Adel DiOrio on Leading Away From Fragmentation and Towards Coherence

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Nate McClennen sits down with Dr. Adel DiOrio to explore how school leaders can move from fragmented initiatives to real coherence through knowledge management, transformational leadership, and coaching. Drawing on her research in rural school systems and insights from The Coach’s Playbook, Adel shares why documenting what works, building strong relationships, and leading with intention are essential to sustaining improvement over time. From the power of “if you think it, ink it” to the life-changing influence of coaches and leaders, this conversation offers practical wisdom for principals, superintendents, teachers, and anyone working to build stronger, more human-centered schools.

Outline

• (0:00) Introduction & Guest Welcome
• (5:56) Adel’s Background & Career Path
• (12:05) Leadership & Building Cohesive Teams
• (19:07) Knowledge Management Research
• (24:08) Dissertation Findings & Practical Takeaways
• (37:51) The Coach’s Playbook
• (47:06) Wrap-Up & Key Takeaways

Introduction & Guest Welcome

Nate McClennen: Hello, everybody. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, and I’m Nate McClennen. We think a lot about leadership and how much leadership matters in schools, and it’s baked into the innovation framework and is within the strategy element.

And we often hear from leaders who feel the pull of this initiative soup, where you have initiative after initiative, but there’s no real coherence in how it all ties together. There are promising practices, but they remain disconnected from a central purpose. So today’s guest is Dr. Adel DiOrio, and she’s joining us to discuss how we can move from that fragmentation toward coherence through a focus on leading change.

So Dr. DiOrio currently serves as the associate superintendent of instruction and technology at the Montcalm Area ISD in Michigan. It’s part of the Future of Learning Council, and we spend a lot of time thinking and teaching and brainstorming about what education could do in Michigan, how we can improve it, and what all the bright spots are.

So, super excited for that. Her award-winning research on knowledge management and school leadership in rural schools, a favorite of mine as well, offers a masterclass in what we call wayfinding, so noticing what’s emerging and then how you adjust course with intention. By studying how information or expertise flows, or gets stuck, within a district, Adel provides a roadmap for rural leaders, and all leaders really, to capture internal wisdom and turn it into a strategic asset.

We’re also going to take some bird walks and some dives into her new book, The Coach’s Playbook: Becoming a Transformational Coach and Leader. And this work intersects the things we think about in terms of learning model, the how, the teaching, or the framework, and also the educator and leader portrait.

So what do educators and leaders, how do they lead, and what does leadership look like? Adel challenges us to think beyond the scoreboard, to redefine success through emotional intelligence and inclusive mentorship. So whether you’re a school founder, a teacher-leader, a principal, or a system sup, this conversation is about finding your bearings and leading with a coach’s heart to navigate what’s next for your learners.

So Adel, welcome. Excited to have you on the podcast. We spent a long, long time trying to schedule this, so it’s great that you’re here, and thank you for your time.

Adel DiOrio: Thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Nate McClennen: All right. And I know that the schools are on break, so you’re having some quiet time, so hopefully this 30 minutes of talk will not be too disturbing to you today.

Adel DiOrio: Well, actually, it’s aligned with a lot of the work that we do in partnership with our local districts anyway. My office is at the county hub. In Michigan, ISD is for intermediate school district, so we are at the level between the state agency and local district. So empowering leaders and supporting them in developing their organizations is part of what we do.

Nate McClennen: And how many districts are in the region?

Adel DiOrio: So we have 10. We have seven brick-and-mortar, what we call local education agencies, or LEAs. We have two charter school districts. One is a fully virtual high school only, and one is brick-and-mortar K-8. And then as an ISD, we also operate a district for specialized programming for students with disabilities, students in career and tech, and in early college.

Nate McClennen: So you operate your own district. This is different in every state, so it’s important for listeners. You operate your own district and you work with students, and you support the regional schools and districts as well.

Adel DiOrio: Yeah, that is accurate. So the part that does the outward service, we call that the education service agency.

Okay. That’s when we go and work with other districts. Some ISDs are actually called ESAs, education service agencies, in Michigan, to complicate things. There’s more than one name for it.

So we have an ISD-created district. Those are the schools and programs we operate. I also didn’t mention it in our list before, because they weren’t schools, but we also operate early childhood programming and services birth to three.

So we have students from birth to age 26 in the district we operate as well that are all resident district students in all of these seven geographical footprints around the county.

Nate McClennen: Got it. And is that true of all ISDs in the state, or is it only some that do the model that you’re doing?

Adel DiOrio: I would say if you’ve ever seen one ISD, you’ve seen one ISD.

Nate McClennen: That makes sense.

Adel DiOrio: There are 56 of us, and a lot of us run a similar model to that. But there are some ISDs that don’t provide any direct programs. They operate programs through their local district, so the district owns the program.

The part that is universal is things like collaborative work as an intermediary hub, cost-sharing, bringing innovation to the county, those pieces. But there are 56 ISDs, and they look vastly different, which is part of the strength of the network. In my job, in each of those ISDs, we meet monthly to talk about how we leverage the resources we have and how we can beg, borrow and steal, or as one of our local leaders called it, harvest, the ideas that have already found success in other places.

