Radical Trust: Teaching and Leading Within with Justin Dent

What does it really mean to trust yourself? Especially when the system you work in doesn’t trust you back? In this episode, Dr. Ilana Nankin and Michael Fenchel sit down with Justin Dent, founder and CEO of Our School, for a deeply human conversation about radical trust as a practice, a pedagogy, and a way of leading.

Justin opens his heart and shares how losing both of his parents within three years became the crucible that revealed just how strong his inner foundation was, and what it truly means to choose trust when the world falls out from underneath you. This is a conversation for every educator who has ever silenced their inner knowing in favor of what the system demands, and who is ready to lead from the inside out.

Here are some of the best moments from the episode:

• The Earthquake and the Foundation: Justin reflects on how losing his mother and then his father two years later tested his trust in himself like nothing else — and ultimately revealed that the foundation he had quietly built would hold.
• Opening the Window: A powerful metaphor for the moment Justin chose to let universal intelligence in — and how that single act became the doorway to everything that followed.
• The Education System Doesn’t Trust Itself: Justin and Ilana name the hard truth — when schools are built around performance and compliance, they strip trust from educators, who then can’t model it for students or families.
• Why Giving Families Money Wasn’t Enough: Justin shares a pivotal lesson from his work at Out School — families in under-resourced communities didn’t use enrichment funds, not because they didn’t care, but because they didn’t trust themselves to make the right choice.
• Deficit Beliefs in the Classroom: Ilana shares her PhD research revealing how educators’ unconscious beliefs about Black and brown families lowered student expectations — and how awareness alone began to transform outcomes.
• Children and Elders as Spiritual Anchors: Justin draws on indigenous wisdom — that children and elders are the closest to universal knowing — and asks why our education system so often silences both.

Listen to this episode of A Work of Heart and sit with this question before your next lesson: what would it look like to trust yourself fully in the classroom today, not despite the system, but through it? Start small and notice when you override your inner knowing. Notice when you listen to it. That distinction is where radical trust begins to take root. Thank you for the courageous, human-centered work you do every day. When educators lead from within, students learn to do the same.

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