http://trudygraham.com.au/, https://trailblazingschools.riverside.com/

Trudy Graham, Rockhampton (2026)

11/06/2026

Earlier this year, I posted a small stack of booklets to principals around Queensland.

AI in Action: Field Notes from School Leaders. Real stories from real Australian principals — the experiments they'd tried, the ones that surprised them, the moments where AI had actually changed how they were working.

I didn't know how many people would read them, or whether a hard copy booklet even made sense in 2026.

Today I had a phone conversation with one of those principals.

She told me she dips into it. Not all at once. She picks it up when she needs it — reads a story, thinks about what another principal tried, and goes back to her week with something new in her head.

She said she finds inspiration in what other school leaders are doing.

That's actually exactly what I hoped for when I put it together. What I wanted to capture was what happens when a school leader decides to try something they’re not sure about and what they learn when they do.

There are now over 20 stories in the guide, organised by the AITSL Professional Standards for Principals. So wherever you're focusing your leadership right now, there's a principal in there who has tried something in that space and written honestly about it.

If you'd like your own copy, it's a free download. Link in the first comment.

05/06/2026

The first thing school leaders report about AI is saving time. And rightly so.

Reducing the hours spent writing reports, analysing data, responding to emails, and record-keeping is a huge benefit in a profession dealing with time poverty.

But during a conversation on the Trailblazing Schools podcast, principal Tim Prerau-Lorking called out another benefit.

For Tim, the most significant gain wasn’t just efficiency. It was clarity.

As he began using AI as a thinking and writing companion, he noticed his communication improved.

When preparing communications for staff, Tim found he could provide the core message and intent, then use AI to help structure and refine it.

As a result, his communication became tighter, clearer and easier to understand.

Most importantly, the need for follow-up clarification almost disappeared. Staff understood what was required, why it mattered and what action was expected.

Tim was also careful to emphasise something I wholeheartedly agree with. AI always needs a human edit. The leader still provides the judgment, context, empathy and understanding of people. AI simply helps sharpen the message.

Used this way, AI becomes less of a productivity tool and more of a communication partner, helping leaders express their ideas with greater precision and impact.

Link to the full episode in the comments.

29/05/2026

Here we are. The messy middle of term 2. The meetings stack up, the emails multiply, and the moment to take a breath feels like it’s always after the next thing on the list.

The conversation with Dr Jodi Richardson in this podcast episode, gave me a way to rethink how we move through our days, so we are not running on empty.

Jodi told me she was reading a novel recently where the author had deliberately stripped out the punctuation to capture how chaotic and fast one character’s life had become. She couldn’t finish it because it was too exhausting. She put it down, and then realised that is how a lot of teachers and leaders are running their days.

Dr Jodi Richardson, the go-to person on anxiety and wellbeing in education, made an observation in our conversation. We are biologically built to cope with stress. We are not built to cope with stress that never lets up.

“We are biologically equipped to cope with stress, just not chronic stress.”
— Dr Jodi Richardson, anxiety and wellbeing expert

Most educators are running on the second kind. No water break. No pause between meetings. Keep pushing through to get stuff done. The body needs the spike to come down.

Her practical reframe is this. Think of your day like a story. It needs commas, full stops and paragraphs. A 20-minute walk is a paragraph break, and most days don’t have room for one. A 30-second pause is a comma, and every day has room for plenty of those.

Thirty seconds is enough to close the stress loop. One minute is plenty to bring the heart rate down. That is what the nervous system actually needs.

When was the last time you put a comma in your day? Thirty seconds, between two things, just to stop.

Listen to the full conversation with Dr Jodi Richardson on this week’s episode of the Trailblazing Schools Podcast. Link below.

21/05/2026

Here comes the end of another week. And if you're like most school leaders, you know what happens next. You move straight to what didn't get done, what needs to happen over the weekend, and what’s on the cards for next week. No pause. Just the next thing.

When you look back over this week, what do you notice first? What's still on the list, or how far you've actually come from the start of it?

