The What School Could Be Podcast

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 curios...

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 s...

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 h...

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 ev...

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 ‘...

Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk is the founder and lead consultant of the Massachusetts based LLC, Bridge Educational Engineering, where she partners with schools, towns, and organizations to design cultures of belonging that strengthen engagement, performance, and retention. Her career sits at the intersection of education, disability access, and mental health—spanning classroom teaching, student support, and a decade leading college mental-health education. She helped design and build NITEO, a structured leave-and-return pathway for young adults navigating disability and mental-health challenges, and she’s authored practical guidance that makes pausing—and coming back—more humane. She’s partnered with more than 100 teams to shift prog...

If you visit WhatSchoolCouldBe.org, you’ll see The Innovation Playlist—a practical change model built on small steps that elevate learning and life outcomes by bringing communities together around a shared North Star, trusting teachers to lead, building on successes and best practices, and fueling the joyful, creative work of challenging students in ways that prepare them for life; the model includes five playlists aligned with the foundational themes of What School Could Be: mobilizing your community, student-driven learning, real-world challenges, assessments for deeper learning, and caring and connected communities. Remix #5 follows the familiar Remix format—an audio mosaic...

There’s a moment in Roman Krznaric’s The Good Ancestor when he invites us to imagine the builders of medieval cathedrals: craftspeople who chiseled stone, hoisted beams, and shaped stained glass with the knowing certainty that they would never worship inside the completed structure. They worked not for immediate applause but for the generations they would never meet. Their legacy lived in the shadows cast by soaring buttresses, in the echoes of future choirs, in the possibility that one day, long after they were gone, someone would look up and feel awe. Krznaric calls this cathedral thinking: a way...

If you navigate to WhatSchoolCouldBe.org, you will find in the nav bar the words, The Innovation Playlist. What is this? The Innovation Playlist is a powerful change model based on small steps that elevate learning and life outcomes. It brings your community together to build consensus on your North Star. It trusts teachers to lead the way, build on successes, draw on best practices, and do what you take joy in, challenging your students in creative, distinctive ways that prepare them for life. One of the playlists is called student-driven learning. Imagine your children, your students, fueled by...

If you navigate to WhatSchoolCouldBe.org, you will find in the nav bar the words, The Innovation Playlist. What is this? The Innovation Playlist is a powerful change model based on small steps that elevate learning and life outcomes. It brings your community together to build consensus on your North Star. It trusts teachers to lead the way, build on successes, draw on best practices, and do what you take joy in, challenging your students in creative, distinctive ways that prepare them for life. One of the playlists is called Caring and Connected Communities. What is this concept? In...

Before I deliver my introduction to this episode, I want to acknowledge my co-creator and inspiration for what you are about to hear today. Her name is Mel Ching and she is amazing. Director of Community Engagement for What School Could Be and producer/host of our YouTube live series, "The Big Think," Mel and I have been co-creating on projects for almost four years. Thank you, Mel. 

Okay, listeners, if you navigate to WhatSchoolCouldBe.org, you will find in the nav bar the words, The Innovation Playlist. What is this? The Innovation Playlist i...

Dr. Carole Basile is the Dean and a professor at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, the largest college of education in the nation. Since 2016, she has led efforts to redesign the educator workforce through team-based models that honor learner variance and expand the possibilities of teaching. Before ASU, she served as Dean of the College of Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and held faculty and leadership positions at the University of Colorado Denver and the University of Houston. Carole is co-author of The Next Education Workforce: How Team-Based Staf...

Listeners, if you are inclined to go to the Red Bridge school website, which I hope you are, and you click on Our Team in the NAV bar, you will find the following bio for Orly Friedman, Red Bridge’s founder: “When I began teaching in 2007, I wanted to expand real opportunity for kids, and since then both opportunity—and the skills to seize it—have shifted; technology lets more people create and connect, but it only matters when learners have the know-how and confidence to use it—that is, agency. Agency sits at the heart of Red Bridge: while trad...

For this 150th celebration my guest on the 101st episode, Emma Reppun (married and now Emma Jean George) and I decided she would interview me. Fun! The following is how she described, on LinkedIn, the episode and her experience being the host of the show. "Today I had the immense honor and privilege of interviewing my dad, Josh Reppun, the Executive Director of What School Could Be, for this 150th 'Talk Story' edition of the What School Could Be Podcast. If you've ever tuned into his show, you know that my pop is a master of crafting thoughtful questions...

