The salient point of today's discourse revolves around the concept of the belief gap, a critical theme we explore with our esteemed guest, Dr. Franklin CampbellJones. This episode delves into the intricate relationships between identity, belief, and the educational environments we cultivate. Dr. CampbellJones, a distinguished educator with over five decades of experience, invites us to reflect upon how our beliefs shape our interactions within the classroom and influence the dignity and agency of every student. He posits that the future of education hinges upon a radical humanization of our schools, wherein hope is nurtured, and every learner is afforded the opportunity to thrive. Thus, we engage in a profound examination of how we, as educators and leaders, must embody the principles of equity and humanity to create inclusive learning spaces that honor the unique identities of all students.

Additional Notes

The dialogue with Dr. Franklin CampbellJones illuminates the concept of the belief gap, a critical barrier to educational equity and inclusivity. Dr. CampbellJones, a luminary in educational leadership, articulates the necessity for educators to confront their own biases and beliefs in order to foster environments where every student feels valued and recognized. He asserts that the act of teaching transcends mere pedagogy; it is a profound exchange of identities, where educators must bring their authentic selves into the classroom. The episode challenges listeners to interrogate their perceptions of students and to cultivate a culture of hope and possibility. The conversation further delves into the imperative of humanizing education, constructing a future where all students can thrive, thereby dismantling the transactional nature of traditional schooling systems. Dr. CampbellJones emphasizes that by nurturing hope and ensuring access to opportunities, educators can enable students to pursue their dreams, thus redefining the future of education as one rooted in humanity.

Takeaways:

• In our exploration of the belief gap, we engage with the profound notion of self-discovery within educational contexts.
• Dr. Franklin CampbellJones emphasizes the urgent necessity of humanizing educational environments for student success.
• The cultivation of hope and opportunity in schools is paramount for fostering innovative and inclusive learning spaces.
• We must interrogate our own beliefs to better connect with the students we serve and support.
• Future-ready schools must prioritize dignity, agency, and belonging for every learner in the educational system.
• The conversation underscores the importance of understanding our own identities as educators to enhance our effectiveness in the classroom.

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Follow Students Matter, LLC on Instagram or LinkedIn — or find any of us there: Kathy Mohney, Michael Pipa, Dr. Alicia Monroe, and me, Dr. Grant Chandler.

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It’s more than a platform — it’s a community.

A free, curated, safe harbor for educators, leaders, and thinkers who want to reflect, connect, and take action together.

Inside Below Deck, you’ll find our special segment: The Wheelhouse: All Hands on Deck, extended content from today’s episode —where purpose meets possibility and learning stays joyful, collaborative, and deeply human.

Join us at LearnHarbor.thinkific.com and become part of this growing movement to build Future Ready Schools — where innovation is always rooted in humanity.

Until Next Time Remember: Keep your doors open and your hearts even wider.

In today's episode, we're diving deeply into the belief gap with our amazing guest, Dr. Franklin Campbell Jones.

There's so much to talk about.

A new episode of the Wheelhouse begins right.

The future of education depends on a radical humanization of schools.

Places where hope is cultivated, opportunities are opened, and innovation is harnessed to serve humanity.

Only then can we create futures worthy of each student's dreams.

We begin by cultivating hope.

We ensure possibilities are real and accessible.

We design futures rooted in humanity.

And remember, the future is already here and it must be deeply human centered.

The Wheelhouse exists to create an inclusive community of empowered educators who believe that together we can disrupt the transactional nature of schooling and reimagine what it means to learn, lead and belong.

We envision districts, schools and classrooms where every student feels confident, capable, optimistic, well supported and emboldened to be and to become who they're meant to be.

Each episode of the Wheelhouse explores the knowledge, practices and stories that bring this vision to life.

Our team, Kathy mone, Michael Pipa, Dr. Alicia Monroe and I, Dr. Grant Chandler, alongside our guests, take on the fundamental challenge of realizing what we want most for every single student to experience in school.

Dignity, agency and belonging.

In season 11, we ask a simple but profound question.

Where are we going?

We strive toward future ready schools that keeps humanity at its core.

So welcome back to the Wheelhouse where we steer into the future of education through the lens of innovation rooted in humanity.

Today, we continue in season 11 in this journey by looking squarely at what it means to be future ready, where we affirm, uplift and extend opportunity for every learner.