Nate McClennen: No, it makes total sense. And as I’ve worked in Michigan for a while now, the context is interesting, right? Because there are over 500 districts, and then you have these 56 ISDs. It’s a complicated system with a lot of small parts that all work in conjunction with one another. And so it’s interesting to learn about, and I appreciate the context there.

So all right, let’s jump in. Let’s jump in and talk about your K-12 education.

Adel’s Background & Career Path

Nate McClennen: So what was your favorite learning experience? And by favorite, I mean what was the most engaging and where you learned the most? So both those criteria have to be true to qualify as favorite.

Adel DiOrio: So the category for me that fit all of those descriptors was when I had my hands on something that not only did I have to struggle to find out, it also had a connection that I could see an analog of in the real world.

So in my seventh grade math class with Mr. Banks, we had to create a landscape design and quote it out. We had no idea what materials cost, but what we knew was that this concept of a landscape and these numbers were learnable. This was before you could Google it, so they actually took some authentic real-world work with telephones and people at the other end.

And there were some things that were curated for us and provided to give just enough context from the teacher to really dig in, but it was also a task that we returned to. So it wasn’t the thing that we did for a day and it was done. It was the thing that we dug into, learned more, establishing math as the answer, not the problem, but the answer to a problem that already exists, returned back to the task, returned back to the task until something through collaboration and context and real significance emerged as a solution, with all of these things that we had to learn and leverage along the way.

Nate McClennen: And was it collaborative or was it individual?

Adel DiOrio: Very much so. Very collaborative. And that type of activity was my favorite type across classes. So when you think of, in my visual arts class, when I was doing my senior board where I was working next to another artist and we worked on this thing over time and developed it and learned, and inquiry was at the base of it, but so was social interaction. So, genius of someone else, how would you approach this? And the iterative coaching process of an educator as mentor-coach in the context of that, where the locus of control was squarely with me as a student. Like, “Yes, this is yours, and in good news, I’m here to help,” rather than, “You’re an empty vessel, let me pour the knowledge into you.”

It’s a completely different feel as a student because I’m the driver.

Nate McClennen: Which is funny because that was a number of years ago, obviously, and we’re still headed toward that trajectory. We’re trying to get there in schools across the United States.

So all right. So that gives us some grounding. And then now think about career. I know from conversations and a bit of research that you started working in alternative settings, in-home providing settings. Give a little bit of description of that and then how that set you up when you got into more formal school settings.

Adel DiOrio: So I grew up in, let’s say, humble means. So I had to find really creative ways to afford to finish a degree. I’m a first-generation scholar. My folks were real hardworking folks, and I still respect the heck out of both of them. But in order to finish my degree, I overloaded as many credits as I could, and I graduated in December rather than June because that was a whole semester of debt that I didn’t have to take on.

But that also launched me in a very fortunate position to be a certified teacher available for hire in December in a buyer’s market where there weren’t a lot of positions. So I started working as an in-home aide to occupational therapy with an adult-sized teenage student with autism. I started subbing. As soon as I was certified, I was the go-to sub for a lot of really hard-to-fill positions during a high-demand season.

So in the spring, when a lot of teachers are being pulled from their classes, and meaningfully so, to engage in the IEP process to serve students with disabilities, they needed steady people who could come in and teach a class for several days in a row, and actually teach, not just supervise, not just manage, but teach.

So I did that in several places all over the Ingham County/Lansing area, right? And then the same for some other positions that were just hard to fill, so in alternative education settings, in classes where students had high behavioral needs, just things that required more training than some subs might have. But I was a certified teacher, so I had a lot of training, the benefit of that, and I just launched early.

So being in all of those settings, I also got to know the pulses of schools. Like, where do you get the answers? Who actually holds the keys to the castles? The idea that the secretary and the custodian are my best friends. I don’t care where you work. They know all the answers. They know how to find the answers if it isn’t something they hold themselves.

But I also got to know a lot of different ways of work. So each one of these districts, right, I floated in and out of districts a week at a time, which is like a Petri dish. It’s not like, actually. A week in, you start to see real glimmers of how things function, and I got to see that probably with more iterations than most because of that experience that was handed to me as a gift.

So by the time I accepted a position as a certified teacher, I had already seen so many different cultures, not just the one, right? Student teaching is a gift, too, and I had my student teaching experience, and I got to know that staff much more deeply. But then after that, I got the reps of going through all of these districts, all of these schools, and seeing in what ways they are alike and in which ways they are different, and what seemed to support their effectiveness, and what parts of culture worked for and against different staff.

So it was kind of a remarkable, really, really early, almost grounded research sort of approach to my very, very fledgling educational career.

Nate McClennen: It’s almost like medical school, when people are in medical school and they get quick rotations in a bunch of different places.

Adel DiOrio: Yes.

Nate McClennen: And I don’t see that very often in education. It feels like you were given a gift of being able to quickly see a lot of different scenarios and a lot of different cultures. And then obviously that impacted who you were as a teacher and then a leader.

So okay, so you have that foundation, and then you entered into schools, and then you eventually became principal. And you started thinking quite a bit about mentoring, I think. Why? What was the problem you were solving for there?

