Move Toward: Unlocked

The last episode of season one starts with a moment of pride, a building that got Act 20 right, together, for the first time. Staff heard. Administration supportive. A system built by the people who would actually use it. Jaye knows that moment is the exception, not the rule. He built Move Toward to change that.In this finale, Jaye traces the journey from accidental teacher to someone who spent over two decades watching good people exhaust themselves on systems that weren't designed for them. He names everyone this work was built for including the year-three teacher who is starting to wonder, the twenty-year veteran whose expertise deserves more than compliance, the specialist who stays late, the principal who is squeezed, the superintendent with an incomplete map. All of them trying. None of them the villain.The solution isn't another initiative. It's better questions, honest answers, transparency, and the patience to stay in it long enough for the work to compound. It's getting the people closest to students into the room where decisions get made about them. Jaye has watched that approach fix things that seemed unfixable. The framework exists because it works. This is fixable. That's the whole point.

The goal was never to be needed forever. It was to build toward the moment when the person in front of you doesn't need you anymore, and then have the discipline to actually step back. Jaye opens with a memory of his dad on a sidewalk and a celebratory Budweiser. Then a young teacher who had everything she needed except the confidence to use it, and the moment a charming eighth grader named Wyatt met someone who finally wouldn't let him charm his way out of it. The hardest part of helping someone grow isn't the teaching. It's knowing when to let go — and sitting on your hands long enough to let it happen.

Jaye almost cancelled a middle school food drive in week three. A student named Julia wouldn't let him. Also: how Post-It Notesspent twelve years almost failing before becoming one of the best-selling products in the world.Nobody talks about the middle. It's not romantic. It's not the inspiring origin story or the triumphant finish — it's the part where the energy has drained, the task list isn't done, and everyreasonable instinct says quit. Jaye tells two stories about what it takes to stay in it: a middle school food drive that nearly collapsed in week three, and the twelve-year near abandonment of Post-It Notes before one more try changedeverything. The work wasn't wrong. The conditions hadn't aligned yet. Stay long enough to find out.

Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player who ever lived. He went 193 and 186 as a coach. Being great at something doesn't mean you can make it clear to someone else. Clarity has two parts and most people only think about one. The first: can people understand what they're supposed to do? The second, harder one: did your teaching actually produce understanding? John Hattie's research gives teacher clarity an effect size of 0.75 — nearly double the threshold for what'sworth doing. Jaye tells the story of a classroom game nobody could follow, a principal who left his staff completely unclear, and the student who solved in six words what twenty minutes of instruction couldn't. Also: IT people.

Behavior is not a problem to be solved. It's a message to be decoded.Jaye tells the story of Elliot — an eighth grader placed in reading intervention who, after one direct conversation about where he stood, refused to enter the room. He sat on the floor in the hallway. He roamed. He made Jaye's life miserable for a year.In his regular classroom, Elliot was fine. It was only during intervention time that he became unreachable.What Elliot was saying: only stupid kids go to intervention, and I am not going to be seen as a stupid kid. Jaye gave him the truth before he had the safety to receive it.Also in this episode: the quiet employee who nods through the meeting and then has the real conversation in the parking lot. Same message, different room.Jaye considers Elliot my greatest failure as a teacher. And he taught him more than almost anyone else.

After you've assessed where you are and uncovered what's underneath, you have to build a response. And here's what makes that hard: the most obvious response is usually aimed at the visible problem, not the real one.Jaye shares the story of Sandra — a veteran teacher with the right strategy and the wrong condition underneath it. He gave her a hand signal to use with three disruptive students. She knew it. She intended to use it. And then a student said something funny, and she laughed, and by the time she noticed how loud it had gotten, the moment had passed.By the end of one observation period, he had twelve marks on a notepad. Every single one was a moment she was doing something she was genuinely good at — connecting with students — at exactly the wrong time.Her asset had become her blind spot. And more strategies weren't going to fix that.

