Episode 30: Beyond the Classroom: The Future of Learning and Leadership with Mike Springer

In this inspiring episode of Luminate: Navigating the Unknown Through Creative Leadership, Sarah Hempstead sits down with Mike Springer, Superintendent of Norwell Community Schools, to explore his remarkable 30-year journey in education. From his humble beginnings on a farm in Illinois to leading transformative educational initiatives, Mike shares lessons on leadership, resilience, and the power of student-centered learning.

Key Highlights from the Episode:

• Early Roots in Leadership
  Mike reflects on how his upbringing on a farm instilled a strong work ethic, teamwork, and resilience—values that shaped his career in education.
• Engaging Students in Learning
  He emphasizes the importance of hands-on, immersive learning experiences, sharing anecdotes about inspiring students to wake up early for birdwatching fieldwork.
• From Teacher to Superintendent
  Hear how Mike transitioned from teaching middle school science to leading entire districts, with lessons learned from mentors and tough but transformational conversations.
• The Role of Space in Learning
  Mike shares insights from a recent project to redesign rigid, outdated classrooms into flexible environments that support collaboration, creativity, and cognitive development.
• Advice for Aspiring Educators
  His message for new teachers: stay resilient, choose the right district, and embrace the joy and reward of shaping young minds.
• The Future of Education
  Mike highlights the growing focus on cognitive development, systematic teaching approaches, and the importance of preparing students and educators to adapt to an ever-changing world.
• Book Recommendations
  Don’t miss his picks: Toy Box Leadership by Ron Hunter and Michael Waddle, and Your Child Learns Differently, Now What? by Roger Stark and Betsy Hill, which explore leadership and the science of learning.

This episode is packed with actionable insights, compelling stories, and a heartfelt passion for education. Whether you’re an educator, a leader, or just someone passionate about lifelong learning, this conversation will leave you inspired and energized.

Transcript

Sarah: [00:00:00] Welcome to Luminate, navigating the unknown through creative leadership. I'm Sarah Hempstead, the CEO of Schmidt Associates and a passionate advocate for creative problem solving. And today I'm thrilled to introduce Mike Springer, the superintendent of Norwell Community Schools. With over 30 years in public education, Mike's journey from teacher to district leader exemplifies servant leadership and a visionary approach to student centered learning.

Sarah: Mike, thanks for joining us. 

Mike: Thank you, Sarah. Happy to be here. Excellent. 

Sarah: I like to start these going all the way back to the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your family, where you grew up and what that taught you. 

Mike: Yeah. So I grew up on a farm in central Illinois. Sports was everything, right?

Mike: So we played whatever sport was in season at the time. And so I have two two older sisters, one, six years older than me, and then one's 17 months older than me, and then an older brother that's four years older than me. And yeah, just wiffle ball in the backyard, right? And basketball in the driveway and all that.

Mike: But really, so they all, every one of my brothers and sisters are in education. Everyone has been a teacher, coach some, that sort of thing. My [00:01:00] parents taught Sunday school, that, but grew up on a farm. So my parents were farmers and lived that life. But education was always a part of our lives.

Sarah: Growing up on a farm, that's a really good way to learn about the value of hard work. 

Mike: For sure. Yeah. And back, I don't know if anyone even does it anymore, but we used to do what was called walking beans. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. But you walk through the bean field and you're pulling weeds and stuff, now you just spray and that's all you do.

Mike: But yeah, I remember just walking mile long rows, and Spend time out doing that and my dad didn't want my brother and I to be farmers. He just didn't, he didn't want us to choose that road. So we got a lot of the lifting and heavy lifting and moving stuff, but didn't do a lot of the machinery.

Mike: He just didn't want to risk us getting hurt and just didn't want us to choose that. But yeah, we did a lot of backbreaking work. He had us do that. He wouldn't, wasn't shy about that. 

Sarah: So there are four kids in my family as well. And that constructs the six of us is that's how I originally learned about.

Sarah: about being a part of a team. Although I was the oldest, not the youngest. 

Right. 

Sarah: All four of your siblings have taught, have been involved in education. [00:02:00] Did you, were your parents teachers too? You said Sunday school. 

