Move Toward: Unlocked

The last episode of season one starts with a moment of pride, a building that got Act 20 right, together, for the first time. Staff heard. Administration supportive. A system built by the people who would actually use it. Jaye knows that moment is the exception, not the rule. He built Move Toward to change that. In this finale, Jaye traces the journey from accidental teacher to someone who spent o...

The goal was never to be needed forever. It was to build toward the moment when the person in front of you doesn't need you anymore, and then have the discipline to actually step back. Jaye opens with a memory of his dad on a sidewalk and a celebratory Budweiser. Then a young teacher who had everything she needed except the confidence to use it, and the moment a charming eighth grader named Wy...

Jaye almost cancelled a middle school food drive in week three. A student named Julia wouldn't let him. Also: how Post-It Notesspent twelve years almost failing before becoming one of the best-selling products in the world. Nobody talks about the middle. It's not romantic. It's not the inspiring origin story or the triumphant finish — it's the part where the energy has drained, the...

Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player who ever lived. He went 193 and 186 as a coach. Being great at something doesn't mean you can make it clear to someone else. Clarity has two parts and most people only think about one. The first: can people understand what they're supposed to do? The second, harder one: did your teaching actually produce understanding? John Hattie's research gives teache...

Behavior is not a problem to be solved. It's a message to be decoded. Jaye tells the story of Elliot — an eighth grader placed in reading intervention who, after one direct conversation about where he stood, refused to enter the room. He sat on the floor in the hallway. He roamed. He made Jaye's life miserable for a year. In his regular classroom, Elliot was fine. It was only during interv...

After you've assessed where you are and uncovered what's underneath, you have to build a response. And here's what makes that hard: the most obvious response is usually aimed at the visible problem, not the real one. Jaye shares the story of Sandra — a veteran teacher with the right strategy and the wrong condition underneath it. He gave her a hand signal to use with three disruptive s...

Most of us aren't really listening — we're composing our response while the other person is still talking. Stephen Covey called it: most people listen with the intent to reply. Jaye shares two stories. The first: a second date he designed entirely around his own interests, presented to a woman whose personal nightmare is public embarrassment. He kept talking. She kept looking for the exit...

Jaye Barbeau's first two years of teaching, his students loved being in class. They were engaged, enthusiastic, and by most observable measures — thriving. They were also learning less than the class next door. The teacher next door was quieter, more structured, and from the outside, a little less fun. His students wrote better. Their scores were higher. And it took Jaye approximately three da...

Every organization has a version of this meeting.   A table full of people. A list. Numbers. Cut scores that tell you who's in the green, the yellow, the red. And forty minutes later, everyone has a task, the meeting ends on time, and nothing has changed.   Jaye Barbeau spent years running those meetings before he asked the question that stopped one cold.   A fourth grader, Grace, had been hov...

Something isn't working. Maybe it's a team. Maybe it's a program. Maybe it's an organization that keeps launching initiatives and wondering why nothing ever sticks.   The response — almost universally, almost automatically — is more. More training. More programs. More meetings about the meetings that didn't produce results. More pressure. More slides. And somewhere in all of th...