She died this week.

Which, frankly, feels like terrible timing.

It’s also the second week of school, and this week more middle schoolers than I can count have looked me directly in the face and told me: “I don’t like to read.” Dolly would have been so disappointed.

I went to yoga this morning and cried about that.

I keep thinking about what has to happen to a child before they decide, at twelve years old, that reading isn’t for them.

I’ve also become increasingly angry about the things we decide some kids deserve.

They won’t read that.

That’s too hard.

They aren’t ready.

So we make it easier. Shorter. Simpler.

The educational equivalent of McDonald’s.

Something they’ll consume. Something that fills the time.

Meanwhile, our kids are starving. For language. Knowledge. Ideas. Something worth wrestling with. For an adult willing to look at them and say: No. You get the good stuff, too.

So that’s where I am this morning.

I cried at yoga because kids don’t like to read. Dolly Parton is dead. My coffee is getting cold.

And apparently I’m supposed to make some coherent meaning out of all of this.

Burn the Script

The Stupid Quest

For the previous 139 days, I danced to Jolene on the internet. Every. Single. Day.

The premise was not particularly sophisticated. My name is Jo Lein. The song is Jolene. I wanted Dolly Parton to follow me.

That’s the whole business plan.

She did not.

Not on Day 1.

@educoachbyjoIt’s actually pronounced Jo LANE … but anything associated with @Dolly Parton is alright with me. #jolene #burnthescript #fyp #viral #dolly

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Not on Day 50.

@educoachbyjoMy grandfather won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Samuel F. B. Morse. My grandmother started her own school. These were serious, accomplished, intellectually formidable people. And now here I am… dancing to Jolene on the internet for 50 consecutive days hoping @Dolly Parton eventually acknowledges my existence. Honestly, there’s a decent chance they would have found this horrifying. But I also think they would have understood something important about it. Every generation communicates differently. My grandfather told stories through scholarship and biography. My grandmother built community through education. And I’m over here trying to create connection through internet lore, vulnerability, literacy, leadership, country music, and sustained absurdity. Different medium. Same human impulse. Because underneath the joke, this series has always been about whether people still gather around something shared. Whether attention can still be sustained. Whether strangers can become community. Whether consistency can still matter in a fragmented world. And I think my ancestors might recognize that part. Even if the TikTok dancing would absolutely require a long family meeting afterward. #educoachbyjo #burnthescript #jolene #dolly #legacy

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Not even around Day 100, when I feel like someone on Dolly’s team really should have admired the commitment to the bit.

I found myself needing something to say because I needed an excuse to post another video of myself dancing badly to the same song.

Then, weirdly, I started looking forward to figuring out what that thing would be. It could have been a conversation I’d had, something a teacher said, or something I’d screwed up. Sometimes, it was even a belief I’d caught myself carrying around.

They don’t care.

Parents aren’t involved.

This group is going to be tough.

That’s just who I am.

And I’d poke at it. What if that’s just a script?

I certainly didn’t begin this because I wanted to develop a daily reflective practice. I wanted Dolly Parton to click “follow.”

But you do something long enough and weird things happen. People start expecting it. Skipping becomes harder than doing it. You get less embarrassed. You stop negotiating with yourself.

And every repetition leaves behind a tiny piece of evidence: I do this.

Do it enough and that becomes: I’m someone who does this.

Which brings me back to the my youth, Dolly Parton, and “I don’t like to read.”

Sometimes I think we’re missing the end of a much longer sentence.

I don’t like to read because reading is where I struggle.

Because everyone else seems faster.

Because the books I’ve been given don’t feel like they’re for me.

Because I’ve accumulated enough evidence to believe I’m not a reader.

That’s the thing 139 days of dancing badly on the internet taught me: Identity follows evidence.

I didn’t become someone who could show up for 139 straight days because somebody told me I was disciplined. I just showed up. Then I showed up again.

And eventually I had enough evidence to believe: I’m someone who does this.

So when a twelve-year-old tells me, “I don’t like to read,” I don’t want to argue with them and give the typical teacher response, “you just haven’t found the right book yet.” I want to get curious about the evidence and then I want us to change it.

One paragraph they understand. One difficult text they realize they can wrestle with. One word they learn and then hear somewhere else. One book that actually belongs to them. One adult who refuses to make the work smaller just because it’s hard.

Evidence.

Then more evidence.

Until maybe someday “I don’t like to read” becomes “I’m a reader.”

Dolly spent decades pointing toward putting books into children’s hands. She put their names on them. She made them theirs and did it again next month.

Give them evidence that books belong to them.

Here I am, in Week 2 of middle school, surrounded by kids who aren’t so sure. And right now, there is one script I am particularly interested in burning: “I’m not a reader.”

I spent 139 days trying to get Dolly to look my way. The whole time, I should have been looking where she was pointing.

My coffee is cold now. I think I’m ready to leave Booth 26.

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And I understood why.

The situation was frustrating. There were legitimate reasons to be upset. But in the actual moment, I was too overstimulated to do anything particularly useful with their anger.

And in the actual moment…I was done.

My brain had approximately 47 tabs open, three of them were playing music, somebody had misplaced the charger, and I was one unexpected problem away from becoming a person who just stares silently at a wall.

So when this person brought me their anger, I did not respond particularly well.

So instead of spending my time deciding what they should have done differently, I came here to think about what I could have done differently.

1. Stop trying to solve it.

Someone comes to us upset and our brains immediately start assembling solutions: Well, here’s why that happened…

What we need to do is…

Have you tried…

This response is occasionally helpful and frequently gasoline.

Anger isn’t always a request for a solution. Sometimes anger is information.

Something feels unfair. Something feels threatening. Something violated an expectation, a value, or a sense of control.

What I could have done was much simpler: “I can see why you’re frustrated.”

Period.

No defense. No explanation. No correction. Just recognition.

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2. Get curious about the anger.

“What part of this is making you the most angry?”

“I’m mad” contains very little information.

Mad about what? The decision? How it happened? Feeling embarrassed? Feeling powerless?

Anger usually has a reason. Curiosity helps us find it.

3. Listen for what’s underneath it.

Anger often stands in front of another emotion, arms crossed. It can hide fear, embarrassment, disappointment, powerlessness, or feeling dismissed or disrespected.

Someone says: “This is ridiculous.”

But underneath that might be: I worked really hard, and it doesn’t seem to matter.

I don’t understand why nobody told me.

I feel like decisions keep happening to me.

I’m scared this is going to make me look incompetent.

I don’t think anyone is listening.

They say: “This always happens.”

And we respond: “Well, technically, it happened twice.”

Congratulations. You won the argument. You also completely missed the person.

Burn the Script

4. Validate before you complicate.

Eventually, there may be another perspective that needs to enter the conversation.

Validation doesn’t mean agreement.

It means: I understand the internal logic of your reaction.

Validate → Complicate → Invite.

First, validate: “I can see why you’re frustrated.”

Then, when the moment is ready, complicate: “Can I offer another piece of the picture?”

And finally, invite: “What do you think the next move should be?”

You don’t have to surrender your perspective to make room for someone else’s.

5. Know when you are the dysregulated one.

Sometimes the emotionally intelligent move is realizing I am not regulated enough to have this conversation well right now.

That was me. Overstimulated. Mentally maxed out. Carrying the emotional residue of several other things.

Then someone handed me one more very intense feeling and expected me to do something useful with it.

I couldn’t.

The better leadership move might have been: “I want to give this the attention it deserves, and I don’t think I’m going to do that well right this second. Can we come back to it?”

Regulation isn’t pretending you aren’t frustrated. It’s noticing your internal state soon enough that it doesn’t choose your behavior for you.

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6. Ask the better question.

“Why are you mad, bro?” sounds flippant. But stripped of the bro, it’s actually a pretty damn good coaching question.

Why are you mad?

• What expectation got violated?

• What value feels threatened?

• What are you protecting?

• What story are you telling yourself about what this means?

And underneath all of that:

What do you need?

Next time someone walks into my space carrying a whole lot of anger, I don’t have to pick it up. I can acknowledge it. I can get curious about it. I can listen for what is underneath it. I can complicate the story when they’re ready.

And if my own brain is currently held together with caffeine and administrative duct tape, I can say: Not yet. I want to do this conversation better than I can do it right now.

Thanks for helping me practice in public.

Eventually, you have to decide what it is becoming.

For the last two and a half years, this Substack has been a lot of things.

A newsletter.
A coaching space.
A place to argue with myself in public.
A place to put ideas before they were fully formed.
A place to make something useful and give it away.

EduCoach has always been built around a pretty simple belief: good ideas about teaching and leadership should not live behind a paywall.

I have maintained, perhaps stubbornly, that if the work was valuable enough, people who had the means and desire to support it might voluntarily throw a few dollars in the jar.

And you have, and that still kind of blows my mind.

But this space is changing a little and so am I.

The Big News

I recently signed on with We Are Teachers as the new writer for their Principal Life newsletter.

I am suddenly thinking differently about audience, about what school leaders need, and about what happens when something I write reaches a few thousand people instead of the little corner of the internet we have built here.

I am still playing with it.

I am learning their voice while trying not to lose mine. I am thinking about what changes when you are writing for principals across the country instead of mostly writing whatever has been rattling around in your own head all week.

The more places I write, lead, teach, post, coach, answer, organize, and show up, the easier it becomes to spend all of my time producing and almost none of it processing.

And I can’t afford to do that.

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I Need This Place

Here is something I know about myself: I need writing.

It is incredibly easy to jump into the work and never look up for air.

There is always another email, student, spreadsheet, and platform blinking at you because apparently modern school leadership requires seventeen different places to check whether somebody needs something.

You can spend an entire week responding to the world without once asking yourself what the world is doing to you.

Writing makes me look in the mirror.

Sometimes I don’t particularly enjoy what I find there, but I need to look.

So I am not leaving this space. I am actually becoming more protective of it.

The First Draft Before the Big Show

I am going to slow down the frequency of what I publish here. I still expect to write several pieces a month. But I no longer want to publish because the internet apparently requires feeding.

I want this to become even more of a place for active thinking. I think of this space increasingly as my practice room…The first draft before the big show.

Some ideas may eventually become We Are Teachers newsletters, videos, professional development, or simply remain weird little essays that twelve people read and three people email me about six months later.

I love those too.

Not every thought needs to become a product. Sometimes writing is simply how I notice my own life.