Mike: No, just Sunday school. They were farmers. They were, my mom was a housewife and dad was a farmer, but.

Mike: But just, he and my dad coached, all my teams growing up. And and I think that's when I think about why did I choose education? Going back, everything was about, I was in athletics from the moment I can remember. And in coaching is teaching and your best coaches are really good teachers.

Mike: And so I think that just that mentoring and in coaching atmosphere. When I started thinking about what I wanted to do, that just was a natural fit. I don't know that I really, I don't remember considering anything else when I went into college. 

Sarah: Was that true for all your brothers and sisters too, or your parents?

Sarah: Did your parents encourage that push towards being involved in education, or did it just spring naturally? 

Mike: No, I think it just sprung naturally. I don't remember. Being encouraged one way or the other on, on what we would do. Yeah, I think it's just something we gravitated towards and it's all at different levels.

Mike: My sister and I are both, we're elementary, mostly I did middle school science, but spent a lot of time in elementary. My brother was a high school math teacher and then [00:03:00] my sister was in pre K. So my oldest sister was in pre K. So not sure why that happens, but we all just gravitated towards that.

Sarah: So when you think about your earliest teachers which Our earliest coaches, which are just teachers of a different sense. Is there one that stands out as somebody who you think about now, even, and who is a good motivator of young people and why? 

Mike: I don't know. I've had several, I think, honestly, I probably would go back to my dad just from the early stages of coaching.

Mike: And I think for him, it was just, you're on time, you're putting in the time. You play hard and you play to win, I think that's just was instilled in me. And of course I had several coaches along the way. I don't know really that one necessarily stands out and that I had, they were all little things I took, good and bad that I picked up along the way with all of them.

Mike: But I think probably, yeah, just the time my dad coached me and. 

Sarah: Okay. I have to ask. Cause my dad coached me. Was your dad easier or harder on you? 

Mike: He was definitely harder on me. Yeah, 

Sarah: me too. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you would, strike out. Don't moat back to the bench, get [00:04:00] back there because the last thing you want is everyone staring at someone that just struck out, right?

Mike: Get back to the bench and move on. So yeah, no, I think he was definitely harder on me and expected more out of me. 

Sarah: That's great. Okay. So go into school to be a teacher. Did you want to focus on middle school? Cause that's where you started, right? Eighth grade? Okay. 

Mike: Not necessarily. So I got an elementary degree.

Mike: That was my bachelor's degree with a middle school endorsement in science. I always really liked science it was an area I enjoyed but elementary was originally where I was headed. Out of college, you're putting your resume and applications out everywhere. Sure.

Mike: And Russ Michael at Wabasee Middle School called me and went in for an interview and it just was a really good fit. And I got to coach early on, so I did a lot of middle school coaching. I didn't, I coached a couple of years. It was just one year at the college level, I was an assistant coach at Goshen college, but for the most part, everything was at the middle school level.

Sarah: And coaching baseball. 

Mike: No basketball and actually coach track, which was funny because I'm a terrible distance runner, but I was a good sprinter, but but really relied on other people that kind of knew more about it. And I just organized it, but [00:05:00] pretty much at the middle school level, it was basketball and track.

Sarah: In those early years of coaching and teaching, what was harder than you expected? 

Mike: I don't know if there's anything that was necessarily harder than I expected, but one thing I learned in that first year, I remember the student sitting in the back of the row, it was Carrie Wardinger, brilliant little girl, just smart.

Mike: And just, here I am coming straight out of college, I was a middle school endorsement in science, right? I wasn't a, I'm not like going in teaching collegiate level, right? Biology. Biology. But. Obviously, I'd be prepared, but she'd come up with these questions, and I'd just be, I felt like I had to know all the answers.

Mike: There's no way that I was going to know all the answers, right? But I thought that coming into it. Sure. And so I think the what I learned in that first year is it's okay to say, you know what? I don't know. Let's look that up. That's something we can, how many people are interested in that and, we can, we could look it up and study and have that be a springboard.

