How to Hire Teachers Who Actually Fit Your School Culture
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
Most principals walk out of a hiring interview with a feeling. A 100% Principal walks out with evidence. In this episode, I'm breaking down the three-stage hiring system that changes who applies, who you interview, and who actually shows up in your building every day. What you'll learn: Why your job posting is filtering for the wrong people (and how to fix it in under 5 minutes) The one question that reveals what a candidate actually believes — versus what they know to say Why a sample lesson in the second interview is the least useful thing you can ask for — and what to do instead The...
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How to Give Your Staff an End of Year They'll Never Forget
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
Your last culture-building moment of the year is already underway — and most principals are about to waste it. It's April. The energy has gone flat. Your teachers are still showing up but everyone is running on fumes. And somewhere in the back of your mind is a thought you haven't said out loud: I'm not sure this year went the way I wanted it to. I've watched principals turn around brutal years in the last six weeks of school. I've also watched great years fall apart in a bad June. Both are possible right now — in your building. What you do in the next six weeks doesn't just close out the...
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Why Principals Slip Back Into Leadership When Things Get Hard
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
Every morning you walk into school with a plan. And by 9am it's gone. You're constantly interrupted, constantly pulled into decisions that aren't yours to make, constantly the person everyone is waiting on before they can move. You probably think you have a boundaries problem. You don't. You have a systems problem. And those two problems have completely different solutions. I was on a podcast recently where the hosts threw every crisis scenario at me they had — low morale, declining scores, surface-level compliance, staff resistance. And every single time I kept arriving at the same answer....
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What Is the 100Percent Principal Podcast? Everything You Need to Know Before April 15th
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
After eight years, this podcast has a new name, a new format, and one very specific focus: principals who have decided that 100Percent student success isn't an aspiration. It's something they're going to build. In this first episode, I'm telling you exactly what The 100Percent Principal Podcast is, who it's for, and what you can expect every week when you show up. Whether you're a sitting principal, an aspiring one, or a district leader who supports them, there's something here for you. Subscribe to the newsletter at 100percentprincipal.com and I'll see you April 15th.
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I Have a Big Announcement (No, This Is Not an April Fools Joke)
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
For the last four weeks I've been naming something you already knew but couldn't say out loud — what's happening with your students, your teachers, your communities, and why everything you were trained to do feels like it's working less than it used to. Today is the final episode of this series. And I have two things for you: the answer you've been waiting for, and an announcement I've been sitting on for a long time. I'll give you the answer first. The announcement comes at the end — and no, before you say anything, I know what day it is. This is not a joke.
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There’s a new kind of teacher: Why everything you know about leadership just changed
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
The teacher you were trained to lead and the teacher standing in your building right now are not the same person, and nobody told you that. That’s why in this episode, I’m going to show you exactly who the New Teacher is, why the tactics that used to work have stopped working, and what it actually takes to reach a teacher who evaluates authority, interrogates truth, and is no longer defined by the profession the way teachers used to be. It’s not you. It’s not them. It’s that the old playbooks no longer work. So you can stop blaming yourself, stop blaming your staff, and start...
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The Leadership Ceiling: Why Working Harder Isn't Working
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
I've spent eight years watching brilliant, dedicated principals do everything right — and still hit the same invisible ceiling. More effort. More initiatives. More of themselves poured into the work. And yet the results plateau, the staff drifts back, and in the quiet moments nobody else sees, the principal starts asking the most dangerous question in education: if I'm doing everything I was trained to do… why isn't it working? In this episode, I'm giving that ceiling a name — the Leadership Ceiling — and I'm going to show you exactly what it looks like in your building, why it has...
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Why this moment in education is different
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
Are you doing everything you were trained to do and still feeling stuck? The problem might not be you. It might be the playbook. In this episode, I'm naming the three forces that have converged to make school leadership harder than it's ever been: widening academic gaps that didn't go away when the headlines did, community instability that walks through your front door every morning with your kids, and financial resources that are shrinking just when you need them most. Then I'm going to show you why the traditional leadership playbook, even when you execute it beautifully, was never designed...
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What 8 Years of Doing This Podcast Has Taught Me
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
This month marks eight years of this podcast — and instead of celebrating with a highlight reel, I want to do something more honest: tell you what these eight years have actually changed in me. I started convinced that the biggest problem in schools was a failure of imagination. What I've learned since is harder, more uncomfortable, and more useful than that. So, tune in for a very real examination of what I’ve learned, what has surprised me, and where we need to take the work next #LikeABuilder.
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The Surefire Way to Know If Your Staff Really Believes in 100%
The 100 Percent Principal Podcast
Are you really sure your staff believes in your 100% vision — or are they just saying what sounds right in the staff meeting? In this episode, I'm sharing a simple but powerful diagnostic I call the Struggling Student Test: four things you can observe this week that will reveal more about your school's true beliefs than any survey or walkthrough ever could. Once you know what you're really dealing with, I'll show you why the answer isn't more motivation — it's smarter systems, so you can make sure every struggling student gets what they need no matter how any individual teacher feels on...
info_outlineIf you've ever felt like you're working incredibly hard but not actually building toward anything meaningful, you're not crazy, and you're not alone. You might be operating with a borrowed vision without even realizing it. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through the four types of borrowed visions: vision by compliance, vision by comparison, vision by inheritance, and vision by avoidance. By the end of this episode, you'll know whether your vision is borrowed, and more importantly, you'll understand why that matters. None of these feel wrong in the moment but that's what makes them so dangerous. Because once you see the difference between borrowed and owned, you can't unsee it and you can finally start building what you truly believe in #LikeABuilder.