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What Isn’t Changing

EduCoach will remain free and open. Education has enough gatekeepers. Teachers should not need a district purchase order to access an idea that might help a kid tomorrow morning.

So if you have been here because you like the practical stuff, it is not going away.

If you are here because occasionally I lose my shit about something happening in education and write 2,000 words about it...I have excellent news.

Practice and reflection.

Action and examination.

Do the work….Look at the work.

Figure out what the work is doing to you. Then go back in.

Burn the Script

Growing Up

Two and a half years ago, I could not have predicted what this little corner of the internet would become. I certainly couldn’t have predicted what I would become while writing it.

You have watched me change jobs, write a book, change my mind, say some things too loudly, and say some other things not loudly enough.

I don’t want to accidentally destroy it by turning the thing that helped me think into one more thing I have to produce.

So EduCoach is growing up.

I have a deep love for the work I have taken on and an equally deep sense of responsibility for doing it well. That means I need somewhere to examine it, question it, and celebrate it.

So I’ll keep coming here. And I am really glad you are still here to read it.

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Love,

Jo

It is summer, which means educators everywhere are doing one of the most dangerous and hopeful things we do: We are looking around.

We are visiting other schools. Reading books. Attending PD. Studying systems.

All of these things are good. Necessary, even.

We should learn from other people’s brilliance. We should notice what works. We should be humble enough to admit that someone else may have already solved a problem we are still wrestling with.

But this is also where we get ourselves into trouble. When we see something working in another school, system, or organization, we are rarely just asking, “What can I learn from this?”

We are usually asking something closer to, “Can we take this thing, bring it back home, and make it work here too?”

Most organizations say they want to scale. They do not.

They want to replicate.

They want to find the thing that worked in one place, copy it, paste it somewhere else, and get the same result without having to re-learn all the messy local conditions that made it work the first time.

And that is where things get weird.

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Application

Application means:
“I learned something. Now I’m trying to use it in my own context.”

This is the most basic transfer move, one that requires judgment. The learning approach here is mostly about understanding the principle rather than memorizing the move.

• What is the core idea?

• What problem was it designed to solve?

• What parts matter most?

• What will I need to adapt?

Example:
A principal learns a strategy for improving hallway transitions. She goes back to her building and tries to apply the same core idea, but she adjusts it to her building layout, student age, staff culture, and current discipline patterns.

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Replication

Replication means:
“I want to recreate this as closely as possible because the conditions are similar enough that fidelity matters.”

The learning approach here is about fidelity, sequence, and clarity. Replication requires discipline.

• What are the non-negotiables?

• What steps must happen in order?

• What language/tools/templates support consistency?

• What should not be changed yet?

• What evidence tells us we are doing it as intended?

Example:
A school has a strong lesson internalization protocol that consistently helps teachers understand the standard, task, exemplar, and misconceptions before teaching. Another team wants to use that same protocol.

Scaling

Scaling means:
“We want this to work across many different contexts without losing the essence of what made it powerful.”

Scaling designs for variation. Scaling does not mean every school uses the exact same tracker, calendar, script, and meeting structure. Scaling means the district identifies the underlying conditions that made the practice work.

Example:
A district sees that one school has built a strong culture of weekly teacher feedback. The district identifies the underlying conditions that made the practice work.

• leaders protect time for feedback,

• teachers know the focus,

• feedback is narrow and actionable,

• follow-up actually happens,

• leaders have a system for seeing patterns.

Then each school builds a version that fits its size, schedule, leadership capacity, and current culture.

The learning approach here is about principles, adaptation, capacity-building, and feedback loops.

Why We Suck at Distinguishing These

Scaling sounds sexy. Replication feels controllable.

When something works, leaders naturally want to bottle it so we say, “Let’s scale this.”

But what we often mean is: “Can everyone please do the exact thing that worked over there so I can stop worrying?”

We blame people for “not implementing with fidelity” when we never actually figured out whether the thing needed fidelity or adaptation. We blame schools for “resisting change” when we handed them a solution built for someone else’s problem.

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The Learning Difference

This is where the approach to adult learning has to change.

If the goal is application…

• Teach the concept, then give people practice applying it to their own reality.

• They need examples, non-examples, reflection, and coaching.

• The core learning question is: Can you use this idea well in your context?

If the goal is replication…

• Teach the model clearly and protect the non-negotiables.

• People need modeling, rehearsal, checklists, exemplars, calibration, and feedback on fidelity.

• The core learning question is: Can you do this as designed?

If the goal is scaling…

• Teach the principles and build adaptive expertise.

• People need to understand the why, diagnose their context, make smart adjustments, test, learn, and share evidence across sites.

• The core learning question is: Can you preserve the essence while adapting the form?

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The Punchline

Most failed initiatives give people a thing to replicate, call it scaling, offer training designed for application, and then wonder why implementation is inconsistent.

We traveled up a bumpy road. And I mean BUMPY—like heads-hitting-the-roof bumpy.

We finally pulled up to a random house.

I don’t know what I was expecting for a thing called Rage Club, but when I rolled up to the home, I did consider whether I was on the way to my death.

But I went inside.

There were 23 other people in the room. We were asked to put our things off to the side, and then we circled up and started talking about what anger meant to us.

People shouted out random words and phrases.

“Anger means shame.”

“It’s ugly.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“You lose control.”

I knew this was going to be my kind of place. We were taking mental models and putting them on the table to interrogate.

Yes. I literally just wrote a book about this. Giddy up.

Then, they said it. “Practice.”

Oh, hell yeah. Woo-woo, indeed.

And when it was my turn to practice, I surprised myself. A couple of times.

Burn the Script

The Bucket

The first exercise involved screaming into a bucket.

When they handed it to us, I assumed the bucket was there to help with the noise.

Nope.

They told us that sometimes people get so emotional that they vomit.

Great. I’m about to sit in a really, really loud room where people are screaming, crying, and potentially puking into buckets. Fun.

Fortunately, I didn’t go first. I watched a room full of people just screaming, listening to accounts of bad relationships, abuse, and grief. People sobbed and shook. They screamed things they had probably swallowed for decades.

I sat there wondering what I really had to be angry about compared to all of this.

This is one of my favorite tricks, by the way. Comparison. It is very efficient way to disqualify your own feelings without ever having to deal with them. Someone else had it worse or a better reason. Someone else deserves the bucket more.

But then it was my turn. I sat in the chair.

And without thinking I started screaming about the thing that makes me the most enraged…public schools.

I screamed about systems that claim to serve children while repeatedly choosing adult comfort.

I screamed about the meetings, “interventions,” and the horseshit initiatives that allow us to feel productive without requiring us to ask whether a child is actually learning.

I screamed about blaming kids for disengaging from experiences that were never designed to engage them.

I screamed about how much we say we care and how often caring seems to stop exactly where inconvenience begins.

Apparently, I did have something to be angry about.

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Stop

The next exercise seemed simple. A person walked toward you, and you had to tell them to stop.

I channeled my best “hey, kid. I just told you to put your hoodie down” energy.

“Stop.”

The person kept walking.

“Stop.”

It wasn’t working. It turns out I don’t really care if you have a hoodie on. I can correct it. I can enforce the rule. I can even use my Serious Administrator Voice.

But rage? No. I was performing authority.

I got coached. “Imagine it is a safety concern.”

“STOP.”

Boom. There she was. Rage came to be protective.

Don’t mess with safety. Don’t endanger my kids. Don’t interpret my calm as permission to cause harm.

I didn’t need to manufacture the anger. It was already there, attached to something I value.

And that made me wonder how often we confuse anger with ego. How often do we raise our voices because something sacred is actually at risk? And how often do we raise them because someone failed to obey us quickly enough?

Burn the Script

The Person

The final exercise was the most challenging.

We had to identify the person who tapped most directly into our rage.

Around the room, people named the expected ones: abusers, former partners, parents. People who had hurt them, betrayed them, controlled them, or made them afraid.

The person who came up for me?

Me.

I opted not to participate in this role. I could not imagine being held back while yelling in my own face.

But I didn’t really need the exercise. I could already hear what I would say.

How could you think alcohol was more important than your life?

You betrayed everyone because you couldn’t handle your shit.

You call yourself a mother?

An educator?

How did you let yourself become that person?

The shame spiral still comes back in waves.

Four years ago today, my spouse had to keep me on suicide watch. The next day I checked myself in. In my brain, I had lost everything. I could not imagine continuing to live with a bitch like me.

The bitch who who hid wine in her car and could not make it through a fucking day without booze.

The bitch who lied.

The bitch who disappeared while still technically standing in the room.

The bitch who was supposed to be a mother and an educator and a leader and could not even be trusted alone with herself.

“FUCK YOU!”

I snapped back into the Rage Room. I had been asked to stand in as the person who was the source of someone else’s rage.

And she had a reason to be full of it. Tears streamed down her face as she screamed at me.

“You can’t hurt me anymore.”

Tears streamed down mine.

But I can.

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But I Can

I thought I had come to practice rage toward the people and systems that hurt us. I had not considered the possibility that the person who still had the greatest capacity to hurt me was me.

I wish I could tell you that this realization unlocked something beautiful and that I walked back down the bumpy road lighter. It would be nice to report that I forgave myself in a random house while someone burned sage and rang a sound bowl.

I did not.

I still know exactly where to stab her. I know which memories to pull out. I know which names to say. I know how to take four years of evidence that I have changed and dismiss it with one image of a bottle hidden in a car.

I know how to put the old version of myself on trial and I never lose the case. I am the prosecutor, the judge, the witness, and the executioner.

I call it accountability but I am not sure that is what it is. Accountability asks what happened, who was harmed, what needs to be repaired, and what must change. Shame skips all of that and goes straight to the verdict. This is who you are.

I have spent years helping people interrogate the scripts that keep them stuck. I wrote a whole damn book about it. Apparently, there was an asterisk. Offer not valid for the author.

I tell teachers that current evidence is not a life sentence. I tell leaders that practice can produce a new identity. I tell people that the patterns protecting them may also be preventing them from becoming who they want to be.

I believe people can change. I have watched them do it.

I just keep acting like I am the exception.

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A Different Kind of Protection

Rage does not always have to destroy something. Sometimes it stands guard.

It can step between me and the voice that keeps dragging the worst version of me back into the room. That voice that knows exactly which memories to use—the bottles, the lies, the hospital, and every person I disappointed.

Rage can look at that voice and say, “No. You do not get to hurt me anymore.”

