personal branding without the ick

For a long time, I wanted nothing to do with personal branding. My husband teases me about the whole “educelebrity” culture.... follower counts, online clout, the performance of it all.

It made me want to run the other direction.

At one point, I even shut down my social media accounts because it felt like the only way to avoid playing that game.

But here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: branding is happening whether I choose it or not. Every time I send an email, walk into a room, or decide what to share (or not share), I’m teaching people something about who I am and what I value. The question isn’t whether I have a personal brand. The question is whether I’ll be intentional about it.

I shared this perspective recently with the Elevated Studios Teacher Navigators, a group of educators passionate about transformational and vibrant learning. We dug into how personal branding doesn’t have to be about performance. It can be about impact: spreading the work that matters.

what: branding is teaching out loud

Branding isn’t a logo or a glossy Instagram grid. It’s how people experience you over time. It’s the story that builds when you consistently show up.

For the Navigators, branding looks like opening the classroom door a little wider so more people can see what vibrant learning really means. It’s teaching out loud.

why: values align intentions

A turning point for me was when Karri and I sat down over a year ago to name our values. That process grounded me. Our values evolved into the ones we now carry in the alchemy handbook: servant leadership, bountiful harvesting, reliable overseeing, and vision planting.

When I lined up my choices with those values, branding stopped feeling performative. It became purposeful. Even the small things, like writing in lowercase, became a way to live out those values. Lowercase signals approachability, humility, and a willingness to sit in a little discomfort, which is exactly the kind of space where growth happens.

The lesson: when your values shape how you show up, people don’t see polish. They see trustworthiness.

how: small, consistent rhythms

Here’s another hard-won truth: consistency matters more than reach. For me, it began with a newsletter rhythm. Writing consistently gave me structure and helped me share in a way that felt natural instead of performative.

For the Navigators, the rhythms looked different: a weekly reflection, a hallway sticky note, or a simple story shared with their team. Branding doesn’t have to be grand. It just has to be aligned and repeatable.

the takeaway

I used to think personal branding was a distraction — too self-centered, too focused on image. What I know now is this: branding is inevitable. The only choice is whether it’s accidental or intentional.

Grounded in values. Lived out through rhythms. Shared with clarity. That’s how personal branding becomes a way to spread the message of vibrant learning instead of shrinking back from it.

Your brand is already happening. Be intentional about the story it tells.

— brooke

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the building leader's guide to local accountability

By Brooke Goff • July 21, 2026

Most principals are watching local accountability happen from the hallway. You don't have to wait for an invitation. There is a teacher in a school you probably know. Maybe you have someone like her on your team right now. She runs the PLCs. She sits in on planning sessions across grade levels. She knows which classrooms are doing cross-curricular vibrant learning work this quarter, and she knows which teachers need extra support to pull it off. When something remarkable happens in a student's learning, she finds out. She takes the photos. She writes the caption. She is the reason the school's story gets told at all. And she is one person. When local accountability arrives at your building (and it is arriving) it is going to ask for documented vibrant learning evidence, a Portrait of a Learner that lives somewhere public, data that shows your community what your school actually stands for. And if your answer to any of those requests runs through one person's head, one person's phone camera, one person's memory of what happened in third period on a random Tuesday in October, you have a fragility problem. Not a people problem. A systems problem. And it is fixable, but only if you start now, before the district finishes building the dashboard you will eventually be feeding. Here is what I want principals to know before anything else: you are not behind. You are not failing. The local accountability conversation in Kentucky has been happening almost entirely at the district level, and the assumption buried inside a lot of that work is that principals are naturally in the loop. That superintendents are passing information down. That buildings are ready. Most of them are not. And that is not the principal's fault. What is within a principal's control right now is whether the work already happening in their building gets captured in a way that will matter later. Not a new initiative. Not a new platform. Not a new committee. Three practices, intentionally done, that most strong principals are already doing accidentally.