fbpx

Everett Hendrixon, with Eco Supply LLC, has been in agriculture for 20+ years. With an early career in law, and then business management, Everett believes he found what he wants to be when he grows up – someone who feeds people. Whether that means giving fresh produce from his micro-farm or educating others on the benefits of growing real food, his mission is to connect as many as possible to their food source.

[fusebox_track_player url="https://traffic.libsyn.com/better/Real_learning_by_connecting_with_real_food.mp3" color="#5956A5" title="Real Learning By Connecting With Real Food" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_linkedin="true" ]

Show Highlights

Connect your learning community to their food source for positive educational outcomes.
The benefits of Flex Farm to get your students excited about authentic learning in the classroom.
Don’t be a “boiling frog” disconnected with the needs of students in both urban and rural areas.
The limitations, pitfalls and generational disconnect in our current agriculture system.
Get kids eating bags of lettuce to support connection to the community.
Teach your brain emotional intelligence, raise self worth, build confidence and self esteem with these systems to “grow” in the classroom.
The need to pivot to help students find solutions to the fragility of our supply chain and climate change to minimize the carbon footprint.
Food can reframe the challenges you have in a way that makes solutions obvious.

“You educate yourself by educating. You’re feeding your mind and then you can feed others. You feed your body, you can feed others.”

- Everett Hendrixon

Madeline Mortimore

Everett Hendrixon’s Resources & Contact Info:

Read my latest book!

Learn why the ABCs of powerful professional development™ work – Grow your skills by integrating more Authenticity, Belonging, and Challenge into your life and leadership.

 

Join the “Back to School Boot Camp”

The one thing you need to start next year off with energy momentum is a
solid 90-day plan.

In the “Back to School Bootcamp” I will teach you how to create
your 90-day plan in just 5-days.

Apply to the Mastermind

The mastermind is changing the landscape of professional
development for school leaders.

100% of our members agree that the mastermind is the #1 way
they grow their leadership skills.

Read the Transcript here.

00:00:02
Daniel: To benefit you as a leader, to have a healthy amount of skepticism and to apply critical thinking in whatever you do, especially listening to a show like this. I hope these ideas challenge you that we talk about within the better leaders, better schools, podcast conversations but don’t take everything as truth. Test the ideas, see that they create results and work for you. If they do, awesome, we’re building more trust in a relationship. This is your go to source for, I guess, mobile asynchronous professional development. That’s one reason why Bob’s podcast is in the top 5% of nearly 3 million global shows. The reason I brought up skepticism and critical thinking is that you should not trust a coach who doesn’t have a coach or you shouldn’t join a mastermind if the people leading a mastermind aren’t part of a mastermind. And that context is important because today’s guest, Everett Hendrixon , I met him in one of the masterminds I’m a part of right now. I’m a part of three masterminds. His Spidey sense went off. “Oh, Danny has this podcast about education. I actually work with schools” and so I started talking to everyone, ” What do you do and you’re going to love it. He’s got this thing called the Flex Farm and you’ll hear about it on the show. It’s so cool because students grow fruit and veg in the classroom, real stuff. It can be organic and they can eat it. It’s like farm to table in the classroom. Some districts have even stopped buying lettuce and other fruits and vegetables because they grow it now within their school with the use of Flex Farm. We’re going to explore what that thing is, but we’re also going to talk about important underlying topics like why a connection to food and food sources are good, especially for students who live in urban settings that have, what do they call them, food deserts. Because they don’t have grocery stores and that kind of stuff is accessible. Believe it or not, ever seen the Flex Farm and the connection from to the food source even in rural settings. For me that was sort of an assumption. I thought those kids were already connected to food. Well, not so according to Everett. So lots of cool stuff to learn. We also talk about authentic learning and what some teachers are doing with the Flex Farm in their classroom. I’m so glad you’re here and thanks for listening to the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast, a show that we create for Ruckus Makers, which is you an out of the box leader making change happen in education. We’ll be right back after a few messages from our show sponsors.