Leadership & Building Cohesive Teams

Adel DiOrio: So early, my first principalship was a very small staff, very cohesive. And I was there for a short amount of time. Another position opened up in the same district to be a secondary principal. So I got, again, fast reps, right? Staying very connected to these folks in that first position. I’m still connected to those folks. They’re amazing.

But as I moved into this other position, there were tons of strengths there, but they had also experienced some really fast leadership turnover. So I was their fifth principal in eight years.

Nate McClennen: Oh, wow.

Adel DiOrio: Yeah. And a lot of systems that at one point had been solidly in place, with that repetition, had eroded. And there were a lot of things that needed to be put back in place to create some stability and to be able to get the district in a forward direction.

I am absolutely proud to say that a lot of the folks that I started with on that staff, we won’t even give you the number of years ago, stayed with that staff. Some are retiring even now. So it wasn’t, “You need to clean house and choose a new team.” Sometimes you need to find the genius in the team that you have and build the systems to help them thrive because these are amazing professionals with really, really deep experience.

But a lot of it was, in many ways, they were struggling because the supports weren’t in place, or there was this constant recycling of, “We’ve already done this.” This idea of, “Don’t build a new thing, and this too shall pass,” because I was the new guy. And what I realized is, in their experience over and over and over again, the leader was always the new guy. So in that mix, one of those five was an interim.

And leaders, if you think of what is the primary purpose of a leader, if it’s to empower in a durable, sustainable way the effectiveness of the system, how do you do that when your reps are happening that quickly?

Long story short, I stayed with them for nearly a decade. So we had some great opportunity to really harness all of the things that had worked, really challenge the process around the things that weren’t serving students, and codify it in a way that many of those same exact systems are still thriving in that space, better than I left them, to this day.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, that’s amazing. So can you give a specific example of a particular project that you worked on, something that you and the team developed over that period of 10 years?

Adel DiOrio: Yes. So one of the things, let’s talk about instructional framework. The end user of the student as a client.

So if you’re a student and a parent, and you’re coming through a secondary school experience, right, you come out of elementary where parents are very familiar with, you call the teacher, right? You have this teacher, Nate. You call Nate, you get the answer. And then you come into middle school, and now you have seven teachers, and nobody owns your student’s experience, so who do you even go to with answers? With the exception of our students with IEPs, who had a caseload manager, right?

But what does it look like to support student transition from elementary to middle when you think of it from the point of view of the students and the parents? So going through that iteration over a decade, we did a lot of things. One of the things we did is we established a school within a school that is the wing for the sixth grade, where we could mentor them into, “Welcome to middle school. You’re ready for this. We got you.” And slow down their experience, using some of the great things that were already in place, but giving a physical structure to provide the support to not only the students, but the parents. Because when you’re a first-time secondary parent, your world is shaken, too.

So then after some of these things are in place, we went through roots of student motivation. And we went through the roots of human motivation: significance, mastery, social connection, fun. This is the Deci and Pink stuff that motivates you and me. When I decided to go to the park this weekend, why did I decide to go? Because I wanted to, choice. And because it was fun. Oh, and I went with my kids, so social connection. I hit three of the five right there.

So if we look at why kids can care, and we build joy and purpose as foundational design elements in their lived school experience, and give teachers permission to do that again, right, so as the stakes go up, sometimes we have lost permission for ourselves to love our jobs.

And when we don’t love our jobs anymore, how can we expect our kids to see that we love our jobs and love theirs? So these became ongoing conversations in the departments, right? So the science department’s talking about it. The math department’s talking about it. And then the key high-impact teaching strategies along with that. So opportunities to respond. How can you respond to something if there’s no question? Oh, that begs quality of questioning. Questioning about what? Oh, that gets back to, okay, what is our cross-cutting concept?

So organically, we identified what is the next thing that we’re ready to build. And as we, going back to that word codified, because this is going to be important later, as we built that into the way we do business around here, we built the next step. And then more people joined our team, and we reinforced what we stood for, and we documented, documented, documented.

We started using the phrase, “If you think it, ink it.” Ooh, I like that. Like you go, “I’ll remember.” No, you won’t. No, you won’t. Of the million decisions you make this year, the one you’re going to need later that you didn’t write down, that you go, “I’ll remember,” won’t be available for you to retrieve, right? So it’s slowing down the bus and building it out in a way that other people who are not there right now, new staff, new leaders, can go back and reference so that when they walk in the door, there’s a way to access the way we do things around here.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I’m such a big fan of that concept of playbooks and making sure we’re documenting the work we’re doing, because we know that staff move in and out of schools and leaders move in and out of schools. But if you can write down what’s happened, then we have a journey map and a place to say, “This is how we do things,” right?

And that helps build profiles of the educator, profiles of a leader, etc. It helps the students. And also, I too support this idea of motivation as a primary factor, is that when humans are motivated, whether they’re educators or the students or parents or whomever, they’ll do amazing things. And motivation’s well-documented in the literature. We know what it is. We just have a hard time building motivating experiences in schools, right? Like that’s the challenge.

Yeah. Okay. So you had this great experience, and then over time you got into your graduate program and working on your dissertation, and you started thinking about rural and knowledge management. And I know you and I have talked a bit about this, but break this down for us. What does this look like, and why was this important? What was the big challenge you were solving for here?