INSTALL THE OUR FAMILY CULTURE APP FROM YOUR FAVORITE APP STORE AND USE THE PROMO CODE: WSCB.

Today my guests are Steve Shapiro and his sister, Nancy Rapport, veteran educators in the Great State of Ohio.

During his 34 years as a public-school educator, Steven Shapiro emerged as a national thought leader in experiential learning. His acclaimed podcast, Experience Matters, featured national experts including Daniel Pink, Tony Wagner, and Father Greg Boyle. In addition to his work as a high school teacher/program director/district leader, Steve trained teachers at...

Listeners, imagine waking up to a school day with no bells, no rows of desks, no rigid timetable of subjects broken into 50-minute chunks. Instead, you open your laptop or step into a learning space that feels more like a studio, a lab, or a mission control center than a traditional classroom. Your day begins by checking in with your learning coach, not to be told what to memorize, but to map out the goals you set for yourself, goals tied to real-world challenges, not just assignments. Maybe you’ll spend the morning collaborating with peers from five continents on...

No joke, listeners—today’s guest, Erin O’Reilly, grew up in Missoula, Montana and attended Mount Jumbo Elementary, Rattlesnake Middle, and Hellgate High. Hashtag best school names, ever. And now, full circle, Erin is shaping the future of education from right there in the heart of Big Sky Country. 

At the University of Montana Erin is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning where she prepares preservice teachers through courses like Ethics and Policy Issues, Educational Psychology, Social Studies Methods, and field experience seminars. She is also an Instructor for the...

Listeners, buckle up. You’re about to meet a Virginia public school superintendent whose mother referred to him as Tom Sawyer, and for good reason. Dr. Jason Van Heukelum has been rallying people around bold visions since his earliest days in Rochester, New York. We can only imagine him convincing friends to join some backyard adventure, or today, getting entire communities to reimagine high school. Jason is someone who knows how to design and build—and bring others with him.

He’s also the kind of educator, coach, guide and mentor who sees transformation not as...

Crystal Clark is a passionate and dedicated educator based in Kemmerer, Wyoming, with over two decades of experience in early childhood and elementary education. 

Currently serving as both a K–6 Instructional Facilitator and teacher in Lincoln County School District 1, she is a dynamic leader who thrives at the intersection of curriculum development, instructional coaching, and educator support. Crystal is deeply committed to hands-on, project-based learning and has played key roles in the RIDE initiative, the Rural Teacher Corps Program, and her district’s PLC and Building Leadership Teams. RIDE PD is supported by 2Revolutions.

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Jennifer Ahn is the executive director of Lead by Learning. She lives with her husband and children in northern California. The reason I asked Jennifer to be on this show is because I read an incredible book in 2024 titled Street Data. Carrie Wilson, the author of chapter 7 of Street Data and the former executive director of Lead by Learning wrote the following for this episode. 

“I remember over a decade ago, after Jennifer Ahn interviewed for a program associate position with us at Lead by Learning, I had this strong sense that there was nothing she couldn't do...

Emine Naz Can is a university student born and raised in Turkey who sees herself as citizen of the world. Emine is not simply studying industrial engineering—she’s actively engineering the future of education as one of the first students in a phenomenon called Nobel Navigators. Her journey is one of bold imagination and quiet courage, of bridges built between cultures, communities, and ideas. She’s the founder of Paridoc Academy, a reimagined learning experience that invites students to be seen, heard, and prepared for life beyond the classroom. And as I just mentioned, she has been an integr...

Listeners, imagine a student who always loved school—not just for the grades or the gold stars, but for the challenge, the structure, the sense of accomplishment. A student who moved frequently as a kid, not worried about making friends, but determined to succeed academically. A student who “played school well,” but, looking back, remembers teachers more than lessons, relationships more than curriculum. That student was Rebecca Parks. Rebecca doesn’t just believe in education—she lives it. From a K-12 experience that set the stage for her passion to teach to the defining “failure moments” that forged her resilience in...

