I Support You Failing Spectacularly

“I support you failing spectacularly” might be the most freeing sentence a teacher can hear, and it sets the tone for a hopeful conversation about online Christian education done with courage and care. We celebrate what God is doing at NorthStar Academy through Katherine’s story as an alumna, teacher, and curriculum designer who turns research into practical tools for online student success. We talk about pacing, student agency, and the kind of supportive culture that helps students get unstuck and become lifelong learners.

• Katherine’s journey from student to teacher at NorthStar Academy  
• Earning a master’s and applying capstone pacing research  
• Designing online course tools that support student success right away  
• “Failing spectacularly” as a leadership posture that fuels innovation  
• Building student agency through reflection, good questions, and flexible project choices    
• Reframing pacing as partnership, relationship, and individualized support  
• Alumni council growth and the value of shared formative experience  

Transcript

Welcome To North Star Narrative

Stephanie Shafer 0:02

Hi, this is Stephanie Shafer, and you're listening to the NorthStar Narrative, a podcast from NorthStar Academy. I want to thank you for joining us. I hope you're encouraged, challenged, and motivated by what you learned today. Enjoy the story. Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode. Super excited because we have not only a NorthStar alumna, but she is also a NorthStar teacher. And even beyond that, she is just jumping into some really incredible conversations and projects. And yeah, just lots of the goodness of Jesus that we see all around NorthStar. And a lot of it has to do with her. I just see him working in her and through her. And so, so glad to be able to have this conversation with her today. We just really want to spend some time celebrating the goodness of God and what he's doing here at NorthStar in and through our students and our staff and faculty and what he's doing in Christian education right now. It is very exciting, and I'm loving all of the circles that I'm in and can't wait to talk to Katherine. So I actually just asked her today. I said, Katherine, you want to jump on and let's just talk about what we're doing. And she said, Yeah. So here she is. So welcome, Katherine. Thank you for having me, Stephanie. So Katherine is not brand new to the podcast. This is her second one. If you want to go all the way back to 2021, we'll have to do that sometime. Listen, uh uh, I never like to listen to myself, but see what was going on back in 2021 to compare to now. And so I know I really want you to catch us up. And so you I know you've received your master's degree since then, you've had a little girl since then. So yeah, just catch us up on all the goodness that God's been doing in you.

Catherine’s Update And Master’s Work

Katherine Clark 1:48

Yeah, absolutely. So since the last time that I was on the podcast, I have written a new course. Um, I've rewritten our US history um regular and honors sections for high school. And as you said, I had a baby, a little girl, she's three now, and I got my master's degree from Messiah. Um, that's a master's in online curriculum and instruction, and just received that this past fall and immediately dove right in at Northstar. I'm just so grateful to be able to use here what I learned during that program. So that was all about my capstone research was all about pacing in online education, which is obviously so relevant for us here at Northstar and such an important piece for students to be successful in the online environment.

Stephanie Shafer 2:42

Yeah, I love it because as soon as you did it, well, you invited us to come um and watch when you presented um your paper and all your data and research, and um, yeah, and immediately said, Hey, I've got tools and I want to share them. I want to share them with Northstar, share them, which is like sharing them with the world and all the students. So, what when you think back on all that hard work, maybe what was the hardest, hardest piece of that? And then what are you most proud of?

Katherine Clark 3:10

I think the hardest piece was just trying to pull off a master's level paper while also parenting a toddler. Um, so I got a lot of help from obviously my husband was a huge support, but also my parents and my sister really stepped in to give me the time that I needed to do that research well. Um, so I'm really grateful for the support that I had from the people around me. Um, what was the second piece of the question?

Stephanie Shafer 3:39

What are you most proud of?

Katherine Clark 3:41

I think I'm most proud that I was able to create something that was really immediately applicable. You know, the whole time that I was doing my master's, which was stretched out over quite a number of years because of life and having a baby and all of those other things, I was always thinking about NorthStar the whole time. And every time I was doing a class, I was thinking about, you know, what do I need at Northstar in order for my students to be able to thrive? Whenever they had me write a unit or write a, you know, a tool or something that would be used in education. Um, I was immediately creating something that I could then use in my courses at NorthStar. So all along the way, it was really intended to be how can I be a better teacher? How can I immediately serve my students at NorthStar? And with that capstone, I wasn't really interested in doing research just for research's sake. I really wanted to create something that then could be used immediately, not you know, a decade down the line, but immediately put in place. And I'm really proud of what I was able to create. I'm really grateful for God's direction and the people here at NorthStar that, you know, spoke me through that. Uh, Katie Amadzai was really instrumental in guiding the direction that I was gonna take for that research. Um, other people like Katie Dunlap really supported me. They let me interview them over and over for my classes. And so I just I really feel like it was um God-driven and also kind of a team effort to get us to that point. So, yeah, I'm really proud of the resources that came out of that.

