02.11.2026

IGNITE

Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action!

Reader,

Post-COVID, I started noticing something I couldn’t unsee.

I’d walk the hallways and the building had settled into a new normal. We were functioning, but we weren’t firing. The spark felt smaller. Teachers were worn down. Kids were compliant, but not always curious.

It looked like school… but it didn’t feel like learning.

One morning during supervision, I casually mentioned it. Just an honest observation.

And Mr. Clouser, one of our PE teachers, smirked and said, “Well we can’t have people feeling this way… because THIS is THE Learning Factory.”

We laughed in the moment. But that phrase followed me down the hallway like a song you can’t turn off.

Learning Factory

It was simple. Slightly cheesy. And somehow… exactly what we needed.

Here’s why it mattered. Research on performance and improvement shows something most adults don’t want to admit: once we reach “acceptable,” we tend to automate. We hit autopilot. We repeat what we’ve always done, and we assume experience equals growth.

But experience doesn’t automatically make you better. Often, it just makes you more efficient at doing the same things.

So we made a decision. We weren’t going to “work harder” our way out of this. We were going to get deliberate about what we practiced. We stopped rolling our eyes at phrases like “data-based decisions” and started using the language like we meant it. We didn’t revolutionize everything. We focused on the terms and tasks we repeated each day until they became normal.

And something surprising happened. Students started using the language of learning.

“This helps my reading fluency.”
“I’m working to meet the benchmark on the winter screener.”
“That was a formative assessment.”

That’s when I realized the secret wasn’t intensity. It was identity. Once we named who we were, we started acting like it. The Learning Factory wasn’t a slogan. It became a system.

Everything we do centers around three questions:
Who is learning?
Who is not?
What are we going to do about it?

And that’s the shift most schools miss. If you keep doing the same routines on repeat, you don’t get growth, you get grooves. You get good at getting through the day. That’s autopilot.

But when you choose one “rough spot” and work it on purpose, you start improving again. Just like a master carpenter who finds a flaw, sands it smooth, and repeats the right reps until the desired result is achieved. That intentional focus is what changed our climate.

Since then, we’ve consistently performed in the top 10% of schools in Illinois. Not because we found a magic curriculum. Because we built a repeatable process.

Those lessons and systems of learning are what built me into a school improvement coach. It’s my jam! If you need an outsider’s view or a steady partner to strengthen the systems of learning in your school or district, hit reply and let’s chat.

Onward >>>

Tom

#TeamBOOM

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