What does this word mean to you? What does it make you think of? Was your first thought about a parking infraction? Grit on sandpaper? A gourmet meal in a fancy restaurant?

What if this was a text message from your significant other after you told them you bought $400 tickets to a Jelly Roll concert?

Does that change the story you tell yourself about “Fine”? Are they okay with this? Are they upset that you spent that much without talking to them first? Would they have preferred Post Malone tickets?

Words need context to convey the meaning the author intends. Without that context, we tell ourselves stories that may be close to the target, but are often way off.

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At a recent Kansas State Department of Education Conference, Dr. Zach Conrad, the new deputy commissioner, demonstrated how numbers carry the same requirements.

During his presentation to the education leaders in the room, he shared a statistic and asked the audience to consider what it meant. (I’m not going to share the specific statistic; that’s not the point here).

He then revealed a little more detail. Some information to give the audience a comparison.

Of course, the new information changed the statistic’s meaning. With context, we could reach a more accurate interpretation.

This is an important point in our communities as schools are working on budgets, politicians are campaigning in tight races, and people advocate for and against key policies affecting us.

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When someone gives out a number without context, we each fill in the blank ourselves based on what we think the number means. Our prior knowledge, expectations, and biases shape how we think about that statistic and how we think that represents our society.

If context is not given, we should reduce our confidence in the statistic and any decision that the presenter wants us to make.

But context alone is not always a sign of a more persuasive message. When people use misleading context, it is just as bad.

We talk a lot about how many students are currently at different levels on state assessments. It can look good or bad, depending on what you already know about the state assessment and the history of literacy in our country.

If you look at literacy just through the test scores with arbitrary cut points, then it can be quite concerning. But if you look at literacy from the perspective that 92.2% of Kansas Adults are literate, ranking 11th in the country according to ThinkImpact. We have never had more college graduates (which nearly all require passing college algebra) than right now (US Census). We have never graduated more people from high school than right now (KSDE). Kansas schools have never been stronger. Kansas educators have never been more successful in preparing students for the world they are entering. There are certainly gaps and places where improvement is needed, and each of these data points deserves its own context and scrutiny. Until these numbers are 100%, there will be room for educators to keep trying new things, but it is a far different story than the failure that some people make it out to be.

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When someone cherry-picks data and gives it no context, they are being intellectually dishonest. They are hoping you tell yourself the story they know they cannot without accountability. They say “look at this and think for yourself”, while knowing that what they shared is partial information that will make you think exactly what they hoped you would.

As schools, we have to be in front of this and share the context of the numbers first. With the full context. We have to be careful as well. Leaving out key information may look like we are trying to do exactly what the other side is doing too. Our communities are smart. They can understand budget numbers and test scores and project bids, as long as we give them enough context to.

My thoughts quickly shifted to the meaning of so many shoes.

Growing up, I only had one pair of shoes at a time. And I wore them until the soles fell off, and my toes poked through the end. To be clear, I had what I needed, and my mom worked hard to ensure I did.

Now, knowing that her hard work compounded, I have been able to give my kids a little bit extra. That is something worth tolerating. Heck, worth celebrating.

It is easy to forget where you come from. Easy to get used to what you have that you used to seek. From time to time, it is good to put yourself in other people’s shoes, even if it is your past self.

I learned this first through the DISC model of communication styles, but have since learned of other models.

One of the most persistent challenges in educational leadership is the search for a single “right way” to solve problems. The perfect IEP format, the ideal behavior intervention, the one true method for professional development. This search is fundamentally flawed. Not because good practices do not exist, but because people operate from different perspectives and preferences that shape what “good” even means to them.

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Understanding these differences is not just about being nice or accommodating. It is about recognizing that when we mandate singular approaches, we are often solving for one set of priorities while creating problems for people operating from another set entirely.

The Two Core Tensions

I have come to see two fundamental tensions that come from these perspectives and shape how people approach decisions in education.

Now versus Later

The first tension comes from how quickly action is expected. Some people prioritize immediate impact. They value quick wins, visible progress, and solutions they can see working today. Others prioritize long-term sustainability. They are willing to accept short-term discomfort if it means building systems that will work better over time.

Neither orientation is wrong. The teacher who wants an immediate strategy to help a struggling student tomorrow is not being short-sighted. They are seeing a real need in front of them right now. The administrator planning for program sustainability three years out is not being cold. They are trying to ensure we can still serve students when the grant runs out.

You versus Me (or Us)

The second tension comes from who will be impacted. Some people primarily consider how decisions affect themselves or their immediate team. Others instinctively think about broader impact on the organization or community. Again, neither is inherently better.

The paraeducator concerned about how a new schedule affects their own ability to pick up their kids is not selfish. They are managing real constraints that affect their ability to do their job. The director worried about how individual accommodations might create precedent for 200 staff members is not heartless. They are trying to maintain systemic fairness.

Why Single Solutions Fail

With these tensions identified, we see why single solutions can fail. When we mandate one approach without acknowledging these value differences, we create predictable problems.

Take a common scenario: implementing a new data system. If you are a “later + us” person, you see the value immediately. Yes, it is more work upfront, but the long-term gains in program evaluation and accountability will benefit the entire organization. However, if you are a “now + me” person, you see something very different: more administrative burden that takes you away from students today for benefits you cannot see, going to people you do not know.

Neither person is wrong. They are just solving different problems based on different values.

Or consider IEP goal writing. The evaluator who wants highly specific, measurable goals with clear decision rules is optimizing for later (defensible decisions at reevaluation) and others (consistency across the district, protection from complaints). The teacher who wants more flexible goals that can adapt to student progress is optimizing for now (this month’s instruction) and themselves (their own professional judgment in the classroom).

We often mistake these value differences for competence issues or resistance. We think people do not understand the importance of what we are asking them to do. But usually they understand perfectly. They just value different things.

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What This Means for Leadership

Recognizing these value tensions does not mean abandoning standards or accepting any approach. It means being intentional about whose values our solutions serve and honest about the trade-offs.

When you implement a new system, you should be able to answer: Who does this serve? Someone valuing now or later? Someone thinking about their own work or the broader organization? What are we asking people to sacrifice who value something different?

Sometimes the answer is clear. Compliance requirements serve “later + others” values because that’s what keeps the organization operational. We cannot compromise on those. But we can acknowledge what we are asking of people who naturally think differently and build in supports accordingly.

Other times, we have more flexibility than we realize. Do we really need one standardized template, or can we allow variation as long as certain key elements are present? Are we mandating a process because it’s truly necessary, or because it matches how the leadership team thinks?

The goal is not to make everyone happy. It is to make thoughtful decisions about which values we are prioritizing and why, rather than pretending our preferred approach is objectively correct for everyone.

Building Better Solutions

The most effective solutions acknowledge these tensions explicitly and use one or more of these approaches:

1. Clearly state which values they’re optimizing for and why. “This data system serves long-term program evaluation needs. I know it creates a lot of work upfront, and here’s why we are asking you to accept that trade-off.”

2. Build in flexibility for different value orientations. “Here are the three non-negotiable details for compliance. Beyond that, you can structure this in whatever way serves your students best.”

3. Create multiple pathways to the same goal. “If you want immediate feedback, use this quick-cycle process. If you prefer to work on something over time, use this development cycle. Both meet the standard.”

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The special education teacher who wants concrete strategies for Monday morning and the administrator planning for systemic sustainability five years from now are both serving kids. They are just doing it through different timelines. The paraeducator concerned about their own assignment and the director concerned about program-wide consistency are both trying to make things work. They are just thinking about different impacts.

Our job as leaders is not to convince everyone to value the same things. It is to build systems flexible enough to work for people with different values while maintaining the standards that matter most. And it starts with acknowledging that the “one right way” we are so sure about might be the right way only for people who think like us.

Hopefully, you will see the fruit of your effort, but no one is owed an outcome. We can control what we can, and do what we must, but what happens after that is beyond us.

For 20 years I’ve been taking action, planting seeds, making an effort. I hoped it was contributing to something that I knew I may never see. Recently, after 2 decades, I heard that it turned out the way I wished. My fear of having not done enough was relieved, at least in part.

It’s funny how we tell ourselves it doesn’t matter if it is noticed, but when it is, it sure matters a lot.

