Curiosity is not something schools have to manufacture. Students arrive with it. They ask questions. They explore. They test ideas. They try to make sense of the world around them.

And yet, somewhere along the way, too many begin to experience learning as something to complete rather than something that invites discovery. It becomes about assignments, grades, pacing, and getting through the required material.

So what happens to wonder?

In this episode, Dr. Beverly Bisnett-Jenks joins us to explore the conditions that allow curiosity, inspired teaching, and meaningful learning to flourish.

Our conversation examines what happens when instruction becomes overly shaped by compliance, fragmentation, and curriculum coverage. We consider how even well-intended educational environments can gradually move away from the curiosity, connection, and intellectual challenge that make learning matter.

Beverly helps us think about the leader’s responsibility in all of this.

Inspired teaching cannot depend entirely on the individual effort of exceptional educators. Leaders must create and protect the conditions that allow teachers to grow, collaborate, take thoughtful risks, and bring curriculum to life.

That requires more than support. It requires clarity. It requires coherence. And it requires the willingness to maintain high expectations while also developing the people responsible for carrying the work forward.

We also explore the meaning of curriculum alignment. True alignment is not about forcing every teacher to teach in exactly the same way. It is about ensuring that purpose, curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional learning, and student experience are moving in the same direction.

When that coherence is present, educators can focus their energy on teaching rather than navigating confusion. Students are more likely to understand not only what they are learning, but why it matters and how it connects to the world around them.

This conversation also continues the progression of our recent Season 13 episodes. Students must be recognized in their full humanity. Their ideas and contributions must not be deferred until some distant future. And they must experience learning environments that develop their curiosity, confidence, capability, and sense of possibility.

Curiosity is not an optional feature of education. It is one of the ways students discover who they are, what they can do, and how they might contribute to the world. Cultivating that curiosity is the secret sauce.

Takeaways

• Curiosity is already present in students; the question is whether schools cultivate it or slowly diminish it.
• Instructional erosion often begins when learning becomes more focused on compliance and coverage than meaning and discovery.
• Inspired teaching cannot be sustained through individual effort alone; leaders must create the conditions that allow it to thrive.
• Curriculum alignment should create coherence without eliminating teacher creativity or professional judgment.
• Supporting educators and maintaining high expectations are not competing responsibilities.
• Students need learning experiences that connect curiosity to confidence, capability, contribution, and meaningful futures.

Follow Students Matter, LLC on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Connect on LinkedIn with each of us individually: Kathy Mohney, Michael Pipa, Dr. Alicia Monroe, and Dr. Grant Chandler.

To learn more about the Students Matter Ecosystem, stop by:

Students Matter

LearnHarbor

Until next time, remember: Students matter, and our choices should show it. Stay Oriented.

Curiosity is natural.

Children enter the world asking questions, exploring possibilities, and trying to understand how things work.

And yet, somehow along the way, too many students begin to believe that learning is simply something to complete, something to get through, something measured by a score, a grade, or whether they produce the right answer.

So what happens to Wonder?

What happens when inspired teaching is slowly replaced by compliance, fragmentation, and curriculum coverage?

And what responsibility do leaders have for creating the conditions in which both students and educators can thrive to Today we're joined by Dr. Beverly Bisnett Jenks, an instructional leader whose 35 year career has been shaped by a belief in curiosity, coherent curriculum, educator development, and the power of teaching to shape futures.

Because inspired teaching does not survive through individual heroics alone, Wonder needs a secret sauce.

A new episode of the Wheelhouse begins right now.

Welcome to the Wheelhouse, where we explore the questions, challenges and possibilities shaping the future of education.

I'm Dr. Grant Chandler, along with the Wheelhouse team, Kathy Mone, Michael Pipa, and Dr. Alicia Munro.

Throughout season 13, we've been examining six conditions that can quietly weaken the educational drift, fragmentation, instructional erosion, dehumanization, future confusion, and lack of alignment.

These conditions rarely arrive with warning signs.

They develop gradually.

A new initiative is added without removing anything else.

Curriculum becomes something to cover rather than something to bring to life.

Teachers work harder, but increasingly in isolation.

Students complete assignments without understanding how their learning connects to their identities, their communities, or their futures.

And over time, what once felt purposeful can become procedural.

