This interview was originally recorded on September 13, 2024, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Welcome everyone to our podcast, all things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their leads. Every week, my guests who range from educators to EdTech entrepreneurs to experts in the field, all share tips, strategies, and insight in social media, content marketing, and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy. Hello everyone. Today I am thrilled to be joined by Monica Milligan, the executive director of Gradient Learning. Monica has devoted her entire career to education. She's worked at KIPP Texas Public Schools, the new teacher project known as TNTP, Chicago Public Schools One Goal, and she even was a middle school teacher in New Orleans. In this episode, we discuss Monica's unique journey that started as a student who is immigrating to the US as a child who didn't speak English, and without spoiling things too much, she ended up graduating from Harvard Business School and spending the last two decades working in organizations to improve education because of wait for it.
One powerful teacher who took the time to connect with her, and for those of you that listened to my show, that is also a theme, including myself, who had one powerful teacher that took the time to connect with me and now I do what I do. In this episode, we talk a lot about the whole student education. If you don't know what it is or the benefits of it, this episode is for you. We talk about its common misconceptions. We talk about why integrating these things that are life skills such as self-direction, curiosity, and critical thinking into the curriculum is crucial for preparing students for the future. I love how she personally provides insightful advice for educators and ed tech professionals on how to support this type of learning, create a lasting impact. So let's jump into this powerful conversation with Monica Milligan. Well, welcome to the show, Monica. I'm so excited to have you on and get to know you.
Monica Milligan:
Thank you. So, so happy to be on.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. So let's start with the audience to tell 'em a little bit about your journey. I think it's fascinating. I was going through, it's really refreshing to see people with a deep background in education with a variety of different contexts even starting from teaching. So why don't you talk to the audience a little bit about your journey on our show people on the audience side, we have people that are always kind of meandering and really looking at what their path is, and it's super refreshing to see other people's paths, whether you're an educator or an ed tech. So why don't you talk to us a little bit about how you got into this cool unique space in the world of education in ed tech.
Monica Milligan:
Yeah. Well, education is and has been my passion almost my entire life. Not only do I lead Gradient Learning as the executive director, but I also carry it into my personal life. I also serve as a board member and I'm the vice president of our local school district near Chicago where my daughters attend school and to know why it is my passion, I really have to go back to when I first started school in the country when I was six, my family and I first moved to Dallas from South Korea and none of us spoke English. So I spent the first two years being in the country, sitting in the back of the classroom and really largely going unnoticed by the teachers and the rest of the class. And as a result, I felt behind really academically. And by the end of second grade, I still struggled to read, speak, and write in English.
And everything really changed in my third grade year when my third grade teacher realized that I didn't speak English and didn't read or write in English, and she took it upon herself to seek out a minister in the local Korean church. And she and the minister came to our house and told my parents that I was falling behind academically. And you can imagine how devastated my parents were because they had left Korea, left everything they knew to give my sister and I a better chance at education. And here we were two years later and the education system was failing me and the teacher could have stopped right there and been done with her duty, but instead she took it upon herself to come visit my entire family a couple of times a week for the next couple of months. And she taught her entire family English and she changed the trajectory of my life and my entire family's life.
And I ended up graduating as salutorian of my high school and ended up going to Amherst College and then later Harvard Business School and eventually ended up going to become a teacher. And the last two decades of my life, I've spent an education and it's really been driven by her because this third grade teacher, I would say, gave me exactly what I needed at the exact moment that I needed it. I want every student to get what they need at the time that they need it because the system has been designed to grant him that. And so I am driven in education to make sure that the system slowly but surely gets to that point. And so over the last 20 years, I've been a middle school math teacher in New Orleans. I have also worked in Chicago public schools in various roles doing everything from running Chicago Public Schools, first blended learning pilot for 25 schools, serving close to 10,000 students to managing their first performance management system all the way to being the chief operating officer of KIPP Texas.