00:02:58
Daniel: Learn how to successfully drive school change and help your diverse stakeholders establish priorities and improve practice in leading change. Certificate in School Management and Leadership Course from Harvard. Leading Change runs from October 12th to November 9th, 2022. Apply by September 30th. Enroll by October 6th. Get started at betterleadersbetterschools.com/Harvard. During COVID every teacher is a new teacher. That’s why innovative school leaders are turning to Teach FX whose virtual PD is equipping thousands of teachers with the skills they need to create engaging, equitable and rigorous virtual or blended classes. To learn more about Teach FX and get a special offer visit teachfx.com/BLBS. All students have an opportunity to succeed with Organized Binder, which equips educators with a resource to provide stable and consistent learning, whether that’s in a distance, hybrid or traditional educational setting. Learn more at OrganizeBinder.COM. Well, hello, Ruckus Maker. I am thrilled today to be joined by a new colleague and friend. We’re in the same Mastermind, and so maybe we’ll talk about that potentially in the show, too. But that’s how I met Everett Hendrixon with Echo Supply LLC, who has been in agriculture for 20 plus years with an early career in law and then business management ever believes he found what he wants to be when he grows up. Someone who feeds people. Whether that means giving fresh produce from his micro farm or educating others on the benefits of growing real food, his mission is to connect as many as possible to their food source. Everette, welcome to the show.

00:04:57
Everett: Danny. Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure to know you since I met you. Thank you so much for this opportunity to have this conversation and talk to your audience.

00:05:06
Daniel: Whenever I get to have people that I actually know, you know what I mean? That’s few and far between. Sometimes I get a lot of pitches for the show, but I’m excited to share your story because you’re somebody that people need to know and this connection with your mission to connect people with their food source and the interesting ways we can do that in classrooms, I think I know my audience in the Ruckus Maker Nation is going to love to hear. Before we get to all that, listen, you grew up in manufacturing and as your bio states, you’re in law, then business and then you got connected to agriculture. Like, what’s the deal? What’s the deal with that? I need to hear that story.

00:05:45
Everett: It really started with my grandmother. It sounds like I’m starting at the very beginning of a very long story, but I promise to make it quick and concise and effective for the audience and what we’re talking about. My grandmother was born in 1914. There were six sisters, so a family of eight, extremely religious, religiously devout family in rural Appalachia. I say all that to frame it in the fact that in the thirties, a young woman from a religiously devout family of this size had a path that was pretty much carved out for them, whether they liked it or not. Most young women at that time would acquiesce. My grandmother ,to me in my world, the original Ruckus Maker. She did not choose that right. She went to college. She was the first one of her entire family to have ever gone to college. She got a finance degree, she got a job. In that culture was kind of unheard of from a young woman. After college, she gets married, she has a child, and my grandfather gets drafted into World War II. Now she’s a married single mom. My uncle was probably three years old at the time, so mother of a very young child. She starts to make some very unique life choices at that time for her. And I say these are life choices because as it turns out, it sounds very typical, but there was an intent behind it. My grandfather came back from the war. He’s a broken man. He’s not alcoholic or abusive, but PTSD is what we would call it now. Back then, they called it being a veteran. So but that means that my grandmother now has a more of a burden in the family to care for. He did get a job at Union Carbide shoveling coal in the furnace every day and did that for 30 years until he retired. He was a productive part of society. He was a very influential man to me as well. But my grandmother is a very frugal woman. She had a finance degree. She hates debt. That’s not in her vocabulary. My grandfather will spend every red cent in his pocket on any shiny thing that he sees coming along. She manages and takes the reins of the finances of the family again, not culturally the way it was done then, but she saves up money and she buys a piece of land. By then, my mother was born. This piece of land has a house that’s half fallen in, and has a barn. It’s 130 acres of mostly forest and hills. She starts a vineyard. She starts an orchard. She has livestock. She has one acre of vegetable garden. In modern terms, we call this a homestead farm. She fed her family of four and many others in her community out of a passion for what she wanted to do. When my grandmother would put food on the table, her face was beaming, and it was extremely important to her, especially to feed her children and then later her grandchildren. She had a passion for education. She had a passion for life. She had a passion for growing food and providing food and that really set the tone for her whole entire life. One other story about her, when I was in my mid-teens, and it really started to define things in my life at that time. She ran across a perfect stranger. A single mother of three. Apparently, there was no other support. So that’s why we say single. I don’t know. Again, this was a stranger, but she was a mother of three young ones and she was sick as a dog, whether it was the flu or some other nasty virus. My grandmother. According to my grandmother, the kids were running around like animals out of the cage. She drops everything she’s doing. She goes home and she makes a massive pot of soup. And then let me tell you, I don’t like soup, but my grandmother made delicious soup. She takes this pot of soup to this woman. She finds out where she lives and she brings it to her and says, “Your kids need to eat.” At that moment, when I heard this story and I processed it, I knew that if I could be half the man that my grandmother was, I would be a productive part of the society and I would bring benefit to my community. I didn’t really connect that until, like you said during the intro law, the business management led me by way of accident to agriculture. I found myself as a general manager of a tomato farm. And then it clicked inside of me. Whether it was the DNA she passed on to me or just that raw admiration. I love to feed people and I have a passion for it. When I was able to look at forming a career around that passion, then things in my life and in the definitions around what I defined were very different. And so that’s the ruckus maker story of my life with my grandmother and how I came to be in agriculture and why it fuels me every day to do something productive for myself and my community.

