Welcome back as we continue our special series on literacy, presented in partnership between the Be Podcast Network and Reading Is Fundamental. To hear more from this series, you can revisit our September episodes from National Literacy Month.

Today’s guest, Dr. Norene Bunt, is an author and former teacher, principal, curriculum coordinator, school improvement strategist, and superintendent. She is an expert on best practices in literacy instruction and integrating the science of reading effectively and efficiently to support high levels of learning for all students.

Her book is called Solving the Literacy Puzzle: Practical Strategies for Integrating the Science of Reading Into Classroom Instruction.

We discuss:

• How the U.S. is performing in the area of reading proficiency
• What factors are impacting students' reading proficiency?
• This book consolidates decades of research on effective literacy instruction. It can feel overwhelming to teachers. What are some of the key things to understand?
• Removing other barriers to using evidence-based practices.
• Science of reading: some of the common practices teachers might not realize are consistent with the science of reading
• Practices to eliminate
• The roles of whole-group, small-group, and independent work

Find Solving the Literacy Puzzle from Solution Tree or wherever you get your books.

Visit https://bepodcast.network to learn about all our shows.

Visit www.rif.org to learn about Reading Is Fundamental.

About today’s guest

Dr. Norene A. Bunt is an author and former teacher, principal, curriculum coordinator, school improvement strategist, and superintendent. She is an expert on best practices in literacy instruction and integrating the science of reading effectively and efficiently to support high levels of learning for all students. Dr. Bunt has more than 15 years of teaching experience and 17 years serving in leadership roles in schools with widely diverse populations of students. Her expertise has been developed through these professional experiences, as well as through action research, classroom observations, and extensive reviews of current research.

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn

Kyle Wagner is the founder and Learning Experience Designer for Transform Educational Consulting Limited, an organization that empowers forward thinking schools and educators to create globally, socially and emotionally aware citizens through project-based experiences and 12 shifts for student-centered environments.

In this episode, we chat about Kyle’s book, Where Is the Teacher? The 12 Shifts for Student-Centered Environments.

Our discussion covers:

• The hard truths about student-centered learning environments
• The role of the teacher in today's classroom
• Leadership's role in building this culture: How do they accelerate the shifts?
• What kind of things need to be in place for the transformation to student-centered learning to take place?
• 12 shifts framework
• Who designs learning? What is the role of content?
• Evaluation vs. motivation

Find Where Is The Teacher? from Routledge or wherever you get your books. Read the introduction and order the book at www.transformschool.com/whereistheteacher or take the 12 Shifts Scorecard: www.transformschool.com/12shiftsscorecard.

About today’s guest

Kyle Wagner is the founder and [Co] Learning Experience Designer for Transform Educational Consulting Limited, an organization that empowers forward thinking schools and educators to create globally, socially and emotionally aware citizens through project-based experiences and 12 shifts for student-centred environments. Kyle fell in love with project-based learning as a teacher at High Tech High, where he witnessed students publish best-selling books, create their own social enterprises, and even influence policy change through real- world projects. He has taken this passion global, founding micro-schools, authoring 2 books, and helping over 1,000 educators develop 1000 + transformative learning experiences and the student-centered environments to support them.

A published author, his two books ‘Power of Simple, and ‘Where is The Teacher: The 12 Shifts for Student-Centered Environments’ feature captivating stories, practical case studies, and simple strategies from student-centered classrooms and schools around the world around how to move from teacher-led to student-centered environments and experiences. Get in touch with him at kylewagner@transformschool.com.

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn

Rhonda J. Roos, PhD is an educational consultant coaching principals, district leaders, and administrative teams in the complex and ever-challenging work of leading schools.

She is a former assistant superintendent in New Albany, Indiana where she led curricular improvement, aligning those efforts with the district’s progress in becoming a professional learning community.

Rhonda joins the show to discuss her book, The Deliberate and Courageous Principal: Ten Leadership Actions and Skills to Create High-Achieving Schools.

The episode covers:

• What Rhonda found to be the most difficult part of being a principal
• The difference between Essential Leadership Actions and Essential Leadership Skills
• How to establish a vision focused on learning
• Clarifying the essential work for educators
• Take Action (Instead of Being Busy)
• How to build relationships
• Favorite strategy to lean into the positive
• Where do most leaders miss the mark in working with their staffs?