Imagine a school, not just built with bricks and mortar, but with hope. A place where students don’t just learn—they lead. A space where innovation isn’t a buzzword—it’s the foundation of every single day. Today on the What School Could Be Podcast, we step into the future of education with two visionary leaders who happen to live and work in the Great State of Rhode Island: Bryan Byerlee and Heather Breton. Heather grew up in Rhode Island, raised by a village—her grandparents, her teachers, and a community that shaped her into the educator she is today...

Listeners, a little over a year ago I attended a leadership conference here in my home city of Honolulu. At that conference the keynote, a futurist named Richard Yonck referred to a book he felt the 1000 business leaders in the audience needed to read. The book he referenced is The Good Ancestor, by Roman Krznaric. Five minutes after Yonck's reference Krznaric’s book was on its way to me via my Amazon app. The Good Ancestor changed the arc of my life and shifted my thinking about education 180 degrees. So it is with great pleasure that I bring to you...

Back in June of last year, listeners, my daughter, Emma got married in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The day after her wedding my wife and I got coffee and breakfast at a Nevada City coffee joint. While I was in the restroom Cheryl spotted a guy wearing a floppy hat reading and writing at one of the shop’s tables. The book he had open was John Hattie’s Visible Learning. She rushed to get me as I emerged from the restroom and excitedly shared what she had spotted. We sashayed over to the guy...

If you are listening to this episode on the day of its release, it is Christmas Day, 2024, listeners, and you are welcome! My Christmas gift to you is Sean Duffie, who, frankly, is a crazy awesome and amazing educator in the great state of Michigan. Sean is a Project Next PBL, and Spanish-Immersion teacher at Forest Hills Northern High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Along the way he has served as Adjunct Professor of Spanish at Grand Valley State University and before that, he was a Fulbright English Teacher at Villablanca High School in Madrid, Spain, where he taught 7t...

My guest for this episode is LeeAnn Kittle, the director of sustainability programs for the Denver Public Schools. 

LeeAnn showed up on my radar screen because of a headline in EdWeek’s weekly newsletter. The headline read, "This Leader Partners With Students to Build a More Sustainable Future for Her District." At EdWeek’s website I discovered two more articles about LeeAnn, and vowed then and there to track down her contact and invite her to be my guest on the show. 

For the past several weeks I have been d...

Mitch Weathers is a brilliant educator, author of the book, Executive Functions for Every Classroom and the founder of Organized Binder. Organized Binder is an evidence-based MTSS Tier 1 universal solution. It provides a structured environment with clear expectations and routines, exposing students to goal setting, reflective learning, time management, study strategies, and organizational skills. It aligns with Universal Design for Learning and supports Least Restrictive Environments, or LREs. You know listeners, I graduated from high school in 1976 with a 2.6 GPA and awful SAT scores. My first year of college was a massive success if you consider drinking and playing ru...

I am totally stoked to welcome to the show Mahealani Jackson, a remarkable 17-year-old senior at Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu. Joining as my color commentator is Hannah Grady Williams, Chief Rebel at d'Skills, who alerted me to this extraordinary young person who was part of her first all-virtual IMPACT10 cohort powering up kids on AI. Mahealani's journey is nothing short of extraordinary. Despite her young age, she has already lived experiences equivalent to multiple lifetimes. From her early years as a skilled planner of Disneyland trips with her parents to her current pursuit of graduating from high school and c...

Listeners, I could not be more excited to share with you that my guest for this episode is Dr. Kyra Monèt Caldwell Templeton. Currently, she is Program Director of Student Engagement, an inaugural position with the Atlanta Public Schools, which serves over 50,000 students in 195 schools with nearly 4000 teachers. Remarkably, the student-teacher ratio in the Atlantic public schools is a very low 12.6. An important caveat here: for this episode Dr. Caldwell Templeton is not speaking on behalf of the Atlanta public school system. Dr. Caldwell Templeton's journey in education includes degrees from Spelman College, Capella University, Georgia State University an...

[During this episode reference is made to the work of mural artist, Dave Loewenstein. Here is his work.] At the Global Nomads Group website their vision, mission and about begins with this paragraph: “In 1998, four college friends had an idea to connect young people across the globe to foster dialogue and forge meaningful connections. They had heard about the emergence of video conferencing technology and thought maybe they could use it to link classrooms.” What happened over the next decades, listeners, is the subject of this episode. My guest today is Sandra Stein, Chief of Programs and Learning at the Gl...