Stephanie Shafer 5:24

I love it. I love yeah, the collaboration, the teamwork, and I'm so proud of you and super thankful. And I asked Katherine when she was finishing up her master's. I said, um, okay, what are you gonna do next? Fully thinking that you know, she's got her master's now, she might go on somewhere different than NorthStar. And I love what you said. You're just like, I love NorthStar, I want my career to be here. And wow, I immediately jumped on that. I was like, okay, Katherine, where can we plug you in? And um, yeah, so just your heart for NorthStar and for education for these students, how to make the pathway um just really clear to these students and what what do they need to do to be successful? And so so excited how you brought those tools here and um yeah, and beyond what that's gonna be.

Katherine Clark 6:14

NorthStar has been very formative in my life, you know, from doing my high school courses here to working with Pam Hornack when I was in college as an intern, um, and then you know, coming back here as kind of my first real job after college. Um, it's been really, really formative. And I really believe in the mission of NorthStar. I really believe in the populations that we're reaching, I really believe in the potential for global Christian education. So yeah, I'm all in.

Freedom To Take Teaching Risks

Stephanie Shafer 6:47

Oh, I love it. Okay, you recently said something to me about Pam Hornick. So I was gonna bring her up before you did just now. Um, but you had said, hey, the most important thing or the most, you know, impactful thing an admin had ever said to me. So I want to let you tell what Pam said.

Katherine Clark 7:03

Yeah, absolutely. So when I was a brand new teacher at NorthStar, like I said, kind of first real job after college, um, I was looking to author a course, and I wanted to do some really kind of innovative things, try some different types of activities, try some different types of projects, and just um I wasn't sure if it was gonna work. And so I was on a call with Pam and I said, you know, I I'm not sure if this is gonna work out, it might be confusing, it might fail. And she said, you know, Katherine, it might fail, but I support you failing spectacularly, and that was really encouraging for me as a teacher to hear that I had this freedom to experiment, which was not something that I had encountered in, for example, my student teaching in a public school. Generally, educators don't have that much freedom necessarily, and so to hear her say that she not only wanted me to try something, but that she wanted me to try something risky in the purpose for the purpose of innovation, um, and in the hope that it would be spectacular, but also recognizing that it might be a spectacular fail. That was really encouraging and really freeing.

Building Student Agency Through Projects

Stephanie Shafer 8:21

I love it. I think that should be the title of this podcast, maybe. I support you failing spectacularly. Um, yeah, because risk risk taking is so important, developing that grit. Um, and so yeah, that brings up the next topic I wanted to talk about. So several of us have been involved with some things Seed Tree Group has been doing with Stephen Carter, um, going to their symposiums and also doing an online working group. So Katherine and I and um Amy Peterman, who works here with us, we have been going through that. We just finished it. Um, but I love it because Stephen challenged us in one of the group meetings to look and see where do your students have agency and what they're doing and um go do something about it. So I immediately said, okay, let's collaborate. And we brought in Jen Sullivan, who is doing some entrepreneurship teaching here in our brand new program with that. And Katherine's like, Yeah, uh, let's use my course, let's figure out an assignment. So I want you to share, you know, kind of what you came up with and um what your students are already doing and and saying.

