When Kids Make a Best-Selling Coffee Flavor with Brian Hyosaka Transformative Principal 428

<p><a href="https://twitter.com/hyosaka2">Brian Hyosaka</a> is a Chicago native and has spent time around the world I’m originally from the Chicago area and am the son of career high school special educator.  I grew up playing a multitude of sports and got into coaching alongside my sister who is also a teacher.  For a few summers during college, I was splitting my day interning at my dad’s company and coaching swimming.  Each day, I would dread going to the office and count the hours until I could be with young people coaching swimming.  That final summer proved pivotal and I came to the realization that pursuing business or an office type job was just not for me.</p> <p>Thankfully, Teach For America existed to allow me to jump into teaching and utilize my bilingualism in Spanish.  I knew that in order to truly give education a shot, I needed to leave my friends and family in Chicago, so I moved to Denver to teach 5th grade in a bilingual classroom.  Unlike most of my friends at the time, I ended up staying in Denver for 5 years teaching in the same school.  During my final 2 years, I also took on full-time teacher residents and realized I had a passion for developing educators.</p> <p>At the same time, I had maintained a dream of living abroad and decided that after 5 years, the time was right to make that happen.  My then fiance who is a high school counselor then applied to schools all of Latin America.  We ended up landing jobs at the American School of Guatemala in Guatemala City.  For us, these were two of the best years of our lives for a number of reasons.  For me, I had begun to feel burned out on the constant pressure to show student achievement on a standardized test.</p> <p>Working in Guatemala, we had no standardized test and I was able to grow my practice tremendously as an educator.  At the same time, a new school leader came in with me my first year.  It was through him that I got to witness and feel the power of an excellent leader for the first time.  He not only changed the culture of the scho