Hey listeners. I have never done this before, so I hope you enjoy. This is a short, four-minute preview of upcoming episodes, the shows that will close out 2024. Fasten your seatbelts!

Today my guest is Theresa Tate, who currently teaches, guides, coaches and advises kids at the Orchard View Innovative Learning Center in Michigan. Theresa is a guest on this podcast because of a recommendation made to me by Chris McNutt, one of the founders of The Human Restoration Project, which just held its annual, virtual, Conference to Restore Humanity. Chris wrote the following for this episode: “Theresa Tate is an incredible educator with an unwavering support of students who have nowhere else to turn. In our focus groups at the Orchard View ILC, students consistently described Theresa's classroom as a "...

Inspired by the Liger Leadership Academy, which, by the way, I featured in a previous episode, Cambodia’s Future Foundation, known as the CFF was created with the ultimate goal of "nurturing leaders and changing lives." In 2014, CFF identified and selected a cohort of ten, 16-year-old students with two years of high school before graduation. CFF recognized that, due to financial limitations, these students did not and would not have the funds to attend university after high school. This stark reality affects thousands of young Cambodians destined to drop out of school to work in factories or farms, marry at...

Months ago a colleague of mine alerted me to an EdWeek article titled “An Unorthodox Plan to Pay Students to Write Curriculum Is Raising Achievement,” which described some very unusual work being done by Dr. Kate Maxlow, an educator on the East Coast. The article opens with this: “Kate Maxlow admits to being the ‘first person in the room to get bored.’ As a teacher, she worked overtime to keep her elementary students engaged but privately wondered if some content is just destined to be dry. She changed her mind the day her daughter—sick with a 100-degree fever—pleaded to be...

[I am releasing this episode while in Nevada City, CA, where my daughter, Emma Reppun (now Emma Jean George), my 101st episode, just got married to her now husband, Jaden. It was a joyous occasion - so in that spirit, I release this 129th episode.] This episode features two guests and largely focuses on the What School Could Be, 2Revolutions masters program in Learner-Centered Schools & Systems, which is geared towards innovative educators seeking to develop capacity as teacher leaders, instructional coaches, and supportive leaders working towards educational transformation. My guests are 2Revolutions’s Senior Consultant, Catherine Thorn, and Wai’alae...

Today's conversation is with Kris Swett, who wrote the following: “My passion is for the alternative. Making sure schools can better serve different students' needs, my life's work is to create alternative educational models. Conventional schooling is falling by the wayside and technology, and a global community becomes our new reality. We cannot teach the students of the future with the ways of the past." Though Kris has held a number of roles in education today’s episode is going to focus a great deal on his time as the principal at South Valley High School, which became, under his...

Listeners, Real World Learning is a Kansas City-based initiative, incubated at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in partnership with the community, that works to prepare its region, students, and employers for the future. Through immersive experiences like projects and internships with leading employer partners, students get a head start on achieving their career goals at an early age. I learned about Real World Learning through its facilitator at the Kauffman Foundation, educator in residence, Bill Nicely. Eventually, after being knocked out by what Real World Learning is doing in the Kansas City area, I asked Bill to name someone...

Andrew Culberson lives and works in New Brunswick, which is one of the 10 (and three territories) provinces that make up Canada. Andrew is a learning specialist for the New Brunswick Department of Education, with a focus on school counseling, mental health and high school change. He has been working in leadership roles in schools and in education and early childhood development over the past 18 years. In many ways Andrew embodies and thrives on what we at What School Could Be care deeply about, which is the building of caring and connected communities. Andrew’s resume is long, and deep. A car...

Meet Lee Fertig, the Head of School at the Nueva School in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lee has more than 30 years of leadership and teaching experience in a wide variety of educational settings including five international schools in Ethiopia, Brazil, Spain, and Belgium, a leading independent school in New York City, and a voluntary integration public magnet school in Minneapolis. In addition, for many years Lee has been training at the Principals’ Training Center (PTC). You will hear more about the PTC in a moment. Lee has taught in the College of Education at the University of Minnesota, and i...