00:11:12
Daniel: It’s an amazing story. Grandma was certainly a ruckus maker, going against the grain of many norms during the day, especially within her community. To take the lead in terms of finances, starting this farm that’s feeding her family and others around it and doing things that are great out of service or helping out strangers and that kind of thing. I could see why you admire her so much. Awesome story. I appreciate you sharing that. You have this connection that’s very real with food. These stories that have been passed down. But not everybody has that. I grew up in Palatine, Illinois. Right. 30 minutes northwest of Chicago. The freshest food anybody from Chicago is going to appreciate, this joke. I’m already laughing about it. The freshest food we grow in Palatine is from Portillo’s. To all my Chicago listeners, they actually have that in Florida now. I don’t know if you’re aware of Portillo’s, but anyways, it’s a fast food place, but it’s really delicious. It’s not fresh. It’s not farm to table at all. And it’s not good for you either. L I said on the Chicago Bears guys and you know, they got that’s why. Deep dish pizza things like Portillo’s and the beer like that’s that’s why Chicago people look that way and have those health health issues. I bring that context in because I’ve been disconnected from the food source and what we put on the table for most of my life and I would say maybe wasn’t until moving to Belgium and Netherlands and Scotland where there’s just so much farm. There’s smaller places, it’s all condensed. We saw that kind of stuff so I started to understand it and care more, care more. I’d love for you to talk about what you think. Is that impact? What do you see in terms of the impact of people’s disconnect from food?

00:13:18
Everett: It’s the pot of boiling water that the frog is in. He doesn’t really realize he’s in trouble until it’s started to boil. It’s kind of where we’ve come to since the last agricultural revolution, which was right after World War II, back then and I use my grandmother as the perfect example, I have a direct connection to a food source. I know how food was raised. My summers were spent with her doing that and all the rest of it. I believe the statistic is 40 years ago or 50 years ago, rather, 90% of the population had that connection, whether it was removed or not, you still had that one generational connection. Now it’s down to something like 3%.

00:14:08
Daniel: From 90 to 3%.

