About Josh Martin
Josh Martin is in his first year as principal of Mt. Olive High School in Mt. Olive, Illinois. A dedicated educator, he has been part of the rural Mt. Olive School District since 2009, serving in various roles throughout his 20-year career. Mr. Martin has taught Health, Driver’s Education, and Physical Education, in addition to serving as Student Services Coordinator and Dean of Students.
Passionate about physical activity, he has coached football, baseball, and track, and he continues to lead the middle school track team. He enjoys engaging in type two fun such as hiking the Grand Canyon in one day, completing a half Ironman event, and running 5k/s to Marathons. Outside of school, Josh enjoys spending time with family and friends. He views every experience as an opportunity for growth, embracing lifelong learning with gratitude for the journey and the meaningful experiences it brings.
Connect with Josh Martin: Email
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The Transcript
**Please note that all of our transcriptions come from rev.com and are 80% accurate. We’re grateful for the robots that make this possible and realize that it’s not a perfect process.
Sam Demma
Welcome back to another episode of the High Performing Educator podcast. This is your host, Sam Demma. And today we are joined by my new friend and guest, Josh Martin. With two decades of dedicated service and education, including roles as a teacher, coach, and administrator, Josh Martin now leads Mount Olive High School as its principal in rural Illinois.
Sam Demma
His diverse experience spans health, driver’s education, and physical education instruction, while his passion for athletics has seen him coach multiple sports and personally tackle challenges from marathon running to completing a half Ironman. A true believer in lifelong learning, Josh approaches each day as an opportunity for growth, bringing the same determination he uses to conquer the Grand Canyon in a single day to his mission of fostering excellence in education.
Sam Demma
Josh, it is a pleasure to have you on the show here today. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Josh Martin
Well, Sam, I appreciate you having me on. Yeah, I’m excited about this.
Sam Demma
Please introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what got you into education.
Josh Martin
Yeah, so like you said, I am a almost two decades. Yeah, this is my 20th year in education. And I would say what got me into education was just life. I went into college thinking that I was gonna go into the medical field, started that route and ended up meeting my wife. And she was going into education. And I ended up through athletics, blowing my knee out and needing to have some surgeries and got to see the medical field and got to meet a bunch of people in the medical field and actually practicing in the area that I had wanted to go into and got to get some feedback and it wasn’t necessarily wonderful, great feedback. So it gave me pause as to like, should I continue to explore this route? And eventually decided, you know what, I wonder if I should go and talk to the guidance counselor at this point. I was in my third year at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and I went in and I had a ton of science and I Was just like I don’t want to start all the way over. What can I do? so they kind of gave me some options and becoming a science teacher was one of those options. And they’re like, so if you want to do that, I was like, well, let’s take that route.
Josh Martin
Let’s see what it’s like. So I took a couple education classes and I actually really, really enjoyed them. And from there decided I didn’t want to be a science teacher. So I was like, well, what other areas and what other passions do I have that I would actually be like excited to teach?
Josh Martin
So that’s where the health came in and the physical education. And they basically were like, hey, if you’re going to get health and PE, you might as well go ahead and get your driver’s ed. So I kind of wrapped them all three and finished up my bachelor’s that way. And I still finished on time, I just took a couple extra summer classes and the rest is history. So it’s been pretty amazing because my wife and I have very similar schedules, which allows us to do a lot of the things we like. We love traveling, so summers are spent traveling. We do a lot of outdoor activities together with our family and our friends. So I think that the entire situation turned out just the way that it was supposed to.
Sam Demma
With such varied experience in different roles, from being a teacher to a coach to an administrator, how have those different experiences shaped or informed the way you think about leadership as a first year principal?
Josh Martin
Yeah, I think the beauty of having multiple or, uh, different points of leadership is it gives you different, uh, like lenses to look through. So you can reframe things. Uh, I think that’s probably the best benefit that I have. And I think the other things that have that’s helped me is you know, I I lead out in other areas of life and I’m a father. So I think every time that you you step into new things you you learn so much more about life and just so much more about yourself and I think learning how to tackle that with some mercy and some grace for yourself. But the biggest part is how do you do that while reframing for others and giving them the empathy and the compassion that we should each day.
Sam Demma
When you think about your experience as a teacher, what are a few of the perspectives you keep in mind or you’ve taken away from those experiences?
Josh Martin
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that being a teacher was making sure that you come in each day kind of fresh, kind of new. I think as a teacher, you got to come in and you got to have like your directives, you got to have your goals and your objectives. But I think when you are thinking about your students, you know, here in Manalo we have a wide range of clientele basically, and you don’t know if that student came in and, you know, they just got in a fight with their parent, or if they got breakfast, or any number of different things, so it’s always, you know, kind of like, is the problem the problem or is something else leading to what we’re now dealing with? And from my perspective, a majority of the time, the problem is not the problem. It’s the thing that happened before the problem.