I’m still not sure I am ready to forgive everything. Some days, I am not even sure what forgiveness is supposed to look like. But I am beginning to understand that I cannot punish myself into becoming a better person. I cannot hate the old version of me into healing. I cannot keep reopening the wound and calling it responsibility.

Four years ago, I could not imagine living with a bitch like me. Today, I am trying to stop using that sentence as a weapon.

When the old voice starts walking toward me, carrying every piece of evidence it has collected against me, I know what I am supposed to say.

I am still learning to mean it.

Stop.

If you know someone who is struggling, 988 is the crisis hotline.

“Good job.”

Cheesy smile.

Good job? I mean... I appreciate the kindness. But I literally scanned a barcode.

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The Trophy I Never Earned

It reminds me of the first trophy I ever got playing the most rigorous of small people sports…T-ball.

Now, there’s a spectrum of little league athletes.

You’ve got the stars. The contributors. The kid pulling dandelions in right field. And then the kid who wanders off the field because a butterfly looked interesting.

I was the dandelion puller.

At the end of the season, every kid got a trophy.

I remember holding mine and having a thought that I probably wasn’t supposed to have at five years old: I didn’t earn this.

That little plastic trophy sat on a shelf in my bedroom for my entire childhood. My mom would occasionally point toward it while reminding me to clean my room. “This is part of your clutter. Deal with it.”

Every time I looked at it, I felt a small tinge of embarrassment. I knew I wasn’t a good athlete.

I knew the difference between earning something and being handed something.

I didn’t feel encouraged. I felt misunderstood.

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Kids Already Know

I don’t think participation trophies are what people think they are. The loudest voices say they created a generation of entitled kids.

I don’t buy it.

Kids aren’t that gullible. They know who scored the goals, who practiced after everyone else went home, and who was pulling dandelions.

Adults think they’re protecting kids’ confidence but kids already know the truth. The trophy doesn’t fool them.

It just teaches them that recognition and achievement are somehow the same thing.

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The Recipe

I was lucky. I had an older sister who really earned her stuff. She practiced. She sacrificed. She won. And I watched it happen.

I saw the work behind the applause.

So when I looked at my little plastic trophy, I already had something better to compare it to.

Achievement had a recipe. One heaping cup of hard work. A dash of failure. Stir for improvement.

Repeat.

The trophy didn’t confuse me because I had a model for what earning looked like. I’m not sure every kid has that anymore.

Participation Isn't Progress

I think we stopped knowing how to recognize growth. We’ve confused participation with progress. We celebrate checking in, showing up, turning something in, and scanning a Y card.

Attendance has become an accomplishment.

Completion has become excellence.

We’ve become so afraid of discouraging people that we’ve stopped describing reality.

Ironically, I think that’s exactly what discourages them. Everyone is constantly trying to calibrate. People—especially kids—are constantly asking one question: How am I doing?

But it has become difficult to discern what actually makes someone better? Not just what gets applause?

The Purpose of Feedback

Participation trophies themselves aren’t the villain. They can signal belonging and encourage teamwork.

But the strongest evidence points shows that praise works best when it helps people understand what they actually controlled. If a person can identify the effort, the strategy, or the inner persistence, they are more likely to replicate those actions.

And this requires careful observation.

Accurate Mirrors

I’ve started noticing how often I flippantly praise, with a “nice job” or “way to go.”

They’re not bad words. They’re just... lazy ones.

They require almost no observation.

• “I noticed you kept reading even when that paragraph got confusing.”

• “You asked a deeper question today than yesterday.”

• “You changed your strategy after the first one didn’t work.”

Now I’m handing them a mirror that reflects something true and that they can actually use.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that feedback has one job: To help them see themselves more accurately.

Confidence comes from evidence from seeing yourself do something difficult.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Next Saturday

“Good job,” he will say.

Next time, I will reply “Not yet.”

Tell me “good job” when I finally hold Warrior 3 on the right side for more than a few seconds or when I stop wobbling through Half Moon.

Tell me “good job” because you noticed something I worked for.

That’s the kind of feedback that doesn’t just make you feel seen. It helps you become someone worth seeing.

In the first three pieces, I focused heavily on adult design: what students need, what teachers need to know and be able to do, and what school conditions make strong literacy instruction possible.

I still believe all of that.

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But a fellow Substack person, , pushed me to name something I had implied more than I had actually said:

The purpose of adult design is not permanent adult control. The purpose of adult design is gradual transfer of power.

If students always need us to choose the strategy, name the barrier, mark the important sentence, select the vocabulary, structure the talk, and tell them whether they understood, then we have not yet built stronger readers.

The goal is not for students to become excellent at complying with literacy routines. The goal is for students to become increasingly able to direct, monitor, and sustain their own literacy growth.

Every adult-created condition should eventually point toward a student-owned responsibility.

We build annotation routines so that students eventually know how to mark what matters when no one tells them which symbol to use. We build independent reading routines so students eventually know how to choose, abandon, persist, recommend, and build a reading life that is not dependent on a log.

Adult design should not steal responsibility from students. It should prepare students to assume more of it.

I stopped doing a lot of the talking-head videos for a bit because, well…Jolene.

Apparently when you commit to dancing to “Jolene” every day until Dolly Parton acknowledges the bit, your content calendar becomes a little weird.

But honestly, it has been fun.

It has been a strange little creative laboratory to play with ideas. And somewhere in the middle of all that yeehaw nonsense, I started projecting forward again to the educator companion for Burn the Script.

That project has had so many stops and starts.

And I used to interpret that as evidence that maybe I was not serious enough about it. Maybe I did not have the discipline. Maybe I did not know what I wanted it to become yet.

But now I think that might just be how some things are born.

Burn the Script was like that for a long time too. It lived in drafts and notes and half-starts and “this is definitely the version” folders that were absolutely not the version.

And then, eventually, with enough consistency, routine, and willingness to keep returning, it became something real.

Burn the Script

This week, I turn 41. Part of me has been excited to say that I published my first book at 40. Forty has always felt like one of those cultural markers. It’s one of those ages people use to measure whether they are early or late or behind or right on time.

But lately, I am less interested in timelines… and more interested in transformation.

Big changes are rarely as clean as we pretend they are after the fact.

They are messy, repetitive, boring, and terrifying. They are full of false starts and strange detours and moments where you realize you have been practicing for something long before you knew what it was.

My first month as a middle school assistant principal has been awesome, and I mean that in the truest sense. It’s certainly not magically calm because I have a cute little leadership framework and a book with my name on it.

Middle school is still middle school.

But there is something deeply energizing about spending all day practicing what I know and believe.

Practice.

The book was practice.
The videos are practice.
The companion will be practice.
This new role is practice.
Becoming the next version of myself is practice.

So here’s to 41.

Here’s to another month of half-starts becoming habits.

Here’s to the strange joy of practice.

Burn the Script Live

Burn the Script Live will meet ONE MORE TIME. Make sure to order your book now so you can jump into the practice.

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Still going a little off the rails on literacy this month. But here’s something that resembles an action step.

@educoachbyjoLet’s f**king go for literacy is not dead yet! 😆 We are engineering that Mississippi miracle… one practice at a time. Let’s talk about morphology. Who has some good practices to share? #literacy #educoachbyjo #morphology #reading #mississippi

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Love,

Jo

Part 2 was about teachers and instruction.

Now we have to talk about the school. We cannot ask individual teachers to solve problems created by school design.

We do this all the time. We tell teachers to differentiate, but we do not build an intervention system. We tell teachers to support multilingual learners, but language development lives in one room, one department, or one person’s job description. We tell teachers to build a reading culture, but students do not have reliable access to books they want to read, books they can read, or time to actually read them.

And then we act surprised when implementation depends on heroic teachers doing heroic things in impossible conditions.

Heroics are not a system.

If the schedule, intervention system, PLCs, materials, and feedback routines do not support literacy, then literacy becomes a personal project for individual teachers instead of a schoolwide commitment.

If we are serious about reading, the school has to be designed like we are serious about reading.

The schedule is part of the reading plan

If literacy matters, the schedule should prove it.

• Where is core ELA protected?

• Where does intervention happen?

• When do multilingual learners receive language support?

• When do students with foundational gaps get targeted instruction?

• When do teachers study student work?

• When do students read independently?

• When do students get pulled from reading instruction, and why?

If we cannot answer those questions, then literacy may be a value, but it is not yet a design.

Student needs are vast, and these gaps don’t magically fill into the cracks of the day.

If intervention time does not exist, intervention becomes something teachers try to squeeze in between the warm-up, the lesson, the platform, and the fire drill.

We have to stop saying, “Teachers will differentiate,” as though that sentence creates time, materials, training, grouping, progress monitoring, and support.

The schedule has to carry some of the promise.

Intervention has to be a system

If intervention is real, we should be able to answer:

• Who needs support? How do we know?

• What kind of support do they need?

• When do they get it?

• Who provides it?

• What materials are used?

• How often do we monitor progress?

• When do groups change?

• When does a student exit?

Literacy cannot live only in ELA

I know the phrase “every teacher is a reading teacher” can make secondary teachers want to disappear into the copy room.

So let’s be more precise.

Not all teachers teach reading the same way. Every teacher does not need to teach phonics or deep literary analysis. Not every teacher needs to become an ELA teacher in disguise.

But every content area has language and literacy demands.

• Science includes dense informational text, cause-and-effect, claims, evidence, reasoning, morphology, and technical vocabulary.

• Social studies has sourcing, context, chronology, argument, maps, primary sources, and perspective.

• Math has precision, symbolic language, vocabulary, explanation, and word problems.

• Electives have procedures, critique, reflection, presentation, and discipline-specific language.

So no, literacy cannot live only in ELA. If students only practice academic language, vocabulary, reading, writing, and evidence in one class, we should not be shocked when those skills do not transfer.

The school needs shared routines that travel.

• Using sentence frames

• Explaining evidence

• Leveraging precise vocabulary

• Rehearsing an answer before writing it

• Annotating the most critical information

The school has to decide which literacy routines matter enough to show up across classrooms.

Not every classroom has to look the same. But students should feel a coherent commitment to language and thinking across the building with frequent opportunities to practice the same processes.

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PLCs and leader feedback must study the same practices

If we want literacy instruction to improve, PLCs cannot become pacing theater.

A PLC that only asks, “What lesson are you on?” will not tell us whether students understood the text, used the vocabulary, explained their evidence, or became stronger readers.