Knowledge Management Research

Adel DiOrio: Sure. Rural is the setting that I decided to investigate this concept in. But it is much broader than rural. I serve in a rural context, so I really wondered, because there was not much research in this area at all, because often highly funded places are also more urban places. So I decided I’m going to live into the equity I stand for every day, and I’m going to investigate what does this look like in rural.

And at the same time, I decided to investigate what does it look like in secondary? Because a lot of black-boxing happens as soon as you exit the fifth grade. We talked about that earlier, right? So what happens? I don’t know. Something in the middle, and then they graduate. But it really is significant, the way we build and function inside of a school.

And as you move into secondary, knowledge is often siloed in departments, right? So you have the science department and you have the math department and you have the special education department and you have fine arts and you have visual arts. And often, unless you have a specific design where they are working together and communicating by design, they’re not. And what is known over here often isn’t known over here.

So if I took a paper out of one pocket and it had a note with significant information, and I hand it to the other hand and I put it in the other pocket, it is now gone from the first pocket. And this is how, inside schools, we share information. The primary mode is asking and telling.

So if I call Nate, and I go, “Nate, how do you do this?” and Nate explains it to me, and I go, “Great, thanks.” And then someone calls me and says, “Hey, Adel, how do you do this?” and I explain it to them. They say, “Okay, thanks. Great.” We have all played the telephone game. We know that at every generation of the message, it shifts slightly. Human memory is not very reliable, and people can’t memorize everything they’ve heard once.

So this idea of asking and telling as the way to get information has a couple fatal flaws here. So first, what about if Nate’s gone? Nate is the owner of all the facts. He’s the OG in the situation, right? He’s the stalwart, the bastion, the room parent, the person that everybody goes to because he lived it all and he’s been here forever. That happens. That is a gift to all of us. And in rural space, we have a lot of people, educators and leaders, who stay. That’s great.

What happens when the stayers leave? And generations of organizational knowledge, key organizational knowledge, leave with them. So now we’re all standing here as a very novice school district, despite the fact that we’re not novice. And this plays out in some school districts. All? Of course not. But if you say if it plays out at all, then we have an equity question that we might never have asked before, and it’s this: Do the students of tomorrow matter as much as the students of today?

So often we think of equity by space, right? ZIP code, ethnicity, disability. What about time? Do the kids I’ve never met matter? Of course they do. So then that challenges our common leadership behaviors, and I’m not just talking about leader meaning principal, superintendent. Anyone who holds a position of influence that impacts the work of those around them and kids, which is a lot of people.

It changes the ways of work of those people if writing it down is now an ethical behavior. Because before, “I don’t have time to do the work, Adel. You don’t understand.” No, what I’m saying is you’re squandering the work for all the kids you’ve never met, and they matter, too. You’re wasting the work for all the colleagues we haven’t hired yet, and their success is critical, too.

So knowledge management at its core is taking tacit key organizational knowledge and confirming it into an explicit form. Can you capture all tacit knowledge? Nope, you sure can’t, because there’s always more of it. Nuance, art, right? But if you say our school relies on this thing that we built that all of us do and is working, you don’t have time to not write it down.

So that becomes part of the process. Instead of, “Oh, we’re going to do this, and it’s working great. Let’s move on,” it’s, “Hey, we’re doing this, and it’s working. We need to look at sustainability from a nonfinancial standpoint.” Because often grants say, “And how do you plan to sustain it,” right? So you’ll get this grant if you have a way to fund it afterward. Funding is only part of the picture. How are you going to sustain it in knowledge and funding is a completely different question.

Nate McClennen: Yep. So okay, so your knowledge management hypothesis is capturing tacit knowledge, capturing it and putting it in recordable form, right?

Adel DiOrio: Yeah.

Nate McClennen: So what was the data? What did you collect? I mean, dissertation is research, right?

Adel DiOrio: Yes, it is.

Nate McClennen: So what did you learn in the process of trying to understand these hypotheses?

Dissertation Findings & Practical Takeaways

Adel DiOrio: Yeah, so the hypothesis itself is whether successful school leadership, as defined by research, so this is Leithwood and colleagues, predicts knowledge management behaviors.

So we already know, it’s established in a lot of research, and not just in education, that if you don’t have knowledge management practices, you can’t engage in continuous improvement. It’s not possible because people leave, systems break, funding goes away. So as people change, if you don’t have a way to rely on organizational memory, then organizational learning can’t last.

So this idea of continuous improvement, we’ve seen it in other industries, right? Medical and manufacturing and IT, and we see this idea of incremental change, and you make it better and more efficient. But when your inputs and your outputs are people, we’ve sort of let ourselves off the hook a little bit on it.

It’s not new in the concept of education. Michael Fullan’s been talking about knowledge management in school leadership since the late 1990s. But why are we not talking about it now when we have already established that you can’t engage in continuous improvement without it?

