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Knowing Your Value: A Lesson on Kindness, Bullying, and Self-Worth for Students: One of the most powerful moments I get to experience in schools is something I’ve built into almost every assembly I do. I hold up a dollar bill and talk to students about value. I crumple it. I step on it. I rip it slightly. I ask students if they think it is still worth a dollar. Every time, they say yes. And they are right. No matter what happens to it, no matter how it looks, no matter how ma

One of the questions I get asked most by principals, teachers, and parents is some version of the same thing: "How do we connect with kids today?" It's a fair question. Students are growing up in a completely different world than the one most adults grew up in. They have access to unlimited information, constant notifications, social media, artificial intelligence, and more forms of communication than any generation before them. Yet despite being more connected digitally, man

When people talk about a “leadership crisis” in schools, the conversation usually goes in a pretty familiar direction. Students are not motivated enough, they are not accountable enough, or they are simply not stepping up the way they used to. I hear that a lot from educators, and I understand where it comes from, but after spending years speaking in schools and working with over 100,000 students, I do not think that is actually what is happening. From what I have seen, the i

One of the most powerful moments during my school assemblies happens when I show students a simple picture. It's a shiny red apple sitting in front of a mirror. In the reflection, the apple looks perfect. Bright. Smooth. Healthy. But the actual apple sitting outside the mirror is bruised, rotten, and falling apart. I ask students a simple question: Which apple is real? Everyone knows the answer immediately. The apple outside the mirror is real. The reflection is only what app

After spending a lot of time in schools and speaking with students across the country, one of the patterns I notice most often is how we talk about motivation. There are days when students show up energized, engaged, and ready to participate, and then there are other days when that same energy feels completely different. Because of that, the conversation in education often turns toward how we motivate students and how we keep them engaged consistently. Over time, I have start