. They're showing other people what it looks like."

— Chad Weiden

"Act like the school is your classroom. Every classroom is my classroom, and when I walk in, I'm going to co-teach with you. That's how we built really great teachers really quickly — that system of real-time coaching."

— Chad Weiden

"There's nothing better when you get feedback that helps you feel more effective or confident. You start to crave it. And once people realize this is going to make your job easier — not tomorrow, right now — they're like, okay, this is weird, but dang, that was helpful."

— Chad Weiden

"To truly love a child is to hold that child to the highest expectation possible. To not love a child is to lower the expectation. I really lived in black and white — what I've deeply changed my mind about is I embrace the paradox."

— Chad Weiden

"Joy isn't big joy. Joy is in small moments — nerding out in a text with a kid, seeing them light up over a pattern they've spotted. That's joy. It's not performative. Because performative is exhausting and you can't do it every moment of every day."

— Chad Weiden

"The system is perfectly designed to get the results that it has."

— Chad Weiden

"Let kids do the work. Teachers hold the learning, hold the modelling — we're talking too much. Let kids do the work. They're ready."

— Chad Weiden

🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: Walk into one classroom with the explicit intention to co-teach for five minutes — not to observe, but to intervene and model in real time if you see an instructional gap.
• This Month: Identify the one teacher on each grade-level team who is closest to beacon status and invest your heaviest coaching hours there first, rather than spreading yourself evenly.
• This Semester: Build a vulnerability framework with your staff — naming real-time coaching as a school norm during onboarding, modelling receiving feedback publicly yourself, and making the four beliefs explicit: it's okay to fail, it's okay to not know everything, it's okay to ask for help, and we are in this together.

⌚️ Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 - The real lever behind student disengagement
• 07:18 - Chad's turnaround story in South Carolina
• 10:22 - The three moves that drove results
• 11:05 - Building a beacon teacher on every team
• 12:26 - Real-time coaching defined and how it works
• 15:18 - How to introduce real-time coaching without fear
• 21:06 - Why every educator should take an improv class
• 30:07 - Joy and growth as the engine of school turnaround
• 39:16 - What Chad changed his mind about in education
• 42:57 - Danny on firing yourself from your own organization
• 44:29 - Marquee message: Let kids do the work

👩🏻‍💻 Connect With Chad Weiden

• Website: https://berkeleycharter.org/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-weiden-99a31878/

🎧 Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com.

🎙️ Today's Ruckuscast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has been a trusted partner for schools for 30 years — and they're not just a supplier, they're a strategic advantage. They give districts access to negotiated cooperative contracts that maximize every education dollar, and they proved it by helping the Baldwin School District transform an entire campus while staying under budget. From essential supplies to cutting-edge technology to flexible furniture, they're your one-stop shop to do school different.

🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to get started.

Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report makes the retention argument in hard numbers: districts that manage professional growth with software are nearly twice as likely to report easier hiring — 47% versus 30%. If you're serious about building a campus where great educators want to stay, this report is the data behind the strategy.

🔍 Download the full K12 Lens Report at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders.

IXL takes the guesswork out of what teachers do next. Ready-made lesson plans aligned to textbooks and state standards, plus daily student performance insights that let teachers adjust instruction before a gap becomes a problem. It's the kind of instructional support that turns real-time coaching from a principal strategy into a school-wide system.

🔍 Start today at IXL.com/leaders.

META DESCRIPTION: School turnaround principal Chad Weiden shares the real-time coaching system and beacon teacher strategy that took a failing school to good-rated in South Carolina.

A decade into the Better Leaders Better Schools Ruckuscast, Danny Bauer has coached and interviewed hundreds of school leaders — and the patterns are clear. Dan Watt, elementary principal in British Columbia and Ruckus Maker, flips the microphone and puts Danny in the guest chair. What follows isn't nostalgia. It's the unfiltered architecture of a school leadership development ecosystem that actually works — and what it means for how you lead your campus.

