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The New People in the Room

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , , on October 20, 2026| 1 Comment »


There is a moment every four years when a newly elected Board of Education gathers around the table for the first time. The room looks much the same. The table is the same, the agenda follows a familiar format, and the superintendent and senior staff are often the same people who were there a month earlier. But the people sitting around the table have changed. Some familiar faces are gone and new ones have arrived. Even those returning are now part of a different group.

I have now been through five of these transitions as a superintendent, and if I have learned one thing, it is that getting elected to a board and becoming an effective board are two very different things.

From Campaigning to Governing

Earlier this year, I wrote Considering Running for School Trustee? A Few Things to Know First, a look at what trustees actually do and, perhaps more importantly, what they don’t do. This was my most-read post in years, so as one does when that happens, I have created this as a sequel.  

Candidates across BC have spent the last couple of months campaigning, sharing ideas and making commitments. As happens each election cycle, some of those commitments touch on areas where local boards have direct authority, while others involve decisions that are made provincially.  Part of the early work together is understanding those distinctions and identifying where trustees can make a difference locally and where they can use their voices to advocate for change.  I have been part of enough transitions to know these conversations are important, and the boundaries are not always as clear as they might first appear.

Within their areas of responsibility, boards have considerable influence. They make important decisions about local priorities, resources, policies and the direction of their districts. But there is a difference between campaigning on individual promises and governing collectively, and making that shift is part of the early work for any new board.

Another part of that transition is understanding how governance and operations fit together.  The Board sets direction, approves budgets, and establishes policies.  The superintendent and staff then turn that direction into the day-to-day work of schools with the Board providing oversight and holding the superintendent accountable for the results.

For example, a board wanting an emphasis on literacy might include this aspiration as part of a strategic plan.  The superintendent and senior staff would work with educators to determine the strategy and approach needed to achieve that goal.  Trustees need enough understanding of that work to ask thoughtful questions and assess results.  The distinction is about where decisions and accountability sit and it takes ongoing conversations to make it work well. 

Fresh Eyes and Institutional Memory

New trustees bring questions that others may have stopped asking. They challenge assumptions and see possibilities that those of us who have been around for a long time might overlook. Returning trustees bring history and context. They understand why past decisions were made and appreciate the complexity behind issues that can look simple from the outside. Neither perspective is automatically right. Experience can become an excuse for maintaining the status quo, and fresh perspectives can miss important context.

Institutional memory is also about more than the people around the table. When I studied the superintendency for my doctorate several years ago, I found that the majority of BC superintendents were relatively new to their roles. That kind of leadership turnover is a reminder that we can’t rely on individuals alone to carry an organization’s history.

The memory has to live in systems as well. A clear board work plan, a clear distinction between board policy and administrative procedure, and orientation that is embedded in policy rather than left to chance all help carry what matters from one group to the next. People come and go. Good systems give a new board something solid to build on, and the real opportunity comes from bringing that institutional memory together with fresh eyes.

Learning Takes Time

In 2014, I wrote about the small things that make board governance work and how boards and superintendents support one another. Clear roles, regular communication and shared learning remain central to how I think about governance. One thing that has evolved is my approach to trustee orientation.

We have long used a series of introductory sessions, our 101s, covering everything from finance and facilities to student learning, governance and community relationships. We used to think of orientation as the first winter. Now we think of it as the whole term. The early months are important, but the learning continues through strategic planning and carries on through all four years.

We know student learning takes time. Understanding develops through repeated experiences, conversations and reflection, and there is no reason to assume adult learning is any different. Orientation is also about more than information. It is about building relationships and giving trustees the confidence to ask better questions, challenge assumptions and make thoughtful decisions. I would rather spend a little more time building that foundation at the beginning than rush through it and spend the next four years wishing we had done things differently. There is no prize for finishing orientation first.

And for any newly elected trustees in West Vancouver reading this, you are getting an early look at the orientation playbook we will work through together.

Everyone in the Room Is New

Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned through these transitions is that orientation isn’t just for new trustees. When the composition of a board changes, the relationships, the dynamics and the questions all change with it, and the way people work together needs to evolve too.

That includes the superintendent.  The voters elected the trustees, and the trustees inherit me. That alone is a good reason for me to do a lot of listening in the first few months. They bring a fresh mandate, and I have a responsibility to understand their priorities and help turn the Board’s collective direction into meaningful action. 

I have worked with boards with different priorities, personalities and approaches to governance. Each transition has required me to listen, adjust and think carefully about how I can best support the collective work of the board, because what worked with one board may not work with the next. Returning trustees are joining a new team as well. Their experience matters, but so does their willingness to adapt. In that sense, everyone in the room is new.

And perhaps most importantly, the trustees need to learn how to work with one another.  Effective boards aren’t ones where everyone agrees.  They are ones where people can disagree, make collective decisions and continue to trust one another afterward.

The Work After the Election

There is something wonderfully democratic about school board elections. Communities have the opportunity to affirm a direction or choose something different. But schools don’t start over every four years.

A new board inherits both the accomplishments and the challenges of those who came before it, and its task is to respect that continuity while exercising its mandate to shape the future. A new board also has an opportunity to consider how it will work together.  Many traditions and practices will be worth carrying forward, while others may need to evolve as new relationships and perspectives take shape.  

Four years from now, the room will probably look much the same again. There will be another election, another group of trustees and another opportunity to begin.

What will matter is less who occupied those chairs and more what they accomplished together.

Note: The image at the top of this post was generated using AI. I also used AI tools for editorial feedback while refining the piece. The arguments and conclusions are my own.

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Teacher Is Still the Best Title

Posted in Change, Professional Development, SD45, tagged , on October 5, 2026| 2 Comments »

World Teachers’ Day has always been one of my favourite days to mark on this blog. That is probably not a surprise. I come from a family of teachers. I started teaching at 22. I met my wife through education. Thirty years after I first walked into a classroom, it remains the only profession I have ever known.

This year the day feels close to the surface. Since the start of school last month, I have had the chance to spend real time with teachers new to our district, and they have reminded me what this work looks like when it is fresh. They are teaching and prepping and marking and coaching and building their practice, and they are loving it. I have also heard the stories of teachers who packed up their lives and relocated to be here. I feel that responsibility keenly. They came to support our students. Part of my job is to ensure we support them just as fully.

It has also been heartening to see our applicant pools growing again. In the years immediately after COVID, there were positions where the number of applicants was noticeably smaller than what we had traditionally seen. More recently, that has begun to shift. People are choosing teaching. They are choosing this work knowing it is not the job their parents’ generation signed up for, but they see the same opportunity to make a difference.

Back in 2010, on one of the first World Teachers’ Days I wrote about here, I said I was good with teacher. That it was who I am, and that it said it all. Sixteen years later I still believe that. But I understand the title a little differently now.

As chosen by UNESCO, this year’s theme fits: “Standing with teachers: 60 years of protecting the profession, advancing its status and shaping our futures.” Sixty years is a long time. Almost everything about schools has changed across those decades. And yet the thing that makes a teacher matter has not moved at all.

The profession I entered in 1996 is not the one someone enters today. Teachers now navigate artificial intelligence, digital citizenship, mental health, changing parent expectations and increasingly complex learning needs in ways that would have been hard to imagine when I started. And the work will keep changing. Some of the more routine parts will likely change or fall away as AI takes on more of the planning, assessment, communication and administration. The classroom of 2036 will not look like the classroom of 2026.

