Karen Borchert of Alpaca explains what teachers say they need to succeed and what school leaders can do about it.

Karen Borchert is the founder and CEO of Alpaca, which was founded in Omaha in 2022 and publishes the School Culture Report 2026. She has a degree in education and started her career there.

Karen describes how Alpaca began with listening: she asked an educator if she could bring her coffee after school and hear about her job. As she puts it, "We thought that this was gonna be a subscription box company with a little tiny survey, and it turns out it's a survey platform with some care packages on the side."

The conversation covers what the School Culture Report found about teacher health, what teachers mean when they ask for time, and how leaders can listen and respond. Scott asks what a principal should do first thing on Monday, and Karen's answer is an activity called Start Stop Continue. Each teacher writes one thing they want their leader to start, one to stop and one to continue. Karen says, "Choose one of those things to do that you believe in as a leader and do it, and then tell your team you're doing it."

The School Culture Report 2026, free from Alpaca: https://hello.getalpaca.com/the-school-culture-report-2026

Alpaca: https://www.getalpaca.com/

Teaching Matters Podcast is hosted by Scott Titsworth, Professor of Instructional Communication in the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University. The show is produced in collaboration with WOUB Public Media and the Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact at Ohio University.

Questions or guest suggestions: Teachingmatterspodcast@ohio.edu

Roughly four in ten American high school students report not feeling connected to anyone at their school. Host Scott Titsworth talks with Dr. Dominique Smith — principal of Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego and co-author of the new second edition of Belonging in School: Creating a Place Where Kids Want to Learn and Teachers Want to Stay — about why the effort students spend trying to fit in is the very thing that pulls them away from learning.

Smith came to school leadership by an unusual route, holding a master’s degree in social work alongside a doctorate in educational leadership, and he is a national trainer for the International Institute for Restorative Practices. In this conversation he breaks belonging into eleven distinct dimensions, makes the case that it functions as the gatekeeper for learning, and describes what a teacher can actually do on a Monday morning with no budget and nobody’s permission.

Belonging in School, second edition (Corwin): https://www.corwin.com/books/belonging-in-school-2e-301936

Health Sciences High and Middle College: https://www.hshmc.org

Teaching Matters is hosted by Scott Titsworth, Professor of Instructional Communication in the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University. The show is produced in collaboration with WOUB Public Media and the Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact at Ohio University.

Questions or guest suggestions: Teachingmatterspodcast@ohio.edu

On this episode of Teaching Matters, host Scott Titsworth talks with Zaretta Hammond, a teacher educator and the author of Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice. Hammond argues that teaching strategies are not the same as learning: teachers can cover the content, model each step, and supply every scaffold, and the student still has to do the thinking, which is why she describes over-scaffolding as the teacher doing too much of the cognitive work. She is not against scaffolding; she says teachers have to know where the wobble is.

The conversation covers cognitive redlining, a term she borrows from redlining in real estate, and the signs she looks for when she walks into a school; the five learn-to-learn moves she wants teachers to hand over to students; the idea of the first pancake and a classroom culture of errors; and why cognitive friction, the confusion and productive struggle she says all learning starts with, is what AI and packaged pacing guides can take away.

To learn more about Zaretta’s work visit her website Ready for Rigor: https://ready4rigor.com

Most districts are still arguing about whether to ban artificial intelligence or allow it. Alex Bronson thinks both sides of that argument are losing. In this episode, host Scott Titsworth talks with Bronson, Director of K-8 Science at Uncommon Schools, about why prompt engineering is not the same thing as literacy, and why she believes the work of preparing students for an AI-saturated world starts in kindergarten with computational thinking rather than in high school with chatbots. They discuss the K-8 sequence she has built, the ethical and equity stakes for students in underresourced communities, and what schools owe teachers who are being asked to teach something they never trained for.

Learn more by visiting https://uncommonschools.org/

In this episode of Teaching Matters, host Scott Titsworth talks with Sabine Wallis, General Manager of NWEA, about where K-12 assessment is headed as districts navigate academic recovery, growing skepticism about testing, and the arrival of AI in classroom tools. Wallis, who joined NWEA in December 2025 after product leadership roles at Renaissance Learning and Illuminate Education, argues that the real opportunity isn't more assessment but better use of the data schools already collect. The conversation covers her path into K-12 education, how assessment providers can build trust through transparency, why research needs to aim beyond simply validating a product, and what genuine integration looks like from a classroom's point of view.
Learn more by visiting NWEA: https://www.nwea.org/

Earlier this year, Teaching Matters talked with the founders of Abre about making school data meaningful. This episode is the other half of that story. Host Scott Titsworth talks with Dr. Karen Cheser, Superintendent of Durango School District in southwest Colorado and the 2025 EmpowerED Digital Superintendent of the Year, about what happens when a district actually puts that kind of system to work. They discuss Durango's community-created Portrait of a Graduate, the challenge of gathering actionable evidence from students, and what the data has revealed for Durango Schools.

https://www.durangoschools.org/

Host Scott Titsworth talks with Natalie Campana, the 2025-2026 National Project Lead The Way (PLTW) Engineering Teacher of the Year, and her former student Sarah Ostovich, now an aviation major at Ohio University. A follow-up to Teaching Matters' July 2026 conversation with PLTW's Katie Minihan, this episode traces the mentorship that connected a Steubenville High School teacher and her student, the hands-on PLTW curriculum and dual-enrollment coursework that let Sarah arrive at college with more than ninety credit hours already earned, and what it takes to build a career in a field where women remain underrepresented.
Project Lead The Way: https://www.pltw.org