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Criticism is inevitable in the human experience. Whether feedback on a work project, comments about our personal choices, or critiques of our creative endeavors, we all encounter criticism in various forms. Administrators also receive criticism through board member comments, anonymous emails, and comments under a local news story. It doesn’t stay at work. It follows us home.

While some feedback can be a valuable catalyst for growth and improvement, unwarranted or harsh criticism can be challenging to navigate. It can affect our self-esteem and influence our decisions. The ability to handle criticism has a huge impact on the trust we build with our staff and the community. There are several strategies we can use to handle it better.

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First, we need to evaluate the source. Consider who is offering the criticism and their motivations. Is it someone whose opinion we value? Are they well-informed about the situation? If the answer is no to either of these, it is likely not worth dwelling on.

Next, we can separate valid points from unhelpful comments. Try to identify any constructive elements within the criticism, even if it is delivered harshly. Focus on these aspects rather than dismissing everything outright. Even if we disagree, consider whether there’s anything we can learn from the feedback. Personal growth often comes from challenging perspectives.

After that, we can decide if we need to respond and plan to do so calmly if it is needed. When faced with criticism, take a moment before reacting. It’s likely a response is not needed. If it is, respond thoughtfully and through the proper channel. Defensive comments added to a social media post rarely land as intended and open up the opportunity for others to pile on or to drag the conversation somewhere else entirely.

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Another important consideration is to practice self-compassion. We cannot let criticism undermine our self-worth. We are not defined by what a stranger says on Facebook, but by what we see in ourselves. We can give ourselves grace to navigate a tricky situation and keep ourselves in a position that keeps our actions legal, logical, and ethical. When we get worked up, we may take actions that don’t reflect who we are, but may define us for those in our community.

Lastly, we should focus on our goals. We should not let criticism derail us from our objectives. We can use it as motivation to improve while staying true to our vision and values. We can fail with our own ideas or those of strangers. Both would bring hard times, but the regrets will be greater if we fail because we didn’t choose our own path. The strategies can be different, but a leader is defined by where they take their organization. If we change our goals, it has to be because we truly believe it. Not because someone else thought so.

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Sometimes the issue with criticism and our ability to interpret it is proximity. When we are too close to the issue or the commenter, it can feel more urgent or more emotional. They always say not to look at the comments. For posts about your own work, this may be helpful, but I have found it useful to look at Facebook posts about policies I have nothing to do with. A story about a walking path being extended. A rule being altered in a sport I don’t care about. I go to the comments and read a few. I run the comments through the options above and consider if the comments are coming from someone who is in the arena. Is it from someone who would understand the full reality behind the decision? Likely not. If you look at a few, you will find the same names expressing opinions on health, construction, and industry. Quite the collection of Renaissance men and women.

Note the takeaways from these posts that you are not involved with. Next time you are getting comments about something you are close to, consider how many of the voices fall into the same group you discovered. There are always some voices you need to listen to and consider, but they probably won’t show up as off-handed comments on social media. Usually, the ones that matter most are already beside you. Working to make things better. In the arena.

Shortly after that thought, I noticed another bench across the street from this bench. The second bench is against a house. Placed there with the thought that the owners would sit together and relax and watch the traffic drive by on a nice evening.

As I considered these benches and others, it dawned on me that most benches are aspirational. They get placed not because of habits or behaviors we are already seeing, but because of the hope that they will be needed. A bench placed at the end of a hiking trail hopes that people will use the trail. A bench placed in a cemetery hopes that people will show up to remember their loved ones.

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These aspirational benches almost never get used, but they still have value. The value they bring is the hope they represent. They communicate an optimism that says that there is more to this community than what is currently here.

Around our communities, many things bring this same aspiration. Parks, walkways, bike lanes, new roads to undeveloped land. In schools, it may be the new gaga ball pit, or a motor lab in a spare classroom, or a new coffee maker in the staff lounge. These rarely get used as much as people think from the beginning, and certainly are not used by everyone in the town or the school. But the lack of these features reveals a community where people complain about a lack of things to do, or a lack of safe spaces for kids to be.

When you leave out aspirations, you lose the humanity that makes people want to be there. If you approach things with only a cost-per-use perspective, you are going to cut these things. And that may meet the “efficiency” mantra that has become so popular, but you will strip away the very things that make everything else more effective.

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We want to make sure not everything is aspirational, but we need to make sure some of it is. Aspiration is where growth and opportunity come from. The first school activity that went beyond reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic was aspirational too. There is a time when recess, or music class, or a school club, or athletics felt unnecessary. Some naysayers thought it made school too soft or that kids would not learn as much. Now those opportunities feel critically important, because we realized they give a purpose to school for kids and parents, while actually helping kids learn the R’s even better.

When you introduce something new to try and get pushback that it's not needed, keep in mind the benches around your town that go unused yet make things more welcoming. The value is not only in its use, it is in the thought that put it there. So go build your benches and build a world worth living in.

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Before I get to the structures, I first want to reiterate my main tenets around email, which have not changed. These tenets helped me determine how Gmail needs to work for me, rather than just accepting the basic setup.

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My email tenets are:

1. Inbox Zero – I need to know what is in my email within a day of it arriving, and it needs to be acted on appropriately (replied, actioned, sorted, archived, etc.). It does not mean I do everything within a day, but it is put in a place where I know it won’t get lost in the noise. To help with this, I also have 3 scheduled times in the day to check and process emails. This helps me not live in my email, which can quickly sink a day.

2. Necessary Complexity – The system is as complex as it needs to be to work, and no more. 2 Main Labels plus Archive work for me. 1 might be the right answer for you, or 4. There’s no magic to 2. It’s just what works for me. I add to and remove things from time to time, but only when I notice things getting in the way of the work. More about my 2 Labels is below.

3. PEEP – A place for everything and everything in its place. I consider the different types of information I receive through email, and how I use that information, then create the spaces where that information needs to go so I can use it for its purpose. This gives me a way to make sure it gets to the right place.

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Under my main inbox, I have 2 Gmail Labels that replaced my folders in Outlook.

• Actionable (Things I need to act on)

• Incubation (Things I want to be able to find, but don’t need to do anything with right now)

• Archive is a separate thing in Gmail, so I still use it, but I just hit the Archive button and let Gmail do its thing with it. (Things that don’t fit the other two)

Within my Actionable label, I use sublabels. I then order the sublabels by general priority. During each email session, I check the number 1s to make sure I’m moving things forward in those areas. The others are checked when they relate to the tasks I need to accomplish.

• 1- Next Email Session – I don’t know where to put it yet, so I put it here

• 1- Due Today – Emails about urgent things that need to be figured out by the end of the day.

• 2 – Projects – Emails related to multi-step tasks that are part of something bigger than the individual email.

• 3 – Waiting For – Things I’ve replied to or sent that I’m waiting for a response or action from someone else. I check this once per day to see if I need to follow up on anything.

• 4 – Upcoming Meetings – Emails related to upcoming meetings or trainings so I know where to find Zoom links, agendas, or other information I know I will need at the meeting.

• 5 - Staff - Emails related to personnel issues.

• Admin – Emails related to admin tasks such as setting up MFA, approvals, reimbursements, mileage, etc.

• Check with Others – Emails that I need to talk to someone else about before I respond or act

• For Next Year – Only used at the end of the school year to organize requests and ideas about next school year.

• Read – Newsletters, articles, etc. that I need to read

There is one key difference in Gmail from Outlook. When I apply the label or sublabel, the email stays in the inbox, cluttering things up. Once I have a label on an email, I can then hit Archive, and it leaves the Inbox but can be found in the Sublabel list. This took some time before I trusted that I wasn’t sending it away, never to be seen again. Once I’m done with an email in a sublabel, I can remove the label, and it automatically goes to Archive.

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Overall, the Gmail experience has been good. I wasn’t expecting the change to be so different, but my email tenets have helped me find new ways to use Gmail than I had done with my personal account. Those settings and practices are slowly starting to be used there too, which has made Gmail even more useful to me.

What about you? How do you organize email so the important things are not overlooked?

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It is us.

Organized to do together what none of us can do alone. We build it. We fund it. We answer to it. And it answers to us.