But I am increasingly convinced that the most important parts of teaching are stubbornly resistant to all of it.

Great teachers know their students. They notice when something is off. They know when to push and when to ease up. They build places where young people feel they belong because they do. Technology can support every one of those things, and I hope it does. None of these can be automated.

I saw a version of this recently. I was in a classroom where a teacher had structured her groups beautifully. One group was getting feedback directly from her. Another was working through revisions. A third was getting feedback from AI. Over the week the students rotated, so everyone had each experience on different days.

She had tightened the feedback loop without making every piece of it run through her. The technology did not replace her. It extended her reach, and it freed her to spend her attention where only she could.

That is the version of the future I am hopeful about. Not one where the teacher matters less, but one where the teacher is freed to do more of what only a teacher can do.

And maybe that is why over the years I keep coming back to Mrs. Caffrey, my teacher in Grades 2, 3 and 4. I arrived in her room barely reading and left three years later a different learner. What I remember has almost nothing to do with curriculum. She knew me. She held me accountable. She made me feel safe.

This past June my Grade 7 class gathered for our 40-year reunion. Everyone in that room had their own story about a teacher who had changed something for them. I had always known what Mrs. Caffrey meant to me and to my family. What I learned that weekend was how many others carried her with them too.

Close to fifty years after I first walked into elementary school, knowing students, holding them to high expectations and making them feel safe still seem like pretty good descriptors of great teaching.

Teachers rarely get to see the full weight of what they do. Mrs. Caffrey never did. She had no idea that, forty years on, a room full of us would still be saying her name.

Most of the teachers who shaped me had no idea they were doing it at the time. You make hundreds of small decisions a day and have thousands of conversations over a career, and every so often one of them quietly changes where a life goes.

Thirty years in, I am still optimistic about this work.

The profession is evolving, as it always has. The tools will change. The expectations will change. The classrooms will change. The chance to make a difference in the world, one student at a time, does not.

So I come back to what I wrote sixteen years ago. I am still good with teacher. It is still who I am. Thirty years later, I still cannot think of a better title.

Happy World Teachers’ Day.

Note: The image at the top of this post was generated using AI. I also used AI tools for editorial feedback while refining the piece. The arguments and conclusions are my own.

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The Scrapbook

Posted in Health, SD45, tagged , on September 15, 2026| 2 Comments »

I still have the scrapbook.

It is filled with newspaper clippings about Terry Fox that I cut out of the Vancouver Sun, among other newspapers and magazines, as he made his way across Canada in 1980. I was an elementary school student, and like so many Canadians of my generation, I became captivated by this young man with an unusual running stride who was somehow trying to run all the way across the country.

At the time, I certainly didn’t understand that I was documenting Canadian history. I just knew there was something about Terry and his Marathon of Hope that mattered. Forty-six years later, it still does.

Terry Fox has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest elementary school memories are of Terry Fox Runs. I also remember his cancer and, eventually, his death in a way that I don’t remember other news from that time. I think Terry’s death was the first death of someone I had never met that really landed. When you are a kid, even famous people somehow seem permanent. Terry wasn’t.

It was also probably my first real encounter with cancer. Now, of course, cancer has touched almost every family in one way or another. But as a child it was new to me. I knew Terry was sick. I knew the whole country wanted him to get better. And then he didn’t. That was difficult to understand, and maybe that is part of why his story stayed with me.

Years later, I had the privilege of serving as principal of Riverside Secondary in Port Coquitlam, Terry’s hometown, and his story was different there. It wasn’t abstract history. The Fox family was part of the community. The streets were the streets Terry trained on for his journey. I remember the 25th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope particularly fondly, with thousands of people gathering in Port Coquitlam, members of the Fox family there, and this sense that the run still belonged to all of us.

The moment I remember most from those years was Bob McGill speaking to our students on Terry Fox Run day. Bob was an Assistant Superintendent in Coquitlam by then, but long before that he had been Terry’s Grade 8 teacher and basketball coach at Mary Hill Junior High.

He didn’t talk about the Marathon of Hope. He talked about a kid who was five feet tall, usually last picked in PE, who barely got off the bench that season and would not quit. That kid went on to play junior varsity basketball at Simon Fraser.

You could feel the room change. Our students had heard about Terry their whole lives. They had never heard anyone say, I taught him.

There are fewer and fewer chances for students to sit in a room with someone who can say that.

I have kept running too. Every September I make a point of finding a Terry Fox Run. It has become one of those markers in my year that I don’t really question, and increasingly I also feel a responsibility to bring someone with me.

Last year that meant one of the most memorable runs I have ever done. I joined two of my kids and thousands of others crossing the Confederation Bridge from Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick as part of the 45th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope.

The best part was looking around. There were people who remembered watching Terry in 1980 and people born years after he died. There were parents with children, grandparents, serious runners and people walking it. Thousands of us were moving across that enormous piece of Canada because of something a 21-year-old from Port Coquitlam decided to do 45 years earlier.

There is also something very Canadian about Terry that is hard to separate from the story. Maybe it is the combination of extraordinary ambition and almost no pretension. He wasn’t trying to become a national hero. He simply thought something needed to be better and decided he was going to do something about it. Somewhere along the way, that very personal decision became part of how Canadians came to understand him, and perhaps a little of how we understand ourselves. Maybe that is why, all these years later, Terry still feels like he belongs to all of us.

For much of my life, Terry Fox was someone I remembered. Now he is someone I feel responsible for helping others remember. For my generation, Terry is memory. We remember adults debating whether he would make it. We remember the hop-step. Many Canadians remember exactly where they were when they learned he had been forced to stop outside Thunder Bay.

I still follow along every year. The Terry Fox Foundation retraces the route through the spring and summer, and I find myself tracking it as though the ending might come out differently this time. The dates are fixed in me: April 12, the morning he dipped his leg into the Atlantic at St. John’s; September 1, the day outside Thunder Bay; June 28, the day he died.

Every year, there are fewer of us who remember it firsthand. For today’s students, Terry Fox is a story, and that changes what happens in our schools every September.

Here is a number that surprised me. Every year, 3.5 million Canadian students take part in the Terry Fox School Run, and the Foundation’s most recent report has them raising close to $14 million. The School Run is now the single largest fundraising program the Terry Fox Foundation has.

Our schools are not a supporting act in this. They are one of the main places where Terry’s story continues.

So the question I keep turning over is not whether we run. We always run. It is what a student actually knows about Terry by the time they cross the line.

That answer looks different in every school, and there is always more any of us could do with it. That isn’t a knock on anyone. It is what happens to any tradition that repeats for decades. It can quietly become the thing we do rather than the thing we mean.

We have been generous with monuments. Terry has schools, fields, statues, a mountain and a highway. I just read that he will be celebrated on the next version of Canada’s 5 dollar bill. All of that matters. But a monument can’t tell a student that Terry was five feet tall and last picked. Bob McGill did. And when people like Bob tell those stories, the rest of us have a responsibility to remember them and tell them again.

Schools don’t only teach history. Schools help decide which stories a society carries forward, and stories need people willing to tell them.

What I want students to understand is fairly simple. Terry saw something he thought should be better and decided to do something about it.

He wasn’t famous when he started out. He wasn’t a professional athlete. There wasn’t a massive campaign waiting for him, and he had no guarantee any of it would work. He was a young person who had been through cancer, had watched others suffer through treatment, and decided that raising money for research was something he could do.

So he started running.

