The What School Could Be Podcast

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...

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 E...

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 c...

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...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 schoo...

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. C...