PLCs need student work on the table. Before opening another dashboard, open the notebooks.

Then ask:

• What did students understand?

• Where did meaning break down?

• Was this a reading issue, a language issue, a writing issue, or a task issue?

• What evidence do we have?

• What do we reteach?

• What teacher move are we practicing next?

Leader feedback has to align to the same work.

A teacher should not practice one thing in PD, discuss another thing in PLC, and get feedback on seventeen unrelated things during a walkthrough.

This becomes instructional confetti.

Here is what coherence can look like. The school chooses one focus. Let’s say it’s consistent annotation routines.

• In PD, teachers practice the routine.

• In PLC, teachers bring annotated student work.

• In walkthroughs, leaders look for the same routine.

• In feedback, leaders name one thing that made the rehearsal stronger and one thing to tighten.

• In the next PLC, teachers adjust and try again.

If leaders observe everything, they reinforce nothing.

If literacy is the priority, prove it

Part 1 was about what students need.

Part 2 was about what teachers need to know and do.

Part 3 is about whether the school is designed to make any of it sustainable.

If every teacher is left to invent these conditions alone, then we do not have a literacy plan.

The curriculum can give us the text. Teachers can build the bridge. But the school has to make sure the bridge has somewhere to stand.

How I Plan to Use This Series as an Assistant Principal

I did not write this series just to write about literacy.

I wrote it because I am stepping into a real school with real students, real teachers, a real curriculum, and real constraints. So now I have to ask myself the only question that matters: What am I actually going to do with it?

Here is the practical plan.

1. I am going to share the “knowledge” pieces from Part 2 in weekly communication

One concept at a time. A paragraph. A classroom example. A “try this tomorrow.” A question to bring to PLC.

Knowledge piece: “Struggling reader” is not a diagnosis.
Instructional question: Where is the reading breaking down: decoding, fluency, vocabulary, background knowledge, language, or writing?
Try this: Listen to one student read three sentences and notice accuracy, pace, and phrasing before deciding what support they need.

2. I am identifying annotation as our first instructional bridge

If we are serious about getting students into text, we need a first bridge. For us, I think annotation is a strong place to start.

To be clear, annotation is not going to solve our literacy problems. Students can absolutely underline half a page and learn nothing. They can highlight random sentences as if they were decorating a crime scene.

So the point is not annotation as compliance. The point is annotation as evidence of thinking.

• Can students identify what matters?

• Can they track meaning?

• Can they notice confusion?

• Can they summarize a chunk?

• Can they mark words that carry meaning?

• Can they use their annotations to talk and write?

And the best part is that I have already found a couple of teachers willing to teach the staff how to do it.

3. I am building literacy mantras with teachers who do not mind late-night text messages

This might be the most “me” part of the plan. I want us to build literacy mantras that we can practice, repeat, and reinforce all year.

Some of the ones we have been playing with:

1. If there’s a text to read, we all will read it.

2. Talk, then write, then talk again.

3. Talking about books like they’re video games.

4. The word is… (what’s the word?)

5. Thinking leaves tracks

6. Read it. Read it again. Read it differently.

7. Give the stem to move the pen.

8. The work tells the story.

The point is shared language. Shared language becomes shared attention- and shared attention becomes shared practice.

4. I am working on a real plan for getting specific reading data

The issue is not “more data.” The issue is specific data that helps us make better instructional decisions.

If we want to stop saying “low reader,” we need information that helps us know what kind of support students need. This week, I started that process with some leaders at a PD.

We need to start asking collective questions:

• What data do we need?

• Who collects it?

• When? How often?

• How will we look at it?

• How will it change instruction?

• How will we know if the support is working?

If the data does not help us decide what to do next, we need better data or a better process.

5. I am going to look for what is already working

There are already teachers building bridges into text. There are already students thinking deeply. There are already routines worth studying. There are already people who know things I do not know.

So part of my job is to find the bright spots.

• Who is already getting students to annotate in a way that supports comprehension?

• Who is already using structured talk routines?

• Who is already teaching vocabulary in a way that sticks?

• Who is already helping students access difficult text?

• Who is already building reading culture?

Then we name it. Study it. Share it. Practice it. Build from it.

Sometimes the next right move is already in the building.

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Thanks for letting me learn out loud.

I keep coming back to my hunch about the computers.

You know the scene.

The text is there. The questions are there. The assignment is posted. Students are clicking. The teacher is circulating.

Sometimes this is instruction. Sometimes it is simply an assignment.

Knowing where to click is not the same as knowing what to do next. So let’s get really narrow at the teacher level.

STOP! Did you read part 1 about students? If not, please go back and read it.

Teacher knowledge and skills

We use a lot of big instructional words…scaffold, differentiate, CFU. These words can produce real meaning and action. They can also mean absolutely nothing to a new teacher and trigger a whole lot of professional scar tissue for an experienced one.

“Differentiate.”

Okay. How?

“Scaffold the text.”

With what? For whom? At what point? For what barrier?

“Check for understanding.”

What evidence am I collecting, and what am I supposed to do with it?

If we want good practice to be visible, learnable, and repeatable, we have to name what teachers need to know and be able to do.

I think many teachers know what students are supposed to complete. I am less convinced we have consistently taught them how to bridge students into difficult reading.

• How do I build just enough background knowledge?

• Which words actually need to be taught?

• Where should I stop and model?

• How do I know whether a student has a decoding problem, a fluency problem, a vocabulary problem, or a language problem?

• How do I structure talk so students actually produce language?

In true backward-planning fashion, I decided to create a know/do chart for our vision of effective literacy instruction, specifically for my students, who are primarily multilingual learners. You can access the Google Doc version here.

Teacher know/do

Good practice has to survive Thursday afternoon

This must be our new standard: Can the practice survive Thursday afternoon?

You know…the hard text, three students absent, and a Chromebook update appearing at the worst possible moment.

“Improve discourse” will not survive Thursday afternoon. “After paragraph two, find one sentence of evidence, rehearse your claim with a partner, then write” might.

Specificity is not micromanagement. Sometimes specificity is mercy.

Teachers deserve practices they can actually see, learn, repeat, and improve. Curriculum can give us the text, but we still have to build the bridge.

What’s in part 3?

We cannot ask individual teachers to solve problems created by school design. In part 3, we go to the school level.

Before we all get buried under logins, pacing guides, and the strange little panic that comes with any instructional resource and a curriculum nerd getting into the mix, I want to be crystal clear: The curriculum matters…but the curriculum is not the reading plan.

My specific curriculum, StudySync, gives us a lot to work with: complex texts, unit themes, essential questions, writing prompts, vocabulary, discussion routines, scaffolds, multimedia, assessments and even foundational skills resources for students who need targeted support.

That is good.

But materials do not teach themselves.

A curriculum can organize the work. It can give us common texts, common tasks, and common expectations. It can help us stop inventing ELA from scratch every Sunday night like exhausted Pinterest goblins.

But it cannot decide what our students need in front of us. McGraw-Hill cannot tell us which student is pretending to read. No MAP test can tell us which student can decode the word but has no idea what it means. No HQIM can tell us which multilingual learner understands the concept but does not yet have the English to explain it.

Over the past year, I watched leaders describe their teachers as “using the curriculum” but skipping the part where students actually talk, read, think, and write. Nah. That’s not using the curriculum at all.

So the question is not simply, “Are we using the curriculum?”

The better question is:

Let’s start with students.

Access has to be designed

The biggest mistake we can make is believing that access to grade-level text means placing the text in front of students and saying, “Okay, go.”

That is exposure, not access.

Access means students can actually enter the text, hold onto meaning while reading it, talk about it, write about it, and get stronger from the experience.

Schools often reward background knowledge, vocabulary, academic language, and reading stamina that students may not have had equal opportunities to develop. So we have to build those things on purpose.

Before students read, we should be asking:

• What background knowledge do they need to understand this text?

• What vocabulary will unlock the meaning?

• What sentence structure might trip them up?

• What cultural or historical context do they need?

• What can I show, explain, model, or connect before we read?

This does not mean we spend thirty minutes frontloading until nobody remembers why we opened the book. It means we give students enough to enter.

This can be a map, a photo, a two-minute video, a key term or a sentence frame they will need later. We need just enough bridge.

Then, during reading, students need support that keeps them in the work.

This could look like a teacher read-aloud, partner reading, stop-and-jot, chunking, or annotating one key line. Simple things like rereading a sentence or modeling how a strong reader handles confusion can also keep readers in the text.

We need to know what kind of reading problem we are looking at

One of the least helpful phrases in middle school is “low reader.”

This tells us nothing.

A student may struggle because of decoding, fluency, vocabulary, background knowledge, or a whole host of other reading issues. Challenges with language development, comprehension monitoring, writing, attention, or years of learning to survive reading tasks without actually reading can impact what we call a “low reader.”

None of those are the same problem.

This means we need to learn to be precise in our diagnosis.

• Can the student read the words accurately?

• Can the student read them fluently enough to make meaning?

• Does the student understand the vocabulary?

• Does the student understand the background knowledge?

• Can the student talk about the text?

• Can the student write about the text?

If a student has a decoding problem and we respond with more comprehension questions, we are not intervening. We are repeatedly documenting the problem and calling it instruction.

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Foundational skills still matter in middle school

This is where we have to be brave.

Middle school students who need support with foundational reading skills still need support with foundational reading skills.

I know….everyone wants middle school ELA to feel grown-up, literary, and full of deep conversations about theme and the author’s craft.

Good. It should be.

But if a student cannot decode words, read fluently, or recognize meaningful word parts, then all that beautiful literary analysis is sitting on shaky ground.

We do not have to choose between grade-level thinking and foundational skill support.

We need both.

Students should have access to complex, meaningful, grade-level texts in core instruction. And students with foundational gaps should also receive targeted support in phonics, decoding, morphology, and fluency.

The school design has to make this possible. “Differentiate in the classroom” is not a complete intervention system. It is often what we say when we have not built one.

If students need targeted decoding or fluency support, we need to know:

• Who needs it? How do we know?

• When do they get it?

• Who provides it?

• What materials are used?

• How often do we monitor progress?

• When do we regroup?

• When do students exit?

If we cannot answer those questions, we do not have an intervention plan.

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Multilingual learners need language production, not just translation

Translation, visuals, and cognates can help. But multilingual learners also need structured, repeated opportunities to produce academic English.

They need to hear it. Say it. Practice it. Revise it. Use it in writing. Use it again tomorrow.