Today, we move the conversation forward once again because it's not enough for students to be seen, it's not enough for them to be heard, and it's not enough to tell them that someday their learning will matter.

Students deserve learning environments that awaken curiosity, build capability, and allow them to see themselves as people who can understand, create, solve problems, and contribute.

Right now, our guest today is Dr. Beverly Bisnette Jenks.

Bev serves as an instructional administrator at Gilderland Central Schools, where she provides leadership for middle school mathematics, science and career and technical education while mentoring, coaching, and evaluating a team of 35 educators.

Across 35 years in education, including 16 years teaching biology, chemistry, and middle school science, Bev has developed a deep understanding of instructional excellence, curriculum leadership, and educator development.

Her doctoral research explored the relationship between servant leadership and science curriculum, two ideas that sit at the center of today's conversation?

How do leaders create coherence without diminishing teacher creativity?

How do we support educators while also protecting high expectations for teaching and learning?

How do mathematics, science and career and technical education help students make sense of the world and imagine their place within it?

And how do we prevent curiosity, wonder, and inspired teaching from becoming casualties of systems increasingly shaped by coverage, compliance, and competing priorities?

Beb's work reminds us that excellent teaching does not happen by accident.

It grows within environments shaped by clarity, trust, alignment, professional learning, and a shared belief in what students and educators are capable of becoming.

So today we ask, what conditions must educational leaders create so inspired teachers can cultivate curiosity, deepen learning, and help every student see a meaningful future?

Let's get oriented.

Good morning.

I'm Dr. Grant Chandler and welcome to another episode of the Wheelhouse.

I'm here with the amazing, and I mean amazing, wheelhouse team of Kathy Mone, Michael Pipa, and Dr. Alicia Monroe.

Good morning.

Good morning.

We had to draw it out a little bit.

You're conducting always helps.

Kath.

Yes.

Pre recording.

Grant made sure that our guest today knew that there was going to be a choir entrance, so we had to live into that a little bit.

That's right.

The Wheelhouse team breaks out in song.

We're in trouble.

I don't think we'll make it.

Thank you, Alicia.

I can't count this morning.

So this is halfway through season 13.

Unbelievable how fast this goes.

We are recording on the last Tuesday in July.

I say that for my dear friend Kathy, who gets really mad at me when I talk about like that.

But this episode drops in August.

So happy August, everybody who's listening to the Wheelhouse.

And we'll bid a fond farewell to the great month of July.

Kathy.

Yes, I know.

I don't really know why you do this.

We talk about how we need to enjoy the moment.

Stop.

Stop.

I'm enjoying this moment.

Stop.

My dear friend.

And I just need to all of you to know that this is not the only time today that he'll mention this.

He just loves to torture me.

We've been friends for 12 plus years and torture.

Torture it is.

And I don't, apparently.

Yeah, I obviously I enjoy the.

The ridiculousness because.

I just don't.

I just want to make sure that you're calendar aware, that's all.

Calendar aware.

Oh, yeah, That'.

Thank you.

That's all.

As usual, I get very excited on Tuesday for lots of really good reasons.

One of them is, of course, because the wheelhouse team comes together on a weekly basis.

But I also get excited when we get to meet incredible educators from all over the country.

And today is no exception.

I formally did an introduction and talked about all of the things that she has accomplished in the intro.

So I won't repeat, but I do want to say a very, very heartfelt warm welcome to today's guest, Dr. Beverly Bisnett Jenks.

Good morning, everyone.

So nice to see everybody and hear from everyone.

Thank you for that introduction.

You're very welcome.

We are delighted, absolutely delighted to have you here and to engage in this conversation.

Today we turn toward the learning environment itself.

What must educators and leaders create so students are not only seen and heard, but intellectually awakened, challenged and prepared to shape what comes next?

That is the topic for today's episode.

So, Bev, jumping right in with all of your expertise, what have you learned about the conditions that cause students curiosity to grow or wither away on the vine?

What's the secret sauce to cultivating a student's curiosity?

Well, it's a bit of a balancing act, isn't it?

I think as a science educator first so I taught science.

I taught biology and chemistry for 16 some odd years before becoming an administrator.

What I learned in just my teaching experience is that never quelch a student's curiosity.

I think what happens in science education all the time is we seem to quelch that well before they get to middle school and high school.

So I think what I have the benefit of is that we're able to teach students in a middle level setting.