00:14:10
Everett: We’ve become disconnected. I can do the research and get back to you on those numbers and where they come from. When I look at it from the context of schools and children. When we connect kids to growing food, it’s much like music. I was raised playing the violin. What I did not realize and what I found out a few years ago is learning a stringed instrument or learning any instrument, but specifically stringed instruments teaches your brain math and you don’t even know it. With growing food, you’re teaching your brain emotional intelligence and you don’t even know it. You get kids connected into their food. You raise self worth, you raise confidence, self esteem. They’re proud of something that they don’t specifically know why. There’s other research that connects kids to food, showing them growing these using these systems to grow in the classroom. That shows that there is attention on food. The statistics in this study in the school district, it was in conjunction with the Brown County Health Department and Goodwill Industries in north central Wisconsin. They followed fourth graders for a year and they surveyed them post and pre and all that. The bottom line is there was a 33% increase in the consumption of fresh vegetables and a 46% increase in the positive perception of fresh vegetables. Understanding that most kids, rural or otherwise, even in the cities or cities or even in rural areas, really don’t know where food comes from, especially produce. They go to the grocery store and get it. The food at the grocery store is not going to be as tasty as something you pick on your own. And that’s for various reasons. And we can go down different rabbit holes there, but when they grow it themselves and they eat it in this specific one, the anecdotal accounts that came out of that study was they the kids would harvest, they’d have about a gallon bag full of lettuce each kid did of their own that they raised. Many of them ate it on the bus on the way home. It didn’t even make it didn’t even make it home. You can’t even get kids to eat vegetables at the cafeteria now. They’re doing it voluntarily on the bus.

00:16:42
Daniel: That’s shocking, because I’ve obviously worked in cafeterias, leading schools and being the teacher. The way vegetables can even be sometimes categorized is a shame. Honestly, tomato sauce on a pizza is not a vegetable. We think about health outcomes and implications and connections to the source of food and then the positive when they are connected. You said confidence, self-esteem, this kind of stuff. We’re really that’s a disservice to our kids. I would see them toss it right. I don’t have research, but my gut tells me the assertion I want to make is that they toss it because most likely because it wasn’t fresh. Probably been cans, frozen, pack preservatives and all this kind of stuff. If you grow lettuce in the class. and we’ll start talking about Flex Farm. But you say kids are smashing bags of lettuce on the way home on the bus and it doesn’t eat like. That’s interesting. Seriously, kids love lettuce. Let’s talk a little bit about Flex Farm because that’s something that you offer schools and it’s doing some really interesting things and classes and we’ll talk about that too. Can you just describe how a Flex Farm gets kids excited about food?

00:18:16
Everett: That’s a great question. The Flex Farm stands about the size of the standard refrigerator and the three by three area. It’s an enclosed clamshell with a light in the middle, and it raises food by aquaponics. It’s trickling water over the roots 24 hours a day, a little pump runs. It’s literally just two plugs, a light and a pump, and it turns on when the kids will germinate seeds. It depends on the teacher. Right. There’s a full bass curriculum that comes with it. It depends on what grade and what subject you’re teaching, whether you’re in STEM or agriculture or language arts or whatever. They’ll raise the seedlings, they’ll put them into the farm, and then they track them. They test the water to make sure it’s got the right nutrition levels and within a month’s time they have a harvest and we have a 30 day turnaround. There’s also an online platform that the teachers are introduced to, and when they get their own farm, that is of a group of other teachers with the same technology for hydroponics and they’re sharing tips and tricks and all the rest of it. One of my favorite stories that comes out of that is a science teacher. She has a farm, and in the fall time, she raises pumpkins for Halloween. She throws a pumpkin in the top pod. So this device has 288 ports. Can grow up to 288 plants, 144 comfortably. But if you’re doing herbs, you can do more anyway. In the top right port, she puts a pumpkin and you think to yourself, pumpkins, if you know anything about food, pumpkins have vines that go forever.

00:20:05
Daniel: And so I know nothing about food. So all I think about as a pumpkin is huge.

