 Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below: In this episode, we chat with Angie Freese who is an educator, author, mom, and founder of the Meant for More Collaborative. Angie shares her transformative vision for creating equitable and inclusive learning environments, emphasizing the importance of focusing on strengths instead of deficiencies. Coming from a family of educators, Angie now travels around the country, working closely with educators and administrators. Her joy is in helping them deepen their understanding of strengths that they already have, and apply them to create positive learning environments and real change. Angie’s recent book, Meant for More: Real Talk About Classrooms Built on Dignity, Authenticity, and Connection applies her years of experience and insights to practical classroom settings. The Big Dream Angie’s big dream for education is to reclaim the dignity of the teaching profession and elevate the people within it. She envisions designing sustainable learning environments where people notice what’s working, why it’s working, and how to apply those principles to other areas. Angie dreams of schools and systems that honor and dignify the individuals within—spaces of inclusion and authenticity where each learner can receive the quality of education they deserve. Mindset Shifts Required To build these inclusive and authentic spaces, Angie believes it all needs to start with a conversation that looks at the inequities that exist for both the adults and the students. To start this discussion, Angie shares how we need to value the adults who facilitate learning experiences in our classroom, realizing that most are fierce, brave, and bold—they’re competent and committed to changing schools and education for the better. A key mindset shift in all this is realizing that no one person is responsible for carrying the emotional or organizational weight of this transformation—everyone is part of it, and everyone has important strengths to create real change. Action Steps Angie believes that educators want to create change and do what’s best for students. But, it can be overwhelming to implement change in a system that isn’t always set up for your success. So, here are three key action steps any educator can implement today: Step 1: Start with yourself. Spend some time reflecting on your unique gifts and talents, and how you can cultivate these into strengths. Embrace your authentic self and give yourself grace in the process. Step 2: Foster collaborative inquiry. We sometimes hold back from asking questions because the system constrains or stifles creative problem-solving. But educators can do anything they put their minds to, especially when collaborating effectively together! Create opportunities for meaningful dialogue and collaborative inquiry within your educational community. Use practical strategies, such as sentence stems for curiosity, to facilitate empathetic and productive conversations. Step 3: Believe in value, not just potential. Each person in the education system already has inherent value and worth, and they already possess strengths and skills. Identify them, recognize them, and raise them up. By believing in the value of every person, we can rehumanize our profession, rejuvenating educator’s passion and focusing on the good we can do rather than the negatives of a faulty system. Challenges? Angie believes that the biggest challenge is not the belief that it can be done—educators know, we know what we’re capable of. Instead, the biggest challenge is the shared commitment to implement the things that we’ve said we’d do. The challenge is acting on agreed-upon behaviors and practices that will move the needle on collective goals. This is why Angie encourages educators to start with self and start with strengths—it’s honoring where you are and what you can contribute to this collective effort. One Step to Get Started For educators who want to start the journey to strengths-based education, Angie recommends one simple step to get started: engage in a reflective practice. Begin by looking inward and understanding your own strengths and areas for growth. You can identify one strength to amplify and share with your team, using it as a starting point for a conversation about how to foster a culture of collaborative inquiry and continuous improvement. This builds confidence and empowers you and those around you to take necessary next steps for growth. Stay Connected You can connect with Angie on Instagram at Meant for More or via LinkedIn. To dig deeper into what we discussed in this episode, grab a copy of Angie’s insightful and practical book, Meant for More: Real Talk About Classrooms Built on Dignity, Authenticity, and Connection. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Angie’s sharing reproducibles from her book with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 191 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Soraya Ramos. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm so excited you're here. 0:00:08 - Soraya Ramos Hi Lindsay, Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. 0:00:11 - Lindsay Lyons I'm really excited for we were talking about, before we hit record like all of the ways that our paths have like almost intersected and I think our work aligns very closely as well. So really excited for our listeners to hear from you today, and I just want to know if there's anything that folks should keep in mind as they are engaging with this podcast episode today. 