The Ruckuscast turns 10 this year. That's 10 years of watching which principals grow and which ones stall, which leadership beliefs hold up and which ones collapse under pressure. This episode is the debrief.

🌟 What You'll Learn

• Why the same interview questions nearly killed the show — and the pivot that saved it
• The core leadership belief Danny held 10 years ago that he's since discarded
• What separates Ruckus Makers from Play-It-Safe Principals at the pattern level
• Why curiosity in classroom walkthroughs beats judgment every time
• The two questions every teacher on your campus is silently asking

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧰 Key Insight #1: Repeatable Processes Are Training Wheels, Not Destinations

• What's broken: Most school leaders build repeatable systems and then defend them — mistaking consistency for quality, and process for progress.
• The shift: Treat your systems as training wheels — useful at the start, necessary to eventually remove when they stop producing growth and start producing boredom.
• Impact: When Danny scrapped his standard interview question bank and replaced it with curiosity-driven pre-interviews, the quality of guest conversations — and listener value — jumped immediately.

🧰 Key Insight #2: Busyness Is Not a Badge of Honor for School Leaders

• What's broken: Principals optimize for activity — more posts, more meetings, more programs — and measure success by how full the calendar looks rather than what outcomes those activities actually produce.
• The shift: Think deeply about inputs you can control and whether those inputs are actually the right inputs — strategy first, then tactics, and only the tactics that move the right needle.
• Impact: Danny turned down CEO and sales positions, fired himself from facilitating the Mastermind, and cut social media volume — and the ecosystem got healthier, not smaller.

🧰 Key Insight #3: Judgment in Walkthroughs Evaluates Teachers Into Being Average

• What's broken: Leaders walk into classrooms, form a verdict in real time, and deliver that verdict to teachers — which trains teachers to play it safe, avoid risk, and teach to the evaluator.
• The shift: Replace judgment with curiosity — "huh, how did that go?" instead of "that lesson was weak" — and follow it with questions about what the teacher was trying, what they learned, and what they'd change next period.
• Impact: A teacher who took a risk in third period and got honest, curious feedback can refine the lesson and nail it in sixth period; a teacher who got judged will never take that risk again.

🎙️ DANNY BAUER QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"If you come in there judging it and being like that was the worst lesson I've ever seen, is that teacher ever going to take a risk again? Probably not. Because you're a jerk. And you evaluated them into being average."

— Danny Bauer

"A Play-It-Safe Principal is just going to wait for the school district or whoever to develop them. Are you the hero of your story? Or are you a victim?"

— Danny Bauer

"Busyness is not a badge of honour, nor is it something that usually leads to the results that we want."

— Danny Bauer

"You exist in the system and there's a way that things are done. And so if you want to dream big and be bold in your leadership, then you have to get outside perspectives."

— Danny Bauer

"Your people really want to know the answer to two questions: Do I belong here? And am I doing a good job? If there's an absence of those answers, there's going to be problems within your culture."

— Danny Bauer

"What does it matter if I have a viral thread on X or a million comments on Facebook if they're just comments and nobody changes?"

— Danny Bauer

"Leadership is a human endeavor."

— Danny Bauer

🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: Walk into one classroom today and instead of evaluating, ask one curious question — "what were you trying to accomplish?" — and actually listen to the answer.
• This Month: Audit your weekly inputs — every meeting, habit, and commitment — and identify the three activities consuming the most time while producing the least change in student or teacher outcomes.
• This Semester: Build a belonging audit into your end-of-year conversations with staff by asking directly: "Do you feel like you belong here, and do you know how you're doing?" — then act on what you hear.

⌚️ Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 - 10 years of the Ruckuscast — what's changed
• 03:05 - Dan Watt takes the host seat
• 04:16 - Why the same questions killed the show early
• 06:03 - How guests are selected differently now
• 09:28 - Episodes that redefined doing school different
• 12:24 - The leadership belief Danny had to unlearn
• 14:28 - Why getting outside your district changes everything
• 19:00 - Patterns in leaders who actually grow
• 21:23 - Why curiosity beats judgment in classroom walkthroughs
• 23:17 - The two questions every staff member needs answered
• 33:46 - Saying no to stay vibrant — what Danny turned down
• 35:25 - Busyness is not a badge of honor
• 39:51 - What a tired principal needs to hear right now
• 41:58 - The invitation to dance and why enrollment beats compliance

🎧 Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your SelfMentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com.