00:20:10
Everett: Yeah, pumpkins are big. You have small pumpkins and you have big, large award winning pumpkins. We’re talking about small and medium pumpkins, but it’s a pumpkin plant. And this thing is going to vine everywhere. So you would think for production purposes, not not effective, but for what she’s doing and more importantly, what her neighbor is doing in the classroom next to her. So they have their partners in crime, so to speak. And what they do is they pop out the ceiling tiles, one tile in her room and one tile in his room. And they find this thing over up to his room. And he’s teaching the grade level above. And he actually uses it to teach sex ed with pollination. And so then they raise pumpkins and all the rest of it. And it’s and it’s a great thing for both classes and fun and exciting and all that. So there’s many unique different ways that an engaged educator is going to find to teach their kids their classrooms about this. Whether you’re in entrepreneurship, like I said before, whether you’re in STEM, most of the curriculum is based around science, technology, education or math. But there are some activities and badging programs and other things that go along with that. But that’s what it is. It’s quite simple. It sits in the corner of a room. We also have technology that sits on a wall. If you want something smaller that is a little bit less intrusive, you can do that and grow a variety of things there, too. And it’s not just lettuce. Lettuce grows the quickest and it grows most effectively and abundantly, and you can get a harvest within a month’s time, but it grows more than that, right? You can do tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and pumpkins and different things.

00:21:51
Daniel: That’s really interesting. And then my mind starts thinking about the implications of how do you make that available in the school cafeteria and to families and man, that you know, and that’s just one farm with 200 plus pods, right. Which is going to have an incredible yield of veg, fresh veg for folks. And so you had a couple of those in the school like, whoa, what could you really do?

00:22:14
Everett: It’s pretty cool. Exactly. And it’s on wheels, too. So if you need to take it to show off what you’ve done or you want to you want to take it to the English class to do their English arts deal. It’s also to take it to the cafeteria to clean it, too, because the panels come out and they go in the dishwasher, clean it up, and they write back together. But there is another school district in Wisconsin, and they had one of these farms and the director of food services found out about it. Long story short, she installed nine farms in sort of an abandoned area of the basement of one of the schools. And they quit buying lettuce three years ago. Yeah, well, they quit buying lettuce the year before the pandemic, let me say that. And then the pandemic, obviously, they didn’t buy hardly any food the first year, the second year, and now the third year they’re back on full production. But within less than 100 square feet, in less than 100 square feet, they’re raising enough lettuce to provide the entire school district. Each individual school educator administrator will find that they want to do something different with this. It’s not just one thing that one trick pony, so to speak.

00:23:25
Daniel: The last thing I’ll say before the break. There’s the connection to food source, which is awesome. There’s all the varieties of produce you can grow, but it’s real learning. It’s not just learning in a book. And we call that authentic learning and project based learning. There’s so many applications that people could utilize with a Flex Farm.This is an awesome, awesome tool for any savvy Ruckus Maker that’s getting as excited as I am. Let’s pause here for just some quick messages from our sponsors when we get back. I want. Talk about kids who are concerned about climate change and how Flex Farm explores and addresses this. Learn how to successfully drive school change and help your diverse stakeholders establish priorities and improve practice in leading change. A Certificate in School Management and Leadership Course from Harvard. Topics include adaptive leadership, culture, equity and more. Leading change runs from October 12th to November 9th, 2022. Apply by September 30th. Enroll by October 6th. Get started at betterleadersbetterschools.com./Harvard. Better Leaders Better Schools is brought to you by school leaders like Principal Gutierrez using Teach FX. Special populations benefit the most from verbally engaging in class, but get far fewer opportunities to do so than their peers, especially in virtual classes. Teach FX measures verbal engagement automatically in virtual or in-person classes to help schools and teachers address these issues of equity during COVID. Learn more and get a special offer from better leaders, better schools listeners and teacfx.com/BLBS. Today’s show is brought to you by Organized Binder. Organized binder develops the skills and habits all students need for success during these uncertain times of distance learning and hybrid education settings, organized binder equips educators with a resource to provide stable and consistent learning routines so that all students have an opportunity to succeed, whether at home or in the classroom. Learn more at OrganizedBinder.com.

00:25:54
Daniel: We’re back with Everett Hendrixon from Echo Supply, LLC. We’ve been talking about his incredible Ruckus making grandma and his connection to food and how that passion has led him to echo supply and how they have this awesome resource for classes in schools and districts called the Flex Farm. College kids for sure. Younger kids for sure. You really care about climate change. This is maybe one of their top, top issues. They’re wondering, is the world going to be around or what’s the quality of life going to be like, that kind of thing. I’m curious if Flex Farm addresses that issue at all or explores it.