An idea has gained ground in recent years, and it arrives dressed as common sense. It says government should be efficient. It says we should run the public sector the way we run a business. It says there is waste everywhere, and our job is to find it and cut it. Almost no one argues with this, because efficiency sounds like a virtue and waste sounds like a sin. The framing wins before the conversation starts.

But efficiency is not a virtue. It is a ratio. It measures what you get against what you spend, and by itself, it cannot tell you what you ought to be getting. A company is efficient when it produces more profit from less cost, and that target is clear because a company exists to earn. Government does not exist to earn. So the moment we demand efficiency from it, we are forced into the question hiding underneath. Efficient at what?

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The market already answers that question for most of our society. The market is extraordinarily efficient at serving people who can pay. If there is money in a problem, someone will solve it, and they will solve it faster and cheaper than any agency could. This is the market working exactly as designed, and it deserves the credit it gets. But the credit has an edge to it. The market serves the paying customer. It was never built to serve the person who cannot pay, and it never pretended otherwise.

Look at what government actually does, and you find the pattern. Government delivers mail to the address at the end of a long dirt road, where no private carrier would break even. Government runs the library that lends to the family that cannot buy books. Government funds the special education teacher for the student whose needs cost far more than tuition could cover. Government keeps the weather service, the water testing, the ag office, the rural clinic. These are not the market failing. These are the spaces the market never entered, because there was no profit waiting inside them.

This is where the efficiency argument quietly breaks. An agency I do not use is wasteful to me. It is essential to someone else. I have never filed a claim with that office, never called that hotline, never needed that service, and from where I stand, the line item looks like money spent on nothing. But I am not the measure. The whole meaning of “for the people” is that it is for all the people, which guarantees that most of what government does will never be used by me directly. That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design. A government built only for the things I personally use is not a smaller government. It is a different thing entirely, and it has stopped being mine to share.

I have spent my career inside one of the clearest examples of this. Special education is inefficient by any business logic you choose. A district can spend more on a single student than it spends on a classroom of others. There is no financial return. There is only a child, and a promise the country made that the child counts. Run that program through a profit filter, and it fails every test. Run it through the test of whether government is for the people, and it is one of the truest things we do.

So watch what happens when we let personal use become the measure of public worth. Government stops being a shared project and starts becoming a subscription. A subscription serves customers, and a customer who stops paying gets cut. The people first in line to be cut are always the same people. They are the ones with the least money, the least time, and the least power to defend funding in a hearing room. They are, in other words, the exact people the market already passed over once. The efficiency movement tends to find its savings in precisely the places government was created to protect.

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None of this is an argument against good management. Public money is a trust, and waste is real, and a program that does not work should be fixed or ended. But we have confused two different questions and let the easier one swallow the harder one. The easy question is whether a service is cheap. The hard question is whether it is the thing the market would never have done. We need to recover the hard question. We need a far better public understanding of which needs the market left on the table, and how government, slowly and imperfectly, picked them up.

Lincoln did not say a government for the people who can afford it. He said for the people. The word was not an accident, and the bill for honoring it was never supposed to be small. Before we cut a line we do not recognize, the honest move is to ask who is standing on the other end of it. The answer is rarely no one.

The line of electric poles marched out from the center of town, reached the place where the houses stopped sitting close together, and then it simply ended. Past that point, the night was the night people had always known. It was lit by kerosene and held back by hand. At the time, roughly nine out of ten farms in the country had no electricity at all, while the cities a short drive away had been wired for a generation.

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The dark was not an abstraction. It was labor, and most of it landed on the people who could least afford to lose the hours. Water was pumped by hand and carried in buckets. Clothes were scrubbed on a board and hung to dry. Food spoiled because there was no way to keep it cold, so it was canned and salted. Lamps had to be filled, and trimmed, and cleaned, and the light they gave was barely enough to read by. A farm wife in 1935 did the work of a small crew, and she did most of it in the half dark, and she did it because there was no other option offered.

The reason the poles stopped at the edge of town was not cruelty. It was arithmetic. The power companies had run the numbers. Stringing copper across miles of open country to reach a handful of scattered houses cost a great deal and returned very little. A business is the sharpest tool we have ever built for delivering what people will pay for, and it is also honest about what it cannot deliver at a price that works. The market looked at the last farm on the line and said that it could not be served profitably. And so, by that logic, the dark was permanent. It was simply what rural life was.

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Luckily, a few people refused to accept that the math was all that mattered. In 1935, the federal government created the Rural Electrification Administration, and the thing to understand about it is what it did not do. It did not march out and build the lines itself. It did not nationalize the power. It lent money to people willing to build. The rest was up to neighbors. Farmers gathered in schoolhouses and church basements and formed user-owned cooperatives. They went from farm to farm and signed each other up, often for a membership of five dollars, real money in 1935. They dug the holes and set the poles on their own land.

Three different answers to three different needs came together. Public credit that no single farmer could secure alone. Private ownership and private labor that no government office could supply. And the gap that the market had left open was finally filled.

Then came the night the lights came on, and the stories of it are remarkably similar across every state where it happened. People left every bulb in the house burning until past midnight, not because they needed the light, but because they wanted to look at it. Neighbors drove out to see another family’s lit-up barn the way you would drive out to see a comet. A woman who had spent twenty years bent over a washboard stood in a kitchen that was suddenly bright at nine in the evening and understood that her life had just changed forever.

The lesson is not really about wires. It is about what a leader decides is stuck and what a leader decides is still open. The dark looked like fate. It was actually a choice. It stayed in place only as long as everyone agreed to treat it as permanent. Leading from hope is exactly this. It is the refusal to accept that the situation in front of you is simply the way things are. It is the assumption that the last farm on the line can be reached, and then the willingness to organize the credit and the labor and the neighbors until it is.

The question for any leader in any sector has never changed. You can look at the people the system is not currently serving and call it arithmetic and go home. The math will even agree with you. Or you can decide that the dark does not have to stay, and get to work figuring out who holds each piece of the puzzle. The first response is logical. The second one wired a continent. The neighbor at the end of your line is still waiting to find out which kind of leader showed up.

That was the country at its best. The market was honest about the farm it could not reach, and the rest of us reached it anyway. But the instinct that wired a continent is not self-sustaining. It has to be carried forward in every generation, and at this moment it is under a quieter kind of pressure. The danger is no longer that we cannot reach the last farm. It is that too many leaders have started to ask why we should bother.

A fool, in Greene’s definition, is not a person who lacks intelligence. Some of the sharpest people you will ever work with are fools. A fool is a person whose values are inverted. They treat the trivial as urgent and the urgent as trivial. They chase the short-term thrill of being right in a meeting over the long-term work of getting something done. They confuse motion with progress and noise with meaning. They feel first, then they think, and then they act on the feeling.

The danger is not the foolishness itself. The danger is that foolishness is contagious. A fool brings you down to their level and then beats you with experience. They bait you into their game. They send the email that makes your jaw tighten. They raise the objection that has nothing to do with the work and everything to do with their standing in the room. And the moment you take the bait, you are playing their game on their field by their rules. You have traded your goal for their drama. Therefore the first rule is not to win the argument. The first rule is to refuse the argument.

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Greene’s prescription is simple and hard. Stay focused on what matters to you. Neutralize the harm a fool can do by keeping your eyes on your own goals. Ignore them when you can. And when you cannot ignore them, use their own actions to your advantage. None of this requires you to be cruel, and none of it requires you to be a doormat. It requires only that you stop treating the fool as a problem to be solved and start treating them as a condition to be managed.

That is harder than it sounds, because the instinct runs the other way. When someone wastes your time or insults your work, the body wants a reckoning. It wants the record set straight. But the reckoning is the trap. The fool does not fear your argument. The fool feeds on it, because your argument is proof that you have stopped working and started fighting, which is the only ground where they can win.

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So the cost of a fool is rarely the harm they intend. The cost is the time and the focus they pull out of you while you try to make them see reason. That time is the one thing you cannot earn back. Spend it on the work instead.

The hardest part of the phrase is the gladness. Greene does not tell you to suffer fools resentfully, or to suffer them while keeping a private ledger of every minute they cost you. He tells you to suffer them gladly, because resentment is just another way of staying hooked. The fool you resent still lives in your head, rent free, long after the meeting ends. Therefore you let them go. You wish them well and you keep walking.