Katherine Clark 9:30

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a unit in my US history course where we're studying kind of capitalism as an economic system, and as a final product in that unit, what students were doing is they had a project where they were comparing capitalism and socialism. While that's worthwhile, it is very much just kind of a synthesis of their learning. It's just a review, right? Here's the things we've been talking about, let's compare them, go into a little bit more depth. And so I thought that that was a great place for us to give a little more freedom for students to explore something from the unit that they're still interested in, something that's still kind of in their minds that they're curious about. And so the way that we did that was students are doing a pretest at the beginning of the unit to see what they already know. And then at the end of the unit, I added a reflection where they're analyzing their responses from that pretest, getting a sense of what they've learned and what questions they still might have. Because obviously that's the biggest piece, right? Is asking the good question. Once we have a good question, then a lot of things flow naturally from there. So trying to guide them in that process of figuring out what's a good question that I want to follow that I want to pursue, and then allowing them the agency to determine how they want to go about learning and answering that question. And I actually just got the first um student doing that section of the assignment the other day. So the first one to go through it, and he has decided that he wanted to look further into consumerism, which is a topic that we have discussed in the unit. And in order to learn more about that, he's gonna be doing a no-spend challenge with one of his friends for a week, and he's gonna be analyzing during that week what are the things that he wants to buy, even if he's not, what are the things that like come up as a desire? And where is that desire coming from? Is it coming from something he truly needs? Is it coming from society? Is it coming from advertising? Is it coming from social media? And I just think that's so exciting and such a worthwhile and practical, real life kind of thing. It really is an example of one of our ESOs to be a lifelong learner, you know, doing something that is so um grounded in real life, and hopefully this is something that he'll remember far into the future. So he's gonna be doing that and doing that analysis, and then there's a lot of freedom too in how students then present their learning to me, whatever really makes the most sense for them. And that whole process is guided, you know. He came to this idea of the no-spend challenge through a conversation with me. It obviously can be a little jarring for students sometimes to have that much freedom all of a sudden. So we want to make sure that we're scaffolding that, that we're guiding them through it. But I just think it's so exciting. He never would have been able to do this with the previous activity that was in there. So just to see already that this is bearing such fruit, um, you know, with the very first student in there, is really exciting.

Stephanie Shafer 12:44

Uh, love it. And so that is an example. I want to say small example, but it's really a huge example of what Jesus is doing right now at Northstar. So that came from we don't have time to tell the whole story, but well, if you listen to Stephen Carter's podcast on here and Jen Sullivan's podcast, you'll hear some of the story of how we got involved with that in the entrepreneurship program and how that's coming alive here at Northstar, but um, through connections, through networks, through us being involved in that working group now, and then saying, hey, let's jump over here to Teams and let's get on live and brainstorm. And then Katherine, yeah, and everybody's speaking into that. And and so how these students are gonna get to who knows where this will go in this student's life and how his wheels are gonna be turning in his brain, and how every other assignment, you know, he's gonna have fun, maybe, you know, see it as being a lifelong learner. So I love, love, love. Love that. It's so fun. I think it's so fun to be a part right now of Christian education at NorthStar. What do you think?

Katherine Clark 13:47

Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think that we always want to be open to the next thing that Jesus is doing. And I just feel like there's so much openness right now, and because of that, there's so many amazing things starting and progressing and building. And obviously, we want to steward that well and we want to build out carefully and thoughtfully, but um just so grateful to see, you know, and NorthStar was very different back when I was a student, um, you know, decades ago at this point. Um, and just seeing how far we've come brings me a lot of joy.

Pacing Support As A Partnership

Stephanie Shafer 14:23

Yeah, so much joy. Um, okay, when I think of life giver, I think you, Katherine's a life giver. And so just the time you spent in your master's and being so sold out to Jesus and and using it more than just checking a box to get a you know diploma. Um you're now able to dream about what student success looks like now and then what it can become for students. So um just speak a little bit about that dream and what we're praying about and starting to pilot. And I just I just want to label it as life-giving because it really is a student success. You're gonna bring life to them at some places where maybe they're stuck in perfectionism or thinking they can't, you know, complete something or move on the procrastination. So um, yeah, how are you gonna give them life?