🤝 Today's Ruckuscast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has been a trusted partner for schools for 30 years — and they're not just dropping off supplies. They help school leaders design dynamic learning environments where students are actually excited to show up, from tech integrations that bring lessons to life to flexible furniture that turns any room into a collaboration zone. Everything ships from a single supplier so you can simplify ordering, stay on budget, and access cooperative contracts without the compliance headache.

🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to learn more.

Frontline Education's 2026 K12 Lens Report surfaces exactly what districts are doing differently to keep great teachers from burning out and walking out. The data is specific: districts that automate professional development processes are nearly twice as likely to report easier hiring outcomes than those that don't — and nearly half report measurable improvement. If you're building a campus where people feel supported and proud to stay,

🔍 Download the full report at frontlineducation.com/leaders.

IXL doesn't ask teachers to guess what their students know. Its diagnostic automatically identifies every knowledge gap, then builds a personalized growth plan for each individual student — so teachers walk into class informed, not hoping. The adaptive platform adjusts difficulty in real time as students learn, closing gaps without requiring teachers to manually differentiate everything.

🔍 Get started at ixl.com/leaders.

META DESCRIPTION: Danny Bauer reflects on 10 years of school leadership podcasting — what he unlearned, what separates growing principals from stalled ones, and why curiosity beats judgment.

She helps principals stop surviving their schools and start leading them. Michelle Sloan is an educator, author, and leadership coach who spent seven years building a school from the ground up — which gave her something rare: "firsthand proof that mission-driven leadership isn't a feel-good concept, it's a survival strategy." Her book The Purpose Driven Principal is the framework she wishes she'd had in year one.

School leadership burnout is not a willpower problem. It's a systems problem. A principal walks in energized, writes down what matters, and by 6pm hasn't touched a single item on the list. This episode is about diagnosing that drift — and building the structure to stop it from swallowing another year.

📚 What You'll Learn

• Why your open door policy is actively damaging your relationships (not protecting them).
• How the four pillars of a purpose-driven school — people, pedagogy, processes, and personal growth — create a filter for every decision.
• The Assess, Design, Align cycle and how to use it to get back to mission-driven work.
• Why what's predictable is preventable, and what that actually looks like in practice.
• The one calendar change that breaks the reactive leadership cycle.

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules ✅ Key Insight #1: Principal Burnout Is a Symptom of Missing Purpose Filters

• What's broken: Principals measure their days by how busy they are, not by whether they're moving toward their mission.
• The shift: Define the school's mission, vision, and core values first — then use them as a filter for every demand, program, and shiny new thing that shows up.
• Impact: A principal who knows why their school exists can say no to the college prep program that works down the street but doesn't fit their community — and feel confident doing it.

✅ Key Insight #2: Processes Are a Leadership Superpower, Not an Administrative Chore

• What's broken: Every knock on the principal's door is treated as an individual problem to solve, so the same problems return every day.
• The shift: Treat every repeated interruption as a signal that a system is missing — then build the process that makes you unnecessary for that question.
• Impact: When processes are in place, teachers stop waiting until 5:30 to ask questions only you can answer, and you get to do the work that actually requires you.

✅ Key Insight #3: The Open Door Policy Is a False Virtue

• What's broken: Principals equate constant accessibility with relational leadership — and end up half-present for everyone, including their families.
• The shift: Set published hours for availability, protect deep work time with the same seriousness that teacher planning periods are protected, and be 100% present when you are present.
• Impact: Principals who define when they are available stop the low-grade distraction that makes a 12-hour day feel like zero progress.

🎙️ MICHELLE SLOAN QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"A good principal is in their office solving problems. But a great principal is out in the classrooms preventing them."