0:00:31 - Soraya Ramos I thought about this one and I think one of the main things for me that I try to remember is that I'm always a learner and that I'm always learning and that I don't always have it or need to know everything or need to have the answer. So I think that, being really forgiving to myself and gracious, I like I'm always learning, we're always learning and it's just part of like life. We're always evolving, making mistakes and then learning from them and coming back from it. So I want to, like you know, hold whatever I say now at this point in time might, might evolve in the next years or decades of my life. So I'm really excited to capture where I'm at right now with you. 0:01:09 - Lindsay Lyons I absolutely love that framing because just this morning I was looking back from like four years ago. I wrote a blog post and I'm like hmm, wouldn't, have done it the same way Would have changed that Like that's so true. I love the snapshot in time idea. 0:01:20 - Soraya Ramos It's true, it's true. I think it's what we want to do with kids too, right, we're always. They're always evolving and physically growing and like we, see the difference. 0:01:32 - Lindsay Lyons So, um, I'm glad that that you, that it resonates with you as well, deeply, yes, thank you for that framing, and I think it'll also be, um, really nice for listeners to hear it, just because I think in our days we can often be unforgiving of ourselves, and so it's a, it's a nice reminder. We're in it together, we're all learning. I love it, and so I guess kind of to think about the continuation of this, like the place we're all trying to go as we learn. I like to ground this or all episodes really and Dr Bettina loves the words around freedom dreaming, where she says you know their dreams, rounded in the critique of injustice, and so I'm curious to know what is that big dream that? 0:02:09 - Soraya Ramos you hold for education. I love her work. I will say that this question got me thinking of like what my freedom dreaming was. Maybe 10 years ago is slightly different, but still similar to the core. But one thing that came to mind around what is that dream that I have for kids, for my younger self, for the kids that come after me, is that all children, all young learners, get to access high quality learning experiences that help them feel like they can shine and that they can tap into their brilliance and their their genius that's so good. 0:02:49 - Lindsay Lyons I love that and it really I love that there's like aspects of you know, goldie Muhammad's work in there and just like that the genius is part of all kids, right, this is not something that we as educators give to them, but like this is there and we're just like helping to cultivate and helping to shine and like I love that framing absolutely, and I think you're right. 0:03:08 - Soraya Ramos Like it's like where did I get all this from? I'm like I've learned from people who have, who have taught me right, or that I've learned in my roles in the past, and, um, I think one of the things that that would add to that is like how do we allow kids to just be kids, to learn to fumble and then get back up without them feeling like there's some kids have higher stakes than others and I'm just curious of like how do we just have them all feel like they can play and have fun? 0:03:39 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. That's, that's so, so good. Thank you for that. And and I think so, sometimes we maybe lose sight of the things, the reasons that we kind of get into education and that knowing that kids have this genius, they have this light, they have they, they should be able to be kids all this stuff and we get into like the nitty gritty and all the things on our plate right. And so I'm wondering if there are specific mindset shifts that folks kind of go through to be able to do the work that you do, for instance, around kind of equitable assessment and all of those pieces. Are there things that we may be no going in lose sight of along the way and need to really kind of reframe our thinking around that you've noticed either people be successful with or that you would just advise folks just entering the work to think about? 0:04:31 - Soraya Ramos My own mindsets have. I've had to go through my own and I'm still going through those shifts now and like really believing in those. I will say some of those mindset shifts that have inspired me in the last few years have come from the work at the National Equity Project around liberatory design, and I think they were able to provide a language to what I already felt to be true and some of those mindsets it's all about. I think the arc of it all is that it's human centered, that we're centering anything, any experience the design of a summer school program, the design of an assessment system on the state level or even a local level is that we're really truly centering humans and putting them at the center. So I would say one of the things that the Libertarian Design Framework says is one of the mindsets is building relational trust is how do we invest in relationships with intention and especially across difference, and we have to honor people's stories and practice empathetic listening. So if I'm going into your home, into your community, what is my role is to to be there as humble as I can, to listen to your expertise, because that is your lived experience. So I think that that's a really powerful piece that I always try to hold is that we're not the I am not the