In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Franklin Campbell Jones, scholar, author, coach and a leading voice in courageous equity centered leadership.

If you've been following the conversations with Dr. Janice Gobert, Chiara Latimer and Neil Curry, you know that we've been building toward this moment understanding not just what our schools must become, but who we must be as leaders to create them.

Dr. Franklin Campbell Jones has been an educator for over 50 years.

He is co founder of Campbell Jones and Associates where he provided professional learning and consultant services to school organizations and systems throughout the United States and Canada.

His work and scholastic interest engaged audiences in the People's Republic of China, Thailand, Canada, Costa Rica and the Netherlands.

Franklin actively participated in presenting numerous state, national and international education, professional and scholastic research forums including Learning Forward, ASCD and AERA.

Dr. Campbell Jones is the author of many titles, several of which include the Cultural Proficiency Journey, the Culturally Proficient School and Culture Class and race conversations that unite and energize your school and community.

He was honored to narrate and co produce the documentary film voices of life under segregation with colleagues Gary homana and Loma McDermott McNulty.

The film is currently under consideration by the Smithsonian museum as an addition to the national museum of African American history and culture.

Dr. Campbell Jones pushes us to confront the human side of the work, Our beliefs, our biases, and our responsibility to cultivate hope in every classroom.

Together, we'll examine how leaders can create learning environments where dignity is protected, identity is affirmed, and students feel seen as distinctive and irreplaceable.

So settle in.

This is a conversation that cuts through the noise and gets right to the heart of leadership, humanity, and the future we're building for our k. You're listening to season 11, episode six of the Wheelhouse, where we're joined by Dr. Franklin Campbell Jones.

Let's get into it.

Good morning.

I'm Dr. Grant Chandler, and this is another episode of the wheelhouse.

So I first want to welcome the amazing wheelhouse team of Kathy Mone, Michael Pipa and Dr. Alicia Munro.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Welcome to our favorite day of the week.

Tuesday.

We get to spend time together.

We drop an episode.

It's fantastic.

It is fantastic.

So just hours ago, we dropped an amazing conversation about representation with Neal Curry, the executive director of the funditious center.

And today we are speaking with an amazing educator.

I've seen this man in action.

I've read his books.

He is incredible what he does.

So I am super excited to welcome the very famous Dr. Franklin Campbell Jones to the wheelhouse.

Sir, welcome.

Good morning to all of you.

It's good to be here.

We are beyond thrilled to have you join us here today.

So good.

We've got a lot to talk about.

We have a lot to talk about.

And I'm going to jump right in because we have so much to talk about.

We in season 10, we had an amazing conversation with Duane Chisholm about the belief gap.

And we're going to return to that conversation today and kind of explore that on a deeper level and in some greater detail.

And I've got some loaded questions to ask this amazing man who has spent his life talking about the cultural proficient journey and building culturally proficient schools and having culturally proficient leaders.

And so the first question, which is loaded and, you know, who knows where we'll go?

Right.

The belief gap is a really important concept.

It's also one that's very difficult for certain types of people.

Certain people, depending on how they identify to look at.

So, Franklin.

Sir?

When we look into the belief gap, if we're brave enough to do that, sir, what might we find?

We would find ourselves.

That's really what this is all about.

You have to find yourself.

There's this notion out there that if somehow you get up in the morning in education, you get dressed, you prepare yourself to go to work, and so you do all the things for that and the world is objectified in some sort of way.

It's outside of you.

And so you, you do all of that and then you go to work.

And it's expected that you should leave yourself at home.

And that's an impossibility.

You take yourself with you wherever you go.

And so knowing you is the most important thing in all of this.

So when you look inside of that gap, you really take a real good look, you see you and you're there and you become comfortable with you in all aspects of not only who you are, but what you are.

And those are two important distinctions.

You know, who you are is your identity.

What you are is connected to everything.

And so bringing that into that notion that we call belief is real important.

I bring my African American identity into that space.

I bring my male identity into all these things that society has labeled us.

I bring into that space.

Prior to that, I bring me into that space which is not any of those things.

Those are things that I just take on.

So in that gap, when you really look at it and you fall in love with it, not only who you are, but what you are, you'll see all of those things.

And there's something else that's really important.

You realize that everybody else is doing the same thing.