— Michelle Sloan

"What's predictable is preventable."

— Michelle Sloan

"If you never get out of that cycle, you can never be intentional about fulfilling your purpose in your mission. You're just in that cycle of whatever the day brings."

— Michelle Sloan

"You shouldn't lose yourself in the process because you stepped into leadership."

— Michelle Sloan

"There's a difference between perfection and being excellent. Do and just loving your people."

— Michelle Sloan

"You get out of alignment when you don't know who you are and why you exist."

— Michelle Sloan

"You were created on purpose and for a purpose. You have unique gifts and talents that only you have and the world needs."

— Michelle Sloan

🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: Block two hours on your calendar this week and mark it as off-campus — then use that time to highlight in yellow every unplanned interruption from yesterday and ask who else could have handled it.
• This Month: Write or revisit your school's mission statement and use it to evaluate one program, initiative, or meeting you're currently running that might not actually align.
• This Semester: Publish your availability hours to your staff and hold them — identify one admin or team member who can serve as the first stop for your three most common interruptions.

⌚️ Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 - Why principals burn out — it's not weakness
• 01:52 - Sponsor break
• 03:34 - Michelle Sloan joins the show
• 06:21 - What a school looks like when purpose is gone
• 09:53 - The four pillars of a purpose-driven school
• 13:55 - The most neglected pillar and its cost
• 19:12 - How to diagnose when you've drifted from purpose
• 21:21 - Two hours, twice a week: the proactive leader's calendar
• 27:34 - Why open door policies are a leadership trap
• 30:49 - What principals owe themselves (and their families)
• 36:19 - The Assess, Design, Align cycle explained
• 39:42 - The first step back to alignment
• 41:31 - How to work with Michelle Sloan

🔗 Connect With Michelle Sloan

👩🏻‍💻 Website: Sloan Leadership Solutions

🔗 Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn

📕 Book: Purpose-Driven Principal Book

🗞️ Purpose-Driven Principal Weekly Newsletter

🎧 Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your Selfmentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your Selfmentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com

🎙️ Today's Ruckuscast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has 30 years of experience helping school districts build spaces where learning actually happens. They helped Belago Academy go from ordinary classrooms to collaborative environments so engaging that students forgot to check their phones — through tech integration, flexible furniture, and sustainable design, all from a single supplier that keeps your purchasing compliant and your budget sane.

🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to see what's possible.

Frontline Education's 2026 K–12 Lens Report exists because staffing, student support, operations, and technology aren't separate problems — they're the same pressure showing up in different forms. Built from insights across more than 1,000 school leaders, this report gives you the clearest available picture of how districts are adapting right now.

🔍 Get the full report at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders

IXL takes differentiated instruction from aspiration to 20-minute reality. Its universal screener identifies which students need intervention fast, and its adaptive learning platform then adjusts difficulty for each individual student as they work — so one teacher can actually reach every kid in the room. Over a million teachers are already using it.

🔍 Get started at IXL.com/leaders

The principal drive home test: if you can't name one thing that mattered today, you're in reactive mode. Here's the fix.

Principal burnout doesn't start in a crisis. It starts in the car at 6pm, when you've done a lot but moved nothing forward — the instructional leadership, the culture work, the long game stuff that actually changes outcomes never got touched. That's not a productivity problem. It's an access problem.

This episode introduces selfmentorship — the practice of being your own first coach instead of waiting for permission-based PD, the right mentor, or the right conference to land in your lap. You'll hear how Elaine, an AVID coordinator stepping into a brand new school, used 90 minutes of clear thinking to walk in day one with a real plan instead of firefighting her way through week six.

Then you'll hear how to join the next Selfmentorship Sprint on Thursday, May 28 at 7pm Eastern — a live one-hour training plus 90 days of Digital Danny access for $100. Reserve your seat: https://ruckusmakers.news/sprint

A professor at San Diego's High Tech High Graduate School of Education and co-author of PLC+: Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design, Nancy Frey has spent decades studying how teachers actually collaborate — and why most of it doesn't work. Her research-backed PLC+ framework is the difference between a Wednesday morning ritual and a genuine engine of collective efficacy. She teaches full-time at a high school that runs every student through a real-world internship program, so her frameworks aren't theoretical — they're road-tested. Find her work at hightechhigh.org.