knowledge holder. I am here to listen and I am in your home, your home, and that is in my culture. There's something really important about I respect where, when I'm, when I'm here and you're in your space. So that's one build a relational trust. I think a second one for me is practicing self-awareness, is understanding like what mirror is in front of me, who am I and how do these experiences that I grew up with influence the way I see things, the way I'm understanding an issue, and our perspectives impact our practice. So I think that practice of awareness is constant and so necessary for me, because sometimes I feel like, oh, i'm'm the hero in this story and I'm gonna, and I'm gonna save, and I'm gonna save these kids, or like when I was, you know, entering teaching um, but it wasn't. It wasn't that no one needs saving um. So self-practicing self-awareness. And then I would say I have a lot that I could share, but I'm going to keep it short. But the one I really feel like that I haven't mentioned is embracing complexity, that the equity challenges are really complex and they're messy and they stay open for possibility. And one thing that I have the cards in front me and one thing that it says here in the card is that powerful design emerges from the mess, not from avoiding it, and so I think that's where sometimes we put pressure on our leaders to have the answer, that one right way. We actually respect people who speak with a lot of confidence in that one solution when it's actually a lot more complex. And how do we do this together to figure it out with the humans that we're trying to serve at the center? So those are, I think, some of the top, but I could keep going, but I'll stop there. So I would say building relational trust, practicing self-awareness and embracing complexity. 0:08:07 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, all of those are so good. And also just tying it to that liberatory design piece, I think is really important and food for thought for folks who are listening now and are like, oh, I haven't heard of that or I want to dig deeper into that. Like there's richness there to dig into. And I love the idea of the last piece really reminds me of both the complexity piece around, like adaptive leadership and recognizing that it is really messy, and also I think you're speaking to the like a shared leadership element as well of right like the leaders are not necessarily the people who have admin titles right, they're the people in the community and the students, right, and the people at the center who who, as you said, have a lived experience and are really informing the change. And to uh, think through how to navigate so many voices when we're talking about all the students and all the families is messy but so worth it, and so I appreciate that framing and that grounding in those, in those three specifically. 0:09:03 - Soraya Ramos Yeah, thank you, thanks for summarizing that in in such a in those three specifically. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for summarizing that in such a nice way. 0:09:09 - Lindsay Lyons I just love connecting it to like. Sometimes I'll use these like leadership reasons. My background is in leadership education and so I think through like things I've said in the podcast before. 0:09:17 - Soraya Ramos I'm like, right, here's the through line, right it's true, there's like these mindsets yeah, it could keep going on, because I'm also a leadership nerd and I'm like learning all these things. And how do we create a culture? Right, how does our leadership impact the culture that we're trying to build here? And I think these elements, these mindset shifts, have to be in there. Um, because we have to live it so that it can. It's almost contagious, it's part of the space that you come into. Yeah. 0:09:45 - Lindsay Lyons I like the idea of contagious. That's good, that's really good. So I guess, thinking about that right, like what does that maybe look like? Feel like what's you know the actions that we, we take to kind of cultivate that and and and live that out and make that contagious and I mean I think about the work that you've done with equitable assessment and like systems of assessment, I mean that's, that's really big work. So thinking about maybe a leader or a community who is like oh, this is such a cool idea and it feels big, it feels messy, it feels like like how, how, really, how do I get started and what does that potentially look like? Could you describe for us a little bit about those like brave actions required to get there? 0:10:29 - Soraya Ramos That's a really good question and I think that it's. I'm always in pursuit of figuring that out. This is a tangent which we can include or not in the podcast. But recently I started working the second, the second job with my mom and it's called. It's a delivery service and we're shoppers at a store and we're shoppers at the same store every single time. And so I started doing it as like a side gig on the weekends and just trying it out with my mom. And what I realized is like every single time that I went into the store and you let me know if I could, if I could tell you, but it's one, it's one of my favorite. So I go in there and I'm like I know people have such a good experience at Target and it's like a very much like a good experience, and so, but going in there as a shopper, I noticed that there was a pattern. I'm like why are the workers so disgruntled and unhappy? Is it just that one location? Is it just that one