You know, the children are bringing that into that space, Other colleagues are bringing that into that space.

It's a co created space.

It's one where we do it together.

There's a togetherness there that happens.

And so that becomes the space.

And the belief simply becomes the governing principle that we live by.

And it's really quite simple.

Very, very simple.

But we tend to make it complicated, more complicated than we have to.

But that means we have to in some cases, depending on who we are and what we bring to that space and what some of our beliefs are.

That means we might have to interrogate some of those beliefs that we, that we bring to the space.

Is that true?

Yeah, we have to.

Because the space isn't becomes a negotiated space.

You know, it becomes a space where we get together and we talk about things.

And some people say you compromise I don't think.

I don't think you compromise in that there's nothing to really give up.

What you do is you share.

And then when that sharing, your horizon simply expands, it doesn't shrink.

And so your perspective just broadens, it gets larger.

All these other titles and categories, like male, female, race, all those things are identity associations.

They're not the you, those are those, those.

It's like going into a mall and you.

And you're putting on clothes.

As a simple metaphor.

How to look at this?

All those is like, you know, you put on different clothes, those clothes can come off and you're still there.

And so all those different titles can come off.

I mean, when I first met Alicia, she was not Dr. Monroe, but the essence of her was there.

It was just.

It was just a beautiful thing to watch.

And we all have that, and it's all present.

We come with that.

And a lot of times, most of my experience in education has been that a lot of that has been stripped away or covered up.

And what these identities that we take on of identity of a student, the identity of a teacher, the identity of a Mrs. Or a Mr. Or whatever those identities are, get in the way.

Of us.

And that is a real problem.

So what our beliefs are really important.

I strongly believe that to be the case.

So it governs my behavior and how I interact with people governs me as a part of the human experience.

It governs me a part of whenever.

If I go to Kenya, it's there.

If I spend time in Colombia, it's there.

If I spend time in Costa Rica, it's there.

Southeast Asia, it's there.

All of that's always with me, and more importantly, it's with everyone else.

Each one of us are having that same experience, negotiating the space around us, sharing it, that perspective.

What does it look like when we bring our beliefs about children to the classroom?

How does that influence how we teach or how we lead or what we do?

Well, it's important to understand what a belief is.

You know, a belief is just simply a governing principle by which you choose to, you know, organize your behaviors around.

That's all it is.

So you can.

You can take on any belief and choose, organize your behavior around that.

How you move through the world, how you engage with others, what sort of actions you take, you don't take.

And the thing about a belief is that when you take it on, it becomes an automatic part of your subconscious behavior, you know, your subconscious.

And so it becomes automatic.

You know, it's.

It's like Driving down the road, you're trying to get home, and you know how you got there.

You simply forget the fact that you.

You've taken this route so many times.

You never stop to think that you pump the brakes and do all those things and make this turn.

You're on autopilot.

That's what the belief is.

It's a governing principle that now, at this point, your behavior is on autopilot.

When I went to school, I was not only an A student, I was the A student.

You have to understand that I was not the A. I was the number one A student in my class.

And when I walked into the classroom, I sized up who was the better student.

That was me.

I mean, since kindergarten, that was me.

And I know that.

I know that about myself.

I went through high school a student through and through.

I didn't just go to college.

I went to UC Santa Cruz.

I'm telling you.

I mean, not just any college, you know, I went to University of San Francisco.

I got an A. I remember getting an A minus in the class and having an argument with the professor over was like, this is impossible.

You know who I am?

I'm.

I do not get A minuses.

And so this became very serious in terms of how I was educated, my experience.

I brought that with me into the classroom.

I also brought with me into the class my experience of growing up in a segregated school system where I was literally told by the entire system that you cannot have these things, you know, in Arkansas and El Dorado and my hometown, and desegregating the school system there, as one of the first group to go out and do that, and basically pushing through the whole notion of, you can't tell me what to do.

And so I brought that into my work and all the things I do.

What that looks like is that when you reflect upon your experience.

And as much as I had all my educational courses about how to teach and structure a, you know, lesson and all those things, those experiences were there with me in terms of when I work with my students.

I brought that with me in terms of what kind of thing that I wanted to share with them.

I didn't just teach social studies, I taught those children social studies.

Gotta look at a place for the modifiers here.

This is important.

And it's important to know that when you're working with a subject matter, you're teaching the children.

