Confidently You: Women in Leadership · Rebecca Malotke-Meslin & Lynne Macziewski

Unlocking Your Leadership with Listening

January 10, 2025·34 min·1 clip

A 10-year-old's quiet 'no' became her signature: leading through listening.

Rebecca Malotke-Messlin and Limma Chesky open the conversation with Liza Goranzik. Liza is the founder of REAL, and her story starts in the classroom, where she loved discussion, wanted students engaged, and then noticed that participation was not nearly as equitable as she expected. That stayed with her. Even though she already cared about inclusive pedagogy and knew her students well, she could see that some voices kept dominating while others were missing, and that tension pushed her to rethink what a good discussion should look like. Graduate school gave that question shape. In 2013, while thinking about how much time kids were spending on screens, she started wondering whether students would bring the same social and relational habits into the classroom or whether teachers would need to teach the mechanics of communication more directly. She chose the second path. As a graduate school project, she designed REAL as a framework for breaking discussion into teachable skills, and the four pieces, relate, excerpt, ask, and listen, gave her language for something she had been trying to name for years. The work did not stay on paper. She kept building it while teaching, serving as a dean, and coaching, and for a long stretch she treated it as a passion project she could only move forward in the margins of everything else she was doing. Mornings mattered. She describes spending about eight early years working on REAL before the wider world really knew it existed, and that steady rhythm included conference presentations, survey pilots, and the kind of practical follow up that turns interest into evidence. People started paying attention. She would present the idea, meet educators who thought REAL was useful, and then follow up by sending materials and gathering survey responses so she could keep refining the model and building a real base of pilots. Eventually the tradeoff became unavoidable. By the time she was ready to leave her full time school role, REAL had reached a point where there was so much interest that she had to choose between keeping it as an add on or giving it the space it needed. She launched REAL. The conversation, guided by Rebecca and Limma, keeps coming back to the same larger theme: confidence grows when leaders learn how to listen well, make room for other voices, and turn a frustrating pattern into something teachable. That is the episode's center of gravity. It leaves the listener with a practical way to think about discussion, and a quiet reminder that leadership often begins with noticing what is not working and staying with that problem long enough to build something better.

As heard by us

REAL Discussion turns classroom inequity into a teachable framework for listening and leading.

At its core, this is a teacher noticing that classroom talk can tilt unfairly and deciding to make that problem teachable. Liza Goranzik follows REAL Discussion from that middle school frustration through graduate school and into a four-part method built on relate, excerpt, ask,…

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Why you'd press play

For turning a classroom frustration into a framework you can actually teach.

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