RECOMMENDED: WATCH THE SHORT FILM, NOTHING BEFORE YOU LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE. AND, READ THE SHORT STORY, "MARRY ME, GEORGIA." Listeners, given my love of all things media production, I am super stoked to bring you today’s guest, Norah DeMello, a screenwriting major at Chapman University’s nationally renowned Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. She is a writer, aspiring filmmaker, and deeply reflective young artist whose relationship with storytelling began early, somewhere between the mountains and rivers of Northern California, stacks of beloved novels, and a home filled with music from bands like Radiohead, Pixies, and The Cure. She describes herself as “a nature girl through and through,” and there is something about the way she talks about art, film, music, and the human condition that makes it feel less like career preparation and more like a voyage of discovery. Norah is also a product of California public schools, including Placer High School in Auburn, where teachers recognized and nurtured her gift for writing long before she fully trusted it herself. Today, after transferring from community college into one of the nation’s most selective film programs, she is developing screenplays, directing short films, balancing multiple campus jobs, and learning how to build a creative life without tying her worth to perfection. Her work explores questions of connection, vulnerability, identity, and what it means to become fully alive, themes that seem deeply connected to her own ongoing process of becoming freer, more open, and more at peace with uncertainty. Mitch Weathers, author of “Executive Functions for Every Classroom,” founder of Organized Binder and a longtime friend of Norah’s father, wrote the following for this episode. “I want to begin by saying that I genuinely admire Norah DeMello. Not simply because of what she has accomplished, although those accomplishments are impressive, but because of who she is as a person. If you are fortunate enough to know Norah, what stays with you is not just her talent, but her authenticity, her courage, and her heart. I’ve known Norah her entire life. Her father, Dave, has been my closest friend since middle school. But over the last couple of years, I’ve had the chance to really get to know Norah herself. Watching her grow into who she is becoming has been inspiring. By most standards, Norah was on the “'deal' path. School came naturally to her. She earned outstanding grades in high school, received an academic scholarship, and enrolled at one of California’s most prestigious universities. But before the end of her first semester, she dropped out. I remember asking her about it, and her answer has stayed with me ever since. She simply said, “I just didn’t find my people.” There is something incredibly brave about a young person stepping away from the path everyone else celebrates in order to pursue a life that feels true to who they are. That decision wasn’t easy, and I know it came with uncertainty and struggle. But Norah chose authenticity over expectation, and that takes real courage. Since then, she has embraced a path in acting and screenwriting, and it’s been amazing to watch her flourish creatively. She has a natural presence both on camera and the stage, and in her writing. If you get the chance, make sure to watch the film Nothing, which she stars in. What I admire most about Norah is that she seems committed to truly living her life, not just performing the version of success others expect from her. And my sense is that somewhere along the way, she has found her people. As always, if you have feedback about this show, reach out to me at [email protected]. Audio engineering is provided by the talented founder of SOZEN Sound, Evan Kurohara. And, my eternal thanks to my podcast creative partner, Mel Ching. 

Dr. Kyra Caldwell Templeton, the Atlanta Public Schools Program Director of Student Engagement and Co-Advisor of the Student Advisory Council, is someone I 100% trust when it comes to understanding what authentic student voice actually looks like inside a large school system. Her work centers on making sure students are not just heard, but meaningfully included in decision-making, and she has helped shape initiatives like the APS Student Advisory Council, where young people sit in real conversations with district leadership. When I asked Kyra if there was a student who embodied what this kind of engagement could look like at its best, she quickly named a young man named John Henry Collins. Atlanta Public Schools is one of the largest urban districts in the country, serving a diverse student population across the city of Atlanta. Under its current strategic vision, APS is working to balance academic outcomes with deeper questions around student voice, belonging, and real-world readiness. It is looking at how schools prepare young people not just for college, but for life in a complex, rapidly changing world. John Henry Collins is a sophomore at North Atlanta High School, but that label only scratches the surface. He is an Eagle Scout who has led environmental restoration projects, a member of the APS Student Advisory Council, a production manager running lighting and sound for live theater, and a young person who has traveled extensively across all 50 states and more than 30 countries, often helping plan and manage those experiences himself. Across all of this, he is developing a rare combination of leadership, technical skill, and systems thinking. He is the embodiment of what folks in my home state of Hawaii call ma ka hana ka ‘ike, or in doing, one learns. Audio engineering is provided by the very talented Evan Kurohara of SOZEN SOUND. Our theme music comes from the master pianist, Michael Sloan. In this episode you will learn about a speech John Henry Collins delivered about his home city of Atlanta. Read that speech here. It will blow you away.