The theme for this year’s Terry Fox Run is Finish It. The obvious meaning is about research. Earlier this year, the Terry Fox Foundation passed $1 billion raised for cancer research. Terry’s dream was never simply that Canadians would remember him. He wanted a cure. The running and the remembering only matter if they continue to serve that.

But Finish It means something else to me this year too. Terry began a story that now belongs to another generation to carry.

This fall, a new feature-length documentary, Run Terry Run, will bring his story back to theatres. It is built around footage and audio from 1980, some of it unseen for decades. I plan to be there opening weekend. For some of us it will be revisiting our own history. For others it will be meeting Terry for the first time.

Bryan Adams has also written a song for the film called The Ballad of Terry Fox. What struck me was where Adams was in 1980. He was 20 years old, a year younger than Terry, touring Canada and playing small clubs. When Terry stopped outside Thunder Bay, Adams had just played a show in Ottawa. He was following the Marathon of Hope the way the rest of us were, through the news.

I was following it with my scissors and the newspaper.

Now Bryan Adams is one of the people passing the story on.

That is how stories survive. Someone tells them to someone else. A parent brings a child to a run. A teacher explains to a Grade 3 class why everyone is heading outside. A principal tells students about growing up watching Terry on the news. A father talks his kids into running across a bridge with him. Eventually, those young people become the ones telling the story.

I still have that scrapbook. Back then, I was clipping Terry’s story out of the newspaper because, for whatever reason, I didn’t want to lose it.

Forty-six years later, I think that instinct still makes sense. I will keep showing up for the run, and I will keep trying to bring someone with me. Not because Terry needs another monument, but because stories like his only last when one generation makes the effort to tell the next.

A Few Resources

  • The Terry Fox School Run resource hub. Start here. Lesson plans from primary through secondary, assembly presentations, morning announcements, videos, playlists and classroom activities. If you only open one link, open this one.
  • Terry’s Timeline. The Marathon of Hope day by day, with Terry’s journal entries and audio woven through it. It ends on September 1 with his final journal entry: “21 miles. 3,339 miles total.”
  • Stories of Hope. First-hand memories from people who saw Terry run, heard him speak or encountered him along the way. For students who can no longer sit in a gym and hear someone say I was there, this may be the next best thing.
  • CBC Archives: Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope. The primary-source video and audio are particularly useful for older students. Terry on television in 1980 is different from watching someone today explain Terry.
  • Hear from Fred Fox or a Terry Fox Ambassador. The School Run program offers free virtual presentations, including opportunities to hear Fred share memories of growing up with Terry and of the Marathon of Hope.
  • Two books worth having. Leslie Scrivener’s Terry Fox: His Story remains the essential biography. Scrivener was a journalist assigned to follow Terry during the Marathon of Hope and built the book from his diaries and interviews with Terry, his family and friends. Douglas Coupland’s Terry is something quite different, a collection of photographs, artifacts and family memorabilia assembled almost like a scrapbook.
  • And two new ways into the story referenced in my post earlier. Sean Menard’s Run Terry Run draws on 96 reels of previously unseen footage and unheard audio from the Fox family archives. Bryan Adams’ The Ballad of Terry Fox, written for the film, offers another entry point from one of Canada’s most famous musicians.

 

Note: AI tools were used for editorial feedback while refining the piece and with collecting the list of resources at the bottom of the post. The arguments and conclusions are my own.

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What Should Change? What Must Endure?

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , on September 8, 2026| 6 Comments »

I love the first day of school. No matter how long you have been doing this work, there is something about this day that still feels like a beginning.

For the last couple of weeks, our schools have been slowly coming back to life. Leadership teams gathered. Staff returned. Classrooms were organized. Schedules were adjusted. Meetings happened. Plans were made. Last Thursday, we brought everyone in West Vancouver Schools together for our annual Opening Day. And today, the people all of that work is actually for walk through our doors.

The students.

A Kindergarten student is walking into school for the first time. A Grade 8 student is trying to figure out where they fit. A Grade 12 student is beginning their final year with us. Some students have been counting the days until they could see their friends again. Others arrived this morning quietly anxious. That is the work underneath all of the work.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have had several opportunities to talk with people across our district about the year ahead. The audiences have changed and the conversations have ranged from artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing to literacy, physical literacy, belonging and wellbeing. But I have found myself circling around the same question:

Where are we going?

I still believe that if we are about everything, we are about nothing. That does not mean schools should only care about three things. We run complicated organizations serving wonderfully complicated human beings, and there will always be hundreds of things requiring our attention. But underneath all of them, I keep coming back to three commitments for the year ahead.

Innovation. Foundational Skills. All Means All.

Increasingly, I do not see these as three separate priorities. I think they depend on each other. And as I think about the year ahead, I keep coming back to three questions. What should change? What must endure? And who gets to be part of it?

What should change?

I have a bit of a history at our Opening Day of finding profound educational wisdom in questionable places, usually involving television programs and movies from the 1980s. Over the years I have somehow managed to work Three’s Company, Newhart and Mr. Belvedere into conversations about education. So after we lost Dolly Parton just before the start of the school year, it probably should not surprise anyone that I found myself rewatching 9 to 5.

For those who have somehow missed it over the last 45 years, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin play three women fed up with a terrible boss who decide their workplace needs to change. Their particular strategy for dealing with management is not one I am recommending for West Vancouver Schools. But there is something surprisingly current in what happens next.

Once the women actually have the opportunity to change their workplace, they begin asking pretty basic questions. Why do we do things this way? Could we organize work differently? Could we create conditions where people actually do their best work? That is not a bad definition of innovation, and it is probably a more useful one than simply chasing whatever is newest.

In one of our leadership sessions before the school year started, we spent time talking about artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing. I do not expect our educators to suddenly become quantum computing experts. We talked about these areas because they are windows into a world that is changing incredibly quickly, and our students are going to live and work in that world.

The temptation with something like AI is to define future readiness as knowing how to use the newest tools. Four years into the generative AI conversation, I am less interested in whether students are using AI and far more interested in whether they are thinking deeply about it.

The more important questions are about judgement. When should I use it? When should I not? What should I trust? What should I verify? What is this tool doing for me, and what thinking still belongs to me?

Those are not really technology questions. They are human questions. They are about curiosity, creativity, communication, critical thinking and judgement. They are about encountering something you do not understand and wanting to figure it out. They are about developing enough confidence in your own thinking that you can use powerful technologies without simply surrendering your thinking to them.

Technology changes. Those skills endure.

That is why I hope we think about innovation broadly this year. Innovation might be a new AI application or a completely new program. It might be finding a better way for a student to demonstrate what they know, reaching a learner who has not yet found their place, or changing the way we organize work so a colleague can thrive. And sometimes innovation is finally letting go of something we have done for years because nobody has stopped to ask why.

The question is not simply, what is new? It is, could there be a better way?

What must endure?

Of course, there is a tension here. The more willing we are to change, the clearer we also need to be about what must not be lost. In fact, I increasingly think the faster the world changes, the more our foundations matter.

There is no version of the future where literacy matters less, or numeracy matters less, or where relationships, perseverance, creativity, judgement and the ability to communicate with another human being become obsolete. And there is certainly no version where belonging does not matter.

This brings me back to Dolly Parton. For all the things she became famous for, the songs, the movies, the rhinestones and Dollywood, one of my favourite parts of her legacy has always been the Imagination Library. At its heart, it is an incredibly simple idea. Put books in the hands of children.

