From Surviving to Thriving: How District Leaders Build a Culture of Innovation & Student Success

Lindsey Barrera: Hello, everyone. Hope everyone is having a great day wherever you're joining in from. My name is Lindsey Barrera. I am the Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Varsity Tutors, and I am so happy to be with you all today.

Today we're going to dive into a roadmap of innovation, bringing student success, implementing some strategies and concepts to decrease the overwhelm that all of us are experiencing in the education sector right now—essentially transitioning that mindset from surviving to thriving. We've got some great speakers with us today.

Angele Hodges: Thank you, Lindsey. I'm Angele Hodges, and I'm the Academic Solutions Advisor for Varsity Tutors. Prior to joining the team, I was a district administrator for many years and a middle school principal. I'm actually a native of Texas, from Fort Worth. I spent over 20 years in education—middle school principal, as well as a GEAR UP project director. Since then, I've been able to lean in and do some really wonderful work with district and campus leaders, helping them design their intervention and tutoring programs.

Lindy Hockenbary: Thanks for having me. First and foremost, I am a lifelong educator. I started teaching middle school and high school business education—my classroom was a computer lab. We were the forefront of tech integration and the 1-to-1 environment. What I do now is help educators use technology as a learning tool and help them unpack the effects of emerging tech on curriculum and instruction.

Lindsey: We're in testing season, spring assessment. The pressure, the knowledge, all these things circling around us. But we're not going to stay there, because the schools and districts that are seeing success aren't doing something magical right now—they're implementing a culture, a way of operating year-round.

Angele: At this point of the year, you should be really compiling all of the data—looking at a historical framework from beginning-of-year assessment, middle-of-year assessment, as we're traveling into end-of-year assessment. The districts who are really doing it well are having conversations around that to start to determine what next steps are.

The districts that are struggling are waiting until now to start making decisions that should have been made along the way. It's like cleaning house—if you wait several weeks or months and then try to tackle the entire house, it sounds and feels overwhelming. But if you travel throughout the week, creating pods of areas to work through, by the time you get to the end, you've got most of it already done and you're just focusing on that one hot area.

Lindy: When you hear the word testing and testing season, there's always a collective sigh—and it's not a sigh of relief. What I hear all the time from teachers is: "We don't have time for anything else." I think that's okay. We need to sit with that. This isn't a point where we're checking off standards boxes—this is a point where we can back up and cover those things we say we don't have time for: focusing on the whole child, social-emotional learning, AI literacy.

Lindsey: The stats are telling: 60% of districts say spring testing triggers reactive planning, while districts in a proactive state see 2 to 3 times higher student growth.

Lindsey: What are you seeing when you're talking to districts that have a strong data culture? What's different about them?

Angele: The biggest difference is just the way they do business. Data is the conversation. Data is what drives decisions, conversations, and meetings. It's very focused, very laser-focused. It's not only the conversations between teacher and principal, but also between teacher and student, principal and student.

The data doesn't lie. That's what those districts are using to drive every decision they make—from budgetary decisions to academic decisions, to who teaches what and what students go where. It's all driven by the data. It's the culture of the building.

Lindy: Data is culture. Technology is culture. Arkansas now mandated that all testing has to be done digitally across the entire state. So technology has to be culture. Some people take that to mean kids staring at screens all day—that's not the case at all. It has a lot more to do with infrastructure. Technology can't be "one more thing," just like testing can't be "one more thing." And the two are so linked now.

Lindsey: How do we get to this culture shift? Is it leadership? Is it resources?

Angele: It starts with leadership. The leadership of that building, of that district. One, they have to be speaking the same language. We have to be focusing on the same problem, discussing the same solutions—or that's where we start to go in different directions and everybody is sending mixed messages.

Leadership sets the tone. The districts who are doing well have taken the time from now until July to really put that plan in place. The key is: once you put that plan in place, it cannot be introduced in August during teacher PD and then placed on a shelf. It has to be implemented with consistency.