person? That one day, and I started noticing a pattern in the ones in my area where it's like no, I think there's something going on in the culture of this company. What is going on that? Are we treating our, how are people being treated while they work here? And it's almost and again it was very contagious and like my experience as a consumer versus a like kind of a shopper right beside these employees was a lot different and not as joyful either. So I think that also communicates into schools. Right, like, culture is everywhere. When we go into a place of business, when we go into a place of education and I know that this is something that you know many educators in the field have already said like the first, the first signal of what a culture is at a school is when you step in the front door and you and you experience what it feels like to be in that space. It's, it's like an energy thing. I don't know much about energy, but I could feel it. And right, it's like um. When you, for example, and no one really greets you, um, or when they do, it's it's kind of like what do you need? Um versus good morning, how are you Welcome to our school? You know, here's our protocol, sign in. And it's a different um experience when you go into these spaces. So I would just say, like, what is the culture in this, in this space? And so I would say how do you make the? I think your question was how do we start? What are the brave actions that we need to make sure is we really need to be the, the creators of that, of creators of that energy, right, like, if a school is off that morning, like how can I go in there and try to? I'm not gonna change it, but I can say just remind them like hey, I'm new to this space, what do you wanna show for your school and your community? But one of the things that the brave actions that needs to happen is the way that I work with other people, whether it's building an assessment system at a state level or building an assessment task with a teacher is what kind of, what kind of relationship are we building around my responsibilities, your like and our accountability to each other? I think the reciprocity is a word that I've used a lot in the work I've done with in the past few years is it's not transactional but it's reciprocal. Is, you know, if we do these for these things for each other, without keeping tab on what it is right, like tip for tat? And so one of the brave actions is really holding that reciprocity part. The other part is recognizing oppression, like always being aware that power can always come in, and being able to like balance that out and calling it out. I think there's something really important about calling it out. If we're gonna partner with each other, let's talk about what the power dynamic is or isn't. So I would say that's super brave action to mention it, because it's an uncomfortable and fearful conversation, especially if you're working with teachers all the way up to superintendents or state commissioners. So that's the brave action. So I'm thinking about another one. I think one is knowing the culture and like reading that Working from a place of reciprocity the one that's really challenging and it goes against maybe the way that our country works is and our system works is we need to come from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. I think when we're trying to build systems or create solutions for education, we think that there aren't enough, like we're actually in some way conditioned or convinced in some ways, like some of us may be able to note why, but that there's always enough resources. This is really hard for me to actually understand it right, because in my own life it's like well, I grew up with very scarce resources, financial resources. So I think like understanding, like there are resources out there. We may not have access to them right now, but we know that they're out there. That's the thing. They just may not be right in front of us, and so I think, knowing that no one's here to steal my job, we're not trying to do the work of another organization in competition with them. It's we're all playing in the same sandbox and in service of the same communities, people, learners, etc. So those are just a few that come to mind, and I'm sure there's more profound other actions, but those are actually super hard. It's like the power, the power piece. How do I work with others in ways that are loving and actually honest and authentic, without my secret agenda, and while also knowing that, like, the resources are real, there's some. There's a perceived notion that there's scarcity out there, but there really is an abundance, and maybe the abundance comes from a different type of resource, not not the financial one. Maybe it, the abundance, is the community that we work in and that's our superpower. So that is where I'll leave it, cause I think that was a lot, but and I'm sure I'm sorry that it's a little bit scattered, but it was my best attempt to try to put them into words- it was perfect. 