So I don't always have the constraints of what we call in New York State the Regents curriculum.

I don't have this test at the end.

I have this beautiful curriculum that's integrated in New York State.

And as long as we're allowing teachers to be able to create authentic learning environments that are solving problems, it's amazing what our students come up with.

And I think it also starts with a belief that all students can learn.

I think sometimes what quelishes that is when I hear teachers sometimes say, not all of them, but sometimes say, a student can't do this, a student can't read, they don't do math.

And then students come into our Environments believing those things about themselves.

So we have to do our very best to create the environments where students believe they can and we give them the conditions in the environment to do that.

So what I hear you saying loudly and clearly is that as an educator, our expectations about what students can and can't do is part of the level of success and it's part of our problem as well.

Exactly, Exactly.

Well said.

So if you think about it, Dr. Business Jenks, it aligns exactly with John Hattie's work around visible learning.

Right.

When you're looking at a meta analysis and one of the indicators is teachers expectations of students, and that is, I believe, 1.64, well beyond the hinge for growth rate and makes it sustainable.

Everything aligns.

So thank you for sharing that.

Absolutely.

So what are a couple of things that you would hope wish elementary teachers would do with their students before they come to you in the middle school?

Yeah.

I have to tell you that our elementary programs are amazing and our teachers do amazing work.

I believe, though, is providing more opportunities for authentic learning.

We get mired down by teaching math and English language arts and ensuring that students can read in the context of an assessment.

And what I would love to see, because I have an extreme bias in this area, is that our students are learning all those things in terms of mathematics and reading and context and literacy.

Through a scientific lens, it all comes together.

And so we tend to silo those things for students in elementary schools.

And if we could find our way to providing a richer environment for students so that they can see the context of all those things and how they all work together.

Yeah.

We were talking with Dr. Ernst last week and we were talking about this fake, isolated way that we teach subjects.

Right.

Like the world doesn't fall into isolated content areas.

And yet that's how we think that kids are gonna flourish is if we focus on ELA in an ELA classroom and science in a science classroom and math in a math classroom and never connect the dots.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

Brilliant.

Kathy, you were going to say something?

I was just going to say it's a bit of fragmentation.

Right.

So when we think about these conditions and what gets in the way, it's this fragmented way of going about education and what that looks like.

And I think that's a.

That's a common way of approaching how we run our days.

Right.

And often that goes to.

What is that scheduling look like?

What is that master schedule?

How's that being dictated?

And I've got to do this during this time and I'VE got to do this during this time.

And that professional learning doesn't help kind of thread those pieces together.

So teachers are able to really understand the connection and have that freedom that you talk about, Bev, that allows you to build this for students, that they see those connections, that they're not left to figuring that out, that we.

We help and we build that environment for them.

That's the challenge.

Right.

And I think it takes an incredible amount of courage for leaders to, like, step outside of what we've always known in terms of what education should look like and how we schedule that.

It's hard in public schools because we have some.

So many constraints put upon us, but we have to find the courage.

I use that word again.

To find ways of scheduling our learning differently and challenging our learners differently.

I'm hoping that I'm not going to be able to see the fruition of that in my tenure here at Farnsworth Middle School.

But the portrait of the graduate in New York State helps us to see that wheel of what we're expecting for our students when they leave a New York State public school school.

So that they are authentic learners.

They have flexible thinking, that they're able to solve real problems and that they're able to engage in discourse very much like we're doing now.

So that students are.

That's the real world.

Right?

That's what we want to prepare them for.

Yet we have systems that don't set them up for that.

Bev, I'm thinking about in particular the.

The work that has continued under your leadership where kids don't have to wait.

They don't have to wait to make their contributions, to apply what they're learning in science classrooms and history classrooms.

And I think a little bit about the Butterfly Project as an example, and the ways in which you have shepherded that program for more than a decade.

And I don't know if you could speak just a little bit about how that functions as an example of kids putting learning into action.

Dr. Alan Fierro, Damien Sink, Dr. Samian Singleton.

Has that passed away over Covid and a number of other educators.

Jennifer Ford, I could go on and on.

Patrice Spring, I can go on and on.

There's a group of educators that came together and used a Krista McAuliffe grant to develop an enrichment program here at Farnsworth Middle School that runs every summer.