One of the biggest challenges, speaking from my own professional experience, is to fight that urge to shift. Do not pivot. Stay consistent with what you're doing. It's okay to tweak it, to give teachers time to reflect and plan. But you can't just completely go rogue. Every time a teacher, parent, or student says "but why?"—we go back to the very first message we started with. Decisions are always based on what's best for students.

Most importantly: do not get to November and—because you don't see what you thought you would see—just hold on, hold tight. Just tweak and keep pushing. Keep fighting because it's going to make a turn.

Lindy: The key word from both the leadership and classroom perspective is: ensure consistency. The classroom does not exist and operate outside of leadership's decisions. If leadership hasn't provided the classroom teachers with the infrastructure, the access, the device quality—then teachers are going to have a really hard time using that technology throughout the year.

Lindsey: How do we get them to say, "Okay, we have a solution, but how do we build that system for that solution?"

Angele: I use the word solution because for every problem you want a solution. You also want teachers to come to the table yelling solutions instead of just griping about problems. But if we only think about the solution, that's just transactional—I just bought something, and then what?

The key ingredient is you need to build a system. You need to be able to define what success looks like for your building in the first 90 days. We all know—if any principals are on this webinar—you've been asked at some point, maybe every year, to come up with your 90-day plan. That's critical, not just for a checkbox, but so that everybody knows: this is how we're starting.

That system has to define what success looks like. It has to have SMART goals—I love them because they're measurable. Everybody should be a part of this. When you build a system, the solutions that come into that system now become more than just a transaction of writing a check. It connects the dots for everybody.

Lindsey: One thing you just said: technology was a piece of that system. It's not the entire system. That is one component alongside staff, students, and the professional development that comes with implementing and building a full-functioning system.

Lindsey: When you're adopting something new, what usually happens? Our poll showed 63% said "it gets used by some, ignored by others." What gets in the way of buy-in?

Lindy: It's exactly what Angele is saying—when you build a system, you build a culture. If you have not built a culture of productive, healthy technology use, that's usually where things break down. Often it comes from a lack of professional learning for the classroom. Teachers have double duty: they have to learn how to use the tool (point and click, where do I find this) and then figure out how it integrates into their curriculum.

Angele: The districts that have done well when implementing technology have allowed it to flow organically before they systematized it. Don't force it down everybody's throat immediately. Allow teachers who feel comfortable with it to be the champions. Show them how those particular technology pieces solve their problems—there's your buy-in.

If I'm a teacher and you can show me—not just how it raises reading scores, but how it helps me as a teacher when I'm in the classroom day-to-day with my sleeves rolled up—then that's the starting point. Allow them the autonomy to use it where it best fits them. What math department does with the technology may not look like what reading department does.

Lindy: To get a teacher to use a new instructional tool, you have to immediately—within the first 20 minutes, honestly less—show how it solves one of two things: How is this going to help me teach better? How is it going to save me time? Bonus if you hit both.

I always use the diffusion of innovation curve. You have a very small percentage of innovators, about 13% early adopters, then the early majority—those three groups make up 50%. The other 50% is the late majority and about 12% laggards. To get to that last 50% takes a lot more time, a lot more organic growth, a lot more structured training built in.

Lindsey: What if leadership isn't prioritizing this right now? How do you roll it out from the bottom up?

Lindy: The K-12 edtech market is completely built on freemium products—you get the basics for free, then pay to upgrade. In the past 15 to 20 years, freemium has become most edtech products because of the bottom-up approach. A freemium product allows the teacher to use it in their classroom without needing budget approval. Then it starts to spread like wildfire because they talk to the teacher next door. Students start to talk too—especially in middle and high school where they're moving between teachers.

Angele: You can also ask as a department or grade level: "Can we pilot this?" Go to your principal and say, "Hey, this sounds like a really good idea." Don't pitch it like "there's this really cool feature"—speak to the principal based on the language that means most to them: How do you tie it to data? How do you tie it to the biggest problem we're having?