Professional learning communities were supposed to fix teacher isolation. Instead, most schools turned them into a weekly meeting where teachers explain why students failed. If your PLCs feel like compliance theater, this episode of the Ruckuscast is the reset you need — Nancy Frey breaks down the PLC+ model and the exact questions that shift a team from admiring problems to solving them.

🌟 What You'll Learn

• Why 85% of PLC conversations focus on student deficits — and the research that proves it.
• The single wrong question most schools are asking in PLCs (and the right one to replace it).
• How to organize collaborative teams around common challenges instead of grade level.
• What "the plus" in PLC+ actually means and why it's the antidote to teacher burnout.
• How one San Diego high school built a healthcare internship program that sends students into the field every week starting in ninth grade.

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧠 Key Insight #1: PLCs Have Become Problem-Admiring Sessions, Not Problem-Solving Ones

What's broken: Research shows that 85% of PLC conversations focus on student deficits — language barriers, behaviour, home life, or suspected disabilities — rather than instructional changes.

The shift: Name a specific, solvable common challenge your team can actually affect, then spend PLC time designing and evaluating actions toward that challenge.

Impact: Teams move from collective helplessness to collective efficacy — and teachers stop feeling like they're carrying student achievement alone.

🧠 Key Insight #2: Organizing PLCs by Grade Level Locks Out the Most Valuable Collaboration

What's broken: Grade-level and department groupings leave singleton teachers — art, PE, music — without a collaborative home and trap everyone else with the same colleagues year after year.

The shift: Organize teams around a shared common challenge, letting staff self-select based on what's genuinely perplexing them right now, regardless of content area.

Impact: Teachers encounter new practices, new contexts, and new colleagues — what Nancy calls a more "vivid" way to experience school as a professional.

🧠 Key Insight #3: The Wrong Question Is Driving Every PLC in America

What's broken: Schools open PLCs by asking "how do we raise reading scores?" — a question so broad it guarantees vague answers and no accountability.

The shift: Drill down to a problem statement specific enough to act on, like "our multilingual learners struggle to answer questions about details from an audio presentation of an academic topic."

Impact: When the problem is scoped correctly, teams can design targeted actions, measure impact, and actually see what's working — instead of chasing a metric nobody controls.

🎙️ NANCY FREY QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"It's not problem solving, it's admiring the problem."

— Nancy Frey

"85% of the time, one of four approaches was used when data were shared — and none of them were about what to do differently instructionally."

— Nancy Frey

"The plus is us. There's a collective responsibility and a collective efficacy to what it is that we do."

— Nancy Frey

"When teams don't understand their collective wherewithal to be able to impact in a positive way, and they're left with going, I don't know what else to do — you can either say it's on me or it's on them. And it honestly is kind of easier to say it's on them."

— Nancy Frey

"They are your top, your advanced students. They already knew it and they did not benefit from what it was that you taught. Because your pre and your post information looks exactly the same. Those students are also hiding in plain sight."

— Nancy Frey

"Nothing is lonelier than feeling like you are the only person taking on all of these challenges."

— Nancy Frey

🧩 Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: Pull your next PLC agenda and replace any open-ended "how do we raise scores" question with a specific, scoped challenge statement your team can investigate and act on.
• This Month: Audit your current PLC structure — identify which teachers have no natural collaborative home and design one cross-content team organized around a shared common challenge.
• This Semester: Implement the PLC+ "who is benefiting and who is not" question as a standing agenda item for every data conversation, and document what instructional changes result.