Harvard researchers Theresa Amabile and Stephen Kramer spent years studying what actually drives motivation and performance at work. Their finding: the single biggest driver of a positive day isn't recognition from above, and it isn't the big wins. It's progress. Even small progress. The problem is that leaders are the least likely people in any organisation to notice their own.

We're wired to measure forward, to see the gap between where we are and the ideal we haven't reached. Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy call this living in the gap. The alternative is measuring from the gain: looking backward from where you started to where you actually are now. The gap is always infinite. The gain is already real.

A 10-minute reflection at the end of a day, a week, or a term doesn't create achievement. It makes achievement visible. And what you can see, you can build on.

"Achievement that lives only in your head is half as powerful as achievement that's been spoken."

A teaching principal I work with ended Term 3 last year, calling her whole term "just little things." By the time we worked through her review, the list included changing schools, calming a community fractured by financial conflict, implementing a new PLD approach she'd never used before, teaching English three mornings a week, and building a colleague's pathway to a principal role. She hadn't forgotten any of it. She'd just never stopped long enough to see it as what it was.

This week: set a timer for 10 minutes, grab paper or open a document, and answer three questions.

1. What did I set out to do?
2. What actually progressed (not just what was completed)?
3. What am I celebrating? Name at least three things, then say them out loud to someone.

That last part matters more than it sounds.

15/05/2026

Yvonne told me it all started three hours before the Year 6 dinner a few years ago, when she had no speech written.

She typed the situation into ChatGPT, hit send, and got back something about high school being the place where you discover what you're passionate about. It was good enough that she still uses a version of it now, years later.

Yvonne Watt is the principal of Glen Aplin State Primary School — 25 students, ten minutes south of Stanthorpe, surrounded by vineyards. She teaches years 3 and 4 four days a week. The fifth day is for everything else: budgets, HR, instructional leadership, strategic planning. One admin person, two and a half days a week, not always in on the same days as her.

So she started pushing things through AI. Speeches, difficult parent emails, her annual improvement plan after the school review, multi-age unit plans with learning intentions and differentiated success criteria. Her HOD-C uses it to build personalised fluency reading texts matched to each student's diagnostic results and what they're actually interested in. One kid is obsessed with Pokémon. He now has ten weeks of Pokémon reading, pitched at his exact level, targeting his specific assessed needs.

Yvonne is currently building a fully integrated arts unit around the school's whole-school musical. Drama, music, dance, design technology, and visual art, all mapped to the curriculum, all assessed, all woven into the production the kids already love. The first musical, a couple of years ago, was done as a standalone. Rehearsed at lunchtimes. Nothing used for assessment. This time, the teaching and the show are the same thing.

She described the shift simply: "I have my life back now."

It's what happens when a teaching principal with no leadership team finds a tool that fits what actually happens in her days and weeks.

I spoke with Yvonne on the Trailblazing Schools Podcast. Link in the first comment if you'd like to hear the full conversation including the staff appreciation posts her students helped create, the cluster PD she organised that got teachers across schools using AI for the first time, and her advice for any principal who doesn't know where to start.

14/05/2026

Six people sitting on the floor.

A dozen more standing across the back wall.

A line of people turned away at the door because there was simply no room left.

That was Thursday before lunch at the Queensland Association of State School Principals conference — a 45-minute session on AI as a Consultant, Co-planner and Coach. We packed that room in every sense of the word, and by the end, 75 people had filled in feedback. 65 gave it five out of five. The other ten gave it four. Not one person below that.

It exceeded my expectations.

But the week started before Thursday.

Tuesday, I spent the afternoon and evening with a group of small school principals at a pre-conference workshop — Small Schools: Bold Moves. These are leaders running schools where they are often the principal, the teacher, the counsellor, and the community representative all at once. The conversations in that room were honest in the way that only happens when you're with people who genuinely understand your world.

Wednesday was Exceptional Middle Leaders at Brisbane Airport Conference Centre. We dug into the Leading with Impact model — Insights, Influence, and Initiative. Middle leaders face a particular challenge. Accountable upward, accountable downward, and often invisible in between. Watching people name that and then work with it, that's why I do this work.

And then Thursday happened.