So my hypothesis is if we know what successful school leadership looks like and we know what knowledge management looks like, I pulled an operational model of knowledge management out of the IT industry because it was the model that I found of knowledge management in team-based, knowledge-rich organizations. Schools are inherently team-based. Departments, teams, grade levels, office staff, whatever the group is, we work in groups. It’s a social process, and we are knowledge-rich. If you think of all of the information that comes at a leader, at a teacher on the daily, it’s as much as our IT folks. My role is the intersection of tech and instructional and systems leadership, and both sides of that work in teams and are knowledge-rich.

So I reached out to the authors and asked them, Singh and Gupta. This is their model. It’s called the Team Knowledge Management Scale, and it measures knowledge management behaviors both at the construct level, so how does this team engage in knowledge creation? That’s getting new ideas from outside places and bringing them in, or creating new ideas inside your organization.

How do they engage in sharing that knowledge? Are they all tacit forms where we’re asking and telling and it’s temporal, like it’s time-based, and then when it goes away, it’s gone, like your email? I sent you that email. Dude, I did not even work here then. Or the person who sent the email doesn’t work here anymore.

Or is there a place that’s durable and maintained, like an intranet or a hub or a portal? How do we retain our knowledge? How do we store it? Is it writing it down? Does it live in a paper binder on your shelf that only you can access?

And then actionable knowledge support was actually a surprise finding in their study. This was the extra that came out of their study that found that actionable knowledge support, or the sociotechnical intersection of knowledge management, it’s not just the stuff and if you wrote it down. It’s how the people help people in the organization access, use, update and apply it.

Nate McClennen: Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Leadership will predict, I mean, the type of leader you are predicts the quality of knowledge management. I don’t know if quality’s the right word, but that relationship, right?

Adel DiOrio: Yeah, so there’s four parts of successful school leadership in the Successful School Leadership Scale. This is Leithwood and his colleagues: setting direction, building relationships and developing people, developing the organization to support desired practices, and improving the instructional program.

He’s been working on this in different iterations and groupings of colleagues since, again, the mid-1990s. And this has been validated and validated and validated. This is what successful school leadership looks like. The more you do these four things, the better you’ll do. So does that predict the knowledge management that we need in our schools for continuous improvement to even happen?

Nate McClennen: And by prediction, you mean the level of direction, the level of relationships, professional learning, developing of organizations, improving instruction. Okay, gotcha. So that’s how we’re measuring that.

Adel DiOrio: Yeah. So really, the big takeaway is a resounding yes, it does predict. So I did 25 different hypotheses, Pearson correlations. I tested 25 hypotheses. So leadership to knowledge management in composite, right? And then leadership in composite to every one of the domains of knowledge management, and then each of the domains of leadership to knowledge management in composite.

So does this part predict it? Does this part predict it? And then every one to every one, every domain to every domain. It looks like shoestrings, right? So my graphical representation, it looks like shoelaces. And every single hypothesis, to the hypothesis, was positive and statistically significant. And what’s really remarkable is that if you look across the way, only one of them was a weak correlation. Everything else was moderate or strong.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. So is that saying that good leaders are doing these four things you talk about that research has supported, and by the way, they’re also doing knowledge management because of being a good leader? Like, it is part of the package. You’re basically linking this in, that they’re doing this because it is supporting these other four major things, helping them set direction, helping them build relationships. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?

Adel DiOrio: Yes. And the other thing is, why would you retain knowledge? So if you think of the functions of leadership as the foundations of why knowledge management matters, the significance of the practice, when you set direction and then you codify that so that other people can see it, you create that knowledge, you share it broadly, you retain it and update it, right? Like, our vision needs to shift because the world has shifted. And then you actually help your staff access and make meaning of that setting direction. The behavior itself manifests itself in ways that change the organization if this leader is already focused on school growth.

So the other interesting thing, though, if you think of developing the organization to support desired practice, that makes sense as something where you go develop the organization. That seems like you’re building a thing that you could go back and see, right? But the one that really flies in the face of maybe conventional wisdom, we know, we have lots of research that says that relationships and building and enabling context are critical in rural space in order to help enable and facilitate change, implement grants, bring programs.

Instead of build it and then shove it on a district where it doesn’t fit, we need to first learn what is the district like and how does it run, and matchmake. How does this opportunity fit with you? What needs to be modified? What can be modified? What is allowed to be modified?

A great example right now is Michigan’s new literacy and dyslexia law, PA 146. It’s a very big law that has implications on continuous improvement, multi-tiered systems of support, literacy coaching, instructional materials, data usage, reporting, lots and lots and lots of pieces. But it’s not going to look the same in each one of our districts.

Nate McClennen: Yeah.

Adel DiOrio: So first we started by bringing it to our county’s curriculum council and said, “What of this is going to need the biggest lift, and who already has expertise and genius that we can leverage here?” Are we done yet? We are not. But when you think of how they are going to apply it, a district that’s half the size of another one isn’t going to be able to plug and play their solution. It needs to be conceptualized, right?

But that building relationships, that piece that we know is critical in rural space, is not represented in that way in Leithwood’s model. He represents it as building relationships and developing people. Building relationships to do what? Not Nate’s my friend. But Nate’s my friend, which allows me to know how to support him best to improve his structure, to improve his practice, to improve his strategy with him.