Because I did not want to be ignored as a child.

So I brought that whole notion with me that I did not want children to be ignored regardless of What I was teaching, whether it was reading, American lit, social science, anthropology, and believe it or not, when I went and taught my freshman students, who I first started teaching in the prison system in California, by the way, I taught the same way all the way through to when I was teaching Alicia in her doctorate courses, there was no difference in that I saw them first, regardless of what the subject matter was.

And not to be ignored was a huge thing.

That's, that was a belief that I developed.

And to see the spirit in front of me was extraordinarily important.

Now that was a belief that I carried.

And so we all have that belief.

We have.

Whatever your belief happens to be, you do not go through this world not believing.

Everybody does.

Discovering what that belief is is crucial because it is organizing how it is you engage with students, how you engage with everyone else and not recognize that is literally be walking around the world asleep and not aware of what's going on about you.

You're subjected at that point to whatever belief that comes to you and you organize yourself around it.

And therefore you simply, you know, go through the world and being so basically pulled around by whatever belief that you, you happen to associate with at the moment.

And so that's part of the problem.

Teachers, educators have to be aware of what beliefs they hold and we have to be aware of how those beliefs, those beliefs engage with students.

And they need to be predicated on a value that is for me, it's a value of care, a value of love, A value that says that you are as important as I am.

We're both co. We're equals, regardless of age.

That's more important to me than you say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you.

But, but regardless of age, that 4 year old that you have in front of you is your co equal.

Think about that for a second.

You know, at kindergartners, your CO equal, that 10th grader is your co equal.

And so I'm sharing me with them.

That's what we call learning.

That's what we call teaching.

Teaching is a sharing of yourself with another.

Think about that for a second.

So when I walk into a school today, I'm going to say, how am I going to share me with my students?

How am I going to share my love for English with my students?

How am I going to teach, how am I going to share my love of this with students?

So I'm not going to go teach math today, I'm going to go teach students my love of math.

It rearranges everything.

And so when I was in My.

And Alicia may relate to some of these experiences, but I had this genuine love at the time when I was working with them for understanding quantum mechanics.

It was very important to me.

And so because I thought it was a way of unlocking the relative nature of stuff.

And it was highly into that.

And it was also based in some sort of what we call the hard sciences of physics, which was a big deal at the time.

And, and, and I was always kind of a pseudoscience geek anyway.

When I was a kid, you know, I was a kid that listened to Mr. Wizard on TV.

It blew things up.

And although I didn't major in science, I loved it.

You know, I loved it.

But there was that conversation about the whole idea of being relative to one another and sharing with one another, even at the level of quarks and electrons and all the way through that just fascinated me.

That was very interesting.

And that the whole idea of the dominance around the atomic world disappeared.

And I. I can relate to this.

And so when I was with them, I sort of looked at what they were doing and found out what they were interested in and went with them.

And folks were interested in all kinds of things.

And Alicia became very interested in the biological aspects of things, which I found fascinating anyway.

And there were other people who were interested in astrophysics and others who were interested in the philosophical.

My job as a teacher was to go with them.

So there's a whole lot of loaded layers that you have in the last few minutes have talked about and thrown out there for us to digest.

Kathy, Michael, Alicia.

So I want to talk about.

And it took me right back to the classroom, right.

And there are a couple of references, right.

So as we deconstruct, that was the astounding offering that you placed in the space.

And I'm never surprised.

It's just genius and brilliant, right.

It brings back.

And I always rest on the ladder of inference and Chris Argus work at the beliefs and the reflective loop of the beliefs and how that's that engine that charges us every day and how we need to interrogate those beliefs in order to develop authentically this engaged community that affirms all that are in the space, right.

Which means that we have to really deconstruct in order to reframe and frame.

And then I also think about leadership in the new science.

Right.

We had to read.

Franklin had us reading everything, right.

So we had to read this.

And during his quantum mechanics frame phase of life, he had his students read about fractals, right.

And how these fractals Come together and they kind of in the air, they swerve.

And to today I use this in my teachings, right?

And all of a sudden, they will either come together and meet and join, or they'll go and look for another community.

But with all of that, how do we negotiate these spaces?

Right.

In community, we're all can coexist well, for the shared vision, I think about a conversation that rings true to today.

Franklin and I had a conversation around poverty.

And I don't know if he remembers this.

