Moves Leaders Make - Season 1, Episode 3: Trust as the Catalyst for Innovation with Teacher Taylor Kanzler

In this episode, hosts Elaine Millen and Penny Kittle sit down with high school teacher Taylor Kanzler to explore how trust empowers educators and fuels innovation in the classroom. From defining trust as “the coin of the realm” to co-creating a groundbreaking interdisciplinary podcast course, Taylor shares the habits, leadership moves, and relational mindsets that inspire both teachers and students to thrive.

GUEST
Taylor Kanzler, veteran high school English and Spanish teacher based on the coast of Maine. Co-designer of the interdisciplinary course If This Land Could Talk.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Trust is foundational. When teachers feel trusted, they gain courage to innovate.
• Publishing student work publicly raises engagement.
• Supportive leadership encourages experimentation.
• Small classroom pilots spark cultural change.
• Post-pandemic openness has paved the way for community-connected learning.

BOOKS & REFERENCES
• Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
• Trust: The Coin of the Realm - essay by George P. Shultz
• “The water will always flow around the boulders.” - Taylor Kanzler
• “When trust was in the room, good things happened. Period.” - George P. Shultz

Moves Leaders Make — A Book Love Foundation Podcast; Hosted by Penny Kittle and Elaine Millen; Produced by Testwood Creative Studio; Music by ryanancona (Pond5); booklovefoundation.org

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Creators and Guests

Host

Elaine Millen

With a heart of a teacher, Elaine has over 50 years of experience as a Teacher, Director of Special Education, Principal, Curriculum Director, and Assistant Superintendent of Schools.

Host

Penny Kittle

Penny is Chairman of the Book Love Foundation and is dedicated to helping students and teachers develop a passion for reading and writing. She has taught English and coached literacy in public schools for 34 years.

Guest

Taylor Kanzler

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Penny (00:06)
Hi Elaine, how are you? I couldn't be more excited than to have Taylor Kanzler, our friend that we both worked with in schools on the podcast today. And I think that when I first thought about big ideas for moves that leaders make, trust was one of the first ones that I had on my list. And I just, you know, take a minute and say something about what you've learned about trust.

Elaine (00:07)
Hi Penny, how are you?

One of the things that actually I learned from Taylor in working with her when she was a department head is the fact that how much trust influences confidence in the work that is just so challenging for us. And I think Penny, when we did our research, our action research for this work of trying to develop these very, very small, but doable moves for our colleagues that are administrators, I think we immediately thought of Taylor and her experience as a department head and how she managed to just develop trust amongst her colleagues in order to do some of the work that she wants to do. So I wanted to tie that into the connection between trust and building confidence in our colleagues to do this very difficult work.

Penny (01:22)
such an important connection. Here's the other one that's been rattling around in my head this week that I haven't even talked to you about yet. And that is that every time I sit with teachers that are frustrated with the current curriculum or current instruction or current leadership, they will say, I can't do that. And I will say, well, who says you can't? And I think that the other side of trust is if a teacher doesn't feel they can try something because they don't feel trusted. And that prevents them from even jumping in and going, can I do this? It's so complicated, don't you think? isn't enough. I mean, no one ever, ever said to me, hey, why don't you try to give kids a lot of free choice and reading and see, you know I mean? Like nobody was like proposing. I was saying, this is not helping my kids. What we are doing as a department and I'm going to start doing something else. But I didn't ask permission.

Elaine (02:24)
But it's also courage. When you have someone's trust, it gives you the courage to move forward with this in such a very challenging time.

Penny (02:33)
When we asked Taylor to write she used this great phrase, trust is the coin of the realm. ⁓

Taylor (02:45)
Hi, I'm so happy to be here with you two, the best. It's a treat. I'm so excited. I love talking to you two.

Elaine (02:49)
It's like a treat, Taylor.

Penny (02:55)
Could you tell people who are listening what you do and who you are?

