What if the key to keeping teachers in the classroom isn't another initiative from above, but listening to the students already in front of them?

In this episode, Katie Meyers—a turnaround school principal and doctoral researcher—shares how centering student voice transformed both teacher retention and school culture at her high-poverty campus. When a teacher told her "I'm out of here" in her first weeks as principal, Katie didn't just react—she researched. Her dissertation explores what keeps teachers in the profession, uncovering a surprising truth: teachers don't just want solutions, they want to be heard. And the same principle applies to students.

Katie reveals how student-led initiatives—from empathy interviews with families to students running daily attendance checks to learners leading their own parent conferences—created the ownership and engagement that traditional top-down approaches couldn't. She explains how goal-setting became a campus-wide practice (every student has a goal binder with weekly checkpoints), how student feedback led to a 30% engagement increase through cooperative learning, and why her leadership team now runs all afternoon tutoring so teachers have space to experiment without fear of failure.

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Key Insights

• Students Hold the Most Credible Feedback: Why asking "what do the kids want?" unlocks insights that data dashboards miss
• Voice Over Solutions: How creating space for teachers and students to feel heard matters more than solving every problem
• Empathy Interviews as Strategy: Why sitting with students, teachers, and parents together reveals the goals and barriers that drive real change
• Goals Must Be Prescriptive and Visible: How campus-wide goal binders, weekly checkpoints, and student-led conferences create accountability with dignity
• The Leader vs. The Boss: When to enforce compliance and when to champion vision—and why naming the difference builds trust
• Compassionate Accountability in Practice: Why timely critical feedback paired with personal encouragement (and languages of gratitude) moves instruction forward
• The Limits of Leadership: Accepting you won't "save education" while still fighting for what you can control—and developing humans, not just implementing systems

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