Suffer fools gladly. Then get back to what matters.

In our daily lives and in our work, there are many more examples of things that are arbitrary, but useful. Where you keep your forks or which side of the road you drive on is arbitrary. Neither side is better than the other, but it is useful for everyone to agree. School policies and practices can fall into this group as well. In many cases, there are several options that would be just as good as the chosen option, but only if everyone is using the same one.

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Walk into almost any district, and you will find a long list of these. The grade that earns an A could start at ninety or ninety-three, and a faculty could argue about the cutoff for an hour without either side being right. The value is not in the number. The value is that a parent, a counselor, and a college all read the transcript the same way. The same is true for how long a passing period runs, what a behavior referral form asks for, where the present levels go in an IEP document, and what you name the shared folder where the team keeps its data. None of these choices is sacred. Each one is useful only to the degree that everyone uses it.

I have watched teams spend enormous energy defending the particular version they inherited, as if the layout of the referral form were a matter of principle. It is not. A referral form is QWERTY. It works because the office staff, the teacher, and the administrator have all learned to read it without thinking. Hand the building a better form in October, and you have not given them an upgrade. You have given them a second keyboard.

But here is where leaders get into trouble. Not everything in a school is QWERTY. Some choices are arbitrary, and the only thing that matters is agreement. Other choices are not arbitrary at all, and agreement is beside the point.

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A common IEP template is arbitrary but useful. It is QWERTY. Any reasonable template will do, and the only thing that matters is that everyone reads it the same way. The reading intervention you put inside that template is not QWERTY. It is the thing the student actually needs, and some options work and some do not. The mistake is treating the second like the first. When you decide that any intervention will do as long as the team is comfortable with it, you have not built consensus. You have only agreed that the choice does not matter. QWERTY survives that logic because one keyboard really is as good as another. A reading program does not, because one of them teaches the child to read and the others do not.

So the leadership skill is not standardizing everything. The skill is telling the difference. When a practice is arbitrary but useful, stop optimizing it. Pick one, train everyone, and move on, because the gain is in the agreement and not in the choice. When a practice actually changes what a student learns, the opposite is true. Agreement is not the goal there. Being right is the goal, and you do not get to the right answer by polling the room.

The same two categories show up at the state level, and they are easy to confuse. Kansas sets a number of instructional hours for the year, a compulsory attendance age, the credits required to graduate, and the renewal hours on a license. Many of these are QWERTY. The exact credit count or the exact renewal total could have landed in a slightly different place, and the system would run just as well, as long as every district and every preparation program builds to the same line. The state is not claiming that twenty-one credits is morally superior to twenty. It is claiming that a diploma needs to mean the same thing in Hays as it does in Olathe.

But the state also makes choices that are not arbitrary, and those deserve a different kind of scrutiny. How the state defines a learning disability, what it counts as adequate progress, how it funds special education, and what it requires before a child can be secluded or restrained are not matters of mere agreement. There are versions of those policies that protect students and versions that harm them. When a policy in that second category gets defended with QWERTY logic, the argument that we have always done it this way and everyone is used to it, that is the moment to push. Familiarity is a real virtue for a keyboard. It is not a virtue for a policy that pushes students away.

This is the test I would hand any team, in a building or in the Capitol. Before you fight about a policy, ask one question. If everyone agreed to do this differently tomorrow, would students be any better or worse off? If the honest answer is no, then you are looking at a keyboard. Stop arguing about the layout, pick one, and teach everyone to use it. If the answer is yes, then you are looking at something that actually matters, and the work is not to find the most comfortable option. The work is to find the right one.

Most of the energy wasted in schools is spent getting this backward. We hold long debates about the keyboards and quiet, fast votes on the things that change a child’s life. The leaders worth following do the reverse.

Both sides are describing something palpable. That is what makes the argument so durable and so useless.

On Explicit Instruction

Walk into a classroom built entirely on explicit instruction, and you will see something that works. The teacher models a skill in small steps. Students see a worked example before they attempt one of their own. Practice is deliberate and spaced out over time. The research behind this is expansive. Direct instruction, worked examples, scaffolding, and deliberate practice all sit near the top of John Hattie’s Visible Learning, based on more than 1,800 meta-analyses. Well above the point where a strategy produces a meaningful year of growth. Project Follow Through, the largest education experiment this country has ever run, found that students taught this way outperformed students in discovery-oriented settings on both academic and social-emotional measures. When a novice is trying to hold a new idea in working memory that can only carry so much, clear teaching is not oppression. It is mercy.

But stay in that same classroom long enough, and you will see the limit. A student who can execute every procedure and still cannot tell you why it works. A class that goes quiet and compliant and stops asking the question beneath the question. Fluency without understanding is a house with no one living in it. Explicit instruction builds the structure beautifully, but a structure is not yet a home.

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On Inquiry Learning

Now walk into a classroom built around inquiry. Students are at vertical whiteboards in groups of three, arguing about a problem that nobody has shown them how to solve. They are making conjectures, testing them, defending them. When this works, it produces the thing every teacher actually wants. A student who believes mathematics is something you do rather than something that is done to you. The thinking is visible, and it is clearly theirs.

But stay in that classroom long enough, and you will see its limit too. The students who walked in with a foundation pull ahead, because they have something to inquire with. The students who walked in behind drift, because you cannot explore a space you have no map for. Hattie’s numbers show inquiry-based learning sitting below his target threshold, and when he is asked why, his answer is not that inquiry fails. He answers that we often reach for it too early, before students have built the knowledge and vocabulary that make exploration possible. Inquiry without foundation is not freedom. It is abandonment dressed as freedom, and the students it abandons are almost always the ones who were already struggling.

And Not Or

So here is what I have come to. Neither approach is a philosophy you adopt. Both are tools, and the skill is knowing which one the moment in front of you calls for.

The honest researchers on every side of this already know it. Good inquiry contains moments of explicit instruction, the teacher stepping in to name a structure or correct a misconception. Good explicit instruction contains moments of genuine inquiry, the teacher stepping back to let students reason and reflect. The learning model that holds up under scrutiny is sequential.

Surface understanding comes first, and surface understanding needs clear teaching and practice.

Deeper understanding comes after, and deeper understanding needs the room to explore, connect, and apply.

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You do not choose between the two any more than a builder chooses between the foundation and the rooms above it. You sequence them. You build the foundation, and then you build the home.

This is the part both camps tend to miss when they are busy defending their territory. A learner who is a novice this morning may be ready for genuine exploration this afternoon, and the teacher’s job is to read where that learner actually is and respond, not to apply a single doctrine to every child in every moment. The teacher who only ever explains is failing the student who is ready to think. The teacher who only ever turns students loose is failing the student who needs to be shown. Most of us, if we are honest, have been both of those teachers.

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I think about this most for the students I have spent my career serving, the ones with disabilities, the ones already behind. They are the first to be harmed when a classroom commits to a single method as an identity. Strip explicit instruction out of the room, and they have no foundation to stand on. Strip inquiry out of the room, and they are taught to be compliant rather than capable. They are handed procedures and never trusted to think. They need both more than anyone. The dogma on either side costs them the most.

I am not interested in which book is on your shelf or which camp you would defend at a dinner party. I am interested in whether the student in front of you got what that student needed in the moment they needed it. Sometimes that is a clear example and a guided practice set. Sometimes it is a hard problem and the trust to struggle with it. Usually, over the arc of real learning, it is both. The goal was never to win the argument. The goal was a greater impact for a greater number of kids, and no single method gets us there.

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It overlays per-pupil spending growth against the change in NAEP scores from 2013 to 2024. Spending climbs 53%, and reading and math scores fall. The conclusion offered with it is that Kansas is spending more and getting less.

I have worked in Kansas special education long enough to have seen this. It is misleading. Not because the data is wrong, but because what those lines represent is not what most people who see them will assume.

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On Spending

Start with the spending line. A large share of that 53% is one-time federal pandemic relief. The three rounds of ESSER totaled roughly $190 billion nationally. That money is gone. It was never recurring state revenue. Putting it on a chart and treating it as a permanent baseline is the funding equivalent of a one-time lottery winning showing up in your annual income and someone concluding you make more than you do.

Inflation eats more of the line. The chart itself shows inflation rose 35% over the same period. A meaningful share of the 53% is just the dollar buying less.

