For those who give voice to education, from the classroom to the boardroom.
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October 2026 · 8 min read · Ai
See what current research says about AI and creativity, and how to keep purpose, judgment, selection, and revision in human hands.
October 2026 · 8 min read · Leadership
A room full of contractors, realtors, and architects, walking table to table and asking students to explain the houses they designed. What changes when the only person who ever sees your work stops being the person grading it.
October 2026 · 7 min read · Ai
Should schools ban AI? Current policy points to a more useful question: which uses fit which ages, learning goals, safeguards, and review conditions?
A clear way to think about communication.
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October 2026 · 5 min read · Leadership
Provo City School District's students recorded more than four hundred thousand absences in a hundred days. Instead of tightening the rules, the district told students what showing up actually gave them — and built a campaign schools could make their own.
October 2026 · 10 min read · Ai
Explore what research says about AI and critical thinking, and how K-12 communicators can keep questioning, checking, and deciding while AI helps.
Only 16 of every 100 children arrived at Rowan-Salisbury's kindergartens with the skills its own readiness screener asked for. The communications team's answer wasn't a poster saying readiness matters — it was showing parents, skill by skill, exactly how to build it.
October 2026 · 6 min read · Ai
Learn what human-centered AI means and how people can keep purpose, context, judgment, and decisions at the center of professional K-12 communication.
October 2026 · 6 min read · Crisis communications
In the first week of a new school year, Highline Public Schools lost nearly every tool it used to reach families. What its six-person communications team did with almost none of them, and what six weeks of honest, on-time updates earned back.
October 2026 · 7 min read · Leadership
Superintendent Al Lewis on why school communication depends on more than a finished message. He shares how listening, visible action, and real participation opened a district that started with public protest.
October 2026 · 5 min read · Ai
Explore AI and curiosity through beginner's mind: keep questions open, test ideas, and use conversational AI without handing over human judgement.
September 2026 · 5 min read · Leadership
What gets built in the first weeks of a school year does not disappear by June, it becomes the material everything else is built from. A look at how early patterns compound across an entire year.
September 2026 · 4 min read · Leadership
Whether people spend the year resisting a decision or helping make it work often comes down to one thing: did they have a real hand in shaping it? A classic workplace study on resistance to change explains why.
One good day, or one bad one, does not tell you whether someone can be trusted. A look at what research on rebuilding broken trust says about what a consistent pattern can, and cannot, repair.
People build their sense of who can be trusted from small, everyday follow-through, long before it ever shows up in a resignation letter. Two studies point to what actually predicts whether people stay.
September 2026 · 3 min read · Leadership
Naming a hard limit honestly, before anyone has to ask twice, builds more trust than a comforting answer that leaves the real boundary unsaid. Research on hidden information shows why holding back backfires.
A vague response like 'we'll take care of it' leaves someone with nothing to hold onto. Three simple questions turn any response into a specific commitment someone can actually check.
Feeling certain you and someone else just agreed on something is not the same as being right about it. Research on everyday miscommunication shows how often a confident agreement hides two different understandings.
A sincere intention can still slip through the cracks unless you decide, in advance, exactly when you will act and what you will do. A look at the research behind turning good intentions into plans that actually hold.
September 2026 · 10 min read · Leadership
A moment left unanswered does not stay empty. The person waiting fills the silence with their own explanation, and research on broken workplace understandings shows what that quietly costs.
September 2026 · 8 min read · Leadership
In the first weeks of a school year, every specific commitment that gets kept, or broken, becomes real evidence about who can be trusted. Research on new-employee role clarity shows why those early signals matter so much.
September 2026 · 2 min read · Leadership
Today the book is available. Fifteen years of watching trust get built or worn down in ordinary communication, turned into six practical chapters for everyone in K–12.
September 2026 · 2 min read · Strategy
The half second before you hit Send is the simplest chance to protect the trust a message carries. A short check to run against the messages that carry weight.
Next Monday, A Culture of Communication arrives. A look back at the trust account and the six practices — and a short self-check to see how your account is doing now.
August 2026 · 9 min read · Strategy
Eight school email templates to parents, with guidance on what to write, what to leave out, and when a call or meeting is better.
August 2026 · 2 min read · Strategy
A book can leave you with a lot of good ideas and no obvious place to start. Six same-day moves, one from each practice, that you can make before you go home today.
August 2026 · 5 min read · Crisis communications
A difficult message has to go out to people who will be worried, angry, or hurt — and you have to get it right the first time. How to respond well under pressure.
August 2026 · 5 min read · Strategy
A message can go out accurate, on time, and easy to read, and still never reach a family who reads another language. Where that failure really begins — and how to fix it.
August 2026 · 5 min read · Storytelling
A school record held the facts: fees unpaid, no longer enrolled. The part worth telling was never written down. Why the story behind the facts is what people remember.
August 2026 · 7 min read · Newsletters
A short update that arrives when people expect it, week after week, builds something valuable — and it shows most on a hard day. The case for steady contact.
July 2026 · 6 min read · Leadership
Most of us take in what people tell us, act on some of it, and never let them know their words landed. How listening — and closing the loop — builds trust.
July 2026 · 7 min read · Strategy
The information was all there, but the reader had to work to find it. Why clarity is a deposit of trust, and how to write the message people understand the first time.
July 2026 · 2 min read · Leadership
A one-page ledger that turns Chapter 1's trust account into something you can use at four o'clock, with a full inbox and three things still to send.
July 2026 · 7 min read · Leadership
Every message you send builds trust a little, or spends it a little. A simple way to see the trust account behind everything you communicate.
July 2026 · 4 min read · Leadership
After fifteen years in K–12 communications, I started Board to Desk. Here is why school communication is a trust account the whole district owns.