We have to be much more intentional with talk. A turn-and-talk is not automatically language development. Sometimes it is two students mumbling “I don’t know” while one student digs through a backpack for Takis.

So we have to structure it.

Instead of saying, “Talk to your partner,” we might say:

• “Use this frame: The author shows ___ by ___.”

• “Partner A, explain what happened. Partner B, add one piece of evidence.”

• “First say it in everyday language. Now say it using the academic word.”

• “Point to the sentence that helped you. Now read it to your partner.”

• “Practice your answer out loud before you write it.”

For many students, especially multilingual learners, talk is the bridge between reading and writing. If we skip the talk, we often make the writing harder than it needs to be.

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Vocabulary has to be taught like it matters

We cannot leave vocabulary to context clues and vibes. Students need explicit vocabulary instruction that is fast, focused, and repeated.

They need to pronounce the word, break the word apart, understand the meaning and use it in discussion and in writing.

And then use it again later.

For multilingual learners, we should be looking for cognates and transferable word parts. For all students, we should teach morphology as one of the most useful tools we have. Because it is. Prefixes, suffixes, roots, and word families unlock unfamiliar words across texts and content areas.

A practical vocabulary routine might be:

1. Say it.

2. Break it.

3. Define it.

4. Connect it.

5. Find it.

6. Use it.

That can happen in five minutes.

Writing instruction has to happen before the big writing assignment

Students need to write constantly. But they also need to be taught how to write.

Those are not the same thing.

We cannot assign constructed responses all week and then act surprised when students produce vague claims, dropped evidence, and explanations that basically say, “This proves my answer because it does.”

They need models, sentence- and paragraph-level practice, oral rehearsal before writing, and revision of a single sentence to make it clearer. They also need to practice using academic vocabulary without sounding like they swallowed a thesaurus and lost a fight.

This can be very practical.

1. Show two responses. Ask: Which one is stronger? Why? Revise the weak one.

2. Underline the claim. Circle the evidence. Box the explanation.

3. Revise this sentence to include a “wow word.”

The point is we can’t leave writing improvement to chance. We have to look at what kids are producing and actively close gaps.

Independent reading needs structure, not wishful thinking

I believe in independent reading. But I do not believe in pretending that all students will magically become readers because we gave them ten silent minutes and a reading log.

Independent reading needs design. Students need help choosing books and access to books they actually want to read. They need time to build stamina and routines for handling a book that is too hard, too boring, or not a good fit. They need chances to talk about what they are reading. Perhaps most importantly, they need adults who can confer with them and notice whether they are actually reading or just performing reading behaviors.

This pushes us to ask these questions:

• What are students reading? How do we know?

• Are they finishing books?

• Are they abandoning books thoughtfully?

• Are they building stamina?

• Are they talking about books?

• Are they finding authors, genres, and topics they care about?

Reading culture is not a poster, a log, or a pizza coupon. It is a set of routines, relationships, access points, and repeated experiences that help students begin to see themselves as readers.

The simple operating model

Next…we tackle the teacher-level.

The interview is going well.

We’ve talked about curriculum. We’ve talked about culture. We’ve talked about difficult conversations with families, holding the bar high even when kids are behind, and what they would do if a student told a teacher to go to hell during third period.

You know. The usual.

Then I drop my favorite question.

“Imagine a pie chart to represent student learning. What percentage of responsibility for student learning belongs to the teacher? The student? The parent? The school? Anyone else you want to include?”

There isn’t a right answer to this question.

But within about thirty seconds, I can usually tell whether someone is likely to burn out, blame families, over-function for students, or build genuine partnerships.

The Pie Chart

The first thing most people assume is that this is a question about responsibility or accountability.

It isn’t.

It’s a question about power.

Every pie chart is a map of where someone believes influence lives.

If I believe teachers are responsible for nearly everything, I will invest heavily in instruction. If I believe families are responsible for nearly everything, I will invest heavily in partnership (or absolve myself of responsibility when things don’t go well). If I believe students are responsible for nearly everything, I will invest heavily in agency and motivation.

The percentages themselves don’t matter much. The story underneath them does.

The Teacher Martyr

One common responses I encounter is some version of this:

The first time I heard it, I remember thinking it sounded admirable.

• “We can only control ourselves.”

• “Great teachers overcome obstacles.”

• “Student success is ultimately on us.”

It sounds exactly like the kind of thing that eventually burns people out.

I am more interested in someone who understands the limits of their responsibility.

Education has a martyrdom problem. We celebrate people for carrying impossible loads, then act surprised when they collapse underneath them.

What’s important to unpack here is that the answer of “100% on us” is actually rooted in protection.

Stay with me.

If everything is my responsibility, then everything is theoretically within my control.

If everything is within my control, then I never have to confront uncertainty.

I never have to confront the reality that students have agency or the reality that families make decisions I cannot make for them. Or the reality that sometimes I can do everything right and still not get the outcome I want.

“If I take responsibility for everything, I never have to feel powerless.”

It explains why so many educators carry burdens they were never meant to carry.

Burn the Script

The Parent Problem

The opposite answer can be just as revealing.

This pie chart reveals a story: “If families would just do their job, schools would be fine.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

But notice what happened….we outsourced responsibility.

Different percentages. Same escape hatch.

One person escapes into over-responsibility. The other escapes into blame.

Then there is the pie chart with no parent slice at all…Zero percent. Families don’t even make the chart.

When I ask people to explain it, I often hear assumptions hiding underneath the answer.

• “Parents don’t care.”

• “We can’t count on them.”

• “Most families aren’t involved anyway.”

Maybe some families aren’t. But what’s interesting isn’t whether the statement is true. It’s that the belief showed up before the evidence.

So if I believe families don’t care, I stop calling, inviting, or looking for a partnership… and eventually my behavior creates the exact reality I expected to find.

The script becomes self-fulfilling.

The Student Passenger

A rarer case is when candidates give students a small slice of the pie. I often find this initially confusing considering the question asked for student learning. But usually the mindset is rooted in compassion.

The candidate has seen poverty, trauma, and instability and wants to respond to it.

Compassion becomes dangerous when it accidentally removes agency. Responsibility is not merely a burden. It is also the source of power.

The more responsibility we remove from students, the fewer opportunities they have to discover what they are capable of carrying.

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The Leadership Paradox

At this point, you might be wondering what the “right” pie chart looks like.

I have no idea. And honestly, that’s the point.

Twenty-two-year-old Jo probably would have given teachers 80%.

Thirty-five-year-old Jo might have landed somewhere around 60%.

Today…I’m honestly not sure.

In some weird way, that uncertainty is probably evidence that I’ve become a better leader. Leadership has taught me something uncomfortable: The world is more complicated than my percentages.

Student learning is shared work.

The percentages matter less than whether we can hold all of those truths at the same time.

• Can we acknowledge barriers without surrendering agency?

• Can we recognize teacher influence without assuming teacher omnipotence?

• Can we believe in family partnership without romanticizing it?

• Can we talk about responsibility without immediately searching for someone to blame?

Those are the questions I care about…not the pie chart.

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The Script Beneath the Slice

This question helps me understand people. The conversation after the pie chart is always more interesting than the pie chart itself.

• Why these numbers?

• What experiences shaped that belief?

• Who taught you that?

In asking these questions, I uncover the invisible rules, or scripts, people carry into classrooms every day. Everyone carries stories that have been repeated so many times they no longer feel like stories at all. We just know they feel true.

The most dangerous pie chart I’ve ever seen wasn’t the one that gave teachers 100% or blamed parents. It was the pie chart someone couldn’t explain.

Because the moment someone cannot explain their percentages, I know something important: The belief is running them…they are not running the belief.

Somewhere along the way, they inherited an answer without ever examining the question - from a mentor, a difficult family, or a painful year. A hundred small experiences have slowly hardened into certainty.

And certainty is a dangerous thing in this work.

Children have a way of exposing beliefs that have gone unquestioned. They are generous in that way. What I want to know before they are in front of said children is whether they have ever examined the story underneath the slice.

I have a growing suspicion that we are accidentally removing childhood from childhood…. One convenience at a time.

We have become obsessed with making life easier for children.

The problem is that many of the things that make people strong are inherently difficult—friendship, reading, and learning. Becoming someone worth becoming is difficult.

Yet much of modern life is organized around eliminating difficulty. The goal is to reduce friction, increase convenience, and provide immediate relief.

And while I enjoy convenience as much as the next person, I think we have stumbled into a question we are not asking nearly enough: What am I no longer practicing?

Every convenience carries a hidden cost. When calculators became common, mental arithmetic became less common. The rise in GPS devices led to poorer navigational skills (thanks, Milgram!). Increases in streaming services led to decreases in boredom.

And when boredom disappeared, many other things disappeared with it—imagination, curiosity, and reflection, to name a few. We have dramatically reduced our ability to sit alone with our own thoughts long enough for them to become something interesting.

A bored child used to start a game, make up a story, or annoy a sibling. Now boredom rarely lasts long enough to become anything. We have become so good at entertaining children that we may be forgetting how development works.

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A while back, one of my kids was helping make breakfast using an actual knife. Another child watched in complete disbelief, “Your parents let you use knives?”

Capability is always a little dangerous. The first time a child rides a bike, walks to a friend’s house, or makes a decision without us comes with risk.

But the alternative is dependence.

And one day our children inherit the world whether they are ready or not.

Burn the Script

Years ago, I had a mentor who used to joke about creating the most dangerous summer camp imaginable. “Let them use knives!” she would declare at happy hour.

Her point was that children need opportunities to become capable.

But time and time again, I see schools, classrooms, and systems strip children of this opportunity. A backpack gets replaced by a color-coded bin. A notebook gets replaced by a platform. A responsibility gets replaced by a system.

Then, years later, we wonder why students struggle to organize themselves.

One day, I opened a locker for a Pre-K student. The teacher immediately corrected me, “You took away the opportunity to practice.”

My goal was opening the locker. Her goal was developing a child who could open lockers.

We often confuse the completion of a task with the development of a person.

Every generation gets the same assignment: Raise children in a world they did not choose.

The details change. The assignment does not.

And every generation must eventually decide what it is unwilling to outsource. I think we are approaching that moment.

So if this is the world we are forced to nurture our children in, we, as the responsible adults, have some expectations.