Find The Deliberate and Courageous Principal from Solution Tree or wherever you get your books.

About today’s guest

Rhonda J. Roos, PhD is an educational consultant coaching principals, district leaders, and administrative teams in the complex and ever-challenging work of leading schools. She is a former assistant superintendent in New Albany, Indiana where she led curricular improvement, aligning those efforts with the district’s progress in becoming a professional learning community. Rhonda has been an educator since 1983 serving as a guidance counselor, English teacher, middle school principal, and district administrator. She has taught graduate courses on leadership at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, Indiana and Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

Rhonda served on the leadership team of the Indiana Principal Leadership Institute and is a regular keynote speaker. Honors include the 2010 Indiana Middle School Principal of the Year, 2011 Solution Tree “Redefining Excellence District Award” and the 2015 Indiana University Southeast Educator of the Year.

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn

Aaron Hansen is a professional learning communities (PLC), response to intervention (RTI) and student empowerment expert and a highly sought-after international speaker, strategic consultant, coach and author.

He has been featured on CNN, ABC, FOX News, and the BBC, as an innovator and thought leader in U.S. education. As a principal of a turnaround middle school, Aaron has lived the work to award-winning levels.

Today, we discuss his book Heroes Within: A Framework for Empowering Students to Own Their Learning Journeys.

The conversation covers:

• Defining heroes and hero-makers
• How stories relate to self-beliefs
• Importance of clarifying the learning goal
• Helping students create and communicate a compelling vision
• What Aaron has learned about feedback
• The fear students have to overcome
• Why Aaron believes education is on the precipice for another fundamental change or crisis

Find Heroes Within from Solution Tree or wherever you get your books.

About today’s guest

As a principal of a turn-around middle school, Aaron Hansen has lived the work to award-winning levels. He has knowledge and track record of helping systems get results. He has a deep understanding for how to develop collaborative processes among educators and transform their schools into high-performing systems. He is passionate about inspiring and helping educators with the knowledge they need to change how students’ experience school. He uses compelling stories paired with educational and psychological research and practical strategies to help teachers empower their students’ as the hero of their own learning journey, ready to face life’s challenges.

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn

It’s a pleasure to welcome returning guest Mark Miller back to The Authority.

Mark is a Wall Street Journal and international best-selling author, communicator, and the former Vice President of High Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A. Today, Mark serves as the Co-Founder of Lead Every Day, an extension of his life-inspired mission to encourage and equip leaders with the tools they need to be successful.

As an author, Mark has more than one million books in print in 25+ languages. His latest is Uncommon Greatness: Five Fundamentals to Transform Your Leadership, which we’re talking about today.

We discuss:

• Why leaders are important
• Mark’s journey to leadership and how it influenced his understanding of uncommon vs. “common” greatness
• Reasons for the global leadership crisis
• 33% of organizations believe there’s not sufficient leadership for today and 50% of leaders don’t believe their organization has enough emerging leaders for the needs of the future
• “How can I add the most value in this situation?”
• Is leadership properly incentivized?
• The Five Fundamentals: See the Future, Engage and Develop Others, Reinvent Continuously, Value Results and Relationships, Embody a Leader’s Heart
• Being a leader people want to follow
• In what ways does “Uncommon Greatness” challenge traditional leadership paradigms?

Subscribe to The Authority to get more deep-dive interviews with education authors. It’s available wherever you get your podcasts. Visit https://bepodcast.network to learn more about the Be Podcast Network for educators.

Connect with our guest:

• Get Uncommon Greatness at https://www.leadeveryday.com or wherever you get your books
• Reach out to Mark directly at 678-612-8441
• Text UNCOMMON to 66866 for additional resources
• Connect on social media at https://www.linkedin.com/in/highperformanceleaders and @MarkMillerLeads

About our guest

Mark Miller is a Wall Street Journal and international best-selling author, communicator, and the former Vice President of High Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A. Mark started his Chick-fil-A career working as an hourly team member in 1977. In 1978, he joined the corporate staff working in the warehouse and mailroom. During his tenure with Chick-fil-A, the company grew from seventy-five restaurants to over 2,700 locations with annual sales exceeding $19 billion. Today, Mark serves as the Co-Founder of Lead Every Day, an extension of his life-inspired mission to encourage and equip leaders with the tools they need to be successful. Mark began writing almost twenty years ago when he teamed up with Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager, to write The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do. With over one million books in print in more than twenty-five languages, his global impact continues to grow. For more information, please visit https://leadeveryday.com.