Taylor (02:58)
I'm Taylor Kansler. I am a high school English teacher and sometimes Spanish teacher. I'm currently living on the coast of Maine, where I teach at a public high school. My 19th year in the classroom. And while I'm originally from the beautiful White Mountains of New Hampshire, my teaching career has taken me to a lot of different places. I've kind of experienced a lot of different school cultures, a lot of different student populations, a lot of different leadership styles.

Penny (03:25)
So when you said trust is the coin of the realm, will you put that in context for us?

Taylor (03:30)
Yeah, it was not my quote. I wish that I was that clever. That quote came to me actually through my friend and colleague, Dan, who is the librarian at the school where I work. And like so many librarians, he's just full of so much wisdom and knowledge and jack of all trades. And he and I were scheming as we do. He's also a great co-conspirator. And I said, do you think that the leaders will let us try this thing that we want to try? And he said, well, Trust is the coin of the realm. And I looked at him and said, where, what is that from? He said, oh, it's from this great George Shultz essay that he sent to me. And I hadn't read it until then. It's an essay that he wrote late in life that he was asked to write, reflecting on all of the things he had learned as a leader. And I don't have the quote right in front of me. And I will not say it as eloquently as it's written, but the thrust of his essay is that trust is the thing. He said, whether it was the war room, the locker room, the classroom, the family room, the board room. When trust was in the room, good things happened. That was, you know, his decades and decades of leadership. He was able to distill down to that single idea that no matter what organization, in what context, when trust was present, good things happened. Period. It was that simple.

And I started thinking about that and how true that is within our own classrooms between student and teacher. between students and peers, between colleagues, teacher to teacher, but vertically as well. And I think a school, as we all know, it's an ecosystem, right? Everything that happens in the classroom is reflective of what's happening in the larger school community, the relationships between the leaders and the faculty. And I think that once we get trust kind of moving through that circuit, that's when good things start happening everywhere. So I'm really interested in how leaders and teachers, who I think are leaders build and sustain relational trust with each other. think it's really hard to do, but I, in my years of teaching, I would agree with the quote. think where there is trust, good things are happening in those schools.

Penny (05:39)
And in the opposite where there is not, things get broken.

Taylor (05:43)
Yes, and people leave and really great, effective teachers will go elsewhere.

Elaine (05:49)
So tell us a little bit about your work with Dan.

Taylor (05:53)
I wanted things to be project-based and multi and interdisciplinary. He brought in an environmental science teacher that he knew. She was a veteran teacher, but he said, she also is thinking the same thing. Let me connect you two. So he brought us together for conversation and the three of us kind of cooked up this idea that we were going to teach a class that was going to have students earning both an English and an environmental science credit. We named it, If This Land Could Talk, the stories of mains, people, forests, and waterways. It would run over two periods, which was a huge ask. That wasn't something that was happening scheduling wise. Everyone said, it'll be a nightmare. You won't be able to do it. You're going to run into this barrier and that barrier. And I kept saying, okay, but surely there's a way around. The water will always flow around the boulders, right? We have to just find the course. And we did. We sat down with the scheduling people. We were really transparent with department members who might be affected by these changes, let them know what we wanted to do, why we wanted to do it, gained their trust, their support, their enthusiasm. And eventually we were able to launch this course. So we had a group of our initial run was 20 students who signed up grades 10 through 12, mixed grades. We had students coming to us from the functional life skills, special education classroom.

And we had students who were giving the speech at graduation, salutatorian, heading off to top tier universities. mean, we had kind of students from all different backgrounds, ability levels, and that was also something that was new and not happening anywhere in the school. So that was really exciting and that was part of the design. And we planned for students to create podcasts, which we kind of went back and forth on whether or not podcasts felt like something that teenagers saw as relevant. But it turned out, they did. It turned out that podcasts, think there was a sweet spot. They were familiar with podcasts. They didn't have enough familiarity to be, to have a real opinion about them, to be turned off by them or overly excited. So there was some curiosity. It was novel. They were doing what they called podcasting in classes, which really just meant they were recording an essay that they wrote into their iPhone. We were talking about doing some really sophisticated sound engineering, going out, practicing interviews, getting ambient noise from different environments, using professional tools to really kind of piece together this true story that is meant for the audio medium, for a listening audience. And that was new for them. So the novelty was exciting. They definitely saw the work of creating a podcast as being relevant in the skill set to the things that they were imagining doing in their life and in their future. So that buy-in was really awesome.