And he said, well, Alicia, it depends on how we define poverty.

If we look at poverty along a socioeconomic status, we all, you know, he and I come from humble beginnings.

But that doesn't mean that our household was not rich.

Franklin's household was full of music, right.

And faith.

Mine was full of faith.

A lot of history, right?

So are we going to go through the social classification of what poverty is, or are we going to look at our students for the richness that they bring to the spaces that we coexist with them in?

I really want to unpack some of these concepts because I do believe that it's the love and the care and the acceptance and respect and community are the critical elements to filling the belief gap.

Well, those are really important fractals, I guess, is one way to look at it.

Pieces and parts of what we're talking about.

So those would be seen.

You might look at those as aspects.

More fundamentally is the notion that we're all one and the same.

And to love myself is to love you.

It's almost.

How am I going to say it this way?

It's almost too simple.

Uh.

It'S in.

In the.

Flip it around.

If I don't love me, it's gonna be hard to love you.

And there are a lot of folks who go around the world not loving themselves.

And so we come up with different ways of splitting ourselves out socioeconomically.

We look in terms of what you have the right classical experiences or not the things that would consider you in terms of the different kinds of elements that we see as educated or uneducated.

How well you speak English, you don't speak English.

We call things coding.

When people go from one linguistic structure to another linguistic structure, we do all kinds of things like that to distinguish one from the other versus the sameness that we have.

The ability to move across spaces, the ability to talk, to do multiple languages, the ability to live in different social, economic situations, the adaptability of the human experience.

Those are the sameness things.

Those are the things that every Human, you know, that's fully developed in terms of their physicalness.

We're all able to do that.

We're able to speak every language on this planet non stop.

Any person can speak Cantonese, any person can speak Spanish, any person can speak English.

There's no difference.

The difference is when we want to separate ourselves from and then assign some value of importance and this importance around it.

So the notion of poverty and in terms of social status falls into those categories of your worthiness in society on those things.

And there are people, and I've been around people who are millionaires, billionaires.

I've been with people who speak different languages.

I grew up with people who barely spoke English.

Well, those are the people that raised me.

I was, I grew up in an environment where communities came together to feed one another because we raised all of the essentials in terms of foods and the animals and the stocks.

I grew up in southern Arkansas, in the woods basically, you know, and I'm very proud of that.

Haven't learned to survive that way.

And I'm very proud of the notion that I can go back there.

In fact, I was just there in September, enjoyed myself.

Dropped all of the San Francisco ness in me, dropped all the New Yorkness in me, dropped all of the Baltimore and Washington D.C. in me so I could have the conversations I need to have with my relatives who came up out of the woods who still live there.

And we talked about all the good times that we had.

So the whole idea of this notion of poverty and all those things are constructs by design to separate us for the egotistical notion of those who are better and those who are not.

And in education we participate in this.

We grade kids just like we grade lumber.

I was going to get that.

Say, by the way, I'll just remind everybody that right here, you know, that, that, that, that still, those notions are still there in terms of who's the best and who's not the best.

Poverty folds into that.

And people who, who find themselves extremely economically wealthy are very impoverished when it comes to adaptability.

They cannot move across spaces.

They will do whatever it can to make you move into their space so they don't have to work.

It's hard.

Those become notions of power at that point and don't realize that those notions of powers are expressions of weakness.

My inability to adapt, my inability to move across spaces, my inability to be fully human because to be fully human is to be fully adaptable.

To be fully human is to be able to speak any language that's in front of me comfortably because I have the brain power to do it.

That's what it means to be full of human.

There are children every day who are living in impoverished situations socioeconomically, who are extremely adaptable, who.

Who show their intelligence on a daily basis in terms of the humanness that is not recognized by the society.

That these structures that we call school and these structures that express.

They express non.

Love.

Let me just put it that way.

They do not express love.

They express the whole idea of trying to mold the human experience into something that looks only one or two ways.

It's oftentimes there are attempts to take the humanness out of you.

And we call that educated.

We call it educated.

Let me give you a story.

I remember working with a group of students out here in Los Angeles, and I was reviewing the school and I was going through reviewing the school and, you know, looking at elements of whether it was a successful school or not.

And then we would write this up, and then we reported to the state department of education and score the school, and we did all of those kinds of things.

You know, in that time, I was into that, you know, and I learned later that.