Most of us aren't really listening — we're composing our response while the other person is still talking. Stephen Covey called it: most people listen with the intent to reply.Jaye shares two stories. The first: a second date he designed entirely around his own interests, presented to a woman whose personal nightmare is public embarrassment. He kept talking. She kept looking for the exit ramp. And then he stopped talking and actually watched her.The second: a B-team basketball squad of eighth graders who weren't there for the development plan. They were there for each other. And for the pizza party.Real listening is exhausting. It depletes you in a way a hard workout doesn't touch. But it's the only way to find out what's actually true for the person in front of you.

Jaye Barbeau's first two years of teaching, his students loved being in class. They were engaged, enthusiastic, and by most observable measures — thriving.They were also learning less than the class next door.The teacher next door was quieter, more structured, and from the outside, a little less fun. His students wrote better. Their scores were higher. And it took Jaye approximately three days of being defensive about this before he admitted what was true.The problem wasn't effort. It wasn't relationships. It wasn't content knowledge. It was the floor.No consistent routines. Expectations that shifted depending on the day and whether he'd had coffee. Students who couldn't predict what class would look like — because he couldn't predict it either. Warmth without structure. Enthusiasm without foundation.This episode is about what Jaye did that summer, the student who challenged him on it in week two, and what happened when he held firm anyway.It's also about a pattern that shows up everywhere — not just in classrooms. When someone is struggling, the first instinct is to find that person and add support. But most of the time, the individual is struggling because the universal conditions underneath them are weak. The expectations are unclear. The routines don't exist. The floor that everyone needs isn't there.You can work on that individual all day. If the floor is broken, the gains won't hold.Fix the floor first. It raises everyone — not just the person you were focused on.

Every organization has a version of this meeting. A table full of people. A list. Numbers. Cut scores that tell you who's in the green, the yellow, the red. And forty minutes later, everyone has a task, the meeting ends on time, and nothing has changed. Jaye Barbeau spent years running those meetings before he asked the question that stopped one cold. A fourth grader, Grace, had been hovering around the same score for over a year. Pulled for support when she dipped below the line. Released when she cleared it. Same response, every cycle. And in meeting after meeting, nobody had asked why. When Jaye finally asked, the room got quiet in a specific way. The kind of quiet that means nobody has an answer ready, because nobody had looked for one. What came out of that silence changed how he thought about every data meeting, pipeline review, and performance conversation he'd ever sat in. This episode is about The Shift: the move from asking who needs help to asking why does this keep happening. Those two questions sound similar. They produce completely different results. One produces a schedule. The other produces understanding. It's a harder question to ask. It takes longer. It requires a room full of people to sit with something uncomfortable instead of moving to the next name on the list. But it's the only question that changes anything.

Something isn't working. Maybe it's a team. Maybe it's a program. Maybe it's an organization that keeps launching initiatives and wondering why nothing ever sticks. The response — almost universally, almost automatically — is more. More training. More programs. More meetings about the meetings that didn't produce results. More pressure. More slides. And somewhere in all of that, the people doing the hardest work start absorbing the blame for a system that was never designed to solve the problem. This episode is about a different move. Jaye Barbeau spent over twenty years in classrooms, coaching teachers, and building the systems that schools use to support struggling students. What he kept seeing in schools, in organizations, in sports programs, in the way individuals approach their own growth was the same pattern. Something isn't working. So we add more. And more. And more. Until everyone is exhausted and nothing has changed. The framework in this episode came out of that work. Four words. Four questions. A sequence that sounds simple and turns out to be the thing most improvement efforts skip entirely. ASSESS.  UNCOVER.  MATCH.  MONITOR.  These four steps aren't complicated. But they require something most improvement efforts don't build in: the willingness to slow down long enough to actually find out what's going on before deciding what to do about it. This is Episode 1 of Move Toward: Unlocked. Episodes are 10-14 minutes. No ads, no lengthy intros. Just a specific idea, a real story, and something you can use.