Penny (08:42)
You talked about buy-in from two really important groups of people in this so far introduction, and one of them was your colleagues, and the other one is students themselves, who often have very different kinds of buy-in around tasks, right? What your colleagues think is important and what students think is relevant, as you said, to their own skill set and their own hopes and dreams. Did you have any of those conflicts?

Taylor (09:04)
⁓ We did a bit. In fact, there was a lot of back and forth around which students would be eligible to earn English credit for this class. So in the pilot year, the department, they were leery of the idea that we were giving English credit to students who weren't writing a traditional essay, who weren't reading canonical novels. They agreed to award English credit to seniors only because in our program of studies, ⁓

That's the year where seniors have a lot more choice in the classes that they take. And so I think it was more comfortable for people to say, okay, well, we'll just think of it as ⁓ another English elective, like poetry or creative writing. So all of our students were producing podcasts. That was their assessment. So instead of an essay that they were writing and handing to a teacher, an audience of one, they realized that these students were publishing their work on Spotify, on a... on a platform that was accessible to the whole world. And in addition to that, the students, they presented in a showcase to the community clips of their podcasts and they talked about their process and they had created promotional posters to kind of drum up some excitement in the community about coming to watch this presentation. And I think that the quality of the work that the students produced was so evident and it was evident because they... they worked so hard knowing that people were going to see it. It's not just my one English teacher who's going to see this essay that I don't care about. Like my parents, my grandparents, all these neighbors, it's going to be on Spotify. My family down in Virginia can access it. And all of a sudden that became a lot higher stakes to them and a lot more real. And so they worked really hard. And I think that was the thing more than anything else that some of the more traditional veteran teachers were able to kind of pivot on and say, well, there's something to that. I don't think we sold them completely on podcasting. don't know that we sold them completely on the interdisciplinary nature of the class, but I do think that we were able to shift their thinking a little around the importance of authentic audience and assess.

Elaine (11:13)
Taylor, what was the influence of the support that you got from either the principal or the administrator that supported? Because we know that in today's culture of school, principals still tend to manage the curriculum. And I'm just, for someone out there who is listening to you and says, my gosh, I would love to try to do this in my school.

Taylor (11:24)
Yeah.

Penny (11:29)
Mm-hmm.

Elaine (11:40)
What was the role of the principal or your administrator to support this, to make this happen?

Taylor (11:47)
Really lucky to have both a principal and a superintendent and a director of learning and instruction who were all really supportive and all really excited about something new and about that proposal coming from teachers. The role that they played, they really guided the process of the proposal. So there's a formal proposal that we had to create for the course that asked us to think through a lot of things we weren't necessarily thinking about when we just started scheming, together over coffee one morning, a lot of the logistics, but also some of the more academic aspects of it. You know, a lot of the kind of curriculum based questions. What are the enduring understandings? What are the essential questions? What are the transfer goals and skills that you have for these students? And so it kind of made it really pinned us down and made us think a lot more in a lot more of a structured way about what we were doing. And I think that was guided by the admin. think they initially met us with enthusiasm, support, but really kind of wanted to make sure that this was something that we had thought through really deeply and that we had worked out the details on. And they were part of that process. They joined those discussions and they were part of the kind of proposal drafting.

This team of leaders, they were a team that from the beginning, from my time at the school, they loved to sit down and talk about ideas. I mean, in the busy, chaotic world of school leaders, I can say that all three of these leaders loved nothing more than the opportunity to sit down with a faculty member, and chat for 15 minutes about big ideas. And that was incredibly valuable to me in building my trust that when I came to them with a big idea, they were here for it. They were excited about it. They were going to entertain it.