It runs five to six weeks in my time that I've been here.

And our middle level students act as docents and we invite the general public to come in and learn everything they possibly can about the Albany pine bush, which is a globally unique ecology to the Albany area.

And it helps kids to have a passion, a passion project.

Learn about how to preserve a naturally unique environment and then educate the public.

It has grown so much from where it started.

Students that are my middle level students that are with us, we have high school students that still come down, have their own process, passion projects.

They're rearing monarch butterflies.

They're teaching the public about the importance of the butterfly to our environment.

They're teaching little children, they're welcoming our disabled population that comes in during the year.

It's just like a really rich program.

It happens over the summer because there's no test.

There's this opportunity for students to come in and just.

I'm interested in doing this and this is what I'm going to spend my five, four weeks with, with these teachers.

And the teachers are able to really facilitate student learning rather than direct it.

So it's been amazing, it's been amazing to watch and keep it lucrative so that families and children and middle level students keep learning and growing together through this project.

So you've said, you've hinted at this a couple of times, and I really, I want to go there while you're here in the wheelhouse.

Right.

So in wheelhouse language, what kids tell us is that they want to be heard H E A R D and not herded toward a finish line.

Right.

And in many places the finish line is some type of end of course assessment.

But I want to start, I want to ask you a couple of questions about that.

The first one is around curriculum because the other thing we hear from educators is they can't focus on human centered learning because they gotta follow a curriculum and a pacing guide and there's no time to be human and no time to be real.

So.

And you're in charge of curriculum.

And one of the things that you have done in your career.

So would you just speak for a moment from your lens.

When does curriculum strengthen our teaching and when does it constrain teachers?

So we need to be careful when we're using the word curriculum.

Curriculum is not just what's written, it's what's taught.

So curriculum starts with the teacher.

And we're all teachers here.

We're all here to work with children.

So I just want to start with that.

And that's what I always say to the faculty that I work with, curriculum starts with you.

And so it's not just those, that list of standards and what we're going to be assessing students on later.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a data geek.

I absolutely love looking at assessment data and I love aligning that to standards.

I think there's enough high effect size that when teachers are doing those things, and I will never go away from those things.

However, there are ways of getting to our standards that are not always about that written test.

Right.

So again, the best subject to teach in the entire world is science because it's not always about the written work.

It's about what we do in our thinking, in experimenting and investigating.

So a big push over the last three years for me and the staff that I've been working with is asking our teachers to think about what do we want our students to investigate.

And if we can provide them with a phenomena that's around, a real world problem that links to those standards that are incredibly important to what we want students to know and to learn, then they have a chance at authentic learning.

So there's a way of getting there that's not just about the assessment.

The assessment's important.

We need to, we need to do that as part of the learning.

But we can do that in a variety of different ways.

I always say it's not just about that written test, it's not just about that multiple choices, but what are the other ways in which you are investigating and thinking about what students know and have learned.

And so let's talk about that.

And then how can you communicate that to the, the students and the families.

So I asked students to do a lot of presenting on their learning.

So this year I was, had the ability to work with now because I'm a little spoiled here.

So I had, I have the choice of who I want to work with.

So I worked with two twice accelerated students this, this year and I used our curriculum program to work with these, these two kids that just needed more, but they wanted to do more in terms of, let's get to that hurting.

You talked about not being heard.

And so they wanted to do the algebra 2.

They're at 8th grade and they wanted to just push through the curriculum, push through to the next test because it's about an accomplishment and that's not really what I want for students.

And this is what I said to the family.

It's not just about accomplishments.

I want them to walk away from a guild alone education and saying I want to learn for the sake of learning.

I want to solve problems and I want to be a meaningful part of society.

So I worked with them on an investigation.

It was simulated because we're in a middle school.

And they did an investigation on antibiotic resistant bacterium.

They used this, the simulation that was a traditional Harvard experiment with a film of bacteria growing through concentrated levels of antibiotics.

And then they had to come up with a full, full investigation from what is the background information that they learned from this?

What did they learn from the data?

How did this affect your thinking?

And then what would be your recommendations if you were the research scientist and were going to present that to the field?

And so they.

They actually presented that to our leadership team at the end of the school year.

And one of my colleagues asked, what did you get from this process?

She is, I've learned a lot of things and I learned a lot of things to do well on a test, and then I forget them.