Essentially really spending about a decade of my time at different districts, really understanding how districts worked before pivoting in the last decade to the nonprofit sector at TNTP one goal graduation. And then at Gradient Learning, where I've spent the last decade really focused on how do I support schools and districts improve teaching and learning in the classroom because I think I'm driven by two truths. One is I want every student to get what they need at the moment that they need in a systematic way. And two, I know from personal experience that being a teacher, being a school leader and being a district leader is incredibly challenging. And I truly believe if they could, every teacher, school leader and district leader would want every child to get what they need. But there are barriers standing in the way. And so I want to ensure that we are doing all that we can to reduce the barriers for those stakeholders to do what they are best at.
And so I consider my role at Gradient that of being kind of a barrier buster for the lack of a better term. How do I get rid of all the barriers? How do I make it as easy as possible so that a teacher can do what they're uniquely qualified to do what no one else can do? How can I reduce all the barriers so that a principal can do what they're uniquely qualified to do? Because I can do that at scale outside of the school, but a principal can't do what they're uniquely qualified to do outside of the school. And I think if we're able to do that so that they can do what they're uniquely qualified to do that only they can do, then I think we have something that's a systematic answer. And so that's what we've been spending time at Green Aunt doing, and that's why I'm really excited to be in this space because I think there are so many amazing people in classrooms, in schools, in districts, and so many people outside in the ecosystem supporting them. And I think we're headed in the right direction. I just don't think we're quite there yet. But I'm optimistic.
Elana Leoni:
I was about to say it's not like it's an easy problem. We're tackling something incredibly complex, nuanced within a traditional system that's known for breaking and known for wrong incentives. So kudos to you when you were talking, I was head nodding the entire time. And when teachers are happy, when they're doing what they do best and allowed to do what they do best as a leader myself, I try to say, how can I get rid of all the challenges for my team? And it feels like you are doing that systematically. How do we get through the challenges so teachers can really focus on the actual teaching and the joy it brings. And when teachers are happy, students are happy, student engagement, student academic performance, teacher retention, all of those things happen. But sometimes I feel like we get focused on the shiny syndrome, the shiny object syndrome, and we get a little distracted in the world of education.
And so it's very refreshing to hear your vantage point around that. And just as a shout out, I think second, third, fourth grade, everyone I talk to a lot of people on this show had this beautiful experience, a connection with a teacher that fundamentally changed the trajectory of their lives, including myself, a fourth grade teacher. And I had that same reaction. Why can't everyone have this? I felt like I was the exception and not the rule, and it made me sad and it actually fueled me as it does you about, okay, let's try to make a difference. Let's try to make it so more people have access to great teachers and teachers have those barriers let go so they can create those connections. So lots of head nodding over here. Love it. Love it. So Monica, you're in the trenches now. You're leading Gradient Learning.
Why don't you talk to our audience a little bit about just what day-to-Day is like for you? Because you're running this big organization with a lot of challenges at hand. You're trying to really talk to people about what whole student is and what does it mean to have cultures where student and teacher relationships are prioritized. You want to talk a little bit about what's top of mind for you and maybe what's your day-to-day like? So we have a lot of people that are ed tech professionals that are just, gosh, they might be leading a small one, but they also might be leading a larger organization and we'd like to learn from leaders in education. So maybe go ahead and talk to us a little bit about your day to day, what keeps you up? What are you focused on right now?
Monica Milligan:
Yeah. I am uber-focused every day on what the experiences of students are. And so I like to center every week on thinking through what the teacher, school leader, and student journey is in our schools. And so every week I start the morning of Mondays thinking through what's the data that I'm getting both quantitatively and qualitatively that tells me how teachers, school leaders, and students are experiencing our program and what's going well and what's not going well and where are there places where we can make incremental improvements. And we have a value at Gradient that is about staying at the forefront of the work and really honoring those at the forefront of the work. And so if I feel like I am a little bit too away from the voices at the forefront of the work, I like to just pick up the phone and talk to one of our coaches who talked to schools every week or every day and just have a conversation with them about what is happening.