Nate McClennen: Yep, yep. No, that makes a lot of sense. And that’s not the same as we’re good friends. I do like you, Nate.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Okay, so just to wrap this section, you’ve got a rural principal listening right now, or a principal anywhere, it doesn’t matter, because like you, I think this applies across the board. Tangible takeaways: obviously the research on leadership is rich, but this additional piece that you found in your work around knowledge management, what should they be doing? Should they be writing it down? Should they be building a playbook? Or is it just they need to have some version of knowledge management? It doesn’t matter what it is, but contextually relevant for them. Is that what you are seeing, that you saw in the research? What’s the nonacademic advice you give here?

Adel DiOrio: I would say first, if you think it, ink it.

Nate McClennen: Okay. Gotcha.

Adel DiOrio: Knowledge retention is the biggest vulnerability, and when you think of rural turnover, rural leaders turn over relatively quickly, and not always because they leave. Sometimes because they’ve been promoted, right? So you have a rural principal who becomes a curriculum director who becomes the superintendent. If that happens every three to five years, and we know that organizational change requires at least three to five years, you can see that our rep is not long enough, right?

To hand off the baton to someone, you need to write it down. So we need to focus on how you are retaining knowledge. How that looks, there are lots of ways to do it, and with free solutions available, right? So if you’re a Google Apps for Education district and you already have Google Sites available, it doesn’t need to be a vendor-specific something, but you have to find a way to retain it and to make sure that other people know it exists.

So in my brain, I’ve conceptualized that as the detection apparatus, right? That idea of not only did Adel save it, but other people have a way to encounter it after I’m gone where you go, “Hmm, what is this?” in a place where they would likely go, we built for them to go.

So that is huge. As a critical vulnerability, rural schools are facing erosion of organizational memory. Things that we’ve been doing for years, every three to five years, are being washed out. Schools can’t move forward, right? So we have to find a way to maintain organizational memory if we intend our organizations to learn.

And transferring that critical knowledge to new teachers and to new leaders, especially post-COVID, we’ve had a lot of retirements, right? So new folks coming into the system, we need to lean into that actionable knowledge support part.

Don’t just go, “I sent you an email.” Don’t say, “Oh, it’s on the internet. Go find it.” Don’t say, “Oh, it’s in the Google Drive.” Google Drive is a quagmire of everything anyone has ever typed, ever. Help them. Apprentice them into how to access. That social-emotional piece that is every human is alive and well in knowledge management.

But often we think knowledge management, we think IT stuff. But it’s just how we access our organization’s memory. So that becomes a key function of the leader: how do you make it normal that part of the mentorship process is helping people find the way we do things?

Nate McClennen: Yep.

Adel DiOrio: Love it. Which is often countered by the asking and telling, unless it’s, “Oh, definitely ask me. Let me show you. And I’ll come next to you and show you, and next time you find it, I’ll show you again.” Because I want to build fluency.

Think of the mentoring pitfalls there if I go, “Oh, I already sent it to you.” They won’t ask me again, and then we’ll go back to asking and telling. So we have to start by saying, “Great question,” pause three seconds, let my own dander come down because I know I’m busy too, and go, “No, I’m glad to show you. Can you swing into my office, or do you want me to come to yours?” And reinforce those behaviors of relationship-building to support organizational functions.

Nate McClennen: Love it. Love it. You know, it’s so interesting. I really appreciate this, and as a school principal, when I was a school principal, we did this. We had a Google Site. We documented all the work, our curriculum, instruction and assessment, and said, “Here’s our outcomes.”

And I think as I’m reflecting and you’re speaking, and we spent a lot of time thinking with the Future of Learning Council about this, the innovation framework as a frame, that Getting Smart has helped build up and supported with FLC, that could form the table of contents for some sort of knowledge management. What is your community vision? What are your mission and vision? What are your core values? What are your outcomes? What’s your whole learning model look like? How are you signaling it? And then what is your learning ecosystem? I mean, it’s capturing it, right? And so there’s such power in the work that you’re doing. I love the ability to tie it together that you’ve done.

Adel, we’re going to pivot because we’re going to run out of time. We could talk for hours, I’m quite sure.

Adel DiOrio: We could. We could.

Nate McClennen: But I do want to talk about your book, okay, and The Coach’s Playbook because, A, I coach soccer at the local high school, so I’m always thinking about coaching and how it relates to education. So I want to learn a little bit more. How did this come about? Just a quick summary of that, and then what does it mean for educators in general? What’s the story here that you’re trying to tell and the advice you’re trying to give here?

The Coach’s Playbook

Adel DiOrio: So the book actually started as Dr. Eric Bushlin’s brainchild. This was his passion project. It started with some research on students that had made an impact on him, who had partnered together, folks working on their dissertations, that found that the most transformational coaches were engaging in a lot of the same behaviors that aligned directly with transformational leadership. And they didn’t do it because they had been students of educational leadership. They did it because it was who they were.

So that idea of who we are is how we lead from Brené Brown’s work, that comes up over and over again. You show up as a servant leader because you believe yourself to be a servant. So when we looked at coaches, so this is the lead-up to the book, before I even joined the project, so I have to give kudos to the team that he assembled before we built out from when I entered. But this idea that the most successful coaches, the most transformational coaches, were actually doing what research called for.