0:17:02 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love so much of this, and I think I mean even just the abundance versus scarcity. I love what you said at the very end of you know, maybe the resource is just something that's not financial Absolutely. Source is just something that's not financial Absolutely. I mean we even from. So the last few years I taught, I worked at a school with 100% students who were learning English at the high school level, and so a lot of times in like multilingual learner education spaces, people like, oh, you know that the scarcity mindset of we need to build English language proficiencies right, and it's like, look at the abundance of linguistic knowledge and proficiency in other languages. I mean some of these kids are trilingual. Like what on earth? This is nuts. Like that is incredible. And we just don't think of the abundance frame, we think only in scarcity. And so I love that you mentioned like it can be financial but it can be otherwise, that we think about these things and what a huge mindset shift to be able to to get to that side of abundance. 0:18:03 - Soraya Ramos And I love that example that you're mentioning, because that's where we miss it. We're conditioned to believe that these other metrics are actually more important than the richness in the culture, in the, in the multilingualness, in like the community, that that they come from, their worlds or realities is. It's like that's where that, that there's richness, there, that we I think the last part I'll say is like I don't know where this fits in the questions you asked me, but there's a, an element of critical consciousness that it's like almost seeing behind the like someone's pulling the curtain, that like these assessments are important but I could see through them that they are problematic, that they can cause harm, that they're imperfect, that they're a measure, but not the measure of our kids and our and our young people. So I think that's where I'm, my role is like how do we get people to see, recognize oppression? Right, but like within? That is like how does this assessment work within that Like it's not the ultimate truth? And, like you said, let's not ignore these beautiful like humans that we get to work with every day, and then their multilingualness and get them to shine. 0:19:15 - Lindsay Lyons I just want to double down on that phrase. Like a measure, not the measure, right, yes, and not the ultimate truth. Yeah, we put so much stock into things that we can measure and put numbers or letters on and it's like no, I'm a human child, like this is a person, totally yes, I mean, I'm curious, you've done such powerful work with so many communities. I'm wondering if there's maybe a success story or kind of quote unquote case study that we can use to just illuminate the possible, like what are the great things happening out there and what can we celebrate? 0:19:50 - Soraya Ramos I appreciate that question and it's the success stories. I feel like you don't see it in the moment. I feel like when you work in schools or in education, sometimes it takes years for you to see your impact as a teacher, for example, and then the kids come back, you know, and they let you know like this is the impact you had, or it could take more than five, ten years to see it. But I think in in I've been really fortunate to have this position as like third party kind of uh roles in my in education now. Uh, where I get to support school districts and I have this different viewpoint, a lay of the land where I can, I can kind of see who the players are and what the strategy is and the vision and et cetera. One of the things that I have not done this alone and I think I've been put into really wonderful teams where I've been able to co-construct these different ways of how to assess kids, how to think about assessment in a more human centered way. Um, you might have I believe that some of the previous speakers on this podcast um Ms Rita Harvey and Charlie Brown, they were. They're some of my uh, they're. We started our journey together as assessment design partners. Uh, in new England, and we had, I believe, a lot of really wonderful case studies that we got to see from the teacher level. So we got to travel to different districts across New England and design assessments, performance assessments, with teachers at an individual school, while also working with their superintendents to build a arc of learning around their pd. So that year, for example, what I I think this is um, we're getting to that that success story is what makes it successful is that you had buy-in from the, from the, from the teacher role all the way up to a superintendent role, and the board as well is how do we get everyone on board about around this one thing and that one thing for one district in particular was how do we get everyone on board around performance assessments? And so year one was what is performance assessments? What are we doing? Why don't we bring in students that have worked with our coaches hence me and my other colleagues to come in and share their experiences with a standardized test versus a performance assessment? And so they got. We have this all happened in one particular district in Attleboro Public Schools, and so that was one of the things is we have support from all folks we get to coach in individual schools and they all have design teams. So the admin at the school had already pre-selected some people that they felt were going to be champions of this work. So that was a huge element, while at the same time, we are facilitating meetings with a consortium of superintendents who are all trying to work towards the same goal, which is how do we build an alternative assessment system that we can apply for a waiver for in the state of Massachusetts? So we have superintendents engaged through the consortium. So we have superintendents engaged through the consortium. We have assistant superintendents supporting us with designing an arc of learning for