Josh Martin
And I think if we can get to that and think about that, oftentimes we can solve nearly everything. And it becomes more restorative and more of a learning and growth experience than just a, hey, I need you to act a certain way and be a certain way. And I know you’re not that right now. And I know that you’re not in a space to do it. But I still need you to do it anyway, because they’re gonna look at you like, I can’t do that. I can’t do that as an adult. But I think, you know, luckily I’ve had people in my life that have spoken into my life and said, hey, you need to be able to say at this particular point, I need to pause. I need to step back. I need to reflect. And I think those are the things, if we can get our students to do that, and particularly now that I’m a principal, if I can get my staff to then get their students to do that, it becomes a culture where advocating for yourself and not just like a compliance culture.
Josh Martin
I don’t want a compliance culture, I want a growth culture.
Sam Demma
You’ve had experience as a teacher, also as a coach. I recently interviewed another educator who was an administrator in Indiana. And his name is Mr. Well, Aaron, but his, his students in class would call him Mr. Schmidt.
Sam Demma
And then when he was on the football field, they’d call him coach. And then sometimes they’d walk into his classroom and call him coach and they’d call him Mr. Schmidt on the field. And he was trying to tell people no on, on the field, I’m coaching in classroom. I’m Mr.
Sam Demma
Schmidt. And he said, you know, you get to see a different side of students when you coach and you hold a level of accountability that’s sometimes slightly different than in the classroom. What are some of the perspectives you took away from your time coaching or still continue to live through your time as a coach that you pull into administration or leading others?
Josh Martin
Yeah, I think it’s knowing the leverage points of the people that you’re working with. Because I think of, you know, the different athletes that I’ve coached, some of them, they needed the motivational quotes, they needed the pick me ups. And some of them, you just need to look at them and said, I don’t think you can do this. Because that was the leverage point for them. They’re like, Oh, you’re, oh, you’re calling me out. You don’t think I can do this. And 100% I thought they could do it. And I knew they could do it. But I knew that the leverage point for them was to like set the bar. And they would always rise and meet that bar. And then they would be like, see, I told you. And I’d be like, yeah, you told me, you told me a lot. Perfect example of that is when I became the head football coach here in Mount Olive, actually my second year here in Mount Olive. And I came from a power I spread offense. And when I came to Mount Olive, they have run a traditional wing T formation for generations. And I didn’t really know that much about wing T. I also knew that generationally they had these, farm strong athletes and they, like when I came here, our starting line was like six foot three, averaging 230. They were, you know, throwing bales of hay. They were doing all the things in the summer. But then when I came in, we saw a very different, we saw these smaller statured athletes, but they had speed. So we really wanted to move to a spread offense, but we didn’t want to tell the kids that right off the bat. We wanted them to fight for it. So they came to us and like, we really want to run this. We’re like, oh, we don’t know.
Josh Martin
You’re really going to have to prove that you can do it. And the only way that you can prove that you can do it is in practice going above and beyond. So even though it was exactly what the coaching staff wanted to run, at practice we had to say, I don’t know. We don’t know if this is going to be it. Because it was a leverage point.
Josh Martin
And it gave them ownership. And I think that’s a big key part is, particularly in education is, how do we give kids, how do we give these students leadership opportunities and give them ownership of the school? Because yes, they’re the client, but they are also the person who’s like learning and doing. So ownership
Sam Demma
is huge. The idea of ownership is important when leading a team on a football field or a team of staff in a school building. I think about the team of folks that I work with to do the work we’re doing. And there’s been times where I delegate a task or a responsibility. And sometimes I’ve caught myself jumping in to finish the task or change the task.
Sam Demma
And I then put myself in the shoes of the person I delegated it to. And I think, wow, they probably think I don’t trust them because I’m now doing their work, as opposed to just letting them finish and then having a conversation. That’s been a tough skill for me to learn to allow people to do the work and then have an open conversation about it. When you think about dealing with other people and delegating tasks and just managing others, human beings are so complex. Are there any ideas or principles that you keep, you know, front and center to ensure you do a good job?
Josh Martin
Yeah, I think number one, you gotta look at them as a whole person and not just how they fit into your system. Like, you know, I think about the teachers that work here at Mount Olive High School and I like to know like, okay, you know,
Josh Martin
what are they doing on the weekends? What songs do they like? What drives them? What’s their passion? Like if when you talk about delegating, I don’t want to delegate them into something that they hate. I want to delegate them into something that like provides them energy, like it’s the right space on the bus. And so the way that you, for me, the way that you do that is you got to build a relationship. Just like when you’re the teacher, you build a relationship with your students as a principal. Now you’re building a relationship with your staff.