⏳ Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Teachers wildly underestimate their students

01:55 - Why PLCs became a compliance checkbox

05:04 - What teachers predicted vs. what students actually scored

07:46 - Old PLC models schools are still running

10:06 - Collaboration isn't just Wednesday mornings

11:11 - Why standards debates still waste PLC time

13:39 - Organizing PLCs around common challenges instead of grade level

14:57 - How PLCs drive deficit thinking — the research

20:01 - The wrong question most schools ask

22:53 - What strength-based PLC conversations sound like

24:34 - What the "plus" means in PLC+

30:20 - Building student internship partnerships with healthcare

33:05 - Advice for Ruckus Makers who want to start internship programs

🔗 Connect With Nancy Frey

👩🏻‍💻 Website: https://fisherandfrey.com/

https://x.com/NancyFrey

https://www.facebook.com/nancy.frey1/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancyfreysdsu/

🎧 Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your SelfMentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your Selfmentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com

🎙️ Today's Ruckuscast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has been a strategic partner for schools for 30 years — from designing STEAM innovation centers to keeping eight campuses stocked from a single supplier with cooperative contract compliance built in. Whether you're upgrading from whiteboards to interactive displays or building out a new learning space from scratch, they handle the full process.

🔍 Visit ODPbusiness.com/education to learn more.

Frontline Education's 2026 K–12 Lens Report makes the staffing case for structured professional learning: districts with targeted, individualized PD report easier hiring at nearly twice the rate of those without it. The data shows that summer is when the culture work starts — and this report shows exactly how.

🔍 Download it at frontlineeducation.com/leaders

IXL gives classroom teachers an adaptive platform that makes differentiated instruction genuinely manageable — and gives you dashboards that show growth at the individual student level so you're never guessing. Customize your reports to surface the data that actually drives your decisions.

🔍 Get started at ixl.com/leaders

META DESCRIPTION: PLCs in most schools spend 85% of time on student deficits. Nancy Frey's PLC+ framework shows principals how to fix that — fast.

Her career started in Philadelphia public schools in the 90s, full of idealism and a master's in counseling psychology. A decade later, she was coaching executives in global corporations.

Now Sage Hobbs coaches school principals and superintendents on the skill that drives everything else — the ability to have conversations that actually matter. She is the author of Naked Communication: Courageously Create the Relationships You Really Want and the host of the Principal Pep Talks podcast.

School leadership research points to strategy, curriculum, data, and policy as the levers that move outcomes. Sage Hobbs will tell you those are all downstream of something simpler: the conversations principals are avoiding.

If you've ever softened a message that needed to land hard, or left a difficult conversation for "another time" that never came, this episode is the diagnosis.

🤩 What You'll Learn

• Why certainty is confused with competence — and what that costs you as a leader.
• How hard conversations drive change in ways checklists and management systems never can.
• What "lead with curiosity" actually looks like when a parent is angry or a teacher is underperforming.
• Why schools that prioritize community above all else outperform schools that prioritize programs.
• The one reframe that makes difficult conversations feel less like conflict and more like leadership.

🔨 Breaking Down the Old Rules 🧰 Key Insight #1: Hard Conversations Are a Leadership Tool, Not a Soft Skill

• What's broken: Most principals treat difficult conversations as a last resort — something you escalate to HR or delay until the situation forces your hand.
• The shift: Conversations are the currency your school runs on; every one is an opportunity for connection, and the willingness to have hard ones is what separates management from leadership.
• Impact: Teachers feel heard, trust builds faster, and change actually sticks — because the real issue got named instead of managed around.

🧰 Key Insight #2: Certainty Is Rewarded, But Curiosity Is What Works

• What's broken: The system trains leaders to have answers — uncertainty reads as incompetence, so principals perform confidence even when it costs them the truth.
• The shift: To lead is to risk; staying curious when someone pushes back, asking "I wonder what's actually going on here" instead of defending a position, is the higher-skill move.
• Impact: Parents who felt dismissed become collaborators, teachers who seemed resistant reveal skill deficits that coaching can actually fix, and the leader stops fighting fires that curiosity would have prevented.