Or if I feel like I'm really, really far away from the work, I like to call up a school or visit a school and just see what is happening. Because if I don't really feel like I have the ability to represent the school experience in every decision I am making, then I am too disconnected to be able to lead on a day-to-day basis. So that's kind of one thing that I anchor on throughout every day. The second thing is I try to really make sure that I am focused on three things and only three things on any given week. Especially I think as a brand new leader, know that it is very easy to get into the weeds of doing the work. That's often how you were celebrated and rewarded in the past, and that may be how you got into this position. And so I try really hard to think about what is it that I'm uniquely qualified to do and only I can do as the leader of the organization.
And so I set a goal that really focuses on what is my unique contribution to the organization and what are the three things I can do to really focus on our three annual goals. And I write it on a little post-it note for each week and every day I look at it and I say to myself, what am I doing today proactively to make sure that I'm accomplishing these things? So that at the end of the week, if I had to give a report out to our team members, I can say I accomplished these things on behalf of our team. And then lastly, I consider my biggest value add to be supportive of our team because at the end of the day, I view myself as supportive of the team. And so each day I also think about where are there places where I can either offer more direction, more support or break down barriers or connect folks?
There's a set of things I ask myself and I ask that for each individual direct report that I have. And then other places where I know that there's kind of stickiness and proactively reach out to folks to say, Hey, I think I may be able to offer support, or, Hey, I know you're tackling this. Is there a way that I can be thoughtful in providing support? And so it's really thinking about those kinds of things. How do I make sure that I'm always thinking about the school because they're our ultimate customer? How do I always think about my team because essentially they're who I'm supporting in doing the work. And then lastly, there's a couple of unique things that I'm uniquely positioned to do. So how do I make sure that if there's anything that I'm individually doing that those things are at the right altitude of work so that I can focus proactively on doing those things which are often externally focused or board focused.
Elana Leoni:
And I think that last point, I mean so many of those points were critical, but as leaders we all struggle with what are we uniquely positioned to do, but how do we still stay grounded in our ultimate users impact, but keeping that balance. So when I talk to leaders, sometimes they're jumping into customer service and I say, well, that's great because you do get that pulse, but it's not scalable and is it what you are uniquely positioned to do? And sometimes the stuff we're uniquely positioned to do with leaders isn't fun stuff. It's really hard challenging stuff. So sometimes I mentally try to go, okay, I'll do this fun stuff while I'll get into client work or whatever it may be. But it's a really good reminder because the opportunity cost is so huge for your organization. So why don't we jump into whole student? I know I've had a pleasure of collaborating with your organization. I know that your organization champions the importance of whole student. Let's start because there's been a lot of terms out there. Let's start by defining what it is and what it is for this audience. Sorry, what it is and what it isn't.
Monica Milligan:
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure many of your listeners have heard the term whole child. This is very similar. Whole student education is about helping students grow as whole people throughout their K 12 journey by supporting them academically, emotionally, and cognitively. It's about helping students master not only academic content, but also critical life skills like curiosity, communication, critical thinking, so that by the time they graduate high school, they are graduating with a stronger sense of self, a greater ability to learn and better life outcomes. And so it's about graduating with both facts and figure mastery, but also mastery of that entire toolkit of skills that you need to really thrive in college and career or post-secondary skills.
Elana Leoni:
And my background of when I was working at Edutopia, we had the pleasure of going around to schools across the nation, and a lot of times we would cover schools with the culture of focusing on that whole student. And it just got me, I was like, oh my gosh, you're a kindergartner and you're able to have this sense of self-regulation of your emotions. You are helping your parents resolve conflicts. You have a sense of self. And it floored me to the point where I said, gosh, of all the things in education, I am fully bought into this because I've seen the change and not only the change within the student, but within the parental communities and the community at large. It just floored me. So I love the way that you describe it. Are there any things that people think like whole student or what you said, people might know it as his whole child, what it isn't or people misnomers around it?