Everything we did in this particular investigation, I won't forget.

So that's where it starts, I think.

And so that's where the blending.

I'm trying to help our faculty see, but I have the privilege, I have to say, I'm in a middle school where that kind of learning can happen.

We have the leadership structure and I have the support to be flexible with my faculty to make that happen.

So what I heard was, and I am thrilled to hear, right, I hear a combinations of skills acquisition and content, which is workplace readiness on the middle school level.

Major.

Okay.

I also hear depth of knowledge and the cognitive rigor matrix.

Words like investigation.

I nearly flipped.

You should have seen me with my thumbs up and my smiling face over here, Dr. Business Jenks, when you were talking about that.

So thank you and hallelujah to that.

And then I did have a question to ask about the student experience, as students have this rich experience in your incredible middle school.

As a former high school principal, I want to know, as the students come back to visit you, what is that experience as they move into a traditionally structured high school?

For them, that may not offer them the exposure and the experiences and the academic freedom that the middle school has offered them in the past?

This is what they're used to.

This has become their norm.

Is there an assimilation process?

How do they acclimate?

I think that's really important for us to.

As we look at the feeder pattern and as they move through this spectrum of learning, what is their next learning space like?

For them, it's very siloed.

Ninth grade becomes very hard and we're Working on that as a system.

But we got a ways to go.

For some students, their experience is okay and they do well.

And then for some students, not so much.

And so that is an issue.

Like I said, I'm really privileged to be in a middle school.

I didn't think I would ever say that.

I'm gonna flip out of my chair.

I mean, I caught high school bio and chem.

You know, I thought I was all that.

We're not really all that.

So it was a humbling experience over my time.

But in the same process I learned and I was able to to push on those authentic learning.

It's really hard to move the ship.

The traditional high schools are really hard to move.

And when they're being really successful for the some, and the some have the most voice gets really, really hard.

And so there's a few of us in our leadership team that fight like to try to make sure that those voices are heard.

I had to work really hard with some of our leadership team to help our high school think about math instruction for our kids who were not passing.

My friend Mike Pipa here introduced me to a book years ago, remember Moneyball?

And we talked about why data was so important.

And what was that piece that helped in that baseball scenario help you score.

Right.

And it was a run on first, right?

Mr. Mr.

Pipe is the baseball person.

I am not so much.

I love baseball, but not like Mr. Piper.

And I helped my teachers think about their data in the same way.

So what was it going to get them to pass?

Algebra.

Because when you're passing your ninth grade classes, you graduate.

The more you pile up in ninth grade classes, the more likely students don't graduate.

They don't have the same equitable experience as everyone else should have.

So what are we doing at the middle school to help prepare those students?

And so that is a continuum of work.

So I.

We have an intervention strategy here at Farnsworth Middle School that is probably my pride and joy because the teachers are amazing.

They're instructional coaches in their own right and they have a strong passion for.

For serving all learners.

So when I started here, I had one AIs math student or math teacher who was only able to service a very few people.

We had a former assessment measure that really was low rigor, so we looked fantastic on paper, but we had a whole bunch of students that really just not were able to think and talk through their mathematics.

So over the last three or 18 years, this is my 18th year here, we have.

I can't believe that we have Three teachers, and each of them are master teachers in their own right.

I mean, literally, they're New York State master teachers.

And so instead of putting the teacher who maybe who struggled in the classroom, I take my most talented teachers and put them in our intervention strategies, and they work together as a team.

And I meet with them sometimes once a week so that we're talking about students and how we can best focus on them.

And then they're also pushing into classrooms, and they're constantly modeling instructional strategies.

And what I have is on a learning lab where my all my math teachers will come into these three and are looking for help and resources to help get their students where they need to.

So it's been a beautiful experiment.

And so I encourage the high school to do something similar for their algebra students.

And I have to tell you, they did the same thing.

And we've had successes, but we have a lot farther to go.

We have a lot farther to go.

I'm so glad you mentioned that, Bev.

As a building administrator and colleague of yours, there were so many instances where we had students who were arriving once the year had begun.

The challenge always was, how do we learn as much as possible about this young learner who's come to us, understand what they can do, understand what their interests are, and how do we start to build on that, build some competence quickly in the areas of math and science.

And then the confidence starts to happen.