Well, often when a coach comes into a space, we show up and go, “Hey, I have a vacancy in volleyball. Here’s a whistle.”

Nate McClennen: Oh, yeah, for sure.

Adel DiOrio: And that’s the onboarding that sometimes happens, and you get the book of rules, right? You get, here’s what the league requires, here’s what you’re allowed to do, not allowed to do. Yes. But when you think of when people look back and say what was transformational in their lives, like, what did sports do for you? It isn’t about a rule. It isn’t about a foul line. It isn’t about a certain play. It’s about the skills in your own life that you transferred into the rest of your life beyond sports. Sports are foundational and transformational.

So when you think of the parallels, so here’s where I enter the project, right? So I was working on my doctorate at Central Michigan University and had the opportunity to serve as a graduate research assistant, and was assigned in part to Dr. Bushlin. And he was working on his idea for a book in his sabbatical.

And as we dug in, I am a very spreadsheet, knowledge-management-focused person, which you’ve no doubt figured out. And he had all of these really great bones, and I did what I naturally do because it’s who I am, right? It’s the way I show up. I built things into spreadsheets and processes and merges, and it just kept the process moving forward.

And as the book, as books do, mutated and formed into something even better than it was, the parallels between his vision and truth about the transformational power of coaches on youth athletes paralleled itself on the transformational power of leader-coaches on their staffs and students.

So if our goals are the same, right, if our goals are the same, the idea that I’m going to help you find your best and most effective self through these practices, and all of those are already aligned with all of the research, Bass and Avolio, transformational leadership, then we can look at this from two different directions.

We brought in coaches who are at the top of their game, award-winning folks across all sports, all genders that we could come up with. We have everything from esports to girls and boys wrestling to, we’ve got swimming, we’ve got football, we’ve got everything, right? And those folks submitted a vignette from their lived experience that we did not give them a specific prompt. We didn’t say, “Write about this.” We said, “Give us a compelling coach’s story.”

Nate McClennen: Okay.

Adel DiOrio: And they provided us the story. And then we had our network of leadership educators from across higher ed, right? So we have the experts in things like Gen Z, and gender, and equity, and disability, and talent allocation, and parent partnership, and you name it. This book is 70-plus contributors all putting together into this one space, and they had a lot of say on what they wrote about as well.

So we made sure that nobody would end up with two chapters of the same thing, but these are already experts in their field. We reached out to them for a reason. And then we did some matchmaking between what the coaches submitted and what the researchers submitted. And it is literally chill-inducing how well they lined up, that these coaches were living the walk of transformational leadership that these education leadership researchers and professors were talking about from the theoretical and from the research end.

Nate McClennen: Isn’t it so funny, this aha moment of coaches intuitively doing things that researchers are saying is transformational leadership, right? Which then begs the question of why. And this is too long for this podcast, but just this question of what in our personalities makes good coaches, right? And what in our personalities makes great leaders, and what can be…

I think there are all sorts of skills that can be developed. But my own gut is that there are some people that are just going to be really good at coaching, and they’re going to learn more because they’re probably lifelong learners. But they’re already engaging, even if you never told them this was a research-based practice, these coaches you were working with were doing it anyway, right? And whether they had stumbled on it or figured out it worked or it was just who they were as a human, I don’t know. It’s just sort of fascinating that way.

Adel DiOrio: What you just said is the premise of the book. So if you read the book and you read the first four chapters first, the rest, jump around. We know that our coaches, especially coach practitioners right now working with youth, might not have time end to end during a season, but you might have time for a chapter, right?

So if you say, like, what are they doing organically, if they guessed it and it worked, the coach next door might have guessed something else that didn’t, that could potentially have caused harm. But just like in our earlier conversation, we were talking about the genius and talent and grit and strength in rural space, all of those things exist in coaches in every space, right? So what if we highlighted what’s working? And we gave people access to it.

So this is exactly the same thing we were talking about before. What we did is we created an apparatus by which they could detect what those practices are.

So after the first four chapters, which is the first chapter is “Did He Just Say a Coach Saved His Life?” which, it should be jolting. Yes. Read the chapter. It really sets a really, really compelling picture to read the book. But chapters 2 and 3 are parallel: Are coaches also leaders, and are leaders also coaches? And both of them make the case for yes, and the behaviors look the same.

So now educational leaders can learn from the coaches in their schools and coaching their youth in their communities. And coaches can learn from the same research that supported their principals and teachers who occupy leadership roles.

Chapter 4 is what do the best coaches do? So essentially we know what they do from the studies that he worked with, and the names on this page were all involved in that work or are currently now.

Then we started to break down and said, “Okay, what do those look like?” So starting on Chapter 5 and working through the four quarters, the whole thing fits a metaphor of an athletic contest of some sort. We de-identified it enough that hopefully you can see your own sport in there. But each one of them leads up with that coach story, and then a chapter written by experts in that field.

So we don’t have to guess. Essentially you can say, “Okay, what does an agile communication style look like?” Well, there’s a chapter on that. What does it look like to leverage parents as partners? There’s a chapter on that. How do you navigate community dynamics? How do you develop potential team leaders? How do you lead through accessibility and inclusion, and why would you do that? Every one of these chapters is also an accessible length on purpose because we want people to say, “Yep, that looks like me. I’ve got 20 pages’ worth of time.”