Mike: to maybe a research project we do or something else. And I learned that early on that just because you're teaching the class doesn't mean that you know everything in the field of biology, right? Especially as a middle [00:06:00] school science teacher. 

Sarah: Actually, that probably translates pretty well to moving to administration.

Sarah: It's the value and asking questions and asking for 

Mike: help. Absolutely. 

Sarah: So when did you decide you wanted to do that, to move from being in the classroom to working on the school or on the system? 

Mike: Yeah, and that was really interesting because I was, so I was teaching eighth grade science and at Wallacy and I was part time athletic director.

Mike: So during my prep time, I would organize things for our athletic teams and scheduling and that sort of thing. And our assistant principal at the time became really seriously ill and had to abruptly retire. And so Russ Michael tapped me on the shoulder and wanted me to see if I'd be interested in doing that and, went through the process and took that job.

Mike: And honestly, it was probably a few years earlier than I was planning on leaving the classroom if I was going to do that. Once I started down that journey, that just took me that way. 

Sarah: So who did you lean on or look to to learn the job of administration? 

Mike: Yeah, I would, Russ Michael was a good mentor for me.

Mike: He, what I was really impressed with Russ as I watched him is dealing [00:07:00] with difficult. parent issues, because you're going to have that. And yeah, very rare cases. I understand. No, I also learned that early on when I was teaching that, this isn't personal when it, when a parent was upset about something, this is their most personal thing they have going on in the world, right?

Mike: Is their children. And so it's not about me. It's about what can we do for the child, what we can do for the student. And so turning that page early on. It was something when I was teaching but just watching, Russ stay calm and navigate those issues and be listening for that nugget of truth that the parent may be expressing in their anger or frustration, whatever there is, a lot of things are coming out.

Mike: What's that nugget of truth that we can actually take from that and move forward with. And I thought Russ was really good at that. And I would be in those, he'd bring me in those meetings and a lot of times I'd just be sitting there while he ran the meeting and had the conversation. And I do think that was intentional for me to watch what he was doing.

Mike: But yeah, I took that and really abused it ever since because [00:08:00] He was really good at it. 

Sarah: It's really it's really generous of him in lots of ways to make sure you could watch how he was managing and navigating and learn that way. That's not, I don't think everybody has that opportunity.

Sarah: That's great. Okay, so what happened next when it was time to step into an even larger leadership role? 

Mike: Yeah, so I was assistant principal there, and then we lived in Goshen, and my daughter was a kindergartner at the time, but just finishing kindergarten, going into first grade, my oldest daughter, and I don't, didn't tell you that.

Mike: I do have four children of my own. Did I tell you that? I haven't yet. No, you didn't, but I would have asked you. Very similar to my family, just different gender numbers. And but so I have three daughters and so the oldest daughter and then a son. So oldest daughter is 29, she'll be 30 in January and I have two grandchildren just had a granddaughter just on October 30th.

Mike: So just a couple weeks ago. Yeah. Thank you. And it's the best, right? Oh, it's awesome. It's great. Yeah. Cause I can pretty much let him do whatever I want and then I can send them back to mom and dad. So yeah. So Kayla's 29, Logan's 26, and then [00:09:00] Jennifer's 22 . And Lindsay's gonna turn 21 here in February.

Mike: So that's my children. And Kayla was a first grader going into first grade at Waterford Elementary, and that position opened up. And so I applied and got the job and that was really special. I was able to be my children's principal pretty much all the way through. There was a year for Kayla and a year for.

Mike: Lindsey, the youngest, where I wasn't their principal, but for the most part, I was a principal all the way through elementary school, and that was pretty neat. Goshen was a great school district to go into at that time for me, really good people. There's a lot of people that were on the administrative team at that time that are superintendents or in central office around the state.

Mike: David Clinton, Denning. One, I don't know if you guys are familiar with David, but he's at Franklin community here in Indianapolis. And David's still friends with David. David's a really great administrator and good guy, but just that whole, we had professionally learning communities was our focus during that time and just had a whatever it takes mentality at Goshen.