A woman who spent her entire career reinventing herself understood something wonderfully basic. Reading changes lives.

I love the tension in that. We can be relentlessly future facing and still recognize that sometimes the most transformative thing we can put in a child’s hands is a book.

Sometimes in education we create a false choice between innovation and the basics. Are we preparing students for the future, or are we focusing on literacy and numeracy? Are we embracing new technologies, or are we protecting human relationships? Are we creating new opportunities, or investing in the fundamentals?

My answer is yes.

We have to be exceptional at both. We should explore AI, cybersecurity, quantum computing and other forces shaping the world our students are entering. We should try things that do not work the first time. We should continue building on the same spirit that took robotics from an idea to something extraordinary in our district, that created Ignite Your Passions and our academy and district programs, and that took physical literacy from an emerging idea a decade ago to something deeply embedded across our schools today.

But none of that replaces the foundations. It builds on them. Foundations are built slowly. On purpose. Over years. They rarely make for the most dramatic announcement, but they are what allow everything else to happen.

Who gets to be part of it?

We use the phrase All Means All a lot in West Vancouver Schools. Like any phrase we use often, there is a danger that it becomes familiar enough that we stop really hearing it. Because All Means All is actually a very difficult commitment.

It means we do not judge an opportunity by whether we offered it. We ask who actually experienced it. We can build remarkable opportunities in AI, athletics, languages, the arts, STEM or anything else, but we still need to ask who sees themselves in those opportunities and who does not. We need to care deeply about the student performing at the very highest level and just as deeply about the student struggling to get through the door in the morning.

It means high expectations for every student, while recognizing that students may need different pathways to reach them. Some students need us to open a door. Some need us to get out of the way. Some need another opportunity. And some need an adult to quietly notice that something is wrong before they are ready to say so themselves.

It means Indigenous learner success is not somebody else’s work. It is our work. And it means safe and welcoming schools are not separate from excellence. They are a condition for it.

All Means All asks us to move past the question, Did we provide it? It asks, Who actually experienced it? Who is thriving? Who is not yet? And what are we prepared to do about it?

That is also why wellbeing belongs in this conversation. A student can be surrounded by extraordinary opportunities and still not be in a place to reach them. They can be sitting in the best lesson we have ever designed and find it almost impossible to learn if they do not feel safe, connected, known or well.

Wellbeing is not separate from learning. It is not the soft thing we get to after the important work is finished. It is one of the conditions that allows the important work to happen.

And the same is true for the adults who work in our schools. Schools only work because of the people in them. A teacher who notices something in a child. An education assistant who helps a student settle and return to class. An administrative assistant who makes a nervous family feel welcome. A custodian whose daily interactions tell students something about whether they belong. A principal who creates the conditions where people want to do their best work. Our facilities, IT, finance, human resources and district teams solving hundreds of problems that students will never know existed.

The student experience is the result of all of us.

There is a second meaning to All Means All. It means every student. And it takes all of us.

Twenty years in

This is my twentieth year in West Vancouver Schools. There are people I work with who have been here for all twenty of those years and some who have been here longer, and there are others beginning their first year with us today. I think there is something valuable in both. Experience should give us perspective without making us cynical. Newness should bring energy without assuming everything that came before needs to be replaced.

What I am proudest of over two decades is not that we have stayed the same. It is that we have stayed curious. Stability is not the enemy of innovation. Strong foundations do not prevent you from asking what could be next. In fact, they may be what give you the confidence to ask the question.

And that is what makes today so exciting. For the last couple of weeks, we have been able to talk about the year ahead in meeting rooms and theatres. We have talked about innovation and foundations and belonging and wellbeing and our commitment that all really does mean all. Today those ideas have names and faces.

The word I chose for this year is Alive. And today, this is what it looks like. There is a child learning to read. There is a student walking into a new school wondering whether they will find their people. There is someone discovering a sport, an instrument, an idea or a technology that may become part of who they are. There is a student who needs to be challenged more than they have ever been challenged before. And somewhere in one of our schools today there is a young person who needs an adult to notice them.

That is when the words matter. So as we begin another school year, I hope we remain genuinely curious about what should change and fiercely protective of what must endure. I hope we are ambitious about the future without becoming distracted by every new thing that arrives. And I hope we keep asking the uncomfortable question about every classroom, every program and every opportunity: Who is not experiencing success yet?

Innovation. Foundational Skills. All Means All. Not three competing priorities. Three parts of the same promise.

September always gives us another beginning.

Today, we get to make something of it.

.

Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers as I edited and refined my thinking.

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30 Things I Believe About Education After 30 Years

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , on June 23, 2026| 7 Comments »

For the past few years, I have ended the school year with a list. One reflection for every year I have worked in education. It has become a bit of a ritual for me. A way to mark the end of the year, make sense of what I am seeing, and say thank you to a profession that has shaped so much of my life.

The tradition has taken different shapes. In 2022, it was 26 teachers and the 26 lessons they taught me. In 2023, 27 ways schools are better than when I started. In 2024, 28 reasons to love teaching. Last year, 29 questions I am still asking about education.

This year feels different.

Thirty years is long enough to have seen trends come and go, long enough to know that every “transformational” idea eventually gets a logo, and long enough to tell within two minutes of a professional learning session whether this is going to be useful or whether someone is about to read us a slideshow.

It is also long enough to have become a little less interested in certainty.

I do not feel like I have education figured out. In fact, in some ways, I probably feel less certain than I did fifteen years ago. But thirty years does clarify a few things. It gives you a stronger sense of what matters, what lasts, and what is mostly noise.

So, at the end of year 30, here are 30 things I believe about education.