Listeners, this episode marks the beginning of what I am calling Josh’s Chapter Six. I am choosing this road less traveled because I’m less interested in talking about what school could be, and more interested in what happens when young people are actually given the chance to experience it, and explain it to us hidebound adults mired in 19th century teaching and learning. Good grief, at some point, we have to stop endlessly chewing on the idea of change and freaking change, which means getting out of the freaking way and letting the kids build their own navigation charts. I apologize for starting this episode in such a crabby state. In my defense, the more I listen to the kids the less I am willing to defend educators and education leaders who sit, fixed to a system that is over 100 years old and hopelessly outdated. Back in March, I had the chance to visit the EDGE microschool embedded inside Liberty Public Schools, just outside Kansas City. EDGE stands for Empowering Discovery of the Global Experience. What I saw was a learning environment built around global challenges, real-world projects, and a level of student agency that felt fundamentally different from the traditional classrooms sitting just down the hall. Same building, very different experience. It was during this visit that I met my two guests today. Scarlet Langhorst is a senior at Liberty High School and a leader within the EDGE microschool. Through her growing composure and patience in professional settings, and her ability to listen to understand rather than respond, Scarlet has developed a collaborative, eclectic and calm presence that makes her both effective and trusted within real-world teams working on real-world projects. Morgan Yeates is a junior at Liberty High School and also lives and breathes her time in EDGE. She is a student leader whose work spans Global Ties KC, the EW Kauffman Foundation, and multiple youth-led initiatives focused on access, culture, and creating meaningful third spaces for young people. Through her sharp debate skills and instinct for reading group dynamics, Morgan has developed the ability to communicate persuasively, adapt quickly, and step into whatever role a team needs in the moment. She pairs that with a self-aware, almost ironic understanding of her own voice, knowing how to use it effectively while staying attuned to when to lead and when to create space for others. Get ready for a doozy of a conversation, listeners because Scarlet and Morgan aren’t talking about the future of school as an idea. They’re living inside a version of it right now, while still navigating a traditional system just down the hall. And over the course of this conversation, we’re going to put them in some real positions, asking them to think like diplomats, designers, even decision-makers, wrestling with global conflict, questioning how schools actually work, and at one point, facing a choice that might sound hypothetical, but won’t feel that way in the moment. As always, you can reach me at [email protected]. My episodes are edited by the very talented Evan Kurohara, of SOZEN Sound. My thanks to Mel Ching at Pililei Consulting, LLP, my JRP creative partner and co-producer. 

The International School Manila, or ISM, is a K–12, nonprofit international school located in Bonifacio Global City in Metro Manila, serving more than 2,000 students from over 90 countries. With a curriculum grounded in American and international frameworks and culminating in the International Baccalaureate Diploma, ISM is designed to prepare students for top universities around the world. But beyond its academic rigor, the school is increasingly asking a deeper question, which is: What does it mean to be truly future ready? Through initiatives like its Futures Committee, ISM is working to become a more responsive, relevant, and student-centered learning community. My guests today are Kaelynn Liu, age 14, and Landon Zhou, age 17, both students at ISM and members of the school’s Futures Committee, where student voice is not just included, but elevated. Kaelynn is a deeply reflective, globally minded learner who brings intellectual curiosity and moral clarity to questions about identity, purpose, and the design of school. Landon is an experienced student leader whose engagement comes alive in real-world contexts, from organizing large-scale events to service work, and who speaks with honesty about growth, pressure, and what it means to become someone others can rely on. Together, Kaelynn and Landon offer a compelling window into student agency and what young people think about this thing we call school. Robert Landau, a former guest on this show and ISM’s Futures Committee consultant wrote the following for this episode: “As a consultant working with the Futures Committee at the International School Manila, my role is to help the community explore what it truly means to be a future-ready school. The Futures Committee guides The International School Manila’s journey toward a more relevant, responsive, and empowering education, preparing students not just for the world as it is, but for the world they will shape and inherit. One of the most important decisions we made was to include student voices at the table, not as participants, but as partners. Kaelynn and Landon embody everything we hope for in a future-ready learner: they speak with authenticity, question with courage, and engage others with purpose. They don’t just represent students; they elevate the conversation. Working alongside them gives me real hope that the future is not something to fear, but something already being shaped by remarkable young people like them.” As always you can reach me at [email protected]. You can also reach me on LinkedIn. My talented audio engineer is SOZEN Sound's Evan Kurohara. Our theme music is provided by pianist, Michael Sloan.