Mike: And that just really set the stage for how I wanted to do things and to this day, I still say Bruce Daly was a superintendent at [00:10:00] the time and Bruce was the most transparent superintendent. I think I've ever seen with board meetings and so I took that and that was at a time when it, you didn't live stream things weren't, so you had a ton of people.

Mike: It was a lot harder to watch every movement of every public entity. But Goshen board meetings were full a lot. And we as principals, we, there were two a month and we had to go to each one of them just in case something would come up about our building. And yeah, and so he was just so transparent, but there's a lot of those things from Goshen that I took with me along the way.

Sarah: So one of the things I appreciate about Gochin is it's, it's a darling, but it's also a very knowable community, like it's a close knit community, and I think the value of transparency is especially important when it is a community like that. Always important, but especially when these are all our friends and neighbors.

Mike: Right. 

Sarah: So how long were you there? 

Mike: Six years. 

Sarah: Six years. Okay. And then. 

Mike: And then we moved down to Avon. 

Sarah: And then you moved down to Avon and the girls kids were all out of elementary school at that point? 

Mike: No. So my youngest ones, actually hadn't even started yet. So they were in preschool. My son was [00:11:00] in third grade and then Kayla was going into, she just finished sixth grade, was going to the seventh grade.

Mike: And so it was really good. I think it was a good move for them. Just more opportunities there. Kayla later one was part of winning Avon's first state championship in volleyball 

and was a mental 

Mike: attitude award winner that year. It was 2012. Yeah, very proud. But yeah, it was a good, it was a good experience.

Mike: I think moving down to. to Avon. And Tim Ogle, ironically, or maybe not grew up in Goshen. And so his, he had a brother in law that was serving on the school board. And so I had just seen the opening at Avon and actually there were two openings. So there was one in Fort Wayne and one in Avon. And we'd known about Fort Wayne.

Mike: It was Southwest Allen, I think Deer Ridge Elementary. So there were two positions open and Kayla had been playing space basketball with them. And so I had applied there and I applied to Goshen at the same, or at Avon the same time, just looking for a change more opportunities for our kids.

Mike: And I got offered both jobs within five minutes of each other and chose Indy because my brother was in the Indy area. But Tim was the [00:12:00] one who hired me at Avon and had some background there in Goshen. But Tim was another really good mentor of mine. He, I remember Tim saying in administration that there's virtually no job, no decision that you can't make tomorrow.

Mike: Now, obviously there's safety ones, there's emergency ones that you make, but some of those important decisions. But he's saying is. Take a breath and think about it before you make a big decision. And I always took that with me. But Tim was also a guy that told me he just, he felt like at the time, Sycamore Elementary, which is where I was going, was underachieving, and it was underachieving it like 80%.

Mike: Right. . . And so I'm coming from, and Goshen, where we were struggling to get to 80%. We had kids coming in at, 40% of our kids on grade level, and we're moving them to 60, 70, 80% in some cases. And they're starting there. And he's telling me that they're underachieving.

Mike: And he said, your job is to get that achievement up and then let me do it. And I just really appreciated it about Tim. He wasn't over my shoulder micromanaging. He just said, here's the expectation. And it was high. And then told me to go do it. 

Sarah: So when you walk into a school [00:13:00] like that where you don't know most of the people and you've been charged with a how do you even start to think about embedding that change in the organization?

Mike: Yeah, it takes time. And yeah, I would, one thing that I've learned from moving to administration, it is, it's not easy by any stretch, but it's much easier at the building level because I'm talking with the teachers and other staff members all the time. I'm in the building, just, you're just with them and you're in it with them.

Mike: And we, so I'd have a lot of. One on one conversations, just stopping by during a prep time or, just, checking to see how things were going and then knowing that they were maybe struggling with a change than talking about that and not doing that, put him on a spot in a big open meeting or things like that.

Mike: And so I think that's part of it, just continuing to talk about it. But I will say there, I remember at Sycamore, I think it was that first year I was there, I think it was in March. It's a tough meeting because we were looking around and our achievement, looking at some data and.