1. We expect children to read deeply in a culture that rewards skimming—so we will protect their attention.

2. We expect them to create more than they consume—so we will protect their curiosity.

3. We expect them to learn how to be bored —so we will stop filling every empty moment.

4. We expect them to tell the truth when it would be easier to perform—so we will value honesty more than image.

5. We expect them to practice things that do not provide immediate rewards—so we will stop confusing convenience with growth.

We cannot spend years removing responsibility, struggle, and practice from childhood and then be disappointed when responsibility, resilience, and capability fail to appear.

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I asked the question: If we don’t build a better world for our kids, then what the hell are we doing here?

One day the world stops being something we give our children and starts becoming something we leave in their hands. Responsible adults need to stop making childhood easier and start making children capable.

And capability cannot be downloaded, automated, or outsourced. It must be practiced.

The Coaching Question

“What will happen if we play the tape forward?”

When to Use This Question

• When someone is focused on short-term relief rather than long-term consequences.

• When a teacher or leader is considering a decision that feels good now but may create problems later.

• When someone is caught in a recurring cycle and can’t understand why it keeps happening.

• When protective patterns like overcompensating, detaching, or surrendering are driving behavior.

• When a team is proposing a solution without considering second- and third-order effects.

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The Problem This Question Aims to Solve

We tend to focus on the immediate outcome:

• The student stops arguing.

• The parent leaves satisfied.

• The meeting ends.

• The conflict disappears.

But coaching often requires helping people look beyond the next five minutes.

This question invites people to mentally fast-forward. It asks them to consider not just the immediate consequence of an action, but the pattern it creates, the habits it reinforces, and the future it makes more likely.

The Research Behind It

• Delayed Gratification Research (i.e. Mischel, 1972): People who can consider future outcomes are more likely to make decisions aligned with long-term goals.

• Systems Thinking (Senge, 2006): Every intervention creates ripple effects. Strong leaders think beyond events and consider patterns and structures.

• Behavioral Psychology (i.e. Skinner, 1953): Every response teaches. What we reinforce today becomes more likely tomorrow.

• Disruptive Mindset Coaching (Lein, 2026): Protective patterns often prioritize immediate relief over long-term growth. Playing the tape forward exposes the hidden costs of those patterns.

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Example Application in Coaching

Scenario: A teacher is considering excusing a student from a challenging assignment because the student is frustrated and shutting down.

Coach’s Response:
“Let’s play the tape forward. What happens if we do that today?”

Teacher’s Reflection:
“Well, they’ll feel better right now.”

Coach:
“And then what?”

Teacher:
“The next time something feels hard, they’ll probably expect an escape route.”

Coach:
“And then?”

Teacher:
“Eventually they may start believing that difficulty means they shouldn’t have to do the work.”

Next Steps: The coach and teacher design a support structure that reduces overwhelm without removing the productive struggle.

Burn the Script

Additional Questions to Deepen the Conversation

• “What are we teaching if we respond this way?”

• “What becomes more likely if this pattern continues?”

• “How will this decision look six months from now?”

• “What problem are we creating while solving this one?”

• “What would your future self say about this choice?”

Final Reflection for Coaches and Leaders

One of the most dangerous questions in schools is “Will this work?” because lots of things work.

Suspensions, lowering expectations, and doing the work for people work.

At least for a day.

The better question is “What happens next?”

Leadership is not just about solving the problem in front of you. It’s about deciding which future you’re building one decision at a time.

Burn the Script live will return on Sunday, June 28 at 7 pm central. See you then!

You would think a person with two decades in public schools, a cute little doctorate, a cute little book, and a cute little nonprofit she built from scratch would be fine.

You would think.

I still believe that careers are mostly dumb luck.

There is luck in timing. There’s the luck of the draw on whether the job posting was real or already promised to someone’s former colleague’s cousin. Or whether the person across the table understands what you actually do or just sees words like “leadership,” “coaching,” and “professional development” and decides you are probably exhausting (I am).

But I think it is more profound than luck.

Careers are not just ladders. They are belief systems.

I have watched people race toward the district office like it is the safe house at the end of the apocalypse…like if you can just get far enough away from the cafeteria duty, the parent phone calls, the sub shortages, the teacher tears, or the hallway chaos, then maybe you have made it. You are safe. You are successful. You have finally arrived.

But the ladder does something weird to us if we are not careful. It convinces us that proximity is something to escape instead of something to honor.

And I almost believed it again.

Early in the process, I got to the final round for a role at a tech company doing “people work,” whatever the hell that means.

And I could feel myself trying to make the story make sense.

Maybe this is the next level. Maybe this is how I prove the model works beyond education. Maybe this is what it looks like to hit the “ceiling” for someone in professional development. Maybe I am not really a school person anymore… Maybe I am a “people” person.

Underneath all of that, a quieter, more dangerous belief was forming: Maybe the work I have given my life to is too small for me now.

Whew. That one makes me want to throw up a little. It is not true, and it was never fucking true.

Systems teach us things, even the systems we love and are trying to change. They teach us that status means being farther away from the problem. They teach us that credibility comes from leaving the room where the work is hardest. They teach us that if you are still close to the mess, you may not have “made it” yet.

And that belief almost got me.

I never wanted to abandon my mission. I was just scared. Rejection makes you start auditioning for lives you do not even want. When a door closes, you will sometimes sprint toward any open one just to prove you are still wanted.

But thank God for the closed doors. Thank God for the rejections. Thank God for every “we went in another direction” that kept me from going in the wrong one.

Because the truth is, I do not need to prove that Burn the Script works in other industries. I know it does. It is not magic. It is not niche. It is not a cute education trick. It is what happens when human beings are under pressure, and their old beliefs start driving the bus.

Of course it works in other industries. It is called being human.

But my mission is not to chase abstraction. My mission is to serve the children of my city. Period.

So please enjoy this small thank-you note for my rejections.

Thank You, Rejections

You hurt my feelings.
You bruised my ego.
You made me spiral in ways I will pretend were intellectually productive.

But you also gave me something back. You gave me disruptive clarity. You reminded me that the point was never to prove I could leave. The point was to choose, again, where I belong.

Burn the Script Live

Burn the Script Live will NOT meet this week because I am trying not to lose my money at the St. Louis backgammon tournament. We will be back next week. Make sure to order your book now so you can jump into the practice.

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Congratulations to you!

Congratulations. You survived part 1 of the great EduCoach subscriber purge.

I made the slightly brutal but necessary decision to remove some folks from this list—not because I enjoy clicking “delete” like a tiny tyrant, but because I want this community to reflect the people who are actually here, actually reading, and actually connected to the work.

As EduCoach grows and potential partnerships enter the conversation, I want to remain honest about the size and strength of this community. Inflated numbers may look impressive, but they do not build trust. Real people do.

So if you are still here, thank you.

You are officially part of the “made the cut” crew, which is either meaningful or deeply concerning, depending on how you feel about my inbox energy.

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Still going a little off the rails on literacy this month. But here’s something that resembles an action step.

@educoachbyjoAny other strategies to build in knowledge without side-questing? #educoachbyjo #microlearning #literacy #reading #scienceofreading

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Love,

Jo

Because concern is cheap.

Concern lets you shake your head, post, and tell yourself that somebody should do something.

Responsibility is different. Responsibility interrupts your plans and costs you something. Responsibility changes where you spend your time, your energy, and your attention.

This year, a seventh grader was shot in the head in one of the schools I supported. After the updates, conversations, and the cute little document with my typed notes, I got in my car and drove to the next school.

I remember pulling away and feeling something I could not quite name. It just felt so normal.

Another school. Another update. Another child.

The machinery of adulthood teaches us how to keep moving.

Stewardship requires us to stop, to notice…to stay. To allow ourselves to be interrupted.

And I realized how many years I had spent confusing concern with responsibility.

I suspect I’m not alone.

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This week, many of us watched the story of Kohen Wiley unfold and felt grief, anger, heartbreak, and helplessness.

While the facts and the investigation matter, beneath all those conversations lies a question that feels harder to answer: What do we owe children?

Children do not choose the world they enter. They do not choose their families, their schools, or the neighborhoods they grow up in.

They do not choose the adults entrusted with their care.

Yet they live with the consequences of all of it.

The longer I work in public education, the more convinced I become that our biggest problem is not a lack of concern. It is a surplus of people hoping responsibility belongs to someone else.

And the truth is that our world is full of concerned people.

Concerned parents. Concerned educators. Concerned leaders. Concerned neighbors. Concerned citizens.

What children need are responsible adults.

I’ve come to believe that “someone else” is one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language. When responsibility belongs to everyone, it often belongs to no one.

Children cannot afford that.

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Children spend their entire lives sending signals. Most signals are missed by people who were too busy to notice. A child may stop showing up, get quieter, or get louder. A child may stop turning in work or start picking fights.

The signals are often there. The tragedy is that attention is not.

Every child is one inattentive adult away from a very different life.

Burn the Script

Somewhere tonight, millions of parents will tuck their children into bed and perform one of the most remarkable acts of trust imaginable.

Tomorrow morning they will send them into the world—to schools, practices, and communities. And beneath every one of those ordinary acts sits an extraordinary assumption: That the adults surrounding their children are paying attention.

The question is whether that trust is deserved.

Because children possess almost no meaningful power. They cannot redesign systems or create safer conditions for themselves.

They depend on adults to notice, to care, and to act.

That dependence should weigh heavily on us.

Heavily.

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Children do not need perfect adults. But they do need present adults.

Every child deserves at least one adult willing to say: I see you. I am paying attention. I am not leaving. You matter.

No child should have to get louder to be seen or to earn an adult’s attention. No child should have to survive our inattention.

Most children just need better adults.

Every tragedy involving a child eventually becomes a conversation about systems.

But systems do not notice children. People do.

Every child is placing a silent trust in the adults around them. Trusting us with something they cannot protect on their own—their safety, their dignity, and sometimes, their tomorrow.

And that means adulthood is not merely a collection of rights. It is a collection of responsibilities.

That has always been the assignment.

If we don’t build a better world for our kids, then what the hell are we doing here?

If you’ve ever worked with a struggling kid, you’ve probably said some version of: “Let’s just focus on today.”

And if you’ve never been the struggling person in the room, that advice can sound ridiculous.

Today?

What about the fifty missing assignments? Graduation? College? What about the fact that your life is currently on fire?

But then I became an alcoholic, and suddenly I understood exactly why today matters.

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When my family first confronted me about my drinking, I doubled down. The Backfire Effect in action. The more evidence people presented, the more I defended the thing that was actively destroying me. The more people pushed me to stop, the more impossible stopping felt.