Listeners, Educators Rising is a national organization that develops future educators by supporting middle school, high school, and college students interested in the profession. Through chapters, leadership opportunities, competitions, and classroom experiences, it helps students build the skills and passion needed to strengthen the next generation of educators. Allianna Walters is a high school student from Spanish Fork, Utah and the 2025–2026 National President of Educators Rising. With experience as a student intern in early childhood, elementary, and special education settings, she is deeply committed to serving others through teaching. Grounded in faith, family, and purpose, Allianna brings a values-driven approach to leadership, advocating for future educators and for students who want to feel seen and supported. And yes, she has a few things to say about what school could be. My wingman and color commentator for this conversation is Jose Carrillo, former National Student President of Educators Rising and now a classroom teacher in Austin, Texas. In this episode, Allianna shares a personal vision for education rooted in identity, purpose, and care, then challenges us to rethink systems, from schedules to AI, and to act as good ancestors for the next generation. Our episodes are edited by the talented Evan Kurohara at SOZEN SOUND. Our theme music comes from the catalog of pianist, Michael Sloan. Questions or comments? You can reach me at [email protected] or through the contact page at joshreppunproductions.com.

Two seniors from St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, Samantha Colvin and Marin Rosenthal, join me to explore what school could look like when student voice, learning science, and curiosity intersect. Samantha Colvin and Marin Rosenthal are seniors at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Maryland and Student Research Fellows with the school’s Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning (CTTL). Sam, a DMV native of Jamaican and African American heritage, brings creativity and cultural curiosity to her work in music, fashion, pop culture, and media, while building research and communication skills through the CTTL. Marin combines intellectual curiosity with initiative, completing Neuroteach Global training and helping lead a student research study on phone use and attention that informed school policy, and so much more. The CTTL translates Mind, Brain, and Education Science research into practical strategies that help teachers and students thrive. As fellows, Sam and Marin help design and conduct real research alongside educators and university partners. In this episode, they tackle technology and attention, question the purpose of homework, dance in their "red shoes" and explore the idea of “addition by subtraction,” removing low-value work so there is room for practice, creativity, and rest. The conversation circles back to a bold question for all of us: If you could redesign school, what would you change first? Our episodes are edited by the talented Evan Kurohara at SOZEN SOUND. Our theme music comes from the catalog of pianist, Michael Sloan. You can reach me at [email protected].

This episode addresses a question I’ve been chewing on for a long time: What happens when school stops treating creativity as an elective and starts treating it as the whole damn point? Story Xperiential is a national and global online visual storytelling experience, inspired by Pixar’s process and built by former Pixar and Khan Academy veterans, and my home state of Hawaiʻi was in on the action from the beginning. In 2021, Kamehameha Schools Kapālama became one of the first schools in Story Xperiential's Hawaiʻi pilot program, and students showed that storytelling can build real world skills, not just artistic tricks. The work is hands-on, learners create and exhibit story reels while learning story development, character, visual composition, storyboarding, sound and music editing, plus the skills that travel everywhere: communication, problem solving, and teamwork. My guests, brothers Nova and Skye Sonomura, did more than participate. They earned recognition, joined the student advisory team, and were later hired by Story Xperiential to improve the program and build the website experience for future learners. Nova lives in Japan and is enrolled in Brigham Young University's Pathway Worldwide. Skye lives in Honolulu and calls his path the school of hard knocks. Both are unmistakably lifelong learners. As Tony DeRose, one of Xperiential's founders put it, Nova showed up early as a creative force, and soon both brothers were helping lead the experience from the inside. Listeners, you’re in for a deep dive into the lives, loves, and passions of Skye and Nova Sonomura. As always, our episodes are edited by the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music is by the pianist, Michael Sloan. You can reach me at [email protected].

Listeners, Mackenzie King is not here as my guest to perform “student voice.” She’s here to show us what governance and leading by learning could be. Picture a real school board meeting, with fiduciary responsibility, hard decisions, and adult-level accountability, then picture the board chair setting the tone, reading the room, and holding the mission steady. Now make that chair a high school senior. This is not a thought experiment. It’s a normal day at One Stone in Idaho, and Mackenzie King, Class of 2026, is the chair of its board of trustees.

If you have never heard of One Stone, you might assume it’s another shiny outlier. But One Stone is a serious learning organization making a serious bet: young people are citizens right now and school should be designed around that thought. Put students in governance and lead by learning roles and you change what “smart” and “leadership” mean, and you create the good kind of pressure that forces everyone to get serious about the purpose of school.

We start in Idaho, identity, family, language, and karate, then pivot into service and the quiet power of simply showing up for others. From there we go inside One Stone, how Mackenzie found her way there, how learning is assessed through competencies, BLOBs, and a Growth Transcript, and what practice she would stop in American schools because it steals tomorrow from kids.

As always, our episodes are edited by Evan Kurohara and our theme music comes from the catalog of pianist, Michael Sloan. You can reach me at [email protected].

Bulldog Manufacturing is a student-run light manufacturing company inside Alden High School 60 miles south by southwest of Rochester, New York. It is a real shop with real tools, real deadlines, and real customers, where teenagers do CAD and design, quoting and invoicing, marketing and sales, production planning, quality control, and shipping, with money and reputation on the line. Max Marzec and Lydia Wrest are two members of Bulldog’s leadership team, and they are my guests today. Max is Bulldog’s CEO, so he’s carrying operations and customer accountability in ways that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever had to deliver on a promise. Lydia is Bulldog’s design director, living in that space where creativity meets constraints, where an idea has to become a thing that works and then become a thing that ships. They’re also full time high school students, which means they are constantly crossing a border between two worlds: the traditional classroom and a purpose driven environment where the work does not care about your seat time, but about your choices you make, minute to minute.

