Case Study
What Counts
An Award-Winning Podcast That Helped Educators Rethink What Counts
What Counts was created to address a persistent challenge in math education: while research consistently shows that relationships, trust, and student voice are foundational to learning, those elements are often overshadowed by standards, pacing guides, and test preparation.
As part of a broader effort to shift how educators think about math learning, Impact Florida and De LeCourt explored a different question:
What if professional learning could happen through story?
91.3%
Educators likely or very likely to recommend the experience
3x
Growth beyond the intended pilot audience
15
States reached through organic sharing
The Challenge
As part of the Math Narrative Project's Community of Practice, Impact Florida was tasked with testing research-backed recommendations designed to shift how educators think about math learning. The goal was to create narrative change and help educators reconsider long-held assumptions about what drives student success in mathematics.
Impact Florida engaged De LeCourt to design a communications intervention that could support this work. Together, we explored a central question:
Could story-driven audio help educators reflect on deeply held beliefs about teaching and learning in ways that traditional professional development often cannot?
The challenge was finding a format educators would willingly engage with amid significant time constraints, competing priorities, and professional fatigue—while also reinforcing learning between coaching sessions, group discussions, and other professional development activities.
The Strategy
An Audio-First Intervention
What Counts is a limited-series narrative podcast that explores a simple but overlooked driver of math learning: relationships. Across five episodes, the series centers first-person voices from educators and students in K–12 classrooms across Florida to show how trust, belonging, and student voice shape math learning.
Developed as part of the Math Narrative Project’s work to change how communities talk about and internalize math, each episode uses story-forward scenes, interviews, and reflective framing to make research-backed insights feel lived and practical for teachers, school leaders, and education partners.
The series was designed as a supplement to Impact Florida’s teacher professional learning—an audio experience that helps educators reflect on classroom culture and the conditions that make rigorous math learning possible. Released privately in fall 2025 to a pilot cohort of just over 100 Florida teachers, the podcast spread well beyond its original audience despite not being intended or formally encouraged for redistribution. By the end of 2025, it had more than tripled beyond the cohort, reaching 360+ unique listeners across 14 states.
That organic spread signaled deep resonance with educators. In January 2026, the team made the series public to support broader access and give the work a stable, properly contextualized home.
Created for Impact Florida by De LeCourt and hosted by Danielle LeCourt, What Counts showed that story-forward audio can move not just awareness, but practice.
What We Produced
An audio-first professional learning experience that helped translate research on relationships and student voice into stories educators could recognize, trust, and apply.
Strategy
Narrative Change Strategy
Professional Learning Design
Limited-Series Podcast Strategy
Production
Narrative Architecture
Interview Design
Host Development
Editorial Direction
Audio Production
The Results
Educators Shared It Even When It Wasn't Designed to Spread
What Counts was initially released as a private professional learning resource for a cohort of approximately 105 teachers.
Despite the friction of a private feed, educators shared the series organically through their own networks, ultimately reaching roughly three times the intended audience and generating listening across 13 states.
Meaningful Shifts in Thinking
Teachers reported changes in how they understood the relationship between instruction and relationships. One participant summarized the shift:
"Relationships are not separate from instruction but are the infrastructure of instruction for learning to take place."
91.3% of participating educators reported they were likely or very likely to recommend the experience to colleagues.
Industry Recognition
Winner
PR Daily Content Marketing Awards
Best Branded Podcast
Winner
EdTech Chronicle Best in Education Awards
Best Podcast Series: K–12
Finalist
PR Daily Nonprofit Communications Awards
Podcast Category
What We Learned
What Counts reinforced a broader lesson: audio can do more than communicate information.
When designed intentionally, it can support reflection, build trust, extend learning beyond live programming, and help communities make sense of complex ideas together.
This insight continues to shape De LeCourt's approach to limited-series podcasts and audio ecosystems.
Interested in Creating a Limited-Series Podcast?
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