And I have been the beneficiary of one family after another coming into our district with their own stories about math and science struggle.

And I've been able to tell them, I'm feeling really, really happy that you've come here and come to us because of the program you just talked about.

I'm thinking of specific colleagues, and you and I have them in common, who you have enlisted, recruited to be part of a program.

To what degree do you feel those staff sense a kind of ownership over math lab math instruction?

And how much do you still feel yourself having to lead?

Oh, it's a total team effort now.

I mean, the buck does stop with me when it comes to certain things because I have to guard the program.

So what happens sometimes as teachers go, oh, send it to the interventionist to fix?

We don't fix children.

They're not broken.

Instead, we need to think about how are we going to coach the instructions so that the tier one is about differentiation.

But you can't say it that way, that way.

So I'm really, really sneaky.

But not anymore, because now I'm on a Podcast and everyone's going to hear it.

So I put like, so you think about it.

Our accelerated students, honor students.

They have the parents that sit in front of me, and they're going to advocate for their child to get the absolute best education because they want their son or daughter with those students.

I'm trying to do is develop a strategy so that my best teachers are in front of the kids with the most need.

Not that I don't really have.

I have fantastic staff across the board.

But in terms of the best teachers who have the most experience working with intervention strategies and differentiation, those are the ones that I want in front of those kids into small groups.

But because we're pushing them into classrooms on a higher frequency than we're pulling students out, we're getting diverse instructional strategies.

We're kind of modeling the teaching that we want to see happen without explicitly saying it.

And sometimes what you see is teachers go, wow, that works really well.

I think I want to try that again.

I don't necessarily need the interventionist with me because now I know how to do it.

And that's just empowerment, right?

That's what we do as leaders.

We empower our students to learn.

We empower our teachers to learn.

And so because that's all we all are.

And teachers are going into each other's classes, and that's the most.

That, to me, is the atomic secret.

Anytime I was in another teacher's classroom and we had the discipline in common, I was seeing practice that I hadn't even thought about.

And it goes in both directions.

You have interventionists who are super accomplished, but they have not seen everything under the sun.

So, you know, what I've.

What I've witnessed is this kind of integration and appreciation among the colleagues, instructionally and professionally.

That is just one of these great benefits, these effects that you weren't necessarily on the list of intended effects, but they just happened.

And Bev, this didn't just happen.

You didn't just, you know, open your eyes one day and this middle school setting was like, oh, it just.

It didn't happen, you know, so when you think about your leadership and really understanding, and even though that there are systems level things that, you know, are in need of some strengthening across the district, there still is that ability for you to be able to lead your middle school the way that you want to lead it, you know, so when you think about that and you think about our leaders that are listening, you know, as our teachers are listening, what are those things that are significant in the work that you're doing that are really vital for other leaders.

Leaders to be hearing right now.

I think you talked about students want voice, educators need voice.

So being able to allow for some teacher agency.

There's been lots of research about teacher agency, but I also within guardrails.

So instead of thinking about getting teachers towards, and I've seen this recently in some recent research, compliance, we're working them towards commitment.

What does that look like?

In a lot of it, in terms of leadership is constant modeling, constant modeling of that commitment and not being afraid to say what you need to say.

You say it in very professional, meaningful ways.

You say it in very positive ways.

But then there's always a constant.

Leadership is also a constant reminder that we're in this business to serve.

And everything that comes from our decision making is about the service of others.

And that means you will have to own that as a leader also.

That's the hard work and it doesn't come right away.

And I think sometimes when we get into leadership roles, our egos get in our way and they.

It never ends.

We all are suffering from it, from one aspect or another.

So you have to have that constant reminder that this is about the service we do for others.

And you're not doing that from your office, are you, Bev?

You know, you've talked about your work with students, you've talked about your work with teachers at, you know, your staff at all levels.

You know, you're in the trenches doing the work alongside.

So it's that commitment that is.

Is being modeled.

You're living and breathing it every day.

That's the goal.

That's what we try to do.

Yeah, sometimes I'd really like to hide in my office.

There are those days right in there sometimes.

But no, I do try to make an effort.

I used to call my rounds Mike, remember that?

I try to make rounds in the morning and I try to make rounds in the afternoon.

So my time is mostly focused on faculty, not as much with students.

I wish I had more time with students, but I think if I had left this position, you know, I had goals of doing that.