Never drink again?

I remember thinking…Ba ha ha…I can’t even make it through fucking dinner. You want me to imagine the rest of my life?

Looking back, I realize now I wasn’t resisting sobriety. I was resisting impossibility.

We often mistake disbelief for defiance.

But when people cannot imagine success, they don’t usually try harder. They shut down. They detach. They surrender. Or they decide the goal was stupid anyway.

The distance between where they are and where you’re asking them to go feels infinite.

I wasn’t carrying a drinking problem. I was carrying too much future.

Every conversation about recovery felt like a conversation about forever. What about Christmas? Vacation? My daughter’s wedding?

You want me to do this for forty more years? Get the fuck out of here.

I wasn’t thinking about forever because forever wasn’t real to me.

The next hour barely felt real.

Forever wasn’t inspiring. Forever made me want a drink.

After a particularly challenging relapse, I finally called someone that I knew was in AA.

“Can you get a dollar and make it to a meeting?” he said on the other end of the phone.

I remember feeling the relief that this was all I had to do. Just get a dollar and get to a meeting. Ok. But, shit…even that felt impossible. There were so many QTs on the way, and I had figured out how to use credit card apps on my phone without my husband’s knowledge. I had become frighteningly resourceful in service of self-destruction.

He felt the hesitation in my voice immediately. “Okay. Let’s make it smaller. What is the next right thing?”

I was sobbing. “Go to the bathroom.”

“Okay. Can you do that? Can you do that without drinking?”

I chuckled through the tears, thinking about how ridiculous it was that I was even here… getting live-coached on fucking living. Remember when you used to live-coach in the toughest classrooms and were good at it, Jo? For real?

“Yes.”

“What’s the next right thing now?”

“Get dressed.”

“Okay.”

“Can you do that without drinking?”

“Yes.”

“What’s next?”

“Get the dollar.”

“Can you do that without drinking?”

“I think so.”

“Then do that.”

Eventually I got to the meeting and dropped the dollar in the basket.

I sat in a folding chair surrounded by alcoholics and cried through most of the meeting. People smiled. They handed me coffee. They introduced themselves. I barely remember any of it.

All I could think was:

Next right thing.

Next right thing.

Next right thing.

The longer I work with people, the more I think everyone eventually arrives at some version of this moment.

Maybe it isn’t alcohol.

Maybe it’s depression, grief, burnout, a marriage, a diagnosis. Maybe it’s that class that absolutely ate you alive, and now you’re wondering whether you even like kids anymore.

Maybe it’s a seventh grader staring at a blank page.

People see laziness. I don’t.

Sometimes that kid isn’t looking at a blank page. They’re looking at every adult who has ever handed them another blank page.

By the time we hand them today’s assignment, they’re carrying a mountain.

Then we wonder why they won’t pick up the pencil.

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I think educators make this mistake all the time. We assume struggling people need a bigger vision. Sometimes they need a smaller one.

We tell kids to think about graduation. We tell teachers to think about the end of the year. We tell ourselves to think about forever.

But struggling people don’t need forever.

They need five minutes. One paragraph. One problem. One class period. One meeting. One dollar. One next right thing.

Looking back, my temporary sponsor wasn’t helping me get sober. He was helping me prove that I could do one thing. Then another. Then another.

Every tiny action became evidence. And evidence slowly became belief.

Sometimes there’s just too much future.

Maybe that’s what “just focus on today” was trying to teach me all along.

Which made me laugh.

I am almost positive at least some of them clicked the automatic LinkedIn button because the AI robot told them to be proud of me.

Thank you, robot.

But the best part is that those AI messages gave me real joy. Perhaps I needed people to validate the move. I am still a person with an ego, a nervous system, and a “brand” to manage now, which is a terrible combination.

But these little AI messages also sent a signal I think I needed. This is a promotion because it is closer to impact.

This got me thinking about the weird math we use to decide what counts as valuable in education.

Years ago, a friend of mine got a job at a nonprofit making around $90,000. At the time, I thought that was an absurd amount of money for the job she did. And yes, I now recognize that this was judgmental, unfair, and wildly underinformed.

Growth is embarrassing. Highly recommend it.

But some of the rationale given for this overly “inflated” salary concerned the number of students she impacted.

This left me with a number of questions I have been pondering for years:

• Does the number of students determine how much someone earns?

• Does proximity determine value?

• Does scale determine impact?

• Can we really quantify someone’s contribution from three organizational layers away? And if we try, are we measuring impact or just counting shadows on the wall?

When I did my dissertation, I made a very intentional methodological choice. I studied impact within one degree of separation because it was easier to prove. Don’t get me wrong…indirect impact is real. But proof gets slippery the farther you move from the actual change.

Money.

Value.

Proof.

Impact.

We talk about these things like they line up neatly. They do not.

Some of the highest-impact people in education are underpaid to the point of exhaustion. Some people with enormous salaries are doing work that is hard to measure but deeply necessary. Some people are very close to students and still not very effective. Some people are several layers away from classrooms and are building conditions that help thousands of children unnoticed.

And some people — let’s be honest — have impressive titles, large salaries, and impact claims that would not survive contact with evidence.

This is where I have to be careful. Because I have absolutely been the person who hears someone’s salary and immediately starts doing moral math. There is no way that person creates that much impact.

But I was trying to use salary as a proxy for worth because I did not have a better way to understand value. And education does this all the time.

And then we wonder why people build careers around looking important instead of staying useful.

That is why those LinkedIn “congratulations on your promotion” comments hit me differently. Not every promotion moves upward. Sometimes that promotion is simply increased alignment and moving toward the problem you are uniquely positioned to solve.

No, I do not think we should romanticize lower pay in the name of purpose. That is how education has exploited mostly women for generations. I also do not think every move closer to students is automatically more noble. I also do not think every systems-level role is bloated or disconnected.

And I definitely do not think impact is easy to count.

But I do know that the closer you are to the actual conditions of change, the harder it is to lie to yourself about whether your work is working. And I’m done lying.

We talk about teacher leadership as if the issue is mostly structural. Create the role. Add the stipend. Build the PLC template.

And, yes, structures matter. But I think it’s time that we were honest about what’s happening to the profession underneath those structures.

If teachers have spent years being told which slide to click, which strategy to use, which data to enter, which script to follow, and which decisions they are not trusted to make, then we should not be surprised when leadership feels risky.

Leadership requires judgment, and judgment weakens when people are trained not to use it.

How We Teach Teachers to Doubt Themselves

Most leaders and coaches I know do not wake up in the morning thinking, “You know what I’d love to do today? Make teachers feel smaller.” But sometimes the way we support teachers subtly creates professional doubt. And, to be honest, I have been complicit at times.

We rush to fix it.

A teacher describes a problem, and before they have even finished the sentence, we are already offering a strategy, a template, a sentence stem, a routine, a resource, or a correction. We call it “support,” but sometimes it communicates: You cannot reason through this without me.

We over-prescribe.

We hand teachers the exact move, the exact wording, the exact pacing, or the exact tool. Again, there are moments when models matter. New teachers need examples. Struggling teachers need concrete support. Complex work needs structure. But when every problem comes with a prepackaged solution, we build dependence.

We over-observe and under-notice.

We walk into classrooms scanning for what is missing. No posted objective.
Only 60% completing the bellwork. Three students off task. But if we only name the gap, teachers learn that being observed means being found lacking. And when being seen consistently feels like being judged, people do not become more reflective. They become more guarded.

We confuse feedback with correction.

A lot of what we call feedback is actually just a list of what the teacher should do differently next time. Tighten this. Change that. Move faster here. Ask this question. Use this system. Again, some of that may be necessary.

But if feedback never includes evidence of growth, evidence of impact, or questions that help the teacher make meaning, then we are not developing judgment. We are creating compliance.

We ask questions we already know the answer to.

Teachers can feel this immediately. If we already know the “right” answer and the teacher is supposed to guess it, that is not coaching. That is a scavenger hunt for approval.

We use data as a weapon instead of a mirror.

Data should help people see. But too often, data is used to prove deficiency. When data is only used to show people where they failed, they stop looking at it with curiosity. They look at it with dread, and dread does not build expertise.

The Moment We Usually Miss

Let’s imagine that you walk into a classroom. Last time you were there, about 60% of students completed the bellwork.

This time, it is 80%.

Now, if you are moving fast, stressed, and carrying the weight of school improvement on your back like a very tired little mule, you might immediately focus on the 20% not doing the bellwork now. I get the instinct.

Why aren’t those students working?
What is the teacher doing about them?
Does the teacher need a tighter entry routine?
Should we revisit the expectations?
Do we need a timer?
A consequence?
A laminated something?

Maybe, eventually, yes. And, to be clear, that 20% absolutely matters.

But if we rush too quickly to the missing piece, we rob the teacher of the chance to see progress. It is in moments like these that the teacher has an opportunity to gather evidence, understand why something is working, and build belief.

“Wow. Last time I was here, about 60% of students completed the bellwork. Today, I counted closer to 80%. That is big progress. What do you attribute that growth to?”

This question does several things at once.

• Names the evidence.

• Makes progress visible.

• Positions the teacher as the thinker.

• Invites causal reasoning.

And most importantly, it builds belief without pretending the work is finished.

This is not toxic positivity. This is not walking past the 20% and pretending every child is joyfully completing the bellwork while birds braid the teacher’s hair.

It is disciplined attention. We say, “Before we fix what is still broken, let’s understand what is starting to work.” If we do not help teachers notice their own growth, they may never internalize it.

Why? People are often terrible at celebrating their own progress. ←Fact.

Especially teachers.

Teachers can have 27 things go better than last week and still walk out thinking about the three things that didn’t.

Leaders must help people see evidence they are too tired, too overwhelmed, or too self-critical to see on their own.

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Belief Is Built Through Evidence

One of the central arguments in Burn the Script is that people do not change simply because we hand them a better strategy. They change when they begin to believe something different is possible.

But belief does not come from motivational speeches. It comes from evidence.

A teacher begins to believe, “My students can start class independently,” after seeing the number rise from 40% to 60% to 80%.

A teacher begins to believe, “I can lead a stronger discussion,” because they have heard more students respond to one another rather than only to the teacher.

A teacher begins to believe, “My multilingual learners can write more than I expected,” because they have student work in front of them that proves it.