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Most of the climb before 2020 has a Kansas story the chart does not tell. The spending growth between 2013 and 2019 was largely court-ordered. Gannon v. State was filed in 2010 after the legislature walked away from the funding remedy ordered in the earlier Montoy case. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled the state’s funding system unconstitutional and forced the legislature into a series of increases. HB 2506 in 2014 added $109 million in supplemental general state aid. SB 19 followed in 2017. SB 16 in 2019 added roughly $90 million per year for four years to base state aid, with inflation adjustments after that.

That matters because the chart implies the spending was a discretionary choice that failed to deliver. It was not discretionary. It was a constitutional remedy. The legislature spent more because it had lost a lawsuit about underfunding schools, and the Court refused to release the case until the increases were actually delivered. The post-2013 spending growth was just restoring funding that had been cut between 2008 and 2013. Almost none of these increases were the legislature deciding to throw more money at schools to see if it would work. Most of them were the legislature catching up to its own obligations.

Then there is special education, which is where I do most of my work and where the chart fails hardest. Kansas law requires the state to fund 92% of special education excess costs. The state has not hit that mark since 2011. The federal government promised 40% through IDEA back in 1975. Actual federal funding sits around 14%. The shortfall to Kansas runs about $223 million, or roughly $3,000 for each of the 80,000 students receiving services.

That is money pulled directly out of the reading and math instruction that the chart is measuring. The spending line includes that transfer. The score line is depressed by it. The chart presents this as a failure of money. It is closer to a failure of the legislature to fund its own statute.

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On Scores

Let’s shift now to what the score lines mean. NAEP scores fell across nearly every state in the country, including states that spent less and states that spent more. National reading scores dropped five points for both fourth and eighth graders between 2019 and 2024. The declines track pandemic disruption and a variable almost nobody on these task forces wants to talk about, which is chronic absenteeism. In Kansas, chronic absenteeism in the 2023-2024 school year was still 71% higher than it was before the pandemic. A student who is not in the building does not benefit from any level of per-pupil spending. Money does not fix an empty seat.

There is also something the chart does not show that anyone serious about these scores has to reckon with. The decline did not start with the pandemic. It started somewhere around 2013 to 2015, depending on the grade and subject. The NAEP framework has been intentionally stable for decades, so the goalposts have not moved.

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However, the decline is not what the chart implies. It is almost entirely at the bottom. Between 2013 and 2019, eighth-grade math scores at the 10th percentile fell by 17% of a standard deviation, roughly four and a half months of learning. Scores at the 90th percentile held steady or rose. The same pattern appears in NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA, and it shows up in 49 of 50 states. The system did not get worse at educating all students. It got worse at educating its most vulnerable students.

What caused the pre-pandemic decline is contested. Researchers point to the impact of smartphone and social media use, the unwinding of NCLB-era accountability that had focused intensively on lifting the bottom, reading instruction that drifted away from phonics in many states, and the long tail of the Great Recession reaching kids who were toddlers in 2008. No single factor explains it, but every honest explanation describes pressures hitting students at the bottom of the distribution, not the top.

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Those students are the ones who rely on the supports the chart treats as wasteful. Special education staffing. Mental health and behavioral supports. Attendance intervention. Reading specialists. The kids in the bottom are exactly the kids those resources exist to serve. The chart presents this as evidence that money does not work. The data actually says the system has been failing its most vulnerable students for more than a decade, and the response cannot be to underfund the supports those students rely on.

One more thing. The phrase “not proficient” is doing heavy lifting in the public conversation, and it is misleading by design. The National Assessment Governing Board, which administers NAEP, states plainly that the Proficient level does not represent grade-level proficiency. It is a stretch standard closer to mastery than adequacy. When task force members say students are not proficient and call it a crisis of competence, they are leaning on a definition the assessment’s own administrators say does not mean what most people hear.

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Real Conversation

The task force has hard work in front of it, and the formula needs attention. But the work has to start with honest data, not with charts that flatter the conclusion someone walked in wanting. Those on the task force or talking to its members can start with a few questions worth asking.

1. What share of the spending growth was discretionary state investment, and what share was court-ordered remedy and one-time federal relief that has now expired?

2. What share of the score decline is concentrated in the bottom quartile of students, and how much of that tracks chronic absenteeism rather than instructional quality?

3. What would Kansas reading and math scores look like if the state had funded special education at the level its own statute requires for the last fifteen years?

The chart is not the argument. It is the beginning of one.

In addition to family roles and work roles, I also had some personal roles. Healthy Human. Responsible Human. The one I want to focus on today is Generous Human.

I sat with this one for a while, because generosity, in the way we usually use the word, is about money, and that was not what I had in mind. What I eventually understood was that the generosity I was reaching for had nothing to do with what I could afford.

It was about grace, and time, and focus. These are the three resources I can never replenish once they are spent, which is precisely why giving them away means something.

The more I sat with it, the more I realized this was not a personal aspiration sitting off to the side of my professional life. It was the center of it because the role of a leader and the role of a generous human are not two distinct roles. They are intertwined.

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We talk about leadership as if it were a matter of decisions. We measure leaders by the calls they make under pressure and the outcomes they produce. We build our evaluation systems around competencies and treat leadership as a performance to be optimized.

The leaders people actually remember are rarely remembered for their decisions. They are remembered for how they made people feel in the little moments. They are remembered for the grace they extended when someone fell short, the time they gave when they had none to spare, and the way they were fully present in a hallway conversation.

When leaders are generous with grace, time and attention, a lot of the hard work takes care of itself.

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Grace

Let’s consider grace first. Every person you lead will eventually make a mistake. The ungenerous leader treats each disappointment as evidence, filing it away, building a case. The generous leader treats each as a moment, assuming competence and good faith until proven otherwise. Grace is not the absence of accountability. Grace is the decision to hold people to high standards while believing they are capable of meeting them. People rise to the version of themselves their leader chooses to see.

But grace costs the leader something. When you extend grace, it’s risky. You give someone a second chance, and they may fail again. The ungenerous leader protects himself by keeping the case file open, by never quite letting anyone off the hook. He is safer this way. He is also alone, leading a team that has learned a single mistake will define them.

The generous leader chooses exposure. He decides the cost of occasionally being wrong about a person is smaller than the cost of building a culture where people are afraid.

Time

Time is the resource leaders guard most fiercely. We are taught to protect our calendars and treat every interruption as a threat to our priorities. There is wisdom in this. But a leader who gives no time at all has misunderstood the job. The work is not the test scores or file review outcomes. The work is the people who do the work that contributes to them, and people need time they did not have to schedule.

The generous leader gives it without keeping score. He stops in the doorway. He answers the question that was not on the agenda. He stays after the meeting ends because someone lingered. None of this appears in any report. All of it determines whether the people he leads believe he actually sees them.

Focus

Focus has become the rarest resource in our society. We are all living in a world of persistent partial attention. We have decided that giving someone forty percent of our attention is acceptable because we are busy. Meetings full of people on laptops checking email. Constant interruptions from calls and texts. The person across from you can always tell. Divided attention is not a smaller version of attention. It is a different thing entirely, and it communicates the one thing the divided leader never intends to say, which is that this person matters less than whatever else is competing for the mind.

In my first job, I was taught that you don’t answer the phone when you are with someone. The customer in front of you had to believe they were the most important one, and they were because they were the one there right then.

The most generous thing a leader can do is also the simplest and the most difficult. Close the laptop. Put down the phone. Let them have all of you for the duration of the conversation. Undivided focus is a gift precisely because everyone has stopped giving it.

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Leading with Generosity

These three forms of generosity have something in common. None of them scale, and none of them can be faked. You cannot give grace in bulk. Each act is small and personal, which is exactly why it works. The team knows the difference between a leader who has a policy of being supportive and a leader who actually shows up.

Generosity is not a drain on the leader, a tax paid on the way to results. It is the only foundation on which results can stand, because people do their best work for someone they believe is invested in them as people.

Therefore, generosity is not the opposite of high performance. It is the source of it. The leader who gives grace gets honesty, because people who are not afraid will tell you the truth. The leader who gives time gets loyalty, because people who feel seen will stay. The leader who gives focus gets the full attention of his team, because attention is reciprocal.

