Episode 296: Beyond Compliance - Building Classrooms Where Students Want to Engage

What if the goal of great teaching isn’t getting students to comply, but creating the conditions where they genuinely want to engage?

In this episode of Leaning Into Leadership, Dr. Darrin Peppard sits down with educator, school leader, author, and founder of Terry Leadership Group, Kendall Terry, for a conversation about what happens when schools stop focusing primarily on what teachers are doing and start paying closer attention to what students are actually learning.

Kendall shares his experience helping build Clayton-Bradley Academy from its early years and the unique opportunity that came with designing educational systems from the ground up. Rather than inheriting decades of “this is how we’ve always done it,” Kendall and his colleagues were able to ask a different question: What does research tell us about how the brain learns, and how should that change what happens in our classrooms?

That question eventually helped shape the Learning-Centered School Model, where the learner—not the teacher, the curriculum, or the test—is at the center of instructional decisions. Kendall and Darrin explore what that actually looks like in practice, from something as simple as welcoming every student into the classroom to making learning relevant, interactive, safe, and meaningful.

The conversation then moves into Kendall’s BRACE Framework, five conditions that can dramatically influence engagement:

B — Belonging: Students and teachers need to know they are valued and that their voices matter.

R — Relevance: Learners need to understand what they are learning and why it matters.

A — Agency: Students and teachers need autonomy, ownership, and opportunities to create, try, fail, and try again.

C — Challenge: Learning should stretch people appropriately while providing the support necessary for success.

E — Engaged Response: Learning isn’t a one-and-done transaction. Students need opportunities to respond, receive feedback, revisit their thinking, and continue until they reach mastery.

For school leaders, BRACE also provides another powerful opportunity: shifting classroom walkthroughs and instructional feedback away from simply looking for compliance and toward identifying the conditions that produce authentic student engagement. As Kendall points out, students can comply because they don’t want to get in trouble—or they can engage because the learning experience is meaningful enough that they actually want to participate. Those are very different outcomes.

Darrin and Kendall also dig into SMART habits and an important leadership truth: goals give us a destination, but habits determine whether we ever get there.