Monica Milligan:
I mean, I think there's a lot of different misnomers around it. I think there's misnomers around it, around it being a very specific thing that you teach in one part of the day. I think there's a lot of folks thinking about it as a check mark curriculum that you teach in advisory once a month or once a week. We'd like to think about it as a really kind of integrated lens into the whole day.
Elana Leoni:
So now we know a little bit about what it is and a couple of things of what it isn't. Talk about what it looks like in practice because you, I've also seen teachers to say, oh yeah, I do that. It's a binder on the shelf I take out once a year, and it's not as easy as that. And anything you do once a year is never going to stick. So how does it look like in practice? I think sometimes the demystifying it is the hardest part.
Monica Milligan:
Gradient learning schools, just as an example, because I think I can paint a picture with the fullest detail in the way that it looks in our schools. As a student, you are in a classroom and you're receiving rigorous relevant instruction on grade level material, and you're receiving differentiation based on your interests and your skill level, which means that you may be receiving instruction on something that's slightly different than the student that's next to you, but it's exactly what you need because you may be either slightly below or slightly above your grade level, or it may be slightly different because you're interested in baseball, but the student next to you may be interested in football or karate, and that's okay because that makes it more relevant and more interesting for you because of your different skill sets. But not only that, you are also receiving regular mentoring from an adult in your school.
It may be your teacher, but it may also be somebody else in this school, and that allows you to feel known and seen in the school. It may be somebody who's working with you on goals, setting goals, progress against goals, or it may be someone who's just working with you to develop a strong teacher student connection at your school. There's different flavors of mentorship that different schools will implement. You're also regularly talking about a set of life skills like curiosity or self-direction or purpose. And you're also regularly developing those life skills in your curriculum because you're able to talk about self-direction and then you're able to apply and practice self-direction through a math lesson, perhaps learning about self-direction and then applying self-direction in a group learning portion of a series of math lessons because your teacher has given you the directions on how you can as a team, practice setting yourself up as a team and then doing independent work in those team settings.
And so you're practicing those skills naturally in your team spaces, and then you're reflecting on your self-direction skills periodically throughout the quarter and you're self-assessing yourself and your peers are assessing you on self-direction, not for a grade, but just so that you have a sense of how you're developing on that life skill and what you may want to work on again the next quarter. So that's one example of how it may look like when you have an integrated whole student education where it's not a separate time in the day, but it's just in your math classroom or in your history classroom. Now as a teacher, it looks a little bit different. Now as a teacher, you have the rigorous curriculum already preloaded into your learning management system because we'll do that for you. You have training that walks you through how to use that curriculum, but not only that, you have the training that shows you how the curriculum is designed to develop life skills already.
So we will point out for you, Hey, this is a great place for you to, if you're interested, develop self-direction so you don't have to do anything. You just have to emphasize this portion of the math lesson if you want to. So no new work for you outside of emphasizing it in your class if you want to. If you don't, no worry, you don't emphasize it and you just move on with your math lesson. And then you also have tools, resources, asynchronous training, data dashboards, AI resources built into your learning management system. So for instance, you have a async course on self-direction that you can take maybe as you're beginning a focus for your class on self-direction, and you may refer to it, you may even pull a video from it to show your class on self-direction, but it's available for when you want it for your own edification and for your student's edification.
It may even have a resource on self-direction that you can give to your students. It's not pushed to you, it's just available to you and it's all in one place so that you don't have to go searching for a research-based tool. It's at your fingertips because we believe it is not a valuable use of your time for you to spend 20 hours researching best practices. It is best use of your time to deliver a warm, inviting culture and climate to actually deliver these lessons, to facilitate these lessons, to decide what is relevant for your classroom to intervene for a couple of students who may need a little bit more support, but not to spend 20 hours curating these resources.