Elaine (13:39)
I love to hear you talk about that because I just want to connect it when our writing, when we were really talking about what these small moves are for administrators, one of the things that we found and talked a lot about in our action research, and your piece was part of that action research, and that was really unleashing potential. know, Penny and I talked a lot about that, and how do leaders unleash potential? In their colleagues, teachers, kids, whomever. And I really appreciate your sharing that with all of us and Penny and I and the people that are listening, because that's what you've described that the role of this principle allowed you to unleash the tremendous potential that you had for developing this for your students. It's remarkable. It really is.

Penny (14:28)
It really is. the other piece that she mentioned that I think we don't pay enough attention to is they were preventing you from failing by giving you guardrails that are going to make more people accept what this proposal is. Cause if you just went in with guns blazing, it's going to be great. And your colleagues or other stakeholders ask the questions and you hadn't thought of them. That puts you in a perilous place. So a good leader not only listens, but says, if we're going here, I'm going to help you get there, which you defined so well. And I know that there are teachers who want to lead curriculum in new ways. They want to make it relevant. even if, Taylor, even if it were only, they want to try it for a unit, but they get afraid to do that because they're not sure how to sell it or how, you know, because we can't think through everything. And that has got to have come into play. Like you thought it would go one way.

And so give us a hurdle that you ran across that you weren't expecting. Yeah.

Taylor (15:31)
I think guardrails is the exact right way to say it. think the biggest stumble that we encountered was just the way that we approached the, in the first pilot year, we had this vision of these students engaging in this year long project that they were going to pick a topic related to Maine's environment. And they were going to spend the whole year researching it and developing this podcast, which they would present toward the end in the spring of the school year. But it became really apparent to us around January that .. that expectation was misguided. That was way too long of a project for students. They were sick of the project. They didn't want to do it anymore. We got together with our principal and he said, yeah, I see, I'm with you. I also thought it was going to go well, but I think we underestimated how quickly they would pick up the technology. You know, their digital need, it took them no time to learn this stuff ⁓ so he helped us, he helped us come up with a plan and figure out how we were going to pivot and what we were going to do and how we were going to communicate that to the families, how we were going to communicate it to the school community, to all of, all of the different stakeholders in this project. And again, that just trust that knowing there's nothing that feels worse than the vulnerability of being out there, of taking this big leap, this big swing, and then it flops.

And you look around and everyone's abandoned you and you're on your own. I mean, it's a terror that's so palpable. think it prevents people from taking risks all the time. And when you believe that you have this leader who's going to be there and who's not only going to help you figure out how to get back on your feet and keep it going, but who's going to say, okay, everyone, nothing to see here. Don't worry. We've got everything under control. Who believes in you and will make everything okay. That is huge. And it really helps keep us going.

Penny (17:21)
Do know what I think is interesting about that example too, Taylor, though, is you didn't even know that existed. The trust meant that you took the leap before you knew he would do that. You had enough intuitively in established already in your relationship with this principle to know that principle might or would help you figure it out. You're trusting that he's going to be there. Yeah.

Taylor (17:43)
I think definitely, I didn't know. It was a leap of faith and I trusted that would happen. And I think that part of the reason why I felt confident that he would be there, why I felt confident in that trust was that he as a leader modeled his own failures. mean, when he made mistakes, he owned it publicly. He was really transparent when things weren't going well. It let me know that he saw failure as an opportunity that it wasn't something he was afraid of. His instinct wasn't to place blame on others when something didn't go well. And so I think I picked up on some of those subtle cues from his leadership style that if I were to fail, he would afford me the same grace.

Penny (18:29)
If I was sitting here listening to this podcast, I imagine one thing I'd be thinking is, you know, what kind of school community is this? Cause in my community, I hear teachers say this all the time. parents have expectations for these kids and they're not going to like how loose this is. And did you get any of that from your community of teachers or people?