Josh Martin
And through those relationships, you are able to then not necessarily even have to delegate, but it’s you get to provide the opportunity for those people to lead out in places that they want to lead out. Now, there are times that you have to go in and be like, hey, I really need you to take your attendance. Everyone’s got to do it. There’s some general things,
Josh Martin
hey, we got to get the grades in the grade book. And those are conversations that you can have. But if you’ve built a relationship, those conversations go much more smooth. And most of the time, don’t even become things that either side think are, oh, they’re trying to catch me, or this is a gotcha moment. They’re just like, oh no, I get it. Everybody’s got a boss, and we all have things that we, there are some have tos in various jobs. And I think when you are working in a situation that kind of flows and has some, like, I like toward the use synergy, where we’re all working towards that common goal, but we all get to use our own, like, passion, and we get to bring our own personality to it. That’s when you see the widest net cast and the most people like catch on to it, that’s when you see the widest net cast and the most people like catch on to it.
Sam Demma
You are someone who lives out that philosophy. I mean I can feel it just through this conversation. I love the idea of replacing the idea of delegating with providing opportunities. That is a way more impactful way to look at it. I know that throughout your career, you’ve maintained consistency with coaching the track team. You’ve also pushed yourself athletically outside of the school building, whether it’s hiking the Grand Canyon or doing the Ironman stuff, those physical challenges, what keeps you pursuing them? And what is it about them that excites you?
Josh Martin
I think it’s the unknown. I like, I often at times have been called by family and friends, a workaholic. And that can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. It really depends on how you frame the rest of your life around those situations.
Josh Martin
So when I was doing the Ironman training, I literally went to my wife beforehand and said, this is what I want. Here’s what I think it will take. Are we as a team committed to providing the time for training because this is something that she’s gonna have,
Josh Martin
like she’s my nutritionist, man. She makes sure that I’m fueled well. That also meant that she was, there’s more laundry, there’s more moving of the kids around. And so you really have to think about how is this impacting others and not just my goal,
Josh Martin
because it is my goal, but it also has an impact on her, it has an impact on our family. So I think the big thing is where, what are we doing with like what’s in front of us? And not always just is it me, me, me. It’s a we situation. And some of the beauty of it is, you know, we get to train together.
Josh Martin
So she likes to run. So we get to do some long runs together. How can we, once again, synergy, how can we take the things that we’re all working towards and make them work together? So like when I, when we apply that into the classroom, it’s how can you take a PE class and a science class and find some kind of cross-curricular activity where
Josh Martin
we’re studying kinetic energy. All right, well you can do some stuff in PE, you can collect the data, and then you can decipher it in science, and in science you can go over it. So I think there’s a lot of like crossover, so you know I think that the latest term, I’ve always called it like a cross-section, it’s they call it intersectionality, It’s an intersection. And so how can we deliberately find those intersections and how can we use them so
Josh Martin
that our students or our family members or the people that we care about are like seen? How can we celebrate them? And how can we learn from them? Because I think if we can do those things, we’re gonna like you’re really going to ignite a lot of people and a lot of passion. What third of the triathlon was the most challenging for you to train for? So the most challenging to train for is swimming. And that’s literally because it’s super boring to go and swim miles upon miles in a pool.
Josh Martin
And until you’ve done it, it can be somewhat anxiety. Like I was stressing about swimming in an open water. Particularly because you can’t see the bottom. You know, there’s choppy waves depending on the wind. Also, location. There’s not always places to swim.
Josh Martin
Particularly in Illinois, there’s only so many months out of the year that you can get in the water. So there’s a lot of, you just have to adapt and you have to get over your fears. And you know, there’s, I will be 100% honest. I went to the race. I had done open water swims with a group.
Josh Martin
It was awesome. And I got there and the day before, and I got in the water and I was like, just panic ridden. Because the group was like just panic ridden because The group was like, all right today. We’re gonna swim without our they have like this I wouldn’t call it a floaty but it doesn’t like it’s not on you. It just floats behind you
Josh Martin
It’s an it’s a it’s a safety mechanism and in case well, we weren’t going to swim with it on our practice run And I it freaked me out I had never done it and And it freaked me out. I had never done it. And so I went in the water twice came back out was hyperventilating. And I was like, guys, I have to swim with my floaty. And they’re like,
Josh Martin
that’s fine. And I went out and swam with it. Having that made like I was perfectly fine. And I have no idea what the difference was the next day, other than guess who showed up? My kids. My kids showed up and I was like,
Josh Martin
I want them to see that I can do hard things. Like, and I was able to articulate, I’m worried about this. This has me a little bit nervous. And just to be honest, we’re people of faith. So I was like, let’s pray about it. And so once we walked through that, I was like,
Josh Martin
all right, now I’ve got to step up because I’m not just doing it for me. I have to think about all those hours that they gave up of hanging out, how many hours that my wife made cooking me these meals and making sure that I was fueled well,
Josh Martin
how many loads of laundry did she do that were extra? And just all of the things and you start to realize, all right, this is bigger than me. And it put me in the right head space and I was able to do it. So sometimes it’s just being able to step back and get try to get
Sam Demma
in that right head space. One of the things we read about you is that you know, you view every experience as an opportunity for growth. It sounds like this was one of them. Where did that philosophy or belief originate for you? Because I believe it’s an important one, but sometimes in life it’s so hard to take that perspective, to choose that belief.
