In this episode of The Smarter Campus Podcast, Zach sits down with a leader from Pikes Peak State College to talk about what it actually looks like to move from experimenting with AI to making it available across an entire institution. Pikes Peak initially began with a small pilot group evaluating different tools and approaches. But when the team brought a limited rollout proposal to college leadership, the response was much bigger: go all in. The result was campus-wide access for students, faculty, and staff, with collaboration and shared learning at the center of the strategy. The conversation also explores why community colleges require especially thoughtful approaches to AI adoption. Different states structure technical education, transfer pathways, and workforce programs very differently, meaning there is no single model that works everywhere. For educators who are still figuring out where to begin, the advice is simple: start small, understand what people are actually afraid of, and use AI as a starting point rather than a finished product. The episode is a practical look at what institutional AI adoption can look like when access, experimentation, and human judgment are built into the rollout from the beginning.

Every leader carries an internal script about who they are, whether they belong, how much they should speak, and what they have to prove. But who wrote yours? In this episode of The Humility Advantage, we explore Chapter 6, Rewriting the Script — Tools to Reclaim Your Voice. J. Alexander’s own leadership journey provides the emotional center—from leading hundreds of Marines and serving in leadership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to entering corporate America and wondering why nobody was choosing him to lead. That tension created a familiar imposter-syndrome script: “You have to prove you belong.” “Don’t let them see weakness.” This episode explores the Proving Script, the People-Pleasing Script, and the Silence Script, along with J.’s four-step framework for rewriting limiting beliefs: Awareness. Interruption. Integration. Reinforcement. You’ll also hear practical tools involving journaling, breathwork, visualization, identity-based affirmations, and one of J.’s central leadership distinctions: Performative confidence versus calm certainty. The question to take with you: Who wrote your script—and why are you still letting it lead you?

Listen to the Podcast, subscribe, leave a rating and a review: Apple:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-fix-a-toxic-work-culture-w-dr-sharalyn-payne/id1614151066?i=1000793212124 Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/episode/6yVX8aebG60swQ8W3RNtnn?si=nqv7nvz-QdOb8I0R_Pu7BQ https://open.spotify.com/episode/6yVX8aebG60swQ8W3RNtnn YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZtQykq-D8Tw

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Lesley Hatton, Senior Programme Officer at Nord Anglia Education, about Global Campus — the platform connecting nearly 90 schools across Nord Anglia's international network, and what it takes to design cross-cultural connection at that scale. The conversation draws on 2023 research with University College London that identified four "connection pillars" behind the program's design. Together, Seth and Lesley explore how Nord Anglia's four connection pillars — self, world, experts, and community — took shape from that UCL research, and the test her team uses to decide whether a proposed activity (a long-requested "mathematics club," a Tanzania expedition, live drawing sessions paired with MIT and Juilliard) actually builds connection or just adds more schoolwork. They get into the harder part of running one platform across dozens of countries with different cultural and legal norms — what gets moderated, what gets held back for a specific school, and why something as simple as an image of a pig can be off-limits in some places. Lesley walks through the six student behaviors her team tracks, including the finding that students at Nord Anglia's most-connected schools score six to ten points higher than their peers on self-reported measures of those behaviors — and closes with what a school outside any international network can realistically borrow from the model. Key Topics The four connection pillars: self, world, experts, community 2023 UCL research on intercultural competence Designing activities that build real cross-cultural connection (the mathematics club example) Content moderation across different countries' cultural and legal norms Collaborations with MIT, Juilliard, and UNICEF The six student behaviors and the most-connected-schools data Building global connection without an international network Links & Resources Global Campus — Nord Anglia Education Nord Anglia Education Learning Explorations - Nord Anglia's podcast hosted by Emily Murphy: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/learning-explorations/id1673148486 Seth's earlier Make It Mindful conversation with Emily Murphy on metacognition — https://www.banyangloballearning.com/podcast/45-metacognition-the-first-step-to-lifelong-learning-with-kayla-morehead-and-emily-murphy Why Distance Learning, Seth's other podcast — https://www.cilc.org/Members/Why-Distance-Learning-Podcast.aspx Banyan Global Cohorts World Savvy Svitlo School Guest Bio: Lesley Hatton Lesley Hatton is a Senior Programme Officer at Nord Anglia Education, where she works on Global Campus, the platform connecting students across Nord Anglia's international network of schools. Before moving into this role, she taught in international schools herself. Hatton studied at the University of Warwick and is based in Reading, UK. About the Host Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

Recorded live at a conference session, Suzanne "Suzie" Myers, Jocelyn Washburn, and Bonnie Palysak from the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning introduce I-STAR — a new adaptive, web-based platform built on the research-backed Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) writing strategies. The team walks through why they built it (teachers lack time to explicitly teach and grade writing), how it works (teacher-led instruction paired with auto-scoring, adaptive practice, and progress tracking), and shares a moving case study of a student's growth from disjointed to sophisticated writing. They also pull back the curtain on the challenges of translating decades-old paper-based strategies into technology with a non-education-focused development team, including AI-generated practice sentences. The session closes with interactive audience brainstorming for future dashboard features and a call for schools to join their pilot study.