And once upon a time in my career, I wouldn't have had that opportunity.

So I wouldn't trade it for anything.

The best part of what I've done is being able to have relationships with teachers.

And they're not just my, you know, the teachers within the departments I serve, but like all the teachers here at Farnsworth.

So I'm super impressed by listening to you and hearing about the work that you're doing?

I have two questions, and one of them you don't have to answer from your district lens.

You can answer this in general, right?

Don't want to put you on the spot.

I don't want you to.

This is not a question about your district.

This is a question about instruction in general.

One of the conditions that we often talk about is instructional erosion.

From your lens, how would you define that term, instructional erosion?

And how would you know if you were seeing it?

I think that when it focuses mostly on compliance, when you're seeing students behaving and not necessarily learning, when you're in environments where that is the goal is for students to be compliant.

I often had that conversation with faculty and with leaders is how do you know?

Right.

So how do you.

We've spent a lot of time in research done on thinking classrooms because it's stemmed out of mathematics, but it fits everywhere and how students fake learning.

So how do you know?

And then we talked a lot about what about faking learning looks like.

And what we think is engagement isn't really engagement and the other way around.

So sometimes the students you think are not engaged are.

And so you have to think about the students in front of you differently.

And so I think the erosion begins over time and about a lot of the things that we've talked about so far.

That siloing of learning, not authentic problem solving for students, not allowing students and faculty have staff or have a voice in what that looks like for their learning, but also when it becomes more about compliance and rule following and not necessarily about learning.

What an incredible.

Thank you for that.

I very much appreciate that definition and that conversation as we get ready to wrap up this episode.

First, I want to say thank you for joining us because what an incredible pleasure to hear you talk about the great work that you're doing with your teachers and with your students.

The wheelhouse is very lucky to be listened to in 80 countries.

So, yeah, congratulations to the wheelhouse.

But I say that only because here's an opportunity for you to speak to educators all over the world.

What do you want to say to them?

Don't give up.

Learning is hard.

It's hard for you, it's hard for your students, and there's a lot of things that get in the way of learning.

So don't ever give up on the essential aspect of why we're here, and that is to learn.

So never stop being a learner.

So whether you're the student, you're the teacher or the leader, and so those things that get in your way, push him aside and remember that the best part of life is learning something new.

And with that, that's a mic drop.

So we'll say, thank you, Dr. Beverly Bisnett Jenks, for joining us today in the Wheelhouse.

That's a wrap.

Today's conversation reminds us that curiosity is not an instructional extra.

It is not something we attend to only after the standards have been covered, the assessments have been completed, or the required work is finished.

Curiosity is one of the ways students encounter their own capability.

It's how they begin to understand that the world is not simply something happening around them.

It's something they can question, investigate, influence, and help shape.

But curiosity is also fragile.

It can be weakened by fragmentation.

It can disappear beneath layers of compliance.

It can be crowded out when educators are asked to move faster, cover more, and implement one disconnected initiative after another.

And it can be lost when students no longer understand why their learning matters or how it connects to the people they're becoming.

That's why Bev's emphasis on leadership and alignment matters so much.

Alignment is not simply making sure everyone is on the same page.

It's ensuring that our purposes, curriculum, instruction, professional learning, leadership practices, and student experiences are moving in the same direction.

It's creating enough coherence that educators can invest their energy in excellent teaching rather than constantly navigating confusion.

And it's protecting the conditions in which inspired teaching can endure.

Over the past three episodes, our guests have helped us see an important progression.

Students must be recognized in their full humanity.

Their contributions must not be deferred until some distant future.

And they must experience learning environments that develop their curiosity, confidence, capability, and sense of possibility.

Dignity, contribution, possibility.

These are not separate aspirations.

Together, they describe what students experience when education is truly designed around the belief that each of them is distinctive and irreplaceable.

Our thanks to Dr. Beverly Bisnett Jenks for joining us and for reminding us that inspired teaching has the power to shape futures, but only when leaders are willing to create and protect the conditions it requires.

And as always, my thanks to the extraordinary Wheelhouse team, Kathy Mone, Michael Pipa, and Dr. Alicia Munro.

Until next time, continue asking the questions that help us recognize drift, restore coherence, and create educational experiences worthy of every student.

Stay oriented and we'll see you next week for another episode of the Wheelhouse.