Mike: And, you don't always want to compare yourself to other schools, but there are other schools in our district that were just like us [00:14:00] and achieving much higher. And it had been tough, 25 school or four star school. I think they were calling it that time, the whole time, that Sycamore had been in existence and we had maybe one time and they said, and they even thought that was a mistake.

Mike: So anyway, so we had a hard conversation about that. It's not about being four star and waving the banner and bragging about it. It's about what that says is that's that many more students. There's 20 percent more students or 15 percent more students that have mastered standards and are meeting standards and on their path to being successful.

Mike: And that's what that means. And if we're not achieving that and we're not getting that done. Then we need to change some things and we've got to change our focus. And so it was a tough meeting because we'd been having those conversations along the way. And there was a little bit of pushback because great people, they're great teachers, but the thought was that standardized testing wasn't that important.

Mike: And the phrase was we teach the whole child and I'm like we want the whole child to graduate from high school too. And and so that's, you know what I mean? So those were tough conversations because. Just wanting [00:15:00] to teach the whole child, that's pretty hard to measure.

Mike: Standardized testing or, standards, mastery of standards, that's pretty easy to measure and it's pretty easy to hold accountable on that and I think that's where people get a little bit nervous when we start being held accountable for results, naturally that makes us nervous.

Sarah: So how long did it take to actually see the results of change? 

Mike: I would say that third year in terms of results, but you could see in the second year. Changes in how we did things and how in the conversations we had there was really a really good kind of paradigm shift After that march meeting it was really it was a difficult meeting, but it was a really good meeting for the long haul But yeah, we had a point.

Mike: I think it was maybe in year four. We had 100 of our third grade students pass math. And I think over half of them were awesome. Yeah. At that time it was ice step. And so they were past plus 50 percent over 50%. percent were past plus in, in math. And and that was all because of. The structures that we had, put in place and bought into and the teamwork we [00:16:00] had intervention blocks where they divided up students and took kids where they were at and stretch these kids, did spiraling curriculum for these kids and it just, it was great.

Mike: And it's just, that's when it's really fun. And teachers were having fun. It wasn't pressure. It wasn't, we've got to get this or, or anything negative. It was just, we're trying to get every student to master every standard. And. And working hard at it, and that's just, it's really fun. 

Sarah: I love that you approached it by taking the big idea, the big construct down to the individual student.

Sarah: Yeah. That's what it's got to be about. 

Mike: Right. 

Sarah: Okay, so when did you make the move to superintendent? 

Mike: So that journey was interesting too. So I grew up, like I said, in central Illinois. There's a school, Rantoul. I don't know if you're familiar with Rantoul. It's just outside of Champaign Urbana. And when I grew up, my, my uncle was actually a dentist there and if there's anything I was going to do other than education, I might've been a dentist because that was always fun to go to my uncle.

Mike: But when I was there, it was a like thriving upper middle class kind of community that an air force base there [00:17:00] and then the air force base left in the early nineties and the community didn't plan for that. It was the economic hub for the community and didn't plan for it. And so by the time. So now this is 2013, the superintendent there had heard about me through somebody else and that had its roots in Indiana.

Mike: And so she called me and asked me if I'd be interested in assistant superintendent position. And so we're still living in India, in Indianapolis area in Avon. Ironically, my oldest daughter is just going through back surgery from volleyball. when that happened. Just got out of five hour surgery and I get this call from the superintendent.

Mike: But I decided to do that and it was really, of all my jobs that might have been one of the most rewarding. I've enjoyed them all, but that community was really beaten down and kids were really struggling. And that was fun. It was fun to put structures in place. And help fill in those gaps that these kids desperately needed and learned a lot in doing that.

Mike: It's when I really started to [00:18:00] work more with, so in Goshen, we had really good foundations and RubyPain and putting in resources and cognitive development. And I could really see that then in, in Rantoul, how much that was needed. Because even though it was a huge need in Goshen students were just coming to school with just, so many gaps and you've got to start somewhere and I think that's something there's one of the books that that I'm reading now is talking about cognitive development and it's just something that I think schools really.