Elana Leoni:
The searching and what I would lovingly say cobbling together of trying to find and identify high-quality resources is real. Our team just did an ebook on high quality instructional materials and the lack of them and how a lot of that onus is put on the educators, and that floored me as well. So that is real. What I loved about what you were saying is why don't we go in with the emphasis of the skill that we're trying to hone and why don't we integrate it into everything we do? And even though that feels like common sense in the midst of all the things we've got going on, if I don't have a prompt and I'm not thinking that way, and I'm not reminding my students to think that way, because you and I when we were students, we probably exhibited some of these things, but I didn't really have a teacher to say, wow, that's really good self-direction, grow that and let's have your peers assess you. That never happened, but guess what? That's the most critical thing I look for when I hire someone. So I love the intentionality of it plus the support and the resources around it.
Monica Milligan:
Yeah, one thing we heard very loudly and very clearly from our teachers, especially after the pandemic was we are so tired and exhausted and we just don't have the capacity for yet another silver bullet intervention or program. All we want is just support on how to do our core work better. We want students to be mastering their content better, mastering their skills better, but we can't just every six months do a new program and every six months throughout the curriculum. And so the ask was, how can we get better every day just a little bit instead of throw everything out every six months? And so our approach and our belief is it's not about a silver bullet. It's about find a foundation of high quality materials. You do need that basis, but once you have that whole student education is, especially when you have high quality materials that have that embedded, it is about determining what the emphasis is that you want to focus on.
So if it's self-direction, great. If it's curiosity, great. If it's growth mindset, great, the majority of them can be found in the materials. It's about developing the lens and then within the structure of the high quality materials just amping up the instructions or amping up the approach a little bit. And so we call it taking a whole student lens to the materials, which is a much lighter lift and it's a flexible lift and it's a transferable lift, right? Taking a lens that is a curiosity lens this year and next year, taking a self-direction lens and next year taking a different lens, once you as a teacher learn how to take a lens and you're using it on the same basis of high quality curriculum, let's say illustrative math each year, now you have all the skill sets and changing what lens you take is the lift is low because then you just need a little bit of research and understanding of, okay, here's the fact base and research on curiosity versus self-direction and that lift is low and that becomes tenable and doable versus learn a whole new curriculum every year, learn a new program every single year, learn blah, blah, blah.
And once we shared that, I mean teachers, I had one teacher in summer training come up to me and just with tears in her eyes and she was like, I was literally about to quit because I thought you were going to introduce a whole new thing and tell me I had to drop everything and you just told me I had to just get better every day and it was just beautiful. I just have to take a lens and that's it. This is doable.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, it's about the small things every day with the intentionality, which I love because that's how we make real progress. It's not this, okay, let's stop everything we're doing. Let's stress everyone out. Let's force people to do things they don't want to do in education. That happens all the time. And so we don't want to contribute to that silver bullet what you said there. Why don't we talk to a little bit about the ecosystem in which this lives, because we know school leaders, district leaders really have to kind of be the advocates and say, Hey, let's do this. Let's do this as a school. Let's do this as a district. But we also know they're really overburdened and have tons of pressure. And I don't need to tell you this because you're also in the school board and you, you've been a teacher, but even now after the pandemic, it's chronic absenteeism and how do we raise our test scores after the post pandemic? How do we keep our school safe? We have a Maslow hierarchy of needs that are just like they're constantly on overdrive. How do we make sure that this becomes part of the conversation so they don't lump it in the nice to have? What
I often share is that for students, which I think everyone who's in education will agree is why we are all in the space to be really centered around for students who are graduating from the K 12 system, this is not a nice to have. They are graduating into an ever-changing world where employers are saying they are graduating without the skills that are needed to be employable. And so if we want students to graduate with the skills that will allow them to thrive in a world where they will likely change jobs every two to four years and have jobs that we have not even conceptualized, then we have to make sure they have mastered the life skills that we are talking about. So I understand that it is difficult, and I understand that there are competing priorities, and I understand that it is not something that you can do overnight and that not every single school district can do tomorrow.