00:26:40
Everett: That’s really part of where the foundation for it from the owners and the inventors side really came from was first of all, they were inner city. The founder and inventor of a Flex Farm was actually an opera singer who was struggling to make a living, and he was living in an apartment in New York City. He couldn’t buy fresh food with plenty of ramen and pasta, but not fresh food. He decided to grow on his own. Fast forward now we have a Flex Farm , but climate change is a huge deal because it is an existential problem that we all have around the world. Agriculture has played a role in that. But more importantly, the past doesn’t equal the future. What we’ve done in the past, the conditions we have. And field production, especially for fruits and vegetables and vegetables, is becoming more and more difficult because of the changing climate. You have more than increasing heat. It is the increasing disasters that we have floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, hailstorms, and they’re wiping out instead of just the corner of the field or one field, they’re wiping out entire areas of stuff. Furthermore, our culture, the way the capitalist society worked after World War Two and the grocery store system, you have like a whole valley in the Carolinas that grows nothing but blueberries. You have a whole area of Georgia that grows just blueberries. As far as fresh produce goes, you have an area in Florida that just grows strawberries. And for a good 4 to 5 months, most of all, the strawberries on the East Coast come out of Plant City, Florida. That monoculture system, which is kind of added to this issue that we have, also needs to be changed for us to effectively produce fresh food moving forward because we can’t afford to lose one crop year over year. We have to be more diverse. The pandemic kind of hastened that as well. It brought on the obvious fragility of our supply chain, especially with fresh food. And so for me, pivoting indoors was the natural pivot, because in fresh fruits and vegetables, in a large sector, this is moving indoors because the climate is not as conducive to growing as it used to be, number one. And number two, the carbon footprint that we have the potential to eliminate by indoor farming is huge. And we need to give our soil time to rehabilitate and we need to do it through. We need to be active in rehabilitating it. We don’t just want to let it sit and move it and let it be burned, but also moving fruits and vegetables inside will also allow us to grow different things on that land that is productive. When you think of carbon footprint, when you think of different emissions and all the rest of it, indoor farming is on the cusp of the agricultural revolution that we’re currently in right now globally.

00:29:56
Daniel: That’s awesome. Connection to your source, growing all this produce authentic learning and addressing climate change. What’s not to like about this Flex Farm ? It’s awesome. I believe you can go to ecosupply.com to get more information. Is there anything else that we should have covered or missed regarding the Flex Farm ? Before I move to my questions, I ask all my guests.

00:30:25
Everett: No, I think we covered it all as far as I know.

00:30:29
Daniel: Brilliant. If you could put a message on all school marquees around the world for just a day, what would that message read?

00:30:37
Everett: I would say, Feed others by feeding yourself.

00:30:43
Daniel: Feed others by feeding yourself nice.

00:30:49
Everett: The definitions you educate yourself by educating your feeding your mind. Then you can feed others. You feed your body, you can feed others.

00:30:58
Daniel: It popped in my head. We should probably talk real quick about masterminds. People listen, unless it’s their first time listening to this show. They know that I serve school leaders in that way. We met in the mastermind a really awesome experience, I would say. Could you describe, I don’t know if that’s the only mastermind you’ve been a part of, if you’ve been a part of others, what is the value of participating in a community like that from your perspective.

00:31:26
Everett: It is online and we’re getting people from all over the world, literally the perspectives that you’re able to grab from that is just amazing. It can reframe the challenge that you have in a way that makes the solution quite obvious. A mastermind of the level you’re talking about, that’s really what it provides. I have been involved with many other groups, coaching groups and what have you for personal reasons and business reasons. What it brings to the table, a community of that nature when you’re pulling out, if you go to your to I go to the county school board, my county school board has the experience of Sarasota County and whatever the school board members might bring to that. But if you’re getting a group from across the nation or from across the world and you’re getting thought leaders out of that put into that room to discuss the very same things, the solutions are going to be not only more prolific, but they’re going to be more targeted to what we can do to solve the challenge that we have.