  1. Relationships are not one more thing. They are the thing. Not in a sentimental poster-on-the-wall way. In a practical, daily, deeply human way. Students learn better when they feel known. Staff thrive more when they feel trusted. Culture moves when relationships are strong.
  2. Great schools are built in small moments, not big announcements. The tone of the front office. The way a principal responds when someone makes a mistake. The way a teacher greets a student who is having a rough day. That is culture.
  3. The best educators I know combine high standards with deep humanity. They do not confuse kindness with low expectations. They push kids, but they do it from a place of belief and hope.
  4. Kids need adults who can see past the current version of them. Some students are easy to believe in. The real work is believing in the ones who are harder to read, harder to reach, or harder to teach in the moment.
  5. Joy matters more than we sometimes admit. Not because school should be entertainment, but because joy is often a signal that people feel safe, connected and engaged. Joy is not fluff. It is fuel.
  6. A school can be academically strong and still miss something essential if students do not feel like they belong. Belonging is not an add-on. It is not a committee. It is not a month on the calendar. It is a condition for learning.
  7. For all the talk about systems, structures, and technology, teachers still make the biggest difference. The person in the room with students every day still matters most.
  8. The profession is harder than many people realize and more beautiful than many people remember. Both things are true.
  9. We should be careful not to confuse activity with improvement. Education is very good at launching things. New plans. New frameworks. New dashboards. New acronyms. Actual improvement is quieter and slower than that.
  10. Trust is the real accelerant in schools. Not pressure. Not compliance. Not another initiative.
  11. Fifty dollars of pizza at a meeting has generated more genuine goodwill than some professional development days I have spent months planning. 
  12. Leadership is less about having the answer and more about creating the conditions where better answers can emerge. The older I get, the less impressed I am by leaders who always have a take and the more impressed I am by those who can build clarity, courage and coherence in others.
  13. The best schools feel alive. There is energy in the hallways. There is laughter somewhere. There is evidence that adults and students are doing more than surviving the day.
  14. Students are paying attention to far more than our lessons. They are watching how adults disagree. How power is used. How people are treated. What gets celebrated. What gets ignored. School teaches through atmosphere as much as instruction.
  15. Public education is still one of the most hopeful things we do together. Imperfect, complicated, sometimes frustrating, absolutely. But hopeful too. A daily act of collective belief in young people and in the future.
  16. We need to get better at protecting the energy of educators. Burned-out adults cannot build thriving schools. We cannot live in a world where everything is urgent all the time.
  17. There are things that matter deeply in schools that will never fit neatly on a spreadsheet. Confidence. Courage. Identity. Friendship. Curiosity. The feeling a student gets when they finally think, maybe I am good at this.
  18. The extracurricular life of a school is not extra. Athletics. Music. Drama. Clubs. Leadership. Service. Trips. Performances. For some students, that is where their school becomes a place they love.
  19. Most school improvement is cultural before it is technical. You can import a new program. You cannot import trust. You cannot mandate generosity. You cannot spreadsheet your way into belonging.
  20. The future is going to demand more of our students than obedience. They will need judgment. Adaptability. Discernment. Creativity. Courage. The ability to work with others. The ability to make sense of complexity.
  21. AI is not reducing the need for human judgment in schools. It is raising the premium on it. After spending this past year immersed in AI integration work alongside teachers, administrators, and students, I am more convinced than ever that the technology does not make human wisdom less important. It makes it more important. The question is not whether to engage. It is how to engage well.
  22. We should be helping students ask better questions, not just produce better answers. In a world where information is abundant and intelligence is increasingly accessible, the quality of our questions matters more than ever.
  23. Children need challenge, but they also need hope. They need to believe that effort leads somewhere, that adults are on their side, and that the future is not already closed off to them.
  24. Schools should help young people become more fully themselves, not just more employable. Career readiness matters. So does character. So does citizenship. So does helping students figure out who they are and how they want to live.
  25. I believe in innovation, but I believe even more in steadiness. In a profession that is constantly being asked to change, there is something powerful about adults who are consistent, thoughtful, calm, and grounded. Steadiness is underrated. It is also, quietly, a strategy.
  26. The adults in a school deserve the same things we say students deserve. Clarity. Belonging. Growth. Encouragement. Grace. A sense that someone notices their effort.
  27. Some of the best work in education never gets tweeted, branded, or turned into a conference session. It happens quietly. A teacher staying after to help. A custodian who knows every kid’s name. A counsellor making space for a student who has nowhere else to go.
  28. Schools are still one of the few places left where different people are asked to live, learn and grow together. This matters. Especially now.
  29. I still believe this work is worth doing with energy, imagination, and yes, hope. Not because it is easy. Not because schools are perfect. But because what happens in them still matters immensely.
  30. One of the clearest signs that this work matters is when a former student comes back years later just to say thank you. After thirty years, I have been to a lot of end-of-year events, sat through a lot of budget meetings, and attended more retirement parties than I can count. And yet nothing has prepared me for how much that moment still lands every single time. It never gets old. If you are looking for evidence that this work matters, that is probably the best place to start.

Thirty years in, I find myself less interested in silver bullets and more interested in substance. Less drawn to certainty and more drawn to people who can hold complexity without losing heart. Less impressed by urgency for urgency’s sake and more appreciative of those who help schools become places where both adults and students can do their best work.

Education has changed a lot since I began. So have I.

But the longer I do this work, the more I believe that the heart of it has not changed nearly as much as people think. Young people still need adults who care. Schools still need cultures built on trust. Learning still depends on relationships. And hope, despite everything, is still a pretty good strategy.

Maybe that is what thirty years gives you. Not all the answers. Just a little more clarity about what is worth holding onto.

Here’s to year 30 and the work still ahead.

The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers as I edited and refined my thinking.

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My Words to the Class of 2026

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , , , , , on June 8, 2026| Leave a Comment »




At the start of this year, I chose a word for 2026: ALIVE

It was a word I picked because it felt like both a reminder and an aspiration.

Stay present. Stay curious. Stay connected to what actually matters.

I did not know then that it would become the word I kept returning to as graduation season arrived.

This spring, I had the chance to speak to graduates at both Rockridge Secondary and West Vancouver Secondary. The speeches were different, because each school and each graduating class is different, but they circled around some of the same ideas: presence, community, possibility, and the importance of staying connected to a real and meaningful life in a world that can pull us toward distraction.

The Rockridge speech (linked here) found its own word: Harmony. A different class, a different idea, but the same underlying hope.

One note on grad speeches. I have a running joke that if anyone remembers what the superintendent said the day after a speech, it probably went horribly wrong. The goal is to be forgotten gracefully.

Still, each year, I try to say something worth saying.


Below are my words to the West Vancouver Secondary Class of 2026.


Staff, proud parents, family members, friends, and most importantly, the West Vancouver Secondary graduating class of 2026.

Before I speak directly to the graduates, I want to offer a brief but heartfelt thank you.

To the parents and families here tonight, thank you for choosing public education, and for trusting this school and this district with your children. And to the staff of West Vancouver Secondary, thank you for supporting, challenging, encouraging, and caring for these students. Graduation is a student achievement, but it is also a community achievement.

Graduates, I want to start with one word.

Alive.

That is the word that keeps coming to mind when I hear Mr. Rauh and others talk about this class.

You are complex, in the best possible way. You bring a wide range of interests, passions, backgrounds, talents, and stories. But you are also something that matters deeply. Again and again, the adults around you describe you as kind, thoughtful, warm, and welcoming. The kind of people who make a school feel better simply by being part of it.

This is a class that showed up.

In athletics, including a senior boys basketball team that won the North Shore. In academics, including a fifth place finish out of 87 schools at the UBC Physics Olympics. In the arts, in music, theatre, Rock Band, and productions like Not Another Murder Podcast.

And sometimes, maybe most impressively, you showed up when you did not have to. You did the work and honoured the responsibility in front of you.

That says something about you.

It says you understand that community is not just built in the big moments. It is built in daily choices. The way you treat new staff. The way you welcome others. The way you keep showing up.

That is a class that is alive.

In a world that is increasingly digital, increasingly mediated, increasingly filtered through a screen, the most radical thing you can do is stay fully, stubbornly alive.

Present. Curious. Connected to real people, real places, and real conversations.

Your education has given you more than content. It has given you the capacity to think, to feel, to question, and to care. It has taught you that learning is not just about preparing for some distant future. It is about becoming more fully yourself, right now.

There will be moments ahead when the path is not clear. Times when it feels easier to stand back, scroll past, or wait until you are completely ready.

But very few meaningful things begin with feeling completely ready.

So say yes.

Say yes to learning something new. Say yes to people who expand your world. Say yes to hard conversations, generous friendships, and work that matters enough to challenge you.

And say yes to being fully alive in the life that is in front of you.

West Vancouver Secondary, Class of 2026, you have been a gift to this school and to this community.

Now go be that gift to the world.

Congratulations.

After the ceremony, a parent sent me a photo from the room. In the foreground were three students, phones out, mid scroll, while I was speaking.

I choose to believe they were posting live updates of their enthusiasm.

And honestly, that feels about right. Graduation is full of big words, proud adults, formal rituals, and young people already beginning to look toward whatever comes next.

That is as it should be.

Congratulations, Class of 2026.