Starting small is always a great idea. Start with a certain demographic where it's going to mean the most and decide how to grow from there. As a former principal, if teachers came to me and said "we're all on board with this, and this is why"—I would listen. But don't sales-pitch it. Come in talking about how it ties to the goals, how it ties to the data.

Lindy: I do want to mention: freemium isn't always the answer. Many schools and districts want to make sure any tool touching students is fully compliant and meeting data privacy standards. Enterprise tools go through that compliance process. If you're a classroom teacher wanting to try a tool, the rule of thumb is PII—personally identifiable information. If a tool collects any PII, do not use it until you go through your district's compliance checks.

Lindsey: How can districts implement AI in their culture—leveraging it to do the data digging, to mine, to identify students?

Angele: The first thing is to take away some of the anxiety. AI doesn't have a soul, so it's not replacing who we are as educators—we're the relationship builders, the connectors, who motivates, who keeps children coming in wanting to learn more. What AI brings is the opportunity to have a collaborative think partner.

To leverage it as a teacher or principal, use it as a method of saving time. I remember the big data boards we would put up on the wall, plugging in the red, green, and yellow. Now you can put that information in to allow AI to make projections. There's predictive analytics where you're no longer guessing—AI can do that within seconds. So you're not having to use 30 minutes of a PLC to figure out where a student is going.

For students: allow them to use it to think through processes, to go through Socratic method. But you have to train students how to best use AI—giving them question stems, setting up classroom expectations that are clear and consistent. It's truly a think partner. It's not there to be the teacher—it's there to supplement what's going on and create opportunities for students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions.

Think of it this way: what if you walked into your classroom and had four more of you to address all the different levels of students? That's what technology can provide—more 1-to-1, more customized opportunities.

Lindy: The train has left the station. AI is here, moving very rapidly—faster than any technology in human history. It's already in your students' hands, whether you like it or not, whether you've planned for it or not.

The research is backing this: students are saying they're using it, but they lack the understanding of how to use it. They don't know if they're using it ethically—and they want to know. A synthesis of almost 100 studies on what students are saying about generative AI found the message was: "Teach us. We want guidance, we want structure, we want clear expectations."

But most classroom teachers don't have the AI literacy to know how to provide that guidance—when it can be a benefit versus when it's a hindrance to learning. A state leader in Montana said to a room full of leaders: "This isn't something your teachers can figure out on their own. This is something you 100% have to have training for."

We've had generative AI available to the masses for over three years since ChatGPT was released. The models that run ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are large language models—you use them as a thought partner. But now we're getting agentic AI, and if you don't have the AI literacy to understand the difference between generative AI and agentic AI, you're not going to be able to leverage it—and more importantly, you're not going to be able to pass that AI literacy on to the students you're teaching.

Q: We're a small district with limited staff. What's the one thing we should be looking at right now that will actually make a difference?

Angele: Ask that one question: Who is that group that since August has not grown? Then determine what about that particular subgroup is preventing them from growth. Have the discipline to wrestle with the answer. Get away from the excuses—let's hone in and be very targeted. Don't get too wide or you get overwhelmed. Everybody doesn't need the same intensity. Focus on where the biggest level of growth is going to come from and laser-focus there.

Q: For educators who want to get started with AI right now—what's one thing they can do this week?

Lindy: If you are not using generative AI and large language models as that thought partner, you need to be. Hopefully your school is providing compliant access. If you're a Google school, you very likely have Gemini built into your Google Workspace—it's compliant and part of the core tool set.

If not, ChatGPT and Claude are options—but be very careful. Do not put PII (personally identifiable information) into a public large language model. No confidential, sensitive, or proprietary information.

Just go and start chatting with it. Start the prompt by telling it what you do—your role, your context. Tell it things like "I teach in rural Montana" or "a lot of my students are multilingual learners." If you're a school leader, share that context. Then say: "How can you help me?" That's the best way to get started.