There are graphics in each one of these things, and then each chapter, because we wrote each one of them sort of as a mini volume, has its own reference sheet right in the chapter. So you go, “What is that thing?” Flip to the back, read more. Because there are some folks who will want the deeper dig, and some folks who say, “I won’t have time for that now.” But instead of putting them all in one giant reference work at the end, we decided to break it out. Like, if we think of this as one encapsulated chapter, let’s reference it that way, too.

And then a really exciting part of the book, I think, is at the back there’s a reflection guide. So we call it the tool shed, and as you go through this chapter, find a buddy. We already talked about how creating and sharing knowledge is a sociotechnical process.

It doesn’t have to be a buddy doing the same sport as you. It could be a coach and a principal together. It could be unlike roles altogether, completely different industries. But when you dig through the chapters, the questions are broad enough, like how do you model humility for your athletes? At the beginning it says, anytime it says athletes, sub in staff.

Nate McClennen: Same thing works there.

Adel DiOrio: For both your wins and your failures. So in my team, how do I model humility for my team through wins and failures? I can reflect on that, so can a T-ball coach.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Love it. Okay, there’s so much here. Like I said, we could go on for a long time. We are coming near the end, so Adel—

Wrap-Up & Key Takeaways

Nate McClennen: To wrap this up, we’ve talked about two big things: one around knowledge management and leadership, and one around coaching. We settled on, you said the take-home is “If you think it, ink it.” Let’s document, because we know documentation and knowledge management are really critical to leadership.

What’s the takeaway from the coaching work? Again, applied to our listeners who are out there practicing every day, whether they’re a coach or a leader or anywhere in between, which we now know there’s a lot of intersection. Other than going out and reading the book, which sounds like a really good piece of advice, what’s the biggest takeaway, you think, from this book?

Adel DiOrio: One, I would say don’t negate your impact. You are a leader.

When you accept the whistle and you get the rule book, you need to know that you already have that idealized influence over every athlete in your scope of care. Don’t underestimate that, because sometimes if we take it too lightly, we can do harm, or even if we don’t do harm, we don’t maximize our impact on these youth.

You’re literally changing lives. That first chapter started with, “Did he just say the coach saved my life?” You’re saving lives. That impact on an athlete of any age, a team member of any age, you’re making a difference and you’re making an impact every single day.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. That’s great. Adel, thank you so much.

Let me, I’m going to try to capture this in a really short amount of time, what I heard today, because there was a lot, but I was writing down some of the more important mic drops you left me today.

So I loved how you started out with just continuing to remind us of your seventh grade class where the locus of control was with the student, and we know that ties into this idea of motivation of students. And in this podcast, I feel like I come back to this over and over again. If we understand motivation and human motivation, we can design incredible learning experiences, and your seventh grade teacher did that, and it sounds like something that you come back to.

And I also love your early career, this idea of the power of seeing many versions, and it makes me curious about how we can support this in early education experiences. How do we get those who are in schools of education, or early leaders, or early teachers to go and visit more places so they can see and get more reps? You had a real advantage there.

And then we talked about this profound question, this idea of what happens when the stayers leave, which is a really, really good question, and you could almost put that out to any district, school or learning organization. It doesn’t really matter. They need to be able to answer that question.

And then the secondary question there, which is just as important, was, do the students of tomorrow matter as much as the students of today? Do the kids I have never met matter? And even you could run a whole couple-hour workshop on just having a group of educators who are working in an organization address that.

And so then we tied into this knowledge management and the importance of knowledge management. Your mantra of “If you think it, ink it,” I think that’s an important one. People should put it up on their walls because knowledge retention is that biggest vulnerability.

So that’s the second part. And then the third part is we dove into this coaching, just the idea that transformational coaches engage in behaviors that were like transformational leaders, and vice versa. When good coaching happens, it is good leadership, and so we need to learn from each other.

And as I go out onto the soccer field later today, I’m going to have this in my mind of what are the behaviors we’re doing today that are things that I did as a school principal? Like, what does that look like? So you’ve really promoted my thinking in those areas.

So, so many good pieces here to think about. In the show notes we’ll put any links you want to provide us, a link to the book, etc., a link to your dissertation work so that people can learn more. And again, thank you so much for your time today. It was awesome. I appreciate always talking to you, and we’ll see you again in person, I think in May, if you’ll be at the summit.

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Guest Bio

Adel DiOrio

Adel DiOrio serves as the Associate Superintendent of Instruction at Montcalm Area ISD since April 2022. Prior to this role, Adel held various leadership positions at St. Johns Public Schools, including Middle School Principal and Elementary Principal from August 2012 to April 2022. Experience as a teacher in Spanish, Video Production Arts, Communication Arts, and other subjects spanned from 2001 to 2012 at Ionia Public Schools and Leslie Public Schools. Adel is pursuing a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership and Administration at Central Michigan University, building upon previous degrees from Central Michigan University, Michigan State University, and Alma College, including multiple Master’s and a Bachelor’s in Education.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• LinkedIn
• The Coach’s Playbook