Spotlight 4 Success
We're shining a light on education success stories and talking about current trends and topics of importance to the education community. Join us in conversation!
Episodes
A single preview copy can be the difference between guessing and gaining. We sit down with a teacher who shares how American Book Company (ABC) books went from “something I tried once” to a repeatable system for better classroom instruction, stronger test prep, and measurable student growth. If you’ve ever stared down a high-stakes EOC and a limited budget, this conversation hits home fast.
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A missed question should not be a dead end, it should be a map. We dig into what makes standards-based textbooks and assessments feel genuinely helpful for students and sustainable for teachers, using American Book Company resources as the jumping-off point.
Website: spotlight4success.com
A single conference hallway can tell you a lot about what educators are carrying and what they still hope to build. From the NCASA conference in Wilmington, North Carolina, we sit down with Rochelle Brown, a CMS biology teacher with 26 years in education and a North Carolina Principal Fellow preparing for a full-year internship at Croft Community Schools in Charlotte. She talks candidly about the mix of excitement a...
We’re recording from the NCASA conference in Wilmington, North Carolina, and we keep hearing the same challenge from school and district leaders: students need more support, but schedules and staffing are already stretched thin. So we sat down with Rene and Connie from Book Nook to get specific about what scalable high impact tutoring can look like when it’s built for real schools, real constraints, and real outcome...
We’re recording from the NCASA Conference in Wellington, North Carolina, and we sit down with Ashley, a fifth grade teacher from Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools who’s stepping into a new season of education leadership. After 14 years in the classroom, she’s now a principal fellow through North Carolina Central, preparing for an administrator internship next year. That transition brings a big question: how do you m...
We’re recording from the NCASA conference in North Carolina, and we sit down with Taylor Simmons, Director of Creative Design at Achievable Dream Urban Learning Leadership Center (AADULLC). If you’ve ever wondered what real school improvement looks like when it’s tailored to a district’s actual needs, this conversation gets specific fast. Taylor breaks down how AADULLC operates as an education consulting partner, bu...
A surprise meetup at NCASA turns into a deep dive on what values based leadership looks like when you actually practice it every day. We sit down with Gina Watts, VP of U.S. Student Transformation at Growing Leaders, and Molly from the student transformation team, to talk about the Maxwell Leadership principles behind their work and why those principles still matter in real schools with real constraints.
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Leadership doesn’t start the day you get the title. It starts in the rooms where you admit what you still need to learn, then go get it. From the NCASA conference in Wilmington, North Carolina, I sit down with Tyneka and Toni, two Wake County Public Schools educators preparing for the next step as principal fellows connected to North Carolina Central University through CCP3 and their MSA pathway.
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A paid principal residency sounds almost too good to be true, but North Carolina is doing it and doing it with real rigor. From the floor of the NCASA Conference in Wellington, we sit down with Lauren, director of the North Carolina Principal Fellows Program, to unpack how the state is strengthening school leadership by investing in a clear pathway from educator to administrator.
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A conference hallway can be louder than a classroom, but it can also reveal what great school leadership sounds like. From the NCASA conference in Wilmington, North Carolina, we sit down with Saida, principal of East Lawn Elementary, to talk about what actually holds a school together when the job gets hard and the needs keep coming.
Website: spotlight4success.com
A student prevents a fight before it starts, and a principal turns it into a moment the whole class will remember. That’s the kind of fast, specific recognition that can shift school culture, and it’s the heart of our conversation from the NCASA conference in Wilmington, North Carolina with Dean Cook, Sales Manager at Presentation Solutions.
Website: spotlight4success.com
You can feel it in the hallway conversations at KAST: schools are not asking whether technology belongs in the classroom anymore. The real question is how to make it matter. From Louisville, Kentucky, I sit down with digital learning coaches Erica and Sandy to unpack what it takes to support teachers when devices, apps, and expectations keep changing.
Website: spotlight4success.com
Educational leadership can feel like a mystery from the outside, so we wanted to make it concrete. We talk with Jessica, a vice president in a statewide education technology organization, about what her role looks like day to day, what she’s learning on the board, and how she’ll step into the president role next. Along the way, we get into why consistent communication like newsletters matters for keeping schools inf...
A school device rollout can look perfect on paper and still fail in the real world if support is slow, warranties are short, and deployment is a slog. That’s why we sat down with Garrett, an account manager at Byte Speed, to talk about what actually makes K-12 IT feel smooth for districts, teachers, and students. Byte Speed has been working with Kentucky schools for decades, and Garrett shares what they listen for w...
A classroom should not feel like a different tech puzzle every time you walk into a new room, yet that’s the reality in many schools with a mix of projectors, older monitors, and newer interactive flat panels. From the KAST conference in Louisville, Kentucky, we sit down with Andrew, AirTame’s Education East territory manager, to talk about a simple idea with big impact: make screen sharing consistent so teachers ca...
Chromebooks are everywhere in K 12, but keeping them working is the part no one advertises. From the CAST Conference in Louisville 2026, we sit down with Kendal Shomura from Vivacity Tech to talk about what it really takes to keep devices in students’ hands without burning out your IT team or blowing up your budget.
Website: spotlight4success.com
Water is the quiet thing we all depend on, until someone treats it like it’s sacred and suddenly you can’t stop paying attention. From the floor of the NCRA conference in Winston-Salem, we talk with author and educator Carol Tremboth about the Native Water Walkers and why their prayerful, relentless miles around the Great Lakes belong in every conversation about clean water, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous...
Reading growth doesn’t always come from a brand-new curriculum. Sometimes it comes from one small shift: letting students have real choice in what they read. From the floor of the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with Emmie and Shantale, ECU ambassadors and graduate students focused on reading and literacy instruction, to talk about what’s working right now with real learners.
Website: spotli...
Letters can be surprisingly hard for young kids. They’re just shapes until a child can link each squiggle to a sound, then blend those sounds into real words. From the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with Vicki Norris, a trainer at Letterland International, to talk about a character-based approach to phonics that helps children make that leap with less struggle and more joy.
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A lot of reading struggles aren’t about effort, they’re about abstraction. When phonics rules live only on a worksheet or a whiteboard, many kids never get a concrete “click” moment. From the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with Meagan Beam, founder of Otter Reading, to talk about a hands-on reading tool she built for the exact problems she kept seeing in her own classroom.
Website: spotlight...
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