“The revelation was I should trust students and believe in them even more.” — Dr. Marta Medved

Dr. Marta Medved Krajnovic didn't set out to lead international schools. She set out to find the right age to teach a second language. A 15-year national research project in Croatia taught her that even a well-proven answer can take a generation to reach a classroom. That lesson followed her from a university research post in Zagreb to three decades in education, including her current role as Head of School at Western Academy of Beijing (WAB).

In this episode, Christian Talbot, President of Middle States Association, talks with Marta about the change effort that didn't work: a plan to relocate Stockholm International School that collapsed when a real estate partner walked away, after the school had already announced the move publicly. Marta traces what she got wrong (deciding without enough of her own faculty at the table) and what she built afterward, a role dedicated to stakeholder relationships that found the school a permanent home years later. The conversation moves to WAB, where Marta and her team trained more than 50 students, from grade five to grade twelve, to lead the school's own strategic conversations, a process that won WAB an international award for how the strategy got made, not for the strategy itself.

Marta's conviction: change works when it's systematic, not when it's fast. And the real constraint on that systematic effort is rarely culture, capacity, or money. It's whether the adults running a school actually believe the people already in the room, especially the students, are capable of leading it.