Katherine Clark 15:15

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, as we're looking at pacing specifically, one of obviously the main challenges in online instruction, I think a lot of it really is about kind of reframing the issue. It a lot of times students feel like um teachers or leaders at the school or even their parents that are supervising them are kind of against them, that it's a little bit of a um it can be a little bit of a conflict kind of situation where students feel like they're being told, oh, I have to do these things, and they're feeling really stressed, and they're not sure how to manage that. And what I really want it to become is I want it to become a partnership. I want it to become a deep relationship where students can feel seen and loved and nurtured and just see how precious they are to their parents, to their teachers, to anyone that they're interacting with at Northstar, that they can see, okay, if you have procrastinated and you're behind, that's not something that we're looking at you and judging you for. We understand and we can help you understand why you might be falling into that trap of procrastination and how can we help you get out. And I really just my hope is for it to be such a relational process, like I said, um, and such a partnership where we're really coming alongside each student individually and asking, what do you need in order to be successful? Knowing that that's going to be so individual, you know, and where one student might need a really strict schedule and some firm accountability. Another student just might need so much love and so much encouragement and just reassurance that they're doing well. And one student, they must they might just need to clear off their desk so that there's less stuff distracting them. And another student, they might need to go out into the living room where there's other people around and work out in the living room so that they have that accountability and they're not getting distracted alone in their room. And so there's just so many ways that it can look to support students and to help them get on the right track with their work. Um, and so that is my hope that it will just be this relational partnership. Um, and yeah, they'll just be full of hope, like the hope of Jesus, right? We're not stuck in the things that are hard, we're not stuck in the things that are maybe even things that we're doing wrong. We don't have to be stuck in that because there is freedom in Christ.

Alumni Council And Lasting Community

Stephanie Shafer 17:41

That's so good. And the life giving comes because you want each student to feel known and seen and right where they are. Yeah. We're we're gonna unstuck you. If you are stuck, if you feel stuck, our job is to unstuck you. Um, and so I just love that. And that really is a spirit across NorthStar because it's the Holy Spirit, you know, here and He wants everyone to feel seen and to know, be known by Him. And so that's what we're all about. All right. Well, I want everybody to hear a little bit of what's going on. Katherine and I could stay here forever and talk about everything, but let's give them a little highlight on one other topic before we go. Um, so the alumni. The alumni is getting some traction here. So what are you seeing? Because y'all know you're a part of it a little bit.

Katherine Clark 18:26

Yeah, absolutely, which is really exciting. Um, our last alumni council meeting, it was very exciting because I was not the only older alumna in the room. We're collecting some people from previous decades, and that's that's really exciting to see. Um, I just think that NorthStar is such a unique experience. And especially for those of us who graduated a while ago, you know, we didn't necessarily have in-person graduation, we didn't necessarily have some of the same connections that students can make at NorthStar now, but we did all share in this really unique experience that was really formative for a lot of us. And so I think that's what I find really exciting about the alumna process and the alumni council and everything that's getting started there is that we're gonna get a chance to build relationships now with people who shared this really formative experience with us and who understand our experience of high school in a way that, you know, my husband can never understand, my friends here can never understand because they didn't live it. Um, so it's like it's like a high school reunion, but across years and with people doing all kinds of different things now, and it's just so exciting to see um where people from NorthStar ending up. And I also think it's really exciting because you know, NorthStar has this goal. We have these ESOs to help form people into a certain type of person, right? People who go out and impact the world for Jesus, people who are lifelong learners, people who are ready to approach the world from a place of um humility, but also strength and growth and and all of these good things that we're learning at NorthStar. And the alumni council is where we get to see that people are doing that, right? That's where we get to meet them and hear what they're doing and be like, oh my goodness, like we're out there doing it, all of us North former NorthStar students.

Stephanie Shafer 20:31

Yeah. It's it's rich, gonna be a rich experience. And we've just now really had the resources to start putting some intentional time into the alumni. But I think it's part of this this next season of NorthStar and just the flourishing. It's gonna be so good. And they're already pouring back in to whether it's spiritual emphasis event or coming to graduation. Um, yeah, just really, really gonna be cool. Having interns. So I'm so excited, so excited that you can be a part of yeah, all these incredible little areas that God is is working. So thank you for making NorthStar your career. Thank you for being all in. Um, I know God's blessing you and He's gonna keep giving you great joy.

Katherine Clark 21:16

Well, I'm really grateful for a uh a place to call kind of my online home for the last several decades now.

Stephanie Shafer 21:28

Yeah. Well, thank you for taking a few moments and jumping on, and yeah, let's just get into chat. I appreciate you so much.

Katherine Clark 21:35

My pleasure. Thank you, Stephanie.

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Stephanie Shafer 21:38

Thank you so much for listening today. If you have any questions for our guest or like information about NorthStar, please email us at podcast at nsa.school. We love having guests on our show and getting to hear their stories. If you have anyone in mind that you think would be a great guest to feature, please email us and let us know. And don't forget To subscribe so you don't miss out on upcoming stories.