Stay present. Stay curious. Stay connected.

Go be the gift.

 

If you are curious, here is a link to last year’s grad speeches as well.

 

 

The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used to do some light editing before publication.

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The Long Game

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , , , , on May 26, 2026| Leave a Comment »

My colleague Sandra-Lynn Shortall recently published a post, Ten Years Strong: Building Physical Literacy, One Move at a Time, and it got me thinking less about physical literacy itself and more about what it means to stay committed to something in education long enough for it to become part of who you are as a community.

I have been in the district office for about 19 years. That is long enough to have seen a lot of ideas arrive with genuine excitement and then quietly disappear. It is also long enough to have watched a smaller number of ideas take root, grow, and become something real.

Physical literacy is one of those ideas, and it is worth pausing to understand why.

Back in September 2013, I wrote a post called But Can They Throw a Ball? I was wrestling with a genuine concern. We were doing a lot of work to get kids more active, which was necessary and important, but I worried we were sometimes confusing physical activity with physical literacy.

The ability to move with confidence and competence, to develop a positive relationship with movement that could last a lifetime, felt like something different.

At that time, Diane Nelson had begun laying the groundwork for this work in our district. There was energy behind it, but also a real question about whether it would last. That was not so long ago. It was also a very long time ago.

Reading Sandra-Lynn’s account of the decade since, I am struck most by how difficult it is to change the actual makeup of school. Not just the program. Not just the schedule. Not just the policy. The felt experience of what school is, what it values, what it looks like to walk through its hallways, sit in its classrooms, and experience learning each day.

That kind of change is slow. It is stubborn. And most initiatives, however worthy, do not survive long enough to produce it. The graveyard of promising educational ideas is vast.

Physical literacy has been different.

It has made it through budget pressures, shifting priorities, a global pandemic and the relentless churn of new urgent things demanding attention. It has lasted because of people.

Diane Nelson’s vision gave it a foundation. Amber Pascual and Erin Crawford gave it a heartbeat, showing up in classrooms year after year, building the trust and relationships that no program document can manufacture. Over the course of a decade, they have delivered more than 5,000 workshops.

I think about that number and what it actually represents. Thousands of individual moments of connection with teachers and students. Thousands of times someone walked into a gym, a classroom, or a professional learning session and made the case again that this work matters.

That is what I find myself writing about here, more than physical literacy itself.

It is the thing I return to again and again in this role. Powerful educators change things. Not systems in the abstract. Not policies on their own. Not initiatives because they appear in a plan.

People change things.

People who care enough to keep showing up. People who are stubborn in the best possible way. People who continue to make the case even when the attention of the institution has shifted to something else. They are the reason anything of lasting value happens in schools.

I have written about physical literacy several times over the years, in 2019, in 2024, and earlier this year. Each time, there was more to say because there was more that had actually happened.

That is the thing about a sustained commitment. It keeps generating stories. You cannot tell an ongoing story if there is no ongoing work to tell it from.

In our district, we have been explicit about positioning physical literacy and AI as two key areas of innovation. At first glance, they may seem like very different priorities. I actually think they belong together.

One speaks to preparing students for a world that is increasingly digital. The other speaks to preparing students for a world that is increasingly sedentary.

Together, they reflect something we believe about the whole child. Being ready to learn and ready to live requires both a capable mind and a capable body. Neither is more important than the other. Both require attention. Both require leadership. And both require the patience to become part of the culture rather than just part of the calendar.

That is the thing about the long game. It is harder than it sounds.

It asks something of leaders that is easy to describe and genuinely difficult to practice. It asks us to protect something through the moments when the excitement has faded and the real work of sustaining it has arrived. It asks us to look at something that is working and resist the temptation to move on simply because something newer has appeared. It asks us to trust that depth, over time, produces something that breadth never can.

Time moves quickly. 19 years in the district teaches you that.

What it has also taught me is that the most meaningful things in a school system are almost never the newest things. They are the things someone refused to stop believing in.

To Diane, Amber, Erin, Sandra-Lynn, and everyone who has kept this work alive and growing: thank you for playing the long game.

The students in our schools are better for it.

The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking.

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Considering Running for School Trustee? A Few Things to Know First

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , , , on May 12, 2026| 8 Comments »

Full disclosure upfront: I am writing this post about an election where the trustees who are elected will become my bosses. Make of that what you will. I will try to be objective anyway.

In October 2026, communities across British Columbia will elect school trustees. In West Vancouver, the five seats on the Board of Education will be on the ballot. While trustee elections rarely generate the headlines of municipal or provincial campaigns, I would argue it is important for everyone in your local community to vote. The trustees elected in October will help guide a school system that locally serves thousands of students, employs hundreds of staff and can shape what learning looks like for years to come.

I have had the privilege of working with several boards of education during my time as a superintendent. Watching how those boards approach their work, the questions they ask, the relationships they build and the way they navigate difficult decisions has shaped my thinking about what good governance looks like in public education.

So this seems like a good time to ask: what does a school trustee actually do? And more importantly, what does it take to do it well?

The Role Is Not What Most People Think It Is

Here is where I want to be honest, because I have seen the disappointment up close. People run for school board because they care deeply about education. Maybe they had a frustrating experience as a parent. Maybe they want to champion a cause they believe in. Maybe they want to make sure their community’s values are reflected in the school system. All of those motivations are completely valid.

But the role itself often surprises people.

Trustees do not run schools. They do not manage teachers, intervene in individual classroom decisions, become involved in individual parent concerns or direct the superintendent on operational matters. They do not have a role in day to day operations of a school district. What trustees do is govern a system. As the BC School Trustees Association (BCSTA) describes it, trustees listen to their communities, guide the work of their district, hire and evaluate the superintendent, and set plans, policies and oversee the annual budget.

That is different from managing. And that distinction matters enormously.

Over a decade ago, I wrote about what makes board governance work well and the relationship between a board and its superintendent. Those posts came out of a presentation with our then-Board Chair Cindy Dekker at the BCSTA Fall Academy. One of the things we kept coming back to then is still the thing I come back to now: when governance works, it is because the board and the superintendent have a clear and respectful understanding of who does what.

In West Vancouver there are twenty board policies and more than a hundred administrative procedures. That distinction is not bureaucratic tidiness. It is the foundation of a functioning organization.

There is also a second gap that can catch people off guard. Trustees are elected as individuals, but they govern as a corporate board. Your personal passion, your neighbourhood concern, or your single issue does not become policy simply because you hold a seat at the table. Trustees are also not there to represent a small circle of voices, whether that is friends, networks or a single issue group, but to consider the needs of the entire system.  Governance requires building consensus, thinking system-wide, and sometimes accepting and articulating decisions that reflect the collective judgment of the board rather than an individual preference. That is not always easy, especially when you care deeply about an issue. But it is central to how public governance works.

And then there is a third gap: much of the work is policy and budget, not community events and ribbon cuttings. The work of the board is done in the board room. The unglamorous work of reviewing financial statements, navigating complex funding formulas, understanding collective bargaining context, and studying Ministry directives occupies far more time than most candidates anticipate.

What Makes a Good Trustee

Before answering that question, it is worth saying something clearly: school trustees across British Columbia volunteer extraordinary time and care to their communities. The role is demanding, often misunderstood and rarely glamorous. Yet hundreds of people across the province step forward each election cycle because they believe deeply in public education. Our system depends on that commitment.

The best trustees I have worked with over the years share a few things in common.