Mike: Really loose side of we get so caught up in kids passing standards and taking tests that we forget that in some cases, there's actually, cognitive development, the brain and rewiring the brain so that you can attend and focus and be ready to learn. And I think it's honestly, I think it's a piece that most schools miss because it's something additional that you're going to have to do.

Mike: So it's going to have to be a. Extra staff member, an extra program, and it's tough, right? It's tough to make those commitments, and usually those are the first things to go, and you just go back down [00:19:00] to, doing what you know. But anyway, yeah, so that was my first step into central office, was at Rantoul City Schools.

Mike: And then that led to Northwest Hendricks, and then that led to Norwell where I'm at now. 

Sarah: And I was going to ask you, you've been doing this for over 30 years, and some things about kids stay the same because kids are kids, but some things change. From your perspective, what has changed with those kids over 30 years, and how does it change how education needs to serve them?

Mike: Yeah, I think, one thing I think that's interesting is that learning doesn't change. The process of learning doesn't change. Back from John Dewey wrote about it in the fifties, right? It's the process for learning. You identify what you need to know. You set those objectives, you put the plan in place on how you're going to do it.

Mike: You have the practice, you get feedback, you reteach, you work in groups and then you at the end say. Did we learn it? And that's just the way it's always going to go, and I don't know if necessarily technology is to blame or the busyness of the family or what it is, but I do think there are, we are [00:20:00] receiving more students that don't come to school ready to attend, things that we took for granted.

Mike: I talked about my parents teaching Sunday school, I grew up sitting in a pew at church focused on what was going on, sitting in Sunday school class, focusing on what's going on before I ever got into a classroom plus sitting at the dinner table right and having conversations and you know we take those kind of things for granted that's just what you do as a family but it's actually training the brain on how to do that how to sit and attend and how to focus and I think we do have more students that come not with that ability To attend and to focus and that's why I go to that cognitive development That needs to be a component of our programming.

Mike: We need to have things in place where we rewire that brain and get have students the ability to learn because if you can't attend and focus , how do you learn? 

Sarah: And one of the things I know my team has been really enjoying working with you on is how space can [00:21:00] Yeah. Transform itself to sup to support that right.

Sarah: To support different cognitive development through flexible learning environments. Can you talk a little bit about what space can do to help? 

Mike: Yeah. And in this particular situation, we had a really challenging classrooms. There were triangle classrooms, small classrooms with a lot of fixed casework.

Mike: Drinking fountain sink in the, in one part of it. And so there's just very limited to what a teacher could do to move things around. And I think that the most important part of having flexible spacing is there's times where you do need to directly teach a whole group and kids need to be able to attend in that there's times where kids need to be off practicing somewhere else while you're maybe doing a small group.

Mike: There's times where kids just need to be in groups themselves, spread around working together. And I just think, There's different types of activities that you need throughout the learning day. And if you have a classroom that kind of prohibits that or restricts that, you're just taking that component away.

Mike: And so that was a really big part of this project that I'm, teachers are excited about, I'm excited about. It was fun to watch. It's just removing all the [00:22:00] fixed case work and having everything unmovable furniture that teachers can move around. The only thing that's really fixed in the room is where their smart board is.

Mike: And which is where it probably needs to be anyway, because it's on the biggest wall and that's what you're going to use. So they would have put it there anyway. And we got feedback from teachers on where they would want that. But everywhere else in the room, teacher has pretty much the discretion to move things around.

Mike: And even. Day by day if they needed to because it's on casters and all that. Yeah, it's just. I think it's huge for teachers to be able to do that. 

Sarah: And it's not a very tough sell to get teachers to want to get rid of triangle shaped classrooms. I will say, in that specific case.

Sarah: Yes. But teaching the teachers and helping them with their own resilience as they as they walk into the classroom every day. How do you look at administration's role in supporting teachers and helping them be as flexible and resilient, really, as they have to be? 

Mike: We have a tagline, it's our mission right now at KnowWell, it's called Ready for What's Next.

Mike: And it's more than just, we didn't want to just have a mission statement or just have a tagline. It's really actually who we want to be. That's who we want to train our kids to [00:23:00] be, because it's going to be changing. The game's going to change on you all the time. And you do have to be ready for what's next, and you do have to be ready to adapt.

