Author: Dr. Brent Anderson
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The Medium is the Message
Leadership + Adult Learning Design A participant in a three-day training I led recently had a realization at the very end, one I think about more than almost anything else from that week. The training was built around helping teachers develop students’ capacity to read, write, think, and speak. For three days, we modeled every…
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You Can’t Train Your Way Out of a Systems Problem
Leadership + Organizational Learning When I opened Murphy Junior High in 2012, I inherited something I didn’t fully understand yet. About half of my new staff transferred from other schools in the district, and most of them came from a single building. They brought their experience with them, which is exactly what you’d want; except…
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The Reframe
A participant wrote something in her closing reflection that I haven’t stopped thinking about. She wasn’t a learning and development professional. She was a classroom teacher, sitting in a two-day professional learning session, answering a routine end-of-training prompt: What are your key takeaways? She wrote this: “Increasing rigor isn’t about making the course harder. It’s…
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Jumpstarting Organizational Improvement with 90-Day Plans
In January 2022, I wrote down a goal: run the Chicago Marathon that October. I had run 13.1 miles exactly once in my life. I didn’t need a five-year vision. I didn’t need an elaborate planning document. I needed a clear outcome, a focused strategy, and a set of specific actions I could monitor week…
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Most Data Doesn’t Fail in Analysis. It Fails in Conversation Design.
I’ve seen this same moment play out in school district leadership meetings, corporate boardrooms, and nonprofit strategy sessions. The room, the slides, and the silence are remarkably consistent regardless of sector. I was sitting in a large corporate meeting recently, not as a facilitator, just as a participant. The slides were polished. The data was…
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What K-12 Got Right About Leadership Development That Corporate America Is Still Figuring Out.
The last corporate leadership workshop I attended had a breakout session on psychological safety. The facilitator called it a breakthrough concept. I smiled — because I’d spent the better part of two decades as a school principal, building it into every staff meeting, every coaching cycle, and every difficult conversation with a struggling teacher. Education…
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“Why Your Strategic Plan Isn’t Working (And What to Do About It)”
When I was 35, I had a big, beautiful binder sitting on a shelf in my office. My team and I had spent real time building it. Pages of outcome data, well-reasoned goals, and clear action steps. The leadership team was committed. There was genuine energy in the room when we finalized it. We were…
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Snacks, Seat Time, and the Illusion of Learning
Organizations spend billions on professional learning every year while quietly accepting that very little of it will actually change what people do on Monday morning. More specifically, when professional learning is a standalone activity, the intended outcome is left entirely up to the participant’s ability and desire to internalize and implement the learning. Facilitators come…
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I Asked an AI to Critique My Outfits. It Taught Me Something About Leadership.
For most of my adult life, I asked my wife what I should wear. Not because I had no opinions. Rather, I had plenty. But I had learned early that my opinions and her opinions didn’t always produce the same result, and her results were usually better. So I abdicated the decision-making and moved on.
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Relationship-Focused Education
The current understanding of effective teaching and learning emphasizes voice, engagement, and rigor as crucial to deep learning. Building relationships, relevance, and rigor (as framed by Dagget) are essential. It’s not just about teacher-student relationships, but also student-student and adult-adult connections are crucial. These relationships are rooted in a social contract of respect, trust, empathy,…