No, no, no, no, no.

But at the time, I was really important that way.

In this school, there were children who came as Spanish speakers into that school.

And the approach at the time was not to let the children speak Spanish at the school in order for them to learn English.

It was called English only.

You may have heard that these are fully functioning kids who were speaking a Latin based language.

And Latin is a pretty basic part of what.

Of the.

Of the English experience.

Right?

I mean, if you really want to learn English really well, Latin is a good thing to know.

Well, these are kids who were learning that particular linguistic structure, and they came with it, but they were being told not to express that.

Express a knockoff, which is English.

I'll say that English is a knockoff of a lot of languages.

So we wrote it up and said, wouldn't it and.

But they were.

They were supposed to not speak Spanish all the way through third or fourth grade, which then they were then allowed to go back and learn Spanish again.

And so we said, is it possible for teachers to learn Spanish and use that as a bridge to learn English?

And the teachers went into a tizzy over this.

And we said, well, what does that look like?

Well, it would look like the school district would then invest in teachers learning Spanish.

That means you would take Spanish in the summers, you would develop these programs, you'd bring them in for them to Learn to speak Spanish, learn conversational Spanish.

You don't have to write around you.

You don't have to learn the academics of it.

Plus people to have a conversation with, parents be able to have a conversations, so on and so forth.

And there's one of the things that I've done, my wife and I've done.

We've gone someplace to learn a different language.

Almost every year.

We, you know, we put ourselves in a situation.

We spent, you know, like, time in Costa Rica learning Spanish.

We spent.

We're gonna.

I planned this next year to go to Southeast Asia and spend some time in Southeast Asia.

We want to go there, take that trip.

We spend some time in Nigeria.

I'm sorry, in Kenya, learning all about that.

Put yourself in a place where you have to adapt.

This was not the case in the school.

So they really, really had a tough time with it because they said the notion was.

The belief was.

This is what the belief was.

I want the best and brightest.

The best and brightest, to me, looks like English.

Your back, your family structure is that of English.

You come here with certain elements of English in place, not language.

English.

English was not looked at as a language, by the way.

English was looked at as a subject.

This is important notion because when you look at English as a language, you begin to see all the elements that makes up a good English speaker.

But if I don't see it as a language, I see it as a way of life, then those children come to me not matching my way of life, and I don't have to.

That means I have to work harder.

My belief is I'm okay.

They're not.

They need to be fixed in some sort of way and fixing them, meaning stripping away the elements that they have and infusing with the elements that look like me.

So therefore, I extend myself on them.

And a lot of times it comes off as extremely extraordinarily oppressive to students.

And it's only a matter of years before kids develop a notion of, I don't like this.

And by third grade, they talk about dropping out.

And that's usually the standard measure as opposed to being welcomed in a linguistic structure that you know and that value is there.

We take the value that you have and don't create a situation of poverty, linguistic poverty, and one of linguistic wealth.

And language, of course, is the bridge that we share from one mind to the next in a symbolic world.

Because we live in a symbolic world.

We know that, right?

We live in a world of symbols, and language is a symbolic notion.

And so as soon As I know the code to the symbols, ah, suddenly I got my door, I'm inside the room, but if I don't know the code to the symbols, I'm outside the room always.

And so the question for me is, as an educator, which means to bring out the best in the children, how do I do that unless I'm willing to walk in the room myself?

I have to go to their room.

And so this whole notion of poverty is kind of a, you know, it's just smoke and mirrors to keep us separated one from the other.

As an educator, as a teacher, I have to walk in all of those worlds.

And the key of that is I have to walk in those worlds.

I bring myself into those spaces.

You know, I, I, I have to know me to get there.

And, and the, the tragedy of all of this is that we put people in places that we call classrooms who are extremely impoverished themselves and they share that with the kids.

We spend a lot of time, and I have taught K12 college, graduate school.

We spend a lot of time stripping people of themselves as opposed to enhancing what they bring.

And that's what we're trying to do.

I'm of the belief that we come into this world with something to offer.

It and we have to be willing to show up then Franklin, as we are.

And I find one of the most difficult tasks, not really a task, but really the process in all of that is as a leader in a K12 space is coaching that piece, right?

We often, even as leaders, we, we do show up being impoverished.

And then therefore, that's how we lead and that's how we, we coach around that versus understanding who we are as humans and allowing for that space.