Taylor (18:48)
Sure. Yeah. mean, our school is a, we live in an affluent area. It's a, you know, considered a high achieving school. Almost a hundred percent of our students go to four year college and university. So certainly there were some raised eyebrows around whether or not this was rigorous enough for the students. And I think that honestly that this again was the leader. We talked about this and his response was that's not for you to worry about. This is our work and sometimes we need to hear the messages coming in from the outside and sometimes we need to be the ones giving the message to the outside. And in this case, we're the ones saying, this is what we're doing. It is rigorous. It is important. It is innovative. If you don't want your child to sign up, that's fine. And he said, and let them come. You build it and they will come. And 20 of them did. And like I said, they were students from all walks of life who also trusted us. mean, these students were taking a huge risk signing up for this class. It was a brand new class. They didn't know what it was going to be. And it was unlike anything that the school had ever run. But it was a lot of students who knew me or who knew my co-teacher or who knew Dan, the librarian who was involved, and they trusted us and they took the class.

Elaine (20:02)
So do you see the possibility of replicating this in your community school?

Taylor (20:07)
Definitely. And I think, you know, I think there are always going to be those parents that and the families who are nervous about change, who want their children's education to look like it looked for them. But I also think that we give a lot of space to the, think it's a very thin margin. I actually am encouraged by how how much positive response we've had from the community, how many parents actually seem really excited about something new. Because I think, and I think a lot of this is post pandemic world. I think they see the reality that times have changed. The kids are, they need something new. And I think that they don't know what it is. And in some ways I think it's really exciting. For all of the noise about how terrifying education has become as a space. I think that there's a lot of opportunity right now for us to really take the reins and move in a new direction. And I think for the first time in a long time, families are like, we don't know what to do. Please show us the way.

Elaine (21:07)
On that positive note.

Penny (21:09)
No, it is. I want to ask you one last question about this experience. And that is that it had to have had an impact on the rest of your teaching, the teaching of your regular classes. Did it?

Taylor (21:21)
Yeah, I mean, I'm always trying new things. You know, I never do the same thing year after year or some things, but it definitely made me consider the importance of getting students outside of the classroom. think that for all of the ways I try to innovate within my four walls every year, I often don't think about how we can just go outside. And I'm lucky enough to live in a place where the outdoors are beautiful and inviting and accessible. And we, I think through teaching this class, which is largely taught outside of the school, we're on site visits and all over the place. I've started taking my own English students and know, English too outside a lot more and also looking at opportunities to really get them in spaces in the community where they can really mine for stories and information and things that are, feel lot more authentic and rich than sitting in the classroom looking at another text. So that is probably the biggest way that it's changed my teaching.

Elaine (22:22)
It's that validation. mean, this experience, I can hear it in the excitement of your voice, how it really validated your beliefs about some of that, some of that information and your practice as Penny and I know the practice that you tried to do all the time with your teaching. And I think that listening to you having had this experience, what I hope the listeners who are listening to you hear that same excitement. And although perhaps they may start at a smaller scale, simulate things in the classroom that represent this. I hope people won't get discouraged of making a big leap because those small, small steps make a big, big difference.

Penny (23:04)
What's a great book you'd recommend?

Taylor (23:06)
I am in the middle of reading Shuggy Bane. Did you ever read that book? No. I've been told for years I must read it and I'm finally reading it and it's incredible. It's a beautiful book. that.

Penny (23:18)
Thank you. That's such a good recommendation.

Taylor, as somebody who got to see you in a classroom in my first book I ever wrote, there you were and I put you in it in a teacher's classroom, to someone who got to teach beside you and think beside you and be in a PLC with you, and then when you were my department chair, right? And now we have to go find you because you don't live in the school where we live. I just think that your inspiration that you've shared with us today changes people, don't you think? Exactly.

Elaine (23:49)
Yeah!

Penny (23:51)
So thank you so much for your time and your

Taylor (23:53)
I feel so lucky to know both of you.

Elaine (23:56)
Taylor, been wonderful, wonderful. Thank you, thank you so very much.