So totally understand all the barriers to implementation, but when I talk to schools about the nice to have component from a student lens and where we want students to end up after the K 12 system, I've never had anyone walk away saying, no, no, no, I'm okay with students graduating just with content mastery. We all always come to a conclusion of, yep, we're in alignment that they have to graduate with these skills. And then we go into discussion about, but how do we get there? Which I think is the right and fair discussion to have.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, it reminds me all the time when we have this discussion around silver bullets and stuff, and sometimes when we chronically focus on the problem at hand, let's take chronic absenteeism and they do all these little bandaid things that really directly try to address it, but they ignore the problem overall. And sometimes when you focus on things like student teacher relationships and start focusing on, okay, how do I make my staff happy and how do we inject that joy into teaching? All of those things will actually reverberate. So sometimes I just feel like we get so focused on fixing it really quick with these bandaid things. If you actually focused on the underlying cause, it all would bubble up and I see it over and over again. So I don't know. I feel like when I talk to school leaders, I'm like, you're focusing on the wrong thing. You're focusing on the short term and not the long term. And sometimes you can't be myopically focused on that because the opportunity cost is so huge.
Monica Milligan:
It's like an ecosystem of factors that blend and impact one another. We have to recognize that it's not just one thing, it's an ecosystem of things.
Elana Leoni:
Yes, a hundred percent. So why don't we meander a little bit more into the ecosystem. So we talked about the district leader. Let's talk about the role of how EdTech plays and facilitates a role in all of this. EdTech is a huge part of the ecosystem. Educators are facilitating and leveraging technologies hopefully in ways that help the students learn a little bit more and focused on student learning and not the shiny object syndrome. Let's try this just because, but it's a huge influence within our sphere. What role do you think that they could play in helping students and districts really emphasize the whole student? Because sometimes it's more about just quick engagement, and I know ed tech founders are thinking about this and they're evolving their products to meet teacher needs and student needs, but sometimes teachers don't even have the vocabulary sometimes to say what they really need. So how would you talk to them about what role could they play potentially? Maybe what are some simple things you'd like them to do or maybe ask them or in the perfect world?
Monica Milligan:
I think it's a couple of things. One is centering as much work around the latest learning science would be great. And I know many, many ed tech companies do that. And so I think the more we have research-based applications and tools, I think the better. And so I think continuing to do that and continue to center learning science and research in products and technologies is one. Two, I think many organizations do this already. So continuing to center educators in some level of the development and testing process so that their voices are heard. And I recognize because we do this in partnership with Zuckerberg initiative, that sometimes it is hard, as you said, for educators to clearly communicate exactly what it is that they need and want. So I do think that there's often additional support that is needed to help translate what it is that educators may need or really want so that it is not necessarily the spur of the moment conversation that is driving that interest, but it is much more of a deeper need.
Monica Milligan:
And so what we have found most useful is either long-term engagement, so a multi week or multi-month of engagement that has spurred the best insights and or kind of a deeper dive engagement that has spurred the best thinking. And so somebody piloting or prototyping, even if it's not a tech base, but something over the longer term has yielded the best insights. So I would say that's two and then three, I mean the things that I would say we are at gradient the most in need from hearing from our schools is tools that allow us to visualize data in an integrated way from both academic and social emotional sources and tools that help make data-based coaching of teachers easier, ideally both academic and social emotional learning or data, but even just academic data easier because that is a major driver of teacher change, but it is not currently happening in, I think the same level of fidelity across the board. And then I think differentiation in a very data-driven way, in a way that is very easy. And so I think those are kind of the biggest things that our group of teachers have lifted up that they would love purely academically, but especially holistically.