🧰 Key Insight #3: Community Is Not a Program — It Has to Be Built in Conversation

• What's broken: Schools bolt community on through assemblies, newsletters, and culture initiatives that live in binders and die in staff meetings.
• The shift: Community is built through listening — and listening builds trust quickly enough that it actually changes how people show up, especially when things get hard.
• Impact: In a climate where the anger is "right there, like a live wire," as Sage describes it, principals who lead with genuine curiosity create the only real buffer between a school community and its fracture points.

🎙️ SAGE HOBBS QUOTES FROM THE RUCKUSCAST

"Conversations are currency — every conversation is an opportunity for connection, and they're highly effective for building trust and collaboration. And they're free."

— Sage Hobbs

"To lead is to risk. You can't please everyone. You don't always know the best next steps. You have to be willing to learn and pivot and be wrong — and that runs counter to everything, because you get rewarded for knowing the answers."

— Sage Hobbs

"Leadership and management are not the same thing, and they're both important. But leadership requires hard conversations, and that's really where change often happens."

— Sage Hobbs

"Can we lead with curiosity as opposed to assuming that person is incompetent or wrong? I wonder what's going on there. I wonder why they see it that way. I wonder if it's a skill deficit versus an actual incompetency."

— Sage Hobbs

"If you don't believe that community and connection is central to an organization running well, this book probably isn't for you. I'm not there to build the case for that — I'm here to tell you how to do that part better."

— Sage Hobbs

"Schools should be community hubs — a real sense of belonging and connection happening there. Make friends, learn cool stuff, and feel cared for."

— Sage Hobbs

🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement? Start here:

• Tomorrow: Identify one conversation you've been postponing and schedule it for this week with a clear intention: lead with curiosity, not conclusions.
• This Month: In your next two difficult conversations — with a struggling teacher, an angry parent, or a resistant staff member — open with a genuine question instead of a position, and notice what changes.
• This Semester: Build one structural habit that treats conversation as a leadership tool: a regular one-on-one format, a listening protocol for parent concerns, or a staff feedback loop that surfaces what's actually being felt on your campus.

⌚️ Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 - Why leaders avoid the hardest conversations
• 00:55 - What "Naked Communication" means for school leaders
• 04:00 - Sage's origin story in Philadelphia public schools
• 07:00 - Why she left education — and came back to it
• 10:43 - What changed in the book's revised edition
• 13:29 - Leading through polarization and community anger
• 22:52 - How to keep conversations focused on kids
• 25:49 - Every conversation is an opportunity for connection
• 31:22 - Dream school: community, nature, experiential learning

👩🏻‍💻 Connect With Sage Hobbs

• Website: sagebhobbs.com,
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sagebhobbs
• Book: https://www.amazon.ca/Naked-Communication-Courageously-Create-Relationships/dp/099817131X

🎙️ Listen & Subscribe

Listen to Better Leaders Better Schools on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If today's episode moved you, leave a review — it helps more Ruckus Makers find the show.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Your Selfmentorship Guide

Meet Digital Danny — your Selfmentorship guide. Always available, never forgets, and evolves with you. Think through your next leadership move at myprincipalcoach.com

Today's Ruckuscast Partners

ODP Business Solutions has been transforming school learning spaces for 30 years — from smart boards to flexible furniture to sustainable solutions that free you from managing five different suppliers. They help you design dynamic environments that make students excited to show up, and their cooperative contracts keep you compliant without the procurement headache.

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Frontline Education's 2026 K-12 Lens Report is built from insights gathered from over 1,000 school leaders across the country — giving you a clear picture of where staffing pressures are easing, where they aren't, and how districts are making decisions that hold. If you're navigating operations, student support, or personnel decisions this year, this is the context you need.

👉 Get the full report at frontlineeducation.com/leaders

IXL's adaptive platform automatically identifies knowledge gaps for every student and hands teachers a personalized growth plan before the bell rings — so no one walks into a classroom guessing what their students know. Over one million teachers use it because it makes differentiated instruction actionable, not aspirational.

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META DESCRIPTION: Hard conversations are the most underused leadership tool principals have. Sage Hobbs explains why curiosity — not certainty — is what builds trust and drives real change.