Mike: And so I think, number one, I think modeling that for teachers and, but at the same time, recognizing that just even, I've made the example at Sycamore. Recognizing where we're at and knowing that we're making a paradigm shift and knowing that's going to be tough for some people, but also articulating why is it important that we're doing this, right?

Mike: And I think, one for right now for a lot of schools is which I think Indiana is doing the right thing along with some other states. But the legislation on science of reading being the, being the kind of the mandate with the state that's what you need to use for curriculum wise for your reading instruction.

Mike: For some people that was a paradigm shift because, a whole language or kind of that more open approach, which again in itself isn't terrible, you just have to make sure that you're explicitly teaching phonics ephendymic awareness. And But that's a shift for some people and for in our district that was a [00:24:00] shift for some people Some really good teachers that were successful with what they were doing But understanding that's not just about what's happening in their classroom It's what happened what's happening in all the classrooms and what happens when someone leaves your classroom goes to the next classroom and a new teacher comes in that doesn't have your 20 years experience and the art of teaching that you've crafted over the last 20 years So that's why these systematic approaches are really important.

Mike: And so I think for some teachers early on, like that was a really difficult conversation. I really like where we're at right now at Norwell teachers coming around to that. But again, I think it's, understanding the big picture, understanding that it's a system. And understanding that they're not throwing away everything that they know.

Mike: They just, these, this is what we have to do consistently in every room. And so I think that's it. I think that resiliency, because it is a lot and there's, there can be a lot of pendulum swinging and education and that can, if you've been doing it for a while, that can get tiring.

Mike: And that can weigh on you. But I think always, tried to control that the best I could as an administrator going through. But I think [00:25:00] just explaining number one, recognizing where people are at. And then number two, where, why are we making the shift? Why is this necessary?

Mike: And helping people see the bigger picture with that. 

Sarah: Okay. So thinking about the teacher experience what advice would you give to students graduating this spring or going into education? 

Mike: One I do think education unfortunately is. I don't know if it's unfairly attacked, but attacked, right?

Mike: And it's easy to attack. I think sometimes education. And so there can be this negative cloud over that and do, is this something I want to go into? And it's just pretty sad because it's a very rewarding, career to be in, but I guess some of my advice, I think for some, if this is where their passion is and something they want to do is first of all, hang in there and it's, find the right district.

Mike: Don't always just take the first job, look around when you go into an interview, understand. That you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. Is this the right fit for you? But more importantly, I just think I do think education's on the, the right pendulum swing right now, and there's a lot of positive things happening.

Mike: I do appreciate, I know people [00:26:00] always talk, anytime you're in anything in government that you're underfunded and, but I, I think to a certain extent that's been true, not for a certain extent, it's been true for education, but I do appreciate the last couple of years. There's been.

Mike: Quite a bit of funding that's headed our way in state tuition and we've taken advantage of that At norwell and really increased teacher pay to a place That's really competitive and we were in a two year collective bargaining agreement during the second year of it so next fall we'll negotiate again and we're already planning for how we can You know make another bump and for us It's not so much of a negotiation as it is a problem solving with the teachers union because we want the same thing we want our teachers to be highly paid and What are positions to be highly competitive?

Mike: So I think students entering, leaving college that are interested in being teachers, I do think they're coming out at a good time. And I think there's, I think there's good opportunities and I think the pay is going to be someplace that's competitive with some of their other colleagues that are graduating in other professions.

Sarah: When you were coming out of school with an education degree, [00:27:00] what do you wish you knew? 

Mike: I wish I knew, I don't, I think, going back to what I learned right in that first year was that, you just don't have to have all the answers. And I think the other thing that I learned at Wawasee that I wish I would have known is just engaging students and being interested in the learning.

Mike: And that's something that I learned just to be a quick, a second here for this. I was at Wawasee. If you can. One of the things I'm proudest of, so Kaz Zaino was a guy I taught science with and he was your typical science teacher. He had wild, crazy white hair, still wore the same clothes he wore in the 70s, just very eccentric kind of guy but really smart.