I went into that exercise expecting to define my roles as a list of separate ambitions, each in its own column. I came out of it understanding that many of them overlap. To be a generous human is not something I do after work or alongside the job. It is the job.

I am preparing to leave my current special education director role to take a similar but different role helping support special education across the state and region. This has been exciting, but also a little nerve-racking. I worry about whether I will be able to do this new work at the level I’m used to. It will demand something new from me. And I’ve questioned if I will be able to meet that demand.

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That is where Manager Tools comes back in. In their Things We Think We Think newsletter, they shared the following.

You don’t start at zero. You start at experience.

When I saw that, it instantly made me feel better about my decision. I have started new jobs and grown into them successfully throughout my whole career. I don’t have to meet tomorrow unarmed. I meet tomorrow armed with the skills I had yesterday and those I learned today.

I’m also carrying all of the other things that Manager Tools helped me achieve.

• I have a network of colleagues who are supportive and need support. We will step into the next challenge in special education together.

• I have a respect for communication and accountability that will ensure those I work with and work for are on the same page as I am, and expect the same work and outcomes.

• I have an understanding of Team One, Priority, Trash Can Fires, Strategy, Operations, People, Knowing Your People, Talking about Performance, Coaching, Delegation, etc. etc. etc. that all will help me in my role, while also helping me help other leaders do their work at a high level.

While the new job will come with a Day One, it is not a completely new start. I will bring my experience and see where that takes me.

If you are interested in what Manager Tools has to offer, shoot me a message or catch me at a conference, and I’ll talk your ear off about all the things that I’ve learned from them.

“The other kids have rights, too.”

If you’ve worked in special education for very long, you have heard this phrase. It comes up in IEP meetings. It shows up in a parent letter sent to the principal. A board member quotes it after seeing something on Facebook. A teacher says it at the end of a long day.

It is meant as a counterweight. The implication is that students with disabilities have somehow accumulated more rights than their peers, that IDEA tips a scale that ought to sit level, and that anyone advocating for a child with an IEP is advocating against the children without one. It slows the conversation, repositions the advocate as the one overreaching, and shifts the burden back onto the student whose rights are actually at issue.

The premise does not hold up. The other kids do have rights. That is the point. They have the right to attend school, the right to access the curriculum, the right to procedural due process before being removed from either. None of that is in tension with the rights of students with disabilities.

They are the same rights.

The Fourteenth Amendment does not have a separate clause for students who read on grade level. Goss v. Lopez did not carve out an exception for students whose behavior is easy to manage. Every protection IDEA codifies for a student with a disability is a protection that already existed for every other child in the building.

So when someone says the other kids have rights too, the honest answer is yes, and those rights are identical to the ones we are discussing right now. The conversation is not about whether one student has more rights than another. It is about whether the student with a disability will receive the rights that every other student already gets without question.

Look at what the sentence actually does in a manifestation determination. A student with a disability did something that, if a nondisabled peer had done it, might result in a ten-day suspension and a hearing. The team is sorting out whether the behavior was a manifestation of the disability, because if it was, the law requires a different response. Someone says the other kids have rights too. But the nondisabled student in that comparison is also entitled to a hearing. Also entitled to notice. Also entitled to the school considering whether the discipline fits the conduct. The manifestation determination is not an extra process. It is the same process, applied to a population that historically did not receive it.

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This is where the upset gets misdirected. The educator, the board member, or the community member is genuinely frustrated, and the frustration has to land somewhere, and the easiest place to put it is the child or the family. The child is “getting away with something.” The family is “playing the system.” The special education team is “tying our hands.” None of that framing accounts for the actual chain of events. The extra procedural step, the manifestation determination, the IEP review, and the functional behavior assessment exist because something the school promised to do did not happen. The procedure is the audit. It is not a favor to the child. It is a check on the institution.

That distinction matters when you are talking to staff and to boards. The system did not invent these procedures because students with disabilities are too fragile to be disciplined. The system was invented because schools repeatedly imposed discipline on students whose plans had not been followed, and then treated the resulting behavior as the student’s failure rather than the school’s. The procedure puts the school’s compliance on the table next to the student’s conduct, and that is uncomfortable for a lot of staff because they are used to only one of those being examined.

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What Gets Heard

Be honest about who is in the room when the sentence gets used, and who hears about it afterward. When an educator says it out loud or shares one of those classroom-themed graphics on social media with the same message in a folksy font, parents of students with disabilities are watching. They see it. They screenshot it. They send it to each other. They bring it to the next IEP meeting in a folder.

The reaction is not abstract. It is specific, and it has consequences for your program.

The first reaction is recognition. Parents have heard versions of this sentence before, often from the very people who were supposed to be educating their children. They know what comes next. A denied accommodation. A reduced service minute. A discipline decision that ignores the disability. The sentence is a tell, and the parents who have learned to read it do not need the rest of the meeting to know where it is heading.

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The second reaction is grief. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that accumulates. Parents of students with disabilities spend enormous energy trying to be reasonable, trying to be collaborative, trying not to be the parent staff dread seeing on the calendar. The sentence undoes that work in one line. It tells the parent that the staff member, even one who has been warm and helpful, is operating from a frame in which their child is the problem and the other children are the standard.

The third reaction is documentation. Parents who have been through the system long enough do not react emotionally in the moment. They write it down. They put it in the email thread. They reference it in the formal complaint. The educator who posted the meme or made the comment in the breakroom usually had no idea they were producing evidence, but that is what it becomes.

The fourth reaction, and the one with the longest tail, is loss of trust. A parent who has heard the sentence from a school employee will not unhear it. She will show up to the next meeting with her guard up. She will bring an advocate where she used to come alone. She will pursue an independent evaluation because she no longer trusts the school’s. Every one of those shifts raises the cost and the conflict of running your program, and every one of them is downstream of a framing that your staff did not realize was costing you anything.

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What Next

School leaders have to share the reality with their people. Not as a disciplinary matter. As a strategic one. This sentence and the images that carry it are not just rhetorically wrong. They are operationally expensive. They produce parents who file complaints, request mediations, and arrive at meetings already certain the school is not on their child’s side. The most diligent compliance work in the world cannot recover the trust that one meme breaks.

The most useful thing you can do when you hear the sentence in a meeting you are leading is to take it seriously and answer it directly. Yes, the other students have rights. Name them. Enrollment. Instruction. Due process. Then point out that the protections under discussion are not above those rights. They are those rights, written down, because writing them down was the only way to keep them from being taken.

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You will say it more than once. To people who hear it and adjust, to people who hear it and argue, and to people who hear it and forget by the next meeting. That is fine. Changing institutional framing is repetitive work by design, because the framing you are replacing is also repeated, in breakrooms and boardrooms and legislative hearings, by people who believe they are defending fairness when they are defending injustice.

The other kids have rights. The kids with disabilities have those same rights. The only difference is who has had to fight to keep them.

It has everything to do with schools.

The model is a two-by-two grid. On one axis: what you know about yourself. On the other: what others know about you. The four resulting quadrants describe the entire landscape of human blind spots.

Most educators live comfortably in one quadrant and avoid the others entirely. That avoidance is costing students.

The Four Quadrants

The Open Area is what you know about yourself, and what others know about you. This is your public professional self. The skills you’re confident in, the communication patterns you’re aware of, the approach to your work that you’d describe the same way your colleagues would. A teacher who knows she’s strong at building relationships with reluctant learners, and whose principal would say the same thing, is operating from her Open Area. This is healthy. This is where effective collaboration lives.

The Blind Spot is what others can see that you cannot. This is the most professionally dangerous quadrant. The teacher who talks over students while believing they’re building dialogue. The administrator who interprets silence in a meeting as agreement when every experienced teacher in the room knows it’s compliance. The person who genuinely believes their delivery of critical feedback is direct and supportive, while the person across the table is quietly shutting down.

The Blind Spot isn’t about bad intentions. Most people in this quadrant are trying hard. That’s what makes it hard to address. You can’t self-correct what you can’t see.

The Hidden Area is what you know about yourself, but others don’t. Every educator has one. The teacher who privately doubts their ability to reach students with significant trauma histories. The administrator who has never been comfortable with conflict and has developed twenty different strategies for avoiding it while appearing decisive. The beliefs you hold about certain families, certain diagnoses, certain types of students — the ones that influence your decisions but never show up in a meeting.