Coaching must go beyond “here is what to do next” to foster agency in our educators. When teachers can see the relationship between their decisions and student outcomes, they begin to trust their own professional judgment.

And when they trust their judgment, they can refine it.

We sometimes act like teacher confidence is dangerous…like if teachers feel successful, they will stop improving. But real confidence is not the enemy of growth.

The goal is not for teachers to think, “I am amazing and have nothing to learn.”

The goal is for teachers to think, “My choices matter. I can study what is happening. I can adjust. I can get better.”

Small Adjustments That Build Judgment

We do not have to overhaul every coaching model tomorrow. But we can start by making small adjustments in the moments we already have.

1. Name progress before naming the gap.

Instead of starting with what is missing, start with what has moved.

• “Last week, transitions took almost four minutes. Today, students were working in under two. What changed?”

• “On Monday, only a handful of students used evidence in their responses. Today, I heard six students reference the text. What did you emphasize?”

• “Earlier this month, students were calling out frequently. Today, I noticed more hands and more wait time. What have you been practicing?”

These make the path to the standard visible.

2. Ask attribution questions.

Attribution questions help teachers connect action to outcome.

• “What do you think contributed to that growth?”

• “What did students seem to understand this time that they did not understand before?”

• “What part of the routine is becoming more automatic?”

• “What did you notice in their responses?”

These questions build reasoning while they become students of their own practice.

3. Separate noticing from fixing.

Not everything we notice has to become an immediate action step.

This is very hard for leaders.

We see a problem and want to solve it. But sometimes the most powerful move is to slow down.

• “I noticed three things today. Before I share my thinking, what felt different to you?”

• “What did you notice during the independent practice today?”

• “I saw some patterns today that I hadn’t noticed before. Can we discuss these observations and figure out what it means?”

When we separate noticing from fixing, we create room for thinking.

4. Stop stealing the cognitive work.

If the leader does all the analysis, the teacher may comply, but they do not grow as much.

If we are always the ones identifying the problem, interpreting the evidence, selecting the strategy, and naming the next step, then we should not be surprised when teachers wait for us to tell them what to do.

Empowerment is not vague encouragement. Empowerment is giving people supported opportunities to reason through the work.

5. Treat teacher thinking as data.

We collect student data all the time. We should also be listening for teacher thinking.

• What does the teacher believe is happening?

• What evidence are they using?

• What explanations do they generate?

• What do they try when something does not work?

• How do they know if it worked?

A teacher’s reasoning tells us what kind of support they need. Skill? Knowledge? A conversation about a belief that has been shaped by years of disappointment?

If we do not listen for the thinking underneath the practice, we will over-coach the wrong thing.

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Support Without Insult

I want to be clear. This is not an argument against structure. I love structure.

I love a good routine, a clear model, a strong curriculum. I love a tight practice cycle with clear “look fors.” I love a checklist when it actually helps us do better work, not just makes everyone feel like they are slowly being eaten by a bureaucratic machine distant from the real heartbeat of schools.

The issue is not structure. The issue is structure without trust.

Support becomes insulting when it implies that teachers are incapable of thought.

Accountability becomes corrosive when it communicates that teachers are presumed ineffective until proven otherwise.

Coaching becomes control when it removes the teacher’s opportunity to make sense of the work.

Leadership becomes surveillance when people only feel seen when something is wrong.

We can have high standards without contempt. We can provide models without creating dependence. We can give feedback without creating fear. We can use data without turning it into a weapon. We can support teachers without shrinking them.

The Leadership Move Beneath the Leadership Move

If we want more teacher leaders, we have to stop treating teacher judgment like a liability.

We have to build the conditions in which teachers can practice making decisions, study the impact of those decisions, and improve over time.

This is leadership that builds capacity while still naming reality, holding the line, and still expecting growth. But we refuse to rob teachers of the chance to think.

You Cannot Build Leadership on Professional Doubt

We say we want teachers to lead. But leadership requires people who trust their own judgment enough to use it.

If teachers have been systematically taught to doubt themselves, then our first job is not to hand them a leadership title. It is to rebuild professional belief—that their decisions matter, their growth is visible, and their expertise is real.

The future of education will not be saved by another binder, dashboard, Solution Tree conference, walkthrough form, or initiative with a suspicious number of capital letters. It will be shaped by teachers who know what they are doing, know why they are doing it, and have been supported enough to keep getting better.

Dr. JC Doornick, “The Dragon,” of the Makes Sense Substack, asked a question I haven’t been able to shake: “How many of the things we believe most deeply did we actually choose?”

It’s one of those questions that sounds simple until you actually let it sit in your body.

At first, you think, Well, obviously I chose what I believe. I’m a grown-ass adult. I have opinions. I have evidence. I have experience.

But then you start tugging at one little thread. Why do I feel guilty when I rest? Why does spending money on myself feel irresponsible, even when I have already done the math? Why do I feel safer when I am the one holding all the details? Why does being needed feel so much like being loved?

Suddenly, you realize some of the beliefs running your life were handed to you. What is especially challenging is that they came from people who loved you deeply and were doing the absolute best they could with what they knew. They came through dinner-table rules, church pews, what got praised, and what got punished. All the while, we are developing our own understanding of what money means, what work proves, what conflict costs, what desire says about us, what goodness requires, what loyalty demands, and whether rest has to be earned.

JC described it as an envelope. The lessons and assumptions we receive from our “Mother, Father, Teacher, Preacher, Society, Evolution,” sealed and labeled: “The Undeniable Truth.”

Inherited beliefs really do feel that way. They feel like the floor and ceiling, not opinions.

I’ll give a recent example. A few weeks ago, I found myself sobbing on my best friend’s couch over something that is technically about money but is very clearly not just about money. After several minutes of deeply undignified emotional release, she said calmly, “You can choose how you think about this.”

She had read my book and, unfortunately for me, remembered it.

Rude.

Accurate. But rude.

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In Burn the Script, I write that belief change is not simply about knowing better. It is about noticing the old script when it activates, disrupting its authority, and practicing something new enough times that your nervous system begins to trust it.

There I was, on her couch, absolutely furious that my own framework applied to me. The old belief underneath the spiral was not really “Money matters.” Of course, money matters.

The old belief was closer to: If I spend this much, it has to prove I was worth believing in.

Whew. That one hurt to name.

Once I could see it, I could also see where it came from. I was raised to be careful. Responsible. Practical. I was taught not to waste. To save. To make things count. I started saving for my master’s degree in middle school, which is either adorable or deeply concerning.

Honestly, that belief helped me. It gave me discipline, options, and a way to feel safe in a world where money did not feel casual. It was not some silly little “limiting belief” I needed to toss into the personal-growth bonfire.

It was care, protection…love with a calculator.

That is what makes inherited beliefs so difficult to disrupt. They are not always born from harm. Sometimes they are born from devotion. Sometimes they were handed to us by people who wanted us to survive. Sometimes they worked, and sometimes they still work in certain rooms.

But a belief can be useful in one season and ill-suited to lead the next.

That’s the part we miss. We think we have two choices: obey the belief or reject the people who gave it to us.

But there is a third option. We can thank it. We can examine it. And then we can decide whether it still deserves authority.

Some beliefs deserve gratitude but do not deserve governance.

Scarcity may have taught you to be careful, but it does not get to decide whether you are allowed to build. Overwork may have helped you become excellent, but it does not get to define your worth. Control may have helped you survive chaos, but it does not get to masquerade as leadership in every room you enter.

But this is the part I want to make exceptionally clear. This work is bigger than your personal growth. Unexamined beliefs leak.

They become the way we lead meetings, how we give feedback, and how we parent. Eventually, our beliefs become other people’s conditions.

Institutions can inherit a belief. A team can inherit a belief. A whole profession can inherit a belief and call it “just how the work is.” But the beliefs we don’t examine get passed on to kids, the team, and the systems. We hand them the same sealed envelope and call it wisdom. Hell, sometimes we even call it culture.

I asked JC to take the question one layer deeper. Here’s where he went with it.

Hmmm.

When I first asked myself, “How many of the things I believe did I actually choose?” the belief that immediately surfaced was the idea that my worth was tied to how useful I was to other people.

Somewhere along the line, achievement, rescuing, producing, and fixing got confused with love. And the dangerous part is… that belief worked for a while. It gave me a boost to my identity, with praise and a sense of significance. Until one day, I realized I had built a life around being needed while progressively losing sight of what I actually needed. Make Sense?

Inside “The Undeniable Truth” envelope, people often discover invisible contracts they never consciously signed: “Rest must be earned.” “If I disappoint people, I lose love.” “Struggle means you’re doing life correctly.” “Busy means valuable.” “Self-sacrifice is goodness.” Most people don’t realize these are inherited and conditioned perspectives, not universal laws. They are often survival strategies dressed up as identity and irrevocable truths.

Questioning inherited beliefs can sometimes feel like betrayal because many of those beliefs came wrapped in love, protection, culture, faith, or even survival. Challenging those beliefs can feel like challenging the very people who handed them to us.

But here’s the shift. Awareness is not disrespect. Allowing yourself to say “Hmmm, what else might be true, JC?” is not rebellion. It is simply the courageous pause between unconscious persuaded inheritance and conscious choice. This is about reclaiming control as the dominant force and shot-caller of our thoughts and feelings, and therefore our actions.

For example, one belief I’m deeply grateful for, but no longer willing to let lead, is that I must constantly prove my value through productivity. That belief built discipline, ambition, and resilience in me. Fantastic right? But eventually, it also bred exhaustion and pulled me away from some of the things in my life that matter most. I’ve learned there’s a difference between creating from inspiration and performing for worthiness. Make Sense?

What I hope ends with me is the unconscious passing down of fear disguised as wisdom. I hope the next generation inherits more from my practice of open curiosity than certainty, more conscious awareness than unconscious programming, and the permission to pause long enough to ask themselves, “Does this belief actually Make Sense for the life I want to live?”

Welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses!

Dr. JC Doornick “The Dragon” - Makes Sense with Dr. JC Podcast

The good news is that there is always a choice. The choice is not always clean, comfortable, or uncomplicated.

But there is a choice.

You can simply thank the belief and choose not to obey it forever. You get to honor where it came from without forwarding it unopened to the people you love, parent, teach, coach, and lead.

Maybe the next question is, “What are we still passing on because we never stopped to choose again?

Join me on Sunday, June 7 at 7 pm central on TikTok for a discussion of chapter 8 of Burn the Script - How to disrupt.