They are curious more than certain. They arrive at meetings with questions rather than verdicts. They understand the difference between the governance work they do and the operational work staff does, and they respect that boundary even when the issues are complex or emotionally charged.

They stay connected to their communities without treating the board table as a platform for a single constituency. Strong trustees think about the entire system — every student, every school — even when the conversation begins with a local concern.

And they commit the time the role actually requires. It is not a full-time job, but requires an ongoing regular investment of time. The learning curve is real, and the work demands preparation, reading, and thoughtful engagement.

One of my favourite lines from those 2014 posts still holds: if you show us a district that is going strong, you will almost certainly find a board and superintendent who are in sync and committed to doing what it takes to work together for students. That relationship is not accidental. It is built deliberately through clear process, trust, and mutual respect.

I also think about a post I wrote in 2023 called Different Voices after a BCSTA session where I was struck by the range of perspectives in the room — student leaders, Indigenous education representatives, international families, 2SLLGBTQI+ voices. Boards are strongest when they actively listen to the many voices that make up their communities rather than assuming they already know what those communities need. That kind of listening is a skill, and it matters in public governance.

BCSTA provides extensive professional learning and resources for trustees through the Trustee Academy, the various virtual and in-person workshops, and other supports. None of that replaces the learning that comes from showing up with openness and humility, but it is helpful that new trustees do not have to navigate the role alone.

Why This Work Matters Right Now

School systems are navigating a moment of significant change.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we think about learning and knowledge. Student mental health needs have increased in ways few people anticipated a decade ago. Communities are becoming more diverse, and expectations of public institutions continue to evolve. At the same time, school districts operate within complex financial constraints and shifting provincial priorities.

None of those realities are solved by a single board meeting or a single decision. But they do shape the conversations that happen around board tables across the province.

Thoughtful governance matters in moments like this. Communities benefit when people step forward who are willing to listen carefully, ask good questions, and make decisions with the long-term health of the entire system in mind.

If You Are Considering Running

If you are thinking about running for school trustee, there are a few simple things that can help clarify whether the role is the right fit.

Prior to running attend several board meetings. Not one. Several. The texture of the work becomes clearer over time, and a single meeting rarely shows you what the job actually feels like month after month.

Talk with current or former trustees and ask them what surprised them about the role. Ask what they wish they had known when they started. And if you have the opportunity in your district, learning about the school system you would be governing can be valuable context as well.

The school trustee role deserves to be approached on its own terms. It is demanding, consequential work that benefits from people who are genuinely interested in governance and in public education.

As BCSTA has put it for more than a century, a high-quality public education system is the foundation of a strong democracy. The people who help guide that system locally matter. October is closer than it seems. Now is a good time to ask yourself seriously whether you want to do this work. If the honest answer is yes, I hope you run.

That work belongs to all of us.

The BCSTA is hosting an evolving series of resources on board elections available HERE. 
The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking.
 

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Repetition Is Part of the Work

Posted in Change, Personalized Learning, SD45, tagged , , on March 4, 2026| Leave a Comment »


We were putting significant energy into bringing Sarah Ward back to speak with families and staff about executive functioning in late January. It is important work, and we know it matters. Still, a small voice in my head said, haven’t we already done this?

And then I paused.

Sara last spoke to our community in 2017.

That was nine years ago.

In that time, more than half of our current parents likely did not have children in the system. A significant portion of our staff were not yet working here. And in a K–12 district, roughly 75 percent of our students weren’t even enrolled yet. Many of our parents’ own experiences of school are now twenty or more years old.

When you look at it that way, the idea that we have “already done this” doesn’t really hold.What is actually happening is something else entirely.

Leadership has memory. Communities don’t.

Those of us who stay in systems long enough carry the history with us. We remember when an idea was first introduced, how it landed, what worked, what didn’t. That institutional memory is valuable. It helps us avoid fads. It gives us perspective. It allows us to be steady.

But it also creates a blind spot.

While leaders remember, school communities renew themselves every year. Every September, new families arrive. New staff join teams. Students move through grades and eventually out of the system altogether. Culture, unlike policy, does not persist on its own. It has to be retaught, re-explained, and re-lived—not because it failed the first time, but because that’s how learning actually works.

Repetition isn’t stagnation. It’s how understanding is built. And it’s often what makes real improvement possible.

I think about our principals who meet with new Kindergarten parents each fall. The presentation is familiar. The questions are fairly predictable. For the principal, it can feel like Groundhog Day. But for those families sitting in the library, it is their first time. Their child is about to start school. Everything is new.

The work of leadership, in that moment, is to deliver that message like you did the first time.

Because to the people hearing it, it matters.

This is the companion idea to what I wrote in my last post, Steadiness as Strategy. There, I argued that steadiness isn’t the opposite of innovation, but its prerequisite. That without trust and a stable foundation, real improvement is hard to sustain.

What I didn’t fully name is what steadiness asks of leaders.

It asks us to say things we’ve said before, to people who have never heard them. It asks us to resist the pull of novelty when the work that matters is still unfinished. It asks us to stay interested in ideas long after they have stopped feeling new to us.

But here’s where it gets complicated.

Not all repetition is the same. Some repetition serves the community. Some repetition just serves us.

I wrote a few years ago about teaching and aging rock stars. Roger Daltrey of The Who once said there was no point in producing new music because fans just want to hear the classics. Just play the greatest hits. And I get it. There’s comfort in the familiar, for the audience and for the performer.

But the artists I admire most, people like Paul Simon, take a different approach. They know the crowd wants to hear the songs that made them famous. They play those songs. But they also keep creating. They rework old material. They stay curious. They resist the temptation to coast on what already worked.

The question for leaders is the same one facing any artist with a robust catalog: are you repeating because it still matters, or because it’s comfortable?

That’s the discernment this work requires.

Executive functioning matters. It mattered in 2017, and it matters now. So we bring Sarah Ward back. This summer, BCSSA is bringing Yong Zhao back to speak with superintendents from across the province, not because we have run out of ideas, but because these ideas still matter, and most of the people who need to hear them have changed since the last time they were said.

Capacity takes years to build. Communities don’t stand still while we build it.

But if I am honest, there are other things I repeat that are harder to justify. Familiar phrases. Comfortable framings. The Superintendent Greatest Hits. Sometimes I catch myself reaching for them not because the audience needs to hear them, but because I already know how to say them.

Steadiness is not the same as stagnation. But the line between them isn’t always obvious. The difference is intention. Am I repeating this because the community hasn’t heard it, or because I haven’t bothered to think of something better?

Earlier in my career, I might not have asked that question. Repetition felt like a lack of momentum. It felt like you weren’t moving fast enough, or far enough, or boldly enough.

Now, I see it differently.

Steadiness creates the conditions for learning to deepen. Trust allows people to hear ideas they may not have been ready for the first time. And consistency sends a signal: this matters enough to stay with.

But only if it actually does.

So when we bring an idea back into focus, when we invite a speaker again, revisit a framework, or restate a belief, we’re not circling.

We are anchoring.

The work isn’t to constantly invent. It is to welcome new people into ideas that matter, again and again.

Without coasting. And without apology.

The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking.

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The Persistence of Yes

Posted in Change, Personalized Learning, SD45, tagged , , on January 20, 2026| 8 Comments »

This is Post #500. Writing that sentence feels both surreal and deeply satisfying. More than anything, these posts have taught me that leadership and life are sustained by one simple word: yes.