Because coaching around beliefs is so much more difficult than coaching around pedagogy.

I, I, you know what?

I would, I would add to what you're saying, Kathy, this way.

To understand coaching is to begin to, so if we just sort of break that down just a little bit and stand back away from it and look at that relationship of coach, the coach and the one that's being coached, there are some assumptions that are at play here.

That is, if the coach knows what, what she's doing and the coach knows what you're trying to do, and if the coach doesn't know what she's doing, it's impossible to help the person do what they're trying to do.

So there's some assumptions at play there that don't quite always add up.

A lot of time being coached is just an assigned space as opposed to Being one of knowingness.

You know, the assumption is that if I'm going to coach you as a wide receiver in a football game or a team, that I should have at least been a wide receiver myself.

You know, if I'm, if I'm going to be the conductor in a band and I should have at least played an instrument, you know, there's something that I should know.

You know, I shouldn't just get up there, you know, and I'm just waving my hands.

I mean, I should know something fundamentally.

Which means we should know ourselves and show up as ourselves.

Bingo.

Right, Right.

I mean, that's bottom line.

So my, my team jokes that are one on ones are therapy because it's about who they are as humans.

Who we are as humans first and foremost.

And understanding ourselves because that's what we bring to every space.

And when we're entrusted with children.

Yes.

We, we, we can't take that lightly.

No.

And I'm gonna, you know, put a, put an exclamation point behind what you're saying.

You know, if I can't bring me into the space, then I'm gonna have a tough time being with someone else in the space.

I mean, how can you be in a space, how can you be in a space with someone and don't show up?

You know, it just, it just doesn't work.

I mean, I mean, I don't care how quantum mechanics you want to be.

It just, you have to be there.

Or it just may not be the space for you.

So I oftentimes as I move into school districts and I build and develop and we build and develop together sometime.

The question is as simple as, is this your space or have you been in this space for a moment and maybe your season is over?

Right.

We really have to have those truth telling, reflective conversations with ourselves.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's time to move on clothes for the season.

Sometimes you just have to move on, you know?

Yeah, you, you gave something a try.

You know what?

It didn't work quite like I thought it.

Grant.

Grant is like.

And on that note, we're gonna go.

Oh, we're headed to the after show, people.

We're headed to the after show.

I can see it all over here.

And it's like, oh, we're gonna go here.

We're going to go here.

Yes, absolutely.

So we're going to continue this conversation with the incredible Dr. Franklin Campbell Jones in the wheelhouse.

All hands on deck.

We'll see you next week for another episode of the Wheelhouse.

Pause.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Ready for the after joke.

Welcome to Below Deck.

Sorry, that's not right.

I gotta do a commercial too.

I forgot to mention.

I forgot to mention that.

So we're gonna go three, two, one.

I'm gonna try to do this.

Yes.

If you'd like to hear more of this amazing conversation, then we have a second part or an after show called the Wheelhouse.

All Hands on Deck or only available at Learn Harbor.

So join us in the Wheelhouse below deck@learnharbor.thinkific.com.

And that's a wrap on season 11, episode six of the Wheelhouse.

A special thank you to today's amazing guest educator and author, Dr. Franklin Campbell Jones, along with the Wheelhouse team of Kathy Mone, Michael Pipa and Dr. Alicia Monroe for helping us navigate this season's journey toward future Ready Schools.

Innovation rooted in Humanity if you're a like minded educator who believes the future of learning must stay human centered, we'd love for you to stay connected.

Follow Students Matter LLC on Instagram or LinkedIn or find any of us there.

Kathy mone, Michael Pipa, Dr. Alicia Munro and me, Dr. Grant Chandler.

And we're also thrilled to invite you to step inside the Wheelhouse Below Deck at Lern harbor, our new online space where these conversations come to life.

It's more than a platform, it's a community.

A free curated safe harbor for educators, leaders and thinkers who want to reflect, connect and take action together.

Inside Below Deck you'll find our special segment the Wheelhouse All Hands on Deck.

Extended content from today's episode where purpose meets possibility and learning stays joyful, collaborative and deeply human.

Join us at learnharbor.thinkific.com and become part of this growing movement to build future ready schools where innovation is always rooted in humanity.

Until next time, remember, keep your doors open and your hearts even wider.