Getting Unstuck – Cultivating Curiosity

This week we chatted with Yasmeen Robbins, an Instructional Review Consultant for the North Carolina Department of Instruction. Her role takes her from one end of the state to the other where she engages with many administrators. And she hears from many of them how isolating the work can be. So, like the great change agent that she is, Yasmeen decided to do something to alleviate some of their isolation. And that "something" symbolizes her desire to connect people, enable collaboration, and grow community.

This interview is part of our "Unstuck" series, which focuses on school leaders who are not just getting unstuck, they're already "unstuck." And by "Unstuck," we mean they are supporting a major shift in education that will increase the potential for administrators and teachers to achieve desired outcomes. Yasmeen Robbins has spent 16 years in public education, most recently as an Instructional Coach. What caught our attention is the APP she's building that will promote cross-district collaboration.

This week we chatted with an Assistant Superintendent of the Mesa Arizona Public Schools, Dr. Randy Mahlerwein. Randy believes that educators need to create different types of learners with a different skill set from what they have typically produced in the past. Doing so is imperative if they're going to create learners who can thrive in the evolving world of work. To help educators navigate such a shift, Randy had to demonstrate adaptive leadership and create a psychologically safe environment.

If school leaders want staff to feel comfortable designing and initiating changes to benefit students, they have to create a culture of psychological safety for experimentation – and failure. Dr. Randy Mahlerwein, the Assistant Superintendent over Secondary Schools in the Mesa Public Schools explains how to do just that.

This week on "Getting Unstuck," we chatted with Principal "Missie" Patschke on the need to build leadership capacity with all staff. The necessity of building the capacity of others to lead is not a new idea. It's not universally practiced, though, because leaders typically get stuck trying to build capacity in one of three ways. We'll investigate a way to break free of those barriers in this week's deeper-dive feature "Worth a Listen, Look, or Read."

In this conversation, we hear from elementary school principal Dr. Melissa "Missie" Patschke, a leader who instinctively gets how you build capacity in others. This interview is part of our "Unstuck" series, which focuses on school leaders who are not just getting unstuck, they're already "unstuck." They're doing things better, not just differently, not just as part of the most recent trend, but because they want to increase the likelihood that they can achieve desired outcomes on behalf of their students.

This week we chatted with Assistant Superintendent Constantino "Costa" Aquilar regarding his district's now six-year shift to broaden its students' post high school opportunities. The district's shift is remarkable not only for its scope, but also because of the extensive communication that fosters it. We dug deeper into that idea of communication by looking at an ongoing process of adaptation and change in a forest where "communication" is required for survival

In this interview, "Costa" Aguilar, Assistant Superintendent of the Merced Union High School District details the shift his district started six years ago. This interview is part of our "Unstuck" series, which focuses on school leaders who are not just getting unstuck, they're already "unstuck." They're doing things better, not just differently, not just as part of the most recent trend, but because they want to increase the likelihood that they can achieve desired outcomes on behalf of their students.

This week we enjoyed getting an update from Principal JoAnne Duncan. JoAnne first appeared on our show last October. She impressed us with how she tried to simplify her staff's approach to managing COVID by keeping them focused on what they could control. We extended the idea of simple through the work of Carl Richards, a certified financial planner. Richards has a knack for recasting complex ideas as simple illustrations with a few strokes of a felt-tip marker and paper no bigger than a napkin.

We aired our first interview with Principal JoAnne Duncan in October 2020. With that challenge staring this young principal in the face, we focused our conversation on leadership. If her leadership could be boiled down to one word, it would have to be "caring." With the challenging year of COVID somewhat in the rearview mirror, we caught up with JoAnne and asked her to reflect on what guided her this past year and provide some guidance to educators who will again be facing a challenging school year.