Josh Martin
Yeah, I think I got it from my parents, honestly, because I look back and I feel like they worked so hard. Oftentimes, my dad was working two jobs, but he never missed a sporting event. If he wasn’t working, it wasn’t like, oh, I worked a double, so I’m not gonna be there because I’m gonna be asleep.
Josh Martin
He’s like, no, I’m gonna show up. I’m gonna make sure that they know. So it just really helped frame the idea that service and showing up for other people is super important and you know this life you only have a limited time and nobody knows exactly how limited that’s going to be for each person So, you know, get off the couch, be active, show up for people, serve people, let people know that you love them. Like that’s one thing that, you know, I have some very close friends and I make sure that when we leave, I tell them I love them. Give them a hug. It’s just something that I do.
Josh Martin
It’s but I learned that from my parents. And other people are like, I can’t believe you just told that person that you love him. And it’s like, well, I don’t know why I wouldn’t. So it’s just something that I grew up with. It was a part of the culture that I grew up with
Josh Martin
and I fully embrace it and it’s helped me as an adult.
Sam Demma
I just started thinking about Lucas, Cross, Savio, Dylan, some of my closest buddies, who we all, I mean, the first time I said, I love you and hung up the phone, they were like, talk soon, man. And now it’s almost common practice. And I have so much admiration and love for those people in my life and family and cousins and everyone that it you’re right It wouldn’t make sense not to express, you know How I feel especially if that was the last time I ever got a chance to speak to them Like you said, we we don’t really know how much time we have left I’m curious in your life It sounds like your parents have had a massive impact on your philosophy and the way you carry yourself. Were there any other teachers or educators or coaches who significantly influenced you growing up?
Josh Martin
Oh my gosh, the list is, it’s a long list. I mean, I think about, you know, once I decided to go into education, I, there were some people that I tried to model myself after because they didn’t even know it, but the impact that they had and the ability for me to reflect back and be like, this person made me feel this way, I want to replicate that.
Josh Martin
My elementary school gym teacher, Ms. Shehorn, she was awesome. Every day was exciting and new to come into the PE room. And I mean, I was an adult before I ever thought, you know what I want to do? I want to do that. But her impact traveled, you know, 20 years. And I never even got to tell her because I didn’t know her as an adult, but she had an impact. And I think about that like the ripple effect like you don’t know
Josh Martin
What what that I love you could mean to somebody and how the ripple effect is But you also don’t know what the good morning and a smile at the front door each tomorrow Just letting them know that all right, but guess what? I’m willing to sit with you and listen and be okay with you.
Sam Demma
I think about some of the educators and people in my life who went above and beyond to make me feel good about myself. And I have a hard time thanking them sometimes. I feel like it’s never enough. So I appreciate you sharing, just taking the time today to share some of your experiences, your beliefs around education, share a little bit about the importance of the perspectives you took away from coaching and teaching and how it impacts the way you think about administration and leadership, the difference between delegation and providing opportunities. This was a rich conversation with lots of ideas. And I just want to say thank you so much for sharing some of your time.
Josh Martin
Well Sam I really appreciate you having me on and I think it goes back to we had you here at the school earlier this year and I think your message of service really resonated. And we ended up having an appreciation service day where students went into small groups and they did various service projects throughout the community. And we wrote Christmas cards for the nursing home.
Josh Martin
We had a group that literally walked down main street and picked all the trash up. We had groups that were willing to do cleaning that like a deep cleaning of various areas of the school. We had kids that went down into the elementary and read books to the elementary students. So it was really exciting to see how they took a message and then
Josh Martin
they were able to take it in, put it into their own frame, put their own hands on the wheel, and then like start steering that a little bit. It was really exciting. Oh man, I had no idea.
Sam Demma
So I appreciate you sharing that. That’s, um, that’s awesome. And, and keep up all the amazing work you’re doing. Uh, keep shoveling the snow and, uh, we’ll catch you again sometime in the, in the spring.
Josh Martin
All right, Sam. Appreciate you.
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