Mike: He had five degrees. I think he could teach five subjects at our middle school, but he was taught science on the small team and I was on the big team. We just really emphasize field work and labs and really engaging kids. And and as the fun stuff, but again, making connections and understanding that these are all part of systems and how systems work together.

Mike: But we we had eighth graders. on this is in the spring at six o'clock in the morning on Wednesdays [00:28:00] and on Saturdays to go out birdwatching with us. We had a nature preserve that was close to our middle school and they would, and they could of course do this on their own. We just gave this opportunity and we had waiting lists for 13, 14 year olds to come in at 6 a.

Mike: m. And what that just told me that. What makes kids want to do that? We had a good time and it was fun. They learned a lot on skills that they could take with them, but it was that's what it takes, right? So being connected to the learning, being connected, being engaged.

Mike: And I think that's just, you don't get there overnight. You learn to do that. Don't expect to some do some jump right into their first teaching experience and they have that and they're off and running. Some it takes a little bit to get that done, but understand that's what it's all about.

Mike: These kids being connected to the learning, because when they're connected to the content, they're going to remember it. If they're just remembering it for ritual compliance to pass the test, it's going to be gone when the test is done. That's that sticky learning stuff, that hands on 

Sarah: immersive. I love that.

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So a couple of questions to close us out. [00:29:00] So what's next for you as a leader? 

Mike: I like where we're at Norwell. We're continuing. Norwell is a good school district anyway. That I came into that talk about close knit community. That's there, but we just, we, we still feel like we have places we need to go and more that we can do as a.

Mike: As a school district, and we really believe that we can be one of the top school district in Indiana, and so that's where my focus is, and that's what it's always about, for me, wherever I've been it's really about student outcomes and how do we maximize student outcomes and maximize student experiences while they're with us.

Mike: So that's what we're focused on at Norwell and yeah, I'm really enjoying 

Sarah: it. All right. And then I'm gonna ask you the same question I ask everybody at the very end. What are you currently reading or what do you recommend everybody that reads? And you would be the first guest to have actually brought the books into the office.

Mike: Yeah. I brought a couple just because these are things that I'm just, so I'm part of a Wells County leadership. And I have a team right now, we're in the second year of it. And it's, I really enjoy it. It's just a lot of people at different places within the community, different [00:30:00] leadership type roles.

Mike: And so it's good. So we're reading a book called toy box leadership by Ron Hunter and Michael Wattle. And it just has different, I don't know if you've ever read it or seen it, but just like different leadership skills within. The toys that you grew up playing and you've heard me talk a lot today about connectedness and that just being everything it's, of course I was raised in middle school and there's no time it's more important that kids are connected than at middle school.

Mike: And the very first toy that they talk about are Legos and they talk about being connected, right? So that's just a really good books. It takes through, uses toys as an example, of leadership traits that you need to have. So I thought that's really good. The other one is Roger Stark and Betsy Hill.

Mike: They have this software called brain wear and it's, and I don't know that we're necessarily going to use it, anything like that, but it's just, it's cognitive development. So it's software that mainly for your older kids, like fifth grade and up they use just to build cognition and skills there.

Mike: But the title of the book is your child learns differently. Now what? And it says the truth for parents. And so I've read a lot of Eric Jensen and, just a lot of just how the brain works and just understanding that, cognition [00:31:00] is everything. And so it's just another take on that, that you just have to.

Mike: And he talks about how that's just a piece of schools is just missing and he's right. And so I just think that's something I think if you know if all schools or even if we had a state kind of focus on that to focus on early cognitive development for kids where that's just not in place for them, I think you'd see major gains.

Sarah: That's awesome. And those are two new recommendations. Thank you. That's awesome Mike's thanks so much for sharing your journey for sharing your insights. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on the second grandbaby. Excellent boy or girl Little girl, what's her name? Ellie 

Mike: and 

Sarah: hi Ellie And this has been luminate navigating the unknown through creative leadership Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe So you never miss an episode connect with us on Facebook Instagram or LinkedIn at Schmidt Associates And until next time, keep navigating the unknown with creativity and confidence.