Elana Leoni:
And I see, just like you, I've seen the evolution of a lot of ed tech products because in the beginning it was just focused on the student experience and the teacher experience was very little. Then we got teacher dashboards, which allowed some differentiation depending on the product, but then they started evolving into admin dashboards too. So that level of data-driven insights was helpful, but really making sure that it's connecting the dots and really telling the story of what ultimately you care about most is where we could go. And you had some really great thoughts on, okay, let's keep these in mind as we start adding in features. It's almost like what you started the podcast with. You're focused on three main things that move the needle. Let's not get caught up in this. This feature is cool. I can do it within a day, let's do it.
But does it help you? Right. And does it help what we're ultimately trying to do in the ecosystem? Yep. Well, great. I know that I have literally 10 million more questions about whole child because I love it, and I do believe that this is one of the most powerful strategies to move change in education. People will have your information in the show notes of how to get ahold of you, how to get ahold of gradient, learning your free tool along all of the things will be in the show notes, but we love to ask this fun question to close out our podcasts, and we're all humans at heart, and we work in a heart forward place where sometimes our heart sings from the impact we make and sometimes our heart breaks. And I love to talk to people about what lifts you up and what energizes and inspires you in those times where you're just feeling like you're not making, it's hard. We're working in a system that's hard. So what's something you've read or watched recently that has inspired you?
Monica Milligan:
Yeah, I just read a couple of weeks ago a book by a colleague that I've worked with closely called Ask by Jeff Wetzler. It's a book that is really about asking good questions, which I know sounds very simple when you first think about it, but it is a book that I'm using to really push myself to make sure that I am gathering as much high information and insights as possible for my entire team because I truly believe that as I make decisions as a leader, my decisions are only going to be as good as the insights and data and information as my team provides me. And if I don't create this space through the safety I create, through the curiosity I exhibit and through the high-quality questions I ask to elicit all of that, then my decisions are not going to be high quality.
Monica Milligan:
And so I've been trying to really work at that. And as I was working on that in my leadership coaching, a friend sent me that book and I was like, this is the book I've been looking for. And so I've been working through that and have found it just to be really a practical resource. There's sample questions that I've been using in my practice, and I feel like I'm back in college highlighting notes and using post-it notes to flag it. And so that's been something that I found really, really kind of energizing and a geeky college student kind of way.
Elana Leoni:
Awesome. It reminded me of sometimes when I have one-on-ones or coaching sessions with my team, I had a moment where someone came up to me afterwards and said, the way that you asked that question, it was so good and it helped me get to where I needed to go, so I wanted to thank you. And I was like, what? Really? And my eye lit up. And those are the things that you remember because we're ultimately here trying to help others, right? I'm not just waiting to speak my opinion, which sometimes that a leader does that at times, but it's really nice. We'll put that link to the book in the show notes as well for people that are interested. So thank you so much, Monica, for coming on the show, talking about things that people just don't fully understand. So I really wanted to get you on to talk about what is whole student, what is this movement and why is it so critical to today and my agenda? Why should we be prioritizing it because it works? And so thank you for sharing your knowledge and your passion here. For those of you, again listening, we'll put all of the information in the show notes. So thank you so much, Monica, and I hope to have you on another time and other people can follow your progress on our show notes and at Gradient Learning. So thank you. Thank you.
Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes leoneconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter @LeoniGroup or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoy today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on all things marketing and education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Monica Milligan, Guest
Monica brings 20 years+ in the education and private sector to Gradient Learning. Early in her career, she taught middle school math, helped women launch businesses, and helped businesses set strategy as a McKinsey consultant. She also served as the Deputy to the CEO at Chicago Public Schools and as the Chief Operating Officer at KIPP Austin. More recently, she was a Vice President at TNTP and was the Chief Program Officer at OneGoal Graduation. Monica joined Gradient Learning as Chief Program Officer in 2021 and was appointed as Executive Director in 2023. Monica holds a BA from Amherst College and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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