107: What's the Instructional Impact? A Principal on Risk and Failure with Dr. David Wiedlich
Dr. Dave Wiedlich, principal of Radnor Middle School, was named Pennsylvania's 2026 Principal of the Year and a National Finalist for Middle Level Principal of the Year by NASSP. In this conversation, he traces a servant-leadership path that began with his parents in Wilkes-Barre and runs through every role he has held since.
Dave shares his grandmother's advice about two ears and one mouth, and how listening shaped his first years as a principal. He explains why he treats curriculum like the Waze app: a set starting point and ending point, with room for teachers to find the route. We talk about the question a superintendent once asked that he couldn't answer, why the first slide he shows students and families every year says "fail," and how his school built new electives from student feedback. For listeners without deep resources, Dave offers a practical path: reach out to universities, anchor new courses in standards, keep them cost neutral, and pilot first.
This is a conversation about building a school where adults and students feel safe enough to take risks.
Connect with Dave via LInkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/drdavidwiedlich01/).
9 Oct 2026
104: Strength-based Instructional Rounds with Vicki Wilson
Most teachers spend a career never seeing a colleague teach.
Vicki Wilson, a former Michigan principal and author of "Lead with Instructional Rounds," set out to change that. In this episode, she and Krista unpack a deliberately non-evaluative, strength-based version of instructional rounds: short ten-minute visits, doors left open, and conversations that name what is working rather than what is wrong.
Vicki shares how she traded her evaluator hat for a facilitator hat, why she starts every round with agreements and an "admiration, not comparison" mindset, and how validating note cards tied to real impact build both self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy. She tells the story of a young-fives teacher who watched a fourth-grade math lesson and reinvented it for four-year-olds, proof of what happens when educators finally get to learn from each other across grades and content.
If your school feels siloed, this conversation is a concrete map from isolation to collaboration.
Connect with Vicki via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vicki-wilson-llc/) and her website (https://www.vickiwilson.org/).
15 Sept 2026
104: From Role Blur to Role Clarity with Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk
Senior leaders often arrive ambitious and passionate, then quietly slide into what Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk calls "role blur," where the all-hands-on-deck approach erases job boundaries, and burnout sets in. As CEO of REACH Leadership, Courtney helps educational and nonprofit leaders bring clarity back to their roles and organizations.
In this episode, she walks Krista through the REACH method: Recognizing the ambiguity, Evening the power differentials, Acknowledging expertise, Collaborating, and Healing, and explains why she treats "values in action" as concrete, observable verbs rather than posters on a wall. They dig into the healing step (owning your part in a rupture and inviting, not forcing, repair), why the physical environment either echoes or contradicts a school's values, and why the real decision makers in student-facing work should include students themselves.
A grounding conversation for any leader who senses something is choppier than it needs to be.
Connect with Courtney via her website (https://reachleadership.today/our-story) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtney-joly-lowdermilk/).
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
5 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 46 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
67
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
60
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