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a consulting and coaching firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn.

Welcome to our National Literacy Month series of podcasts, presented in partnership between the Be Podcast Network and Reading Is Fundamental. The month of September may be done, but we’re continuing the series with more conversations this fall.

Today, Karen Gazith joins the show. Karen received her PhD in Education and Counselling Psychology from McGill University and has taught at McGill for over two decades. She also serves as the Graduate Program Director of the Certificate in Inclusive Education in the same department and as a liaison to the Office of First Nations and Inuit Education in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill.

Karen’s book is The Power of Effective Reading Instruction: How Neuroscience Informs Instruction Across All Grades and Disciplines.

We discuss:

• Teaching students to read is the most essential duty of schools
• Reading is everyone’s business
• What should change in pre-service and inservice learning?
• What neuroscience research says about how children learn to read
• The Big 5: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Fluency, Comprehension
• Reading instruction across content areas

Find The Power of Effective Reading Instruction from Solution Tree or wherever you get your books. Learn more about Karen’s work: https://teachingmeanslearning.com.

Listen to more National Literacy Month podcasts at https://literacy.bepodcast.network.

Learn more about Reading Is Fundamental at www.rif.org

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn

Welcome to our National Literacy Month series of podcasts, presented in partnership between the Be Podcast Network and Reading Is Fundamental.

Today’s guests, Margarita Espino Calderón and Lisa Tartaglia, are co-authors of Cultivating Competence in English Learners: Integrating Social-Emotional Learning With Language and Literacy.

Dr. Calderón, born and raised in Juárez, is a Professor Emerita/Senior Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and development projects have been funded by US Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Labor, and State Offices of Education. One of her empirical studies “The Bilingual Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (BCIRC)” is featured in the What Works Clearinghouse.

Ms. Tartaglia is a high school assistant principal with Loudoun County Public Schools with over 20 years of public school experience. She has been a classroom teacher, reading specialist, and coach at the elementary and high school levels. She is also a Senior Associate for Margarita Calderón and Associates, and provides training on instructional strategies for ELLs, language and literacy, instructional coaching, and Social Emotional Learning (SEL).

We discuss:

• “Laymen’s definition of SEL”
• Identifying the English Learners and multilingual learners in our schools
• How the core tenets of the CASEL framework apply to English learners’ relevant needs
• Common reasons why English Learners’ needs aren’t met
• Why it’s critical for core content teachers to engage with these strategies
• Schoolwide culture shift to SEL — where to start?
• Assist English learners and multilingual learners in developing their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills

Find Cultivating Competence in English Learners from Solution Tree or wherever you get your books.

Visit https://bepodcast.network to learn about all our shows.

Learn more about Reading Is Fundamental at www.rif.org

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn

Joel Backon is the editor-in-chief of Educate AI Magazine, a new platform dedicated to supporting those who seek to enhance learning through artificial intelligence. The Be Podcast Network is collaborating with Educate AI to share podcasts and other content advancing educators’ understanding of AI tools and trends.

I’m proud to be a contributing editor and columnist for Educate AI. You can read my columns here: https://edu-ai.org/author/ross-romano.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• How Joel got involved with Educate AI and the publication’s “why”
• Topics covered in the magazine: use cases, opportunities and risks, AI’s evolution
• How educators are discussing their experience with AI
• The value Educate AI seeks to provide
• Opportunities to get involved

About today’s guest

Joel Backon is the editor-in-chief of Educate AI Magazine. Before joining Educate AI, Joel launched and was the founding editor of Intrepid Ed News, an online education publication that grew to almost 100,000 readers. For most of his career, he was an independent school teacher and administrator, teaching history and government while leading the school’s instructional technology effort, running a dormitory, coaching basketball, and chairing several committees. Immediately following college, Joel spent 15 years in the printing and publishing industries.

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn

I also host Sideline Sessions, a podcast for coaches and parents of student-athletes. The show features conversations with coaches and performance experts in the NFL, NBA, NCAA, Olympics, and more. Listen here: https://bit.ly/3Rp0QGt