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.
🎙️ The full report is free at FrontlineEducation.com/leaders
IXL eliminates the guesswork in lesson planning with ready-made plans aligned directly to your textbooks and state standards, so teachers spend less time building and more time teaching. Daily performance insights let teachers adjust instruction before a small gap becomes a big one.
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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.