People are asking about speaking, AI Pro PD, the Leaders Learning Circle, and Trailblazing Schools. That tells me the conversation is landing somewhere real.

It was a big week. I'm still processing it.

08/05/2026

I know principals who write their school newsletter on Sunday night.

Who draft their improvement plan on a Sunday.

Who save that hard document, the one that needs real thinking, for the weekend because that's the only time the interruptions stop.

It's not laziness that lets it pile up. It's that Monday to Friday doesn't leave enough of you to do it justice. So Sunday becomes the overflow valve.

The cognitive load school leaders carry is real.

Structuring the draft, ensuring the plan is aligned and word-smithing the communication that needs exactly the right tone. That's what takes the Sunday.

AI won't do your leadership for you. But it can do that part. The first draft. The structure. The thing that was keeping you at the kitchen table at 9pm when you should have had the night off.

That's what I've watched it give back to the principals I work with.

Link to this episode in the comments.

07/05/2026

Easter 2023. I wasn't doing research. I wasn't doing a course. I was playing.

I put my teacher hat on, pretended I was teaching Year 4 the following term, and asked ChatGPT to plan an English unit aligned to the Australian Curriculum. What came back left me gobsmacked. Structured. Curriculum-aligned. Lesson sequences, success criteria, and assessment ideas. In minutes. The stuff that takes teachers hours.

My immediate thought: This is going to change education. I have to share it.

So I took screenshots and posted them in a couple of Australian primary teacher Facebook groups over the Easter break. Within hours, hundreds of comments. Personal messages from educators right across Australia. I couldn't keep up, so I created a Facebook group. That group now has over 14,500 members.

But the moment that changed how I work with school leaders came the following year.

I was working with a small group of teaching principals in my first Leaders Learning Circle, and one of them asked me to help with her school's strategic plan. I'd done strategic planning routinely as a principal and as a system leader. I knew the old-school processes well. Cutting up pieces of paper. Sticky notes. Blue tack. Moving things around. Trying to get it all aligned.

Again, I found myself wondering: What would AI do with this?

So I uploaded her school's review report. The actual document, with the findings and the improvement strategies. I gave it context about the school, and asked it to draft a strategic plan in response. What came back was extraordinary. It had read the improvement strategies, understood the priorities, and structured a plan with headings that matched her preferred template. Something that would have taken days was scaffolded in under an hour.

I shared what I'd found with that first group of principals. And the energy in the room… the excitement, the curiosity, the "wait, show me how you did that"… it was immediate.

That was the moment I knew I had to lean in. I couldn't ignore the potential difference this could make for school leaders and teachers.

I talk about all of this, including real examples from the principals I work with, in an episode of the Trailblazing Schools podcast. It's called AI as a Thinking Partner for School Leaders, and it's the episode I'd send to any principal who's tried AI once or twice and hasn't quite made the leap yet. Link in the first comment.

02/05/2026

The school’s 150th anniversary celebrations were just months away. Tania, the principal at Emu Creek, with an already full teaching load, is left to bring it all together when the school’s historian pulls out.

With researching and writing the sesquicentennial now her responsibility, she turns to AI.

After uploading 25 years of school newsletters for AI to read and summarise, she produced the last chapter of the school’s history without having to do extensive research herself.

Then, with just half an hour of prompting, she used AI to write a 15-minute anniversary play for her 27 students, with every child having a speaking part. The parents were convinced she’d written it herself. She told me, “Writing the prompt is good enough.”

For the school tour at the same event, she gave AI everything it needed to know and asked it to script a 30-minute guided tour, stopping at key sites, covering the history. It was done in five minutes.

Her story is one of more than 20 in my free guide, AI in Action: Field Notes from School Leaders. Real stories from Australian principals, mapped to the AITSL professional standards, showing exactly what's possible when you stop treating AI as an email assistant and start treating it as a thinking partner.
Link to download in the first comment.

Trudy Graham

11/06/2026

05/06/2026

29/05/2026

21/05/2026

15/05/2026

14/05/2026

08/05/2026

07/05/2026

02/05/2026

Address

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category