That yes began more than fifteen years ago, uncertain and small. When I pressed “publish” on my very first entry, I had no sense of where it might lead. Would anyone read it? Would I have anything worth saying after a handful of posts? Would the blog simply fade out, like so many others? And yet, here we are. 499 posts later.

The Early Yes

At the beginning, the simple act of writing was an experiment. By the time I reached 150 posts, I reflected that

Blogging has helped me become very comfortable with who I am … it has forced me to be specific about ideas, pushed me to share publicly, and given me a regular vehicle to reflect and refine my thinking. Blogging is different; it is the difference between telling and engaging, and I look forward to engaging in the next 150.

That shift, from telling to engaging, was one of my first and most important yesses.

At 150, I was already sharing advice for others who wanted to start: be clear about what you will and won’t write about … write for yourself, not for what others may want … think in blog posts … be a storyteller. Our schools are full of amazing stories waiting to be told. It was a reminder that blogging isn’t about volume; it’s about voice.

The Hard but Important Yes

Here’s what I didn’t know at the beginning: how difficult it would be to keep saying yes.

At 400, I wrote:

When I started blogging, I never really thought about how it would end. And I don’t think I fully knew that it was actually hard to write regularly. Anyone who tells you blogging is easy is lying! But most important things are not easy.

There were weeks when the words wouldn’t come. Stretches when I questioned whether I had anything new to say. Moments when the pressure of other responsibilities made the blog feel like one more obligation rather than an opportunity. Even at the 10-year mark, when I joked with George Couros that we might be “two of the last bloggers out there,” I wondered if persistence was just stubbornness by another name.

But then someone would stop me at a conference to share how a post resonated with them. Or an email would arrive from a teacher I had never met, describing how an idea sparked something in their practice. Or a comment would appear on the blog itself: thoughtful, challenging, extending the thinking beyond what I had offered. And the yes would return, renewed not by my own certainty but by the community that had quietly formed around these posts.

The persistence of yes, I have learned, is not a solo endeavor. It is sustained by every reader who takes the time to engage, whether directly on the blog, through social media, or in those wonderful in-person moments when someone says, “I read your blog.” Those four words matter more than you might know.

The Yes Behind the Yes

What I haven’t said yet is that I never wrote alone.

Before there was a blog, there was a newspaper column. And before every column went to print, it went to my dad. He was my first editor, catching errors, questioning word choices, and making everything a little bit better. When I started the blog in 2010, I had just officially become a superintendent. My dad was proud of that. He saw me settle into the role, saw the blog take shape, saw the first few years of posts. He passed away in August 2014, and I think of him often when I write. Some habits, once formed by people we love, thankfully stay with us.

When I started this blog in 2010, newspapers were still flourishing. I had grown up reading them, writing for them, learning from the columnists who made sense of the world in 800 words at a time. Over these 500 posts, I have watched that world shrink. Papers have closed. Bureaus have emptied. The people who made a living thinking in public, holding institutions accountable, telling the stories of communities, have largely moved on or been moved out. I miss newspapers, but more than that, I miss the people who wrote for them. Blogging is not the same thing, but in some small way it feels like an attempt to keep that spirit alive: a place to think publicly, to wrestle with ideas, to believe that writing for an audience, however small, still matters.

Since my dad, others have quietly taken up the work of editing. Tricia Buckley, and before her Sharon Pierce and Deb Podurgiel, have read every single post before it was published. Every one. They catch what I miss, sharpen what I muddle, and make this space better than I could make it alone. To write for 500 posts is one thing. To have colleagues willing to read 500 drafts is something else entirely.

I am also grateful to Jay Goldman, editor of School Administrator Magazine. Over the years, Jay and the magazine have repurposed a number of my posts and accepted other pieces of writing. What begins as a post for this small corner of the internet sometimes finds its way to a broader audience. That reach, and the connections it creates, has mattered more than I expected.

And then there are the bloggers who showed me what this could be. In the early days, I had a blogroll that was inspiring. I would read Dean Shareski, or Will Richardson, or David Warlick and be excited. The world of web 2.0 was booming and each post I read was opening me up to new ideas and a new world I was trying to understand. George Couros has been both friend and model for what it means to tell the story of education with optimism and persistence. More recently, I have found kinship with a small community of BC superintendent bloggers. Jordan Tinney and Kevin Godden have since retired, but for a time we kept each other going. Now it’s mostly Dave Eberwein and me. I also appreciate how Cari Wilson and Sandra-Lynn Shortall in West Vancouver blog regularly and keep the blog community humming.

The Yes in Ideas

Looking back across 499 posts, I am struck by something unexpected: the topics have changed dramatically, but the underlying themes have remained remarkably consistent.

Yes to innovation with curiosity: From early posts on social media in classrooms and mobile devices to today’s reflections on generative AI, the tools change but the thread remains: lean into change with curiosity, not fear.

Yes to mentorship that outlives us: I arrived in Mrs. Caffrey’s Grade 2 class unable to read and without confidence. I had her for Grade 2, Grade 3, and Grade 4, and left at the end of those three years a completely different student. I have written about her many times over the years because she represents something I believe deeply: a single teacher can change a life trajectory. From World Teachers’ Day tributes to stories of colleagues who shaped my early career, I have come to see mentorship as how yes persists beyond any single person, passed forward voice to voice, generation to generation. And now, at 52, I find myself on the other side of that exchange, trying to be for others what so many were for me.

Yes to well-being as core, not extra: Posts on physical literacy, wellness, and school sports remind me that joy, movement, and balance are not optional. They are essentials for students and leaders alike.

Yes to family and wonder as part of leadership: Interwoven among leadership reflections are personal stories: concerts with my wife, milestones with my kids, anecdotes from sports and community. Leadership is human work. Yes is sustained when it includes wonder, humour, and gratitude.

The Yes that Learns

Over the years, I have admitted when I was wrong. I have revised posts, shifted my stance, and acknowledged that what once seemed certain might now be more complicated. The persistence of yes doesn’t mean refusing to change. It is about holding fast to values while letting strategies evolve. It is about being willing to write in pencil, not ink.

The Yes Forward

So what does yes look like after 500 posts?

It looks like continuing to model thoughtful, transparent use of AI in schools, choosing curiosity over compliance, and reminding ourselves that technology should expand opportunity, not shrink relationships.

It looks like protecting public education as a place of hope, belonging, and possibility, even when the winds of politics blow cold.

It looks like saying yes to wonder, to the small joys that keep cynicism at bay.

It looks like believing, still, that education can and must be better tomorrow than it was yesterday.

After 500 posts, here is my promise: I will keep saying yes to relationships before technology, to students before systems, to hope before cynicism. Because public education still deserves our most persistent yes.

The Power of People

As I’ve been rereading old posts in preparation for this one, I keep being struck by the same thing: the people. Name after name, story after story. I am reminded of how many good people we have in West Vancouver, and more broadly across education. People who care deeply, who show up for one another, who make this work meaningful. I am lucky to be part of this community.

The Invitation

So here, at Post #500, I leave you with the same question that has guided me since the beginning:

What, in your corner of education, still deserves a persistent yes?

For me, the answer is unchanged: a stubborn belief in public education as a place of hope, possibility, and human connection.

When I pressed “publish” on that first post, I didn’t know if anyone would read it. 499 posts later, I still don’t know exactly where this is going. But I know the question is still worth asking, and the yes is still worth emphatically saying. This is not just persistence. This is the persistence of yes.

The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking.

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