00:32:30
Daniel: That’s one of the best values for me is that global perspective. Getting so many different tools and approaches to solving a problem. You really have to work hard to not implement solutions, right? To be effective, you’re just going to grow. At the end of the day, you’re going to level up. I want to announce really quickly, it is self serving in the respect that I want to talk about how I serve school leaders. If we could just diverge for a second but I’m very excited. We’re recording in June and this is going to be released in the fall. By the time this is out we are shoring up all our cohorts. Masterminds are sort of North American focused in terms of time zones and we are going to be launching it’s happening. It’s going to happen this summer. By the time this is live, it will have happened, the African and European time zones, because if they want to participate, I did this while living in the Netherlands, Belgium and in Scotland. I felt the pain doing masterminds from 11 p.m. to 2 in the morning. That’s not so, that’s not so fun. It’s not so cool so we are offering masterminds to fit those time zones. We’re excited to offer that and we’ll be working to get one that works for Australia sort of region as well in the future. Enough about us.

00:33:52
Everett: That’s awesome.

00:33:57
Daniel: I am more like fired up these days about this to connect, grow and mentor every school leader who wants the level up, it’s permission. They have to pick themselves. But I am going to do my darndest to make this opportunity available to all that want to do it. And I have this vision of changing the landscape of education through supporting school leaders and the way we do. And that’s what I want my legacy to be and it’s happening. It’s fun, yeah, it’s a fun ripple effect to have in the universe. Let’s talk about building your dream school, Everett. If you could build your dream school, this is a thought experiment. You’re not, you don’t have any sort of resources as a limitation. You’re only limitations. Actually, it’s your imagination. How would Everett build his dream school? What would be your three guiding principles?

00:34:50
Everett: What you don’t know about me is that my imagination is my limitation. My dream school, obviously, to the talking point we’re talking about here. It would have a working farm that wasn’t just teaching kids about a certain type of animal behavior or anything else, but it would be something that would be a community service. It would have a robust music program and arts programming in the school. And it would have something I don’t find in schools anywhere, which is a curriculum based on emotional intelligence, something I referred to earlier, and really teaching our kids why they experience the motions they do, how to gain control of them, how to empower themselves with those things and with the education that they’re receiving. Also for a podcast that you mentioned that was in your archives about. They mentioned just briefly that in Japan they don’t have custodians because the kids do all the cleaning.I would definitely implement that because that’s part of that working mentality, too. Have skin in the game. Everything is respected more. When you’re talking about food, you’re going to respect your food more. You’re going to be more connected to it. You’re going to savor it more. All the rest of it, whether you end up growing food or not. The principles behind my school, really, it comes down to the principles of eco supply. And I don’t mean that to be cheesy because I did give this some thought and I’ve never thought about building a dream school. It would be people, passion and planet. That’s our mission at eco supply. It would be about feeding people and by feeding people, we’re feeding our passion. When we feed passion, we can give back to the planet.

00:36:32
Daniel: Yeah, love that. We covered a lot of ground in everything we discussed today. What’s the one thing you want a ruckus maker to remember?

00:36:40
Everett: The one thing I want a ruckus maker to remember is grow today.

00:36:47
Daniel: Thanks for listening to the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast ruckus maker. If you have a question or would like to connect my email [email protected] or hit me up on Twitter at. @Alienearbud if the better leader is better schools podcasts are helping you grow as a school leader then please help us serve more ruckus makers like you. You can subscribe, leave an honest rating and review or share on social media with your biggest takeaway from the episode. Extra credit for tagging me on Twitter at @AlienEarbud and using the hashtag #blbs. Level up your leadership. Better leaders, better schools dot com and talk to you next time. Until then, “class dismissed.”

 

SHOW SPONSORS:

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.

TEACHFX

School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.

Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs

ORGANIZED BINDER

Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder

 

Copyright © 2022 Twelve Practices LLC

(Visited 94 times, 1 visits today)