The What School Could Be Podcast

What happens when a young person who has spent years striving for perfection begins to discover that her worth cannot (and should not) be measured by grades, class rank, or other people's expectations? Meet Baylee Hunt, a seventeen-year-old senior at Fleming County High School in rural Kentucky, where she has spent her entire educational journey. Baylee is an accomplished student, cheer captain, c...

Frankly, it’s hard to find the words to describe my guest, Arlian Ecker. To say he is a Planet Earth activist and young changemaker does not seem to do him justice. Arlian’s story began in Australia when, on his eleventh birthday, he watched three rehabilitated sea turtles being released back into the ocean and learned about the harm plastic pollution had caused them. The experience left him with...

The Five Angles Podcast is coming soon. Created by Josh Reppun of Josh Reppun Productions, The Five Angles Podcast explores one compelling idea at a time through five conversations, five distinct perspectives, and five different ways of seeing. Each collection brings together educators, researchers, designers, creators, students, community leaders, and other curious minds whose expertise and lived...

Listeners, this episode takes us to Warren Local High School in rural southeastern Ohio, where sophomores Jocelyn Evans and Lily King are helping us explore what can happen when a public school begins listening differently to its students. Warren is a recognizable American public school, grades, schedules, homework, tests, football games and homecoming, but something interesting is happening insid...

Many of you know that the film  Most Likely to Succeed changed my life, opening doors into the education reimagined movement I never imagined possible. At the heart of that film was High Tech High in San Diego. Despite its name, High Tech High is not one school or simply a technology academy. It is a network of 16 public charter schools serving roughly 6,300 K–12 students. Founded in 2000, HTH is...

Earlier this year I listened to two episodes of Phil Evans' Education by Design podcast. One explored the Iovine and Young Center, founded on the vision of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, where challenge-based learning, design thinking, and entrepreneurship are redefining what public education can become. The other episode featured the International Baccalaureate's ambitious Systems Transformation pilot...

Earlier this year I listened to two episodes of Phil Evans' Education by Design podcast. One explored the Iovine and Young Center, founded on the vision of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, where challenge-based learning, design thinking, and entrepreneurship are redefining what public education can become. The other episode featured the International Baccalaureate's ambitious Systems Transformation pilot...

Nobel Navigators is a global learning community founded by a way cool education revolutionary named Andrew Sachs. By revolutionary I mean the type of person who wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Andrew didn't set out to redesign this thing we call school. He more or less decided to ignore tradition and build something completely different. Nobel Navigators has a bold mission: helping...

Listeners, earlier this year I participated in a virtual event called Eye on Student Protagonism, hosted by education author and consultant, Jennifer D. Klein . The format was simple. Invite young people to showcase their school projects, surround them with interested adults primed to listen, ask questions and offer insights. During this event Jennifer’s two student presenters were from a program...

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 ref...

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 help...

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...

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 bey...

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...

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 DM...

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 f...

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 sen...

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...

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, child...

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 suppo...

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 inclu...

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 shad...

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 y...

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 y...

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, listene...