The Hidden Area isn’t automatically problematic. Some things are appropriately private. But when the gap between your internal framework and your observable behavior creates inconsistency that students or staff experience without explanation, the Hidden Area becomes a liability.

The Unknown Area is what neither you nor others can see yet. This is the professional growth that hasn’t happened yet, the capacity that hasn’t been called for, the pattern that no one has had the language or the relationship to name. It shrinks when people receive genuine developmental feedback and when organizations create conditions for reflection. It stays large when evaluation is performative and feedback is compliance theater.

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What This Looks Like in a Classroom

A teacher’s Open Area is usually well-developed in the technical dimensions of the job: content knowledge, lesson structure, classroom procedures. These are visible and regularly evaluated. Teachers get feedback on them, refine them, develop confidence in them.

The Blind Spot is where instructional culture quietly breaks down.

Consider a teacher who believes they run an inclusive, welcoming classroom. They greet students at the door. They use student names. They say they have high expectations for everyone. But the data shows a consistent pattern: students with IEPs are called on less frequently during whole-group instruction, their work is accepted at lower quality thresholds, and their behavior is managed reactively rather than proactively. No one has said this out loud. The teacher would be genuinely shocked to see the pattern quantified.

Therefore, the Blind Spot is not an indictment of character. It is an indictment of feedback systems. Teachers cannot address what they cannot see, and they cannot see what no one is willing to name.

The Hidden Area operates in parallel. A teacher who privately believes a particular student is simply too low-functioning to benefit from grade-level instruction will make thousands of micro-decisions in alignment with that belief — which materials to send home, how much to push during a frustrating lesson, whether to advocate strongly at an IEP meeting. None of those decisions will be documented. All of them will have consequences.

Reducing the Hidden Area requires something most professional development doesn’t build: psychological safety and a genuine belief that honesty with trusted colleagues leads to growth rather than judgment.

What This Looks Like in a Building

Administrators have the same four quadrants — with wider impact.

The Open Area for most building leaders is built around operational competency: scheduling, compliance, crisis response, communication with families. These are the visible functions of the job. Supervisors evaluate them. Leaders refine them. They tend to be well-developed because they’re regularly tested.

The Blind Spot for administrators is almost always relational and cultural.

The principal who believes they’re approachable but whose office door sends a different message. The director who thinks they communicate clearly, but whose emails require a decoding key that only veteran staff possess. The leader who is certain they treat all staff equitably but whose feedback practices, stretch assignments, and informal mentorship consistently favor the same small group of teachers.

These patterns are visible to staff and invisible to the leader. But staff rarely surface them directly, because the cost-benefit calculation of speaking honestly to an evaluator is rarely in the speaker’s favor. Therefore, the administrator’s Blind Spot tends to be larger than the teacher’s — not because administrators are less self-aware, but because the feedback ecosystem around them is more filtered.

The Hidden Area for building leaders often contains beliefs about their own authority, their discomfort with the messiness of inclusion, their private frustration with certain families or student populations, and their honest assessment of which staff they believe are worth investing in. These beliefs shape culture without ever being named in a leadership meeting.

The Unknown Area for administrators grows or shrinks based on whether the organization treats evaluation as development or documentation. Leaders who have coaches, who participate in honest peer feedback, and who create structures for receiving upward feedback from staff will shrink their Unknown Area over time. Leaders whose only external input is a summative rating from a district supervisor will not.

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What To Do With This

The Johari Window doesn’t come with a repair kit. It’s a diagnostic, not a prescription. But the direction it points is clear.

Shrinking the Blind Spot requires feedback that is specific, behavioral, and delivered by someone with enough trust and standing to be heard. For teachers, that means instructional coaching that is honest rather than affirming. For administrators, it means creating actual mechanisms — not just open-door rhetoric — for staff to surface observations about leadership patterns.

Shrinking the Hidden Area requires internal work. Not therapy, necessarily, though for some that’s appropriate. But honest professional reflection on the beliefs that are driving decisions that no one is checking. Writing down the assumptions you’re making about a student before an IEP meeting. Naming, privately, the reasons you’re avoiding a specific conversation with a staff member. The Hidden Area shrinks when you look at it directly rather than working around it.

The Unknown Area shrinks when organizations take developmental feedback seriously and when leaders model vulnerability. You cannot create conditions for staff growth that you are unwilling to inhabit yourself.

What quadrant do you spend the most time in? What would it take to look through a different one?

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The difference is not the people in the room. It’s not the data on the table. It’s not the amount of time blocked on the calendar. The difference is whether the team knows what question they’re trying to answer.

The teams that produce the best outcomes for students are asking two questions. Not a vague exploration of “what’s going on” with the student. Two questions.

1. What skill does this student need?

2. What experiences will help them learn that skill?

That’s it. Everything else is noise until those two questions have clear answers.

The Skill Question

Most teams skip this question entirely. They think they’re answering it, but they’re not. They’re answering a different question: What is this student doing wrong? This is not the same question.

“He’s disruptive” is an observation about behavior. It tells you nothing about the skill the student is missing.

“She won’t stay in her seat” is an observation.

“He refuses to start independent work” is an observation.

“They can’t get along with peers” is an observation.

Observations are the starting point, not the answer. But in too many meetings, they’re treated as the answer. The team describes the problem behavior in great detail, everyone nods, and then the conversation jumps straight to interventions. What consequence should we use? What reinforcement system should we build? Should we move the student’s seat? Should we add a check-in?

All of those might be fine ideas. But they’re answers to a question the team never asked. You cannot design an effective intervention without first identifying the skill the student needs to develop. You can manage behavior without identifying the skill. You can suppress behavior without identifying the skill. But you cannot teach without it.

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So what does the skill question actually sound like?

If a student is disruptive during whole-group instruction, the skill question might be: Does this student know how to maintain attention during a fifteen-minute lecture? Can they self-monitor when their attention drifts? Do they have a strategy for re-engaging when they realize they’ve checked out?

If a student refuses to start independent work, the skill question might be: Does this student know how to begin a multi-step task independently? Can they break a complex assignment into parts? Do they know how to ask for help without shutting down?

If a student struggles with peers, the skill question might be: Does this student know how to enter a group conversation? Can they read social cues that signal when someone is finished talking? Do they have language for disagreeing without escalating?

Each of those is a different skill. Each requires a different instructional response. And none of them are obvious from the behavior alone.

This is the gap. The team sees the behavior and assumes they understand the need. But the behavior is the surface. The skill deficit is underneath it. And the only way to get to the skill is to ask the question directly and resist the urge to leap to solutions before you have an answer.

The Experience Question

Once the team has named the skill, the second question becomes possible.

What experiences will help this student learn that skill?

This question forces precision. It forces the team to think like teachers instead of managers. It forces us out of the consequence-and-reinforcement loop and into instructional design.

If the student needs to learn how to self-monitor attention, then the experience needs to involve direct teaching of what self-monitoring looks like, guided practice in low-stakes settings, and opportunities to use the strategy with feedback. That is instruction. That is something a teacher designs and delivers with the same intentionality they would bring to a phonics lesson or a math intervention.

If the student needs to learn how to initiate a multi-step task, the experience might be explicit modeling of task initiation, a visual checklist that breaks the routine into steps, and daily practice with gradually fading support. Again, instruction. Not a behavior plan with a sticker chart.

If the student needs to learn how to disagree without escalating, the experience might be scripted role plays, video modeling, social narratives, and structured opportunities to practice the skill in real interactions with real-time coaching.

The word “experience” matters here. Not “intervention.” Not “strategy.” Experience. Because the question is fundamentally about what the student needs to go through to learn. Learning is an experience. It requires doing the thing, in conditions that support success, with feedback that helps the learner adjust.

Too many behavior plans are built around things we do to the student. Consequences delivered. Reinforcement schedules maintained. Points earned and lost. Those are management tools. They have a place. But they are not teaching.

The experience question asks: What does this student need to do in order to develop this skill? What does the adult need to set up so that the student gets enough repetitions, enough feedback, enough supported practice to actually learn?

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Why Teams Get Stuck

If these two questions are so straightforward, why do most teams skip them?

Because the alternative is easier.