Here’s what’s coming, listeners. We’re going to start by dropping you into Bulldog Manufacturing on a busy day, a walk through the sights, sounds, and smells, the rhythm of a team moving with purpose, and the little decisions that make a shop either feel alive or feel like school pretending to be work. Then we’ll get specific about quality, what it means in their world, how they decide something is truly ready to ship, and what happens when the team splits on whether “good enough” is actually good enough. From there we’ll take on a transition most schools never name out loud: the switch from school mode to Bulldog mode. Picture them walking out of chemistry and then heading into customer driven work with real stakes. What changes in your body and brain as you make that switch? What do you start noticing that a typical class does not ask you to notice? We’ll go into leadership too, not titles, the moments when standards slip, a deadline gets missed, someone’s feelings are on the line, and you have to choose between being liked and being honest, and we’ll ask what principles Max and Lydia are trying to live by so Bulldog does not become school with a boss. We’ll also zoom in on each of them as individuals. With Max, whose family speaks both Polish and English, we’ll use his resume as an artifact, including the QR codes that link to websites he has built, and we’ll go deep on how an internship at a law office shaped the way he thinks about the path forward. With Lydia, we’ll talk about what it means to be trusted with real tools, real standards, and real consequences, and about moments when that trust became real through a decision, a mistake, or a standard she had to defend. We’ll talk about Lydia’s school trip to Italy and how it shaped the way she sees buildings now that she wants to become an architect, and we’ll also bring AI into Bulldog Manufacturing, where it can genuinely improve the work and where it introduces risk. And we’ll close by honoring the giants. Lydia will reflect on the trade lines in her family and what they taught her about real learning. Max will shout out Mr. Allen Turton and name one concrete way he wants to pay Allen’s coaching, guidance and mentorship forward to the next generation. Our audio engineer is the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music is provided by the master pianist, Michael Sloan. If you have insights or comments about this episode, email me at [email protected]. 

Peter Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, wrote the following in the Washington Post. “I began to look at research, which showed and documented that beginning as early as the 1960s until now, there has been a continuous, gradual but huge increase in anxiety, depression, and, most tragically, suicide among school-aged children and teens. Over that period of time, children have also been less and less free to do the things that make them happy and build the kind of character traits — of confidence, of internal locus of control, of agency — that allow them to feel like ‘the world is not too scary, because I can handle what life throws at me.’ This kind of attitude requires independent activity to develop, and we have been offering less and less of that activity.” 

Peter Gray’s powerful words are the perfect way to introduce today’s conversation with Pam Moran and Ira David Socol, two educators who have spent their careers pushing on a simple idea that feels obvious once you say it out loud: school should help young people find their voice, build real agency, and guide them as they learn how to influence their world and shape their futures. 

Pam led Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia from 2006 to 2018, a long run in superintendent years, and she was named Virginia Superintendent of the Year by the Virginia Association of School Superintendents.

Ira has lived an unusually wide-angle life in service, including work in New York City public safety and decades in public education as a technology and innovation leader, with a deep focus on Universal Design for Learning and environments that work for every kid. 

Together, they have written and edited books that refuse to treat school as a neutral machine. In Timeless Learning, with co author Chad Ratliff, they argue that we should stop mistaking “great teaching” for learning, and instead redesign learning experiences so kids have choices, purpose, and time to do work that matters. In Designed to Fail, Ira makes the tougher claim; a lot of what we call school was built to sort, to rank, and to protect comfort for adults and advantage for some kids. 

And in their newest book, an edited volume titled Real Learning, Real Accomplishment: Schools that Work for Kids, Pam and Ira gather stories from educators across the country who are moving from compliance to mastery, not by chasing one more initiative, but by changing the ecosystem, the expectations, the schedules, the spaces, the assessment, and the relationships that shape what kids actually experience. 

So that is where we are headed. We are going to talk about student voice as more than a slogan. We are going to talk about what it means to trust kids, and what it costs when we do not. And we are going to keep pulling the conversation back to the practical question that sits under everything they do: How do we design and create systems of learning that put the learning in the hands of the young learners, with the adults on the side as coaches, mentors, guides and sponsors? One of the answers you will hear in the next hour is that we adults must, must, must do this design and development with the learners. We must treat them as co-creators and co-designers. Truly, we must Just Say Yes.

If you have thoughts or insights on this episode email me at [email protected]. Our audio engineer is the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music is provided by the master pianist, Michael Sloan.