Life Ready Students with Glenn Robbins

Life Ready Students with Glenn Robbins

June 28, 2026 · 27 min · Season 13 · Episode 723

About this episode

Jethro Jones interviews Glenn Robbins about fostering a culture of innovation in schools.

In this vault episode of Transformative Principle, host Jethro Jones interviews Glenn Robbins, principal of Northfield Community School in New Jersey and NASSP Digital Principal of 2016. Glenn shares how he builds a culture of innovation by prioritizing autonomy, transparency, and authentic collaboration among staff, students, and community. He discusses meeting daily with his union president to take the pulse of the building, using design thinking charettes to co-create a school-wide "Life Ready Manifesto," encouraging staff and students to bring problems paired with two solutions, and how owning his own mistakes publicly broke down trust barriers early in his tenure. Glenn measures success not by test scores, but by the enthusiasm of kids who don't want to leave school. We’re proud to be sponsored by IXL . IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more: Simplify and streamline technology Save teachers’ time Reliably meet Tier…

People in this episode

Host: Jethro Jones

Guest: Glenn Robbins

Topics covered

Keywords

Sponsors

IXL

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Northfield Community School, NASSP, Johns Hopkins University

Products: IXL

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