It is easier to describe a behavior than to identify a skill deficit. Description requires observation. Skill identification requires analysis. Teams default to what they can see because it feels productive. We filled a whiteboard with information. We documented the problem thoroughly. We feel like we accomplished something.

But description without analysis is just a really detailed way of not solving the problem.

It is easier to pick an intervention off a menu than to design an instructional experience. Schools are full of pre-built behavior systems, packaged programs, and consultant recommendations. Choosing one feels decisive. It feels like action. But if the intervention doesn’t match the skill the student actually needs, the action is wasted.

It is easier to talk about what the student is doing wrong than to figure out what they need to learn. Deficit talk is comfortable in schools. We’re trained in it. We have forms and processes designed to document what’s wrong. Flipping the lens from deficit to skill takes discipline, and it takes a team that has practiced it enough to do it naturally.

What Changes When Teams Get This Right

When a team consistently asks these two questions, meetings get shorter. Not because anyone is rushing, but because the conversation has direction. You spend less time describing the problem and more time designing the response. You leave the room with a plan that is instructional, not just managerial.

Progress monitoring becomes meaningful. When you know the skill you’re targeting, you can measure whether the student is acquiring it. You can tell the difference between a student whose behavior is being suppressed by a reinforcement system and a student who is actually learning the skill that will eventually make the reinforcement system unnecessary.

Staff feel more effective. Teachers and paraeducators who are asked to “implement the behavior plan” often feel like enforcers. Teachers and paraeducators who are asked to “teach this student how to self-monitor attention using this method” feel like educators. The difference in professional identity matters more than we admit.

And students learn. Not just to comply with the current system, but to actually develop the skills that allow them to function independently when the system is no longer there. That is the whole point.

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The Test

Next time you’re in a meeting about a student who isn’t making progress, listen for whether the team answers these two questions.

1. What skill does this student need?

2. What experiences will help them learn that skill?

If the conversation is mostly about what the student is doing wrong and which consequence or reinforcement to apply, the team hasn’t answered either question. They may leave the meeting with a plan. But it won’t be an instructional one.

The best teams I’ve worked with don’t have better data systems or more time or fancier programs. They have a habit of asking the right questions before designing the response. And the right questions fit on an index card.

Every teacher has had a student who seemed to flip a switch overnight. One week, they are dysregulated, disruptive, difficult to reach. The next week, something changes. A new seat, a different greeting at the door, a conversation that finally landed, and the behavior shifts. It feels like a breakthrough. And it is.

But that story can become a trap. Because when we have seen behavior change fast, we start to expect it to change fast every time. And when it doesn’t, the attribution creeps back in. He is choosing this. She knows better. They just don’t want to try. That thinking will make progress harder. And it is the same thinking that derails system-level change.

A student who enters your classroom in the morning has already lived hours of a life you know almost nothing about. You see them at 8:00. You do not see what happened at 6:45. You do not see the home, the sleep, the hunger, the argument, the fear, the grief, or the uncertainty that walked in alongside them. What you see is behavior. And behavior is the last thing that changes, because it is only the surface of everything underneath.

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This is not an excuse for the behavior. It is an explanation for why your intervention yesterday did not produce the result you expected today. The complexity lives in what you cannot see. Just as I wrote last week about a teacher whose resistance made no sense until I learned what she was carrying, the behavior in front of you will not make sense until you understand what is underneath it. Do not fool yourself into thinking a child’s circumstances lack the complexity of your own. Mark Twain said it about adversity. It applies here, too.

So what do we do with that?

We must start with the world as it is. We start with an honest inventory of the present reality. Not what the student should be able to do. Not what they did last spring. What they are actually doing right now, in this environment, under these conditions. That is your starting point. Anything else is fiction.

From there, the goal becomes clear. Define what you want the behavior to look like. Be specific. Better behavior is not a destination. Staying in the seat for fifteen minutes is. Asking for a break instead of walking out is. Using a specific phrase when frustrated is. The more concrete the goal, the more useful the map.

Now comes the part that requires patience. The road between the present reality and the goal is not straight. It is not short. And it will not travel itself. Last week I used a car that needed to get from Kansas City to Wichita. The route has to be planned. The work has to happen. Skipping steps does not make the trip shorter. The same is true here.

Behavior change is not a light switch. It is closer to physical therapy. A patient recovering from a knee injury does not go from surgery to running on day two. They go from surgery to standing. Then to walking with support. Then to walking without it. Then to jogging. Each step has to be stable before the next one is possible. Rush it, and you do not get there faster. You get a setback.

The same is true for your student. The intervention you put in place today is not supposed to produce the final behavior. It is supposed to produce the next behavior. The one that is one step closer to the goal than where you started.

This is where staff often lose faith in the plan. Two weeks in, the student is still struggling. The team reconvenes. Someone says it isn’t working. A new intervention gets layered on top of the old one, or the plan gets scrapped and replaced entirely. And the student, who was just beginning to find the edges of something stable, starts over.

The plan may not be failing. The timeline may just be wrong.

That said, behavior can change fast. The right intervention, matched precisely to the purpose of the behavior, can produce visible results quickly. A student who is escaping difficult tasks may respond almost immediately when the task is modified. A student who is seeking attention may settle quickly when attention is delivered proactively. When you find the key, the lock opens.

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But finding the key takes time. It takes observation and hypothesis and data and adjustment. It takes knowing the student well enough to understand what the behavior is communicating, not just what it looks like. And it takes a team willing to hold the plan long enough to learn whether it is working.

The student in front of you is not a problem to be solved before dismissal. They are a person navigating a life of genuine complexity, expressing what they cannot yet say in words, in the only language currently available to them. Your job is not to eliminate the behavior. Your job is to understand it well enough to teach a better one.

Start with the world as it is. Define the present reality. Define the goal. Map the steps between them. Then do the work, with patience, with consistency, and with enough humility to know that the complexity you cannot see is real.

The behavior will follow. Just not always on your timeline.

When the leader takes up the work to act on this vision, they are sure to meet resistance. And it is natural to interpret that resistance as negativity.

Someone doesn’t want to do their job.

Someone doesn’t want to do what’s best for kids.

But that thinking is a trap that will make progress harder.

Even when the leader can see the challenge that change will create for others, it is easy to dismiss it as “not that bad.” We minimize what others face because we only see a fraction of it.

There is a quote that captures this perfectly. Mark Twain once wrote: “By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.”

The shallow view tricks us into thinking we understand the whole picture. But the complexity of another person’s life lies in what we cannot see. I have watched a teacher resist a new behavior intervention for months. My internal read was that she was checked out. What I eventually learned was that she was managing several major life events at once. The resistance was not laziness. It was a person already at capacity being asked to carry more. Do not fool yourself into thinking another life lacks the complexity of your own.

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I find myself, at times, expecting change to happen faster than it does. I get judgmental. I get frustrated. I forget that change does not happen overnight. We must start with the world as it is, and work to move it toward what we hope it can be. That move takes time. It takes energy and adjustment. It takes relationships and communication. It takes learning new things and helping others learn them too.

If a car is sitting in Kansas City and needs to get to Wichita, that change is clearly possible. But it is not instantaneous. The road is not straight. The car does not drive itself. Other drivers have their own plans that may get in the way of yours. Construction might force a detour that you feel you cannot afford.

And since the car does not drive itself, the change will not either. Someone has to plan the route before anyone gets in the car. In a school, that might mean identifying which staff need training before a rollout, which buildings need additional support to sustain the change, and which relationships need repair before a new ask will land. Skipping that planning does not make the trip shorter. It makes you more likely to run out of gas on I-70.

If you expect the car to already be in Wichita and get angry that it is not there yet, you waste your time and energy and delay the goal even further.

We have to apply this thinking inside our schools. Whether it is a system-level change or a single student’s behavior plan, the principle is the same.

Start with the world as it is. Define the present reality. Define the goal. What are the steps along the way? What are the destinations? Who will have to do something different for the new reality to take hold? What will they need, given the complexity of their own circumstances, to make that sustainable?

Only when we approach change with that mindset will we see something that lasts. Before your next initiative, try writing down what the world actually looks like right now for the people you are asking to change. Not what you hope it looks like. Not what it should look like. What it actually is. That description is where the real work begins.