all teachers in the district around performance assessments year one, and we also have board meetings where that could be like our performance assessment per se, where teachers and students can come in and demonstrate their work. So I would just say like those are some of the levers that this district was able to pull and were super successful because after year two, performance assessments didn't go away. Performance assessments, we went deeper. We said rubrics 101. So part of a performance assessment is a rubric right, like how do we know that you've met? How do you know that you've met the target? So rubrics was like. We noticed that there was. Maybe we needed more literacy around that. How do we build everyone's capacity? So, yeah, every year the learning arc. So everyone was doing the same thing. During those teacher learning days we had multiple opportunities for them to come and present to the consortium and to their boards. So I would just say like those are some of like a really effective leadership moves and decisions that were created in this particular district in Attleboro that we were really proud of. They were so committed and people were not confused around initiatives. It felt like they all knew what we were doing and we were able to reach all teachers within three years around performance assessment. Unfortunately, things were paused because of the pandemic, but the fact that we have such good momentum and people were just like champions and it was like this groundswell of support I remember that's a word that Charlie would mention a lot. We need to get the groundswell of support and I think that was a really powerful thing, instead of it coming down as a requirement. 0:25:01 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, another kind of tied to that shared leadership piece. Right, it doesn't come from the top, it has to be that ground salt. That's so good. There is so much here that I appreciate you have just kind of laid out. I'm thinking of a leader listening who's like how long does it take and what happens each year? You've just laid out what is possible and I just really appreciate that clarity for someone who's kind of new to it. I also want to speak to if someone's unfamiliar with that consortium in Massachusetts, like New York has one as well. But just the idea of schools coming together to say like we can do better than standardized assessment, is this really great way to not do it alone? And so I'm wondering if there is. I don't know if this is speaking to the next question I was going to ask or not, but just thinking about the challenges of the work Sometimes I wonder if it's like oh, we're on our own and kind of this island of we think it would be a great idea to do this, but we don't have a consortium to tap into or something like that. Is there any kind of school model that you've worked with there where it's like they're not part of a larger organization, but they're just choosing to do it because they know it's what's fast and they're going to move forward. 0:26:07 - Soraya Ramos Absolutely. I think there's folks that are connected to a wider net and others are doing it within their own district. I think that it's really helpful when you are part of a group, a consortium, or whether it's a learning group or anything else. I know that there's some here in California as well, where you just get to learn around practice with each other. It's like what are you all doing? Oh, this is how we're choosing to implement graduate profiles right now is a really is a really big thing, and it actually is very trendy to have a graduate profile, or you know these learner outcomes of what we want kids to learn and competencies we want them to have by the time they graduate. But how do you know? And how do you know that? How do if you're doing it right, right, like? A lot of people are like, okay, great, we have really cool posters, now what? So that's where people turn to these communities, where they're like this is how we're learning how to bring this poster to life and it's super beneficial. I'm part of this. I'm really glad that I'm part of this group called Scaling Student Success, and then we get to learn from each other around best practices of how to bring graduate profiles to life and everyone's at a different stage, so there's different groupings of districts. So it is a really cool opt-in opportunity that I've seen on the West Coast. But what about folks that aren't connected outside right Like? We know that this is best practice period and I think that's why they bring some of these districts, bring in third party technical providers, and that's where people like myself come in third party technical providers and that's where people like myself come in and envision learning partners who we may not be creating the space for everyone to come in as a consortium or a learning space, but we are the communicators of oh, you have also shortages with subs. This is actually a trend that's happening across the country and people are actually some of the people are actually very surprised when we tell them that they're like really, I thought we were the only district, oh no, I'm like this is going on across the country. Um, you are not the only one. And how do we get creative so um around like pds, right, if you can't have everyone out on the same time? Like, how do we, how do we create this more flexible uh plan? So I don't know if I kind of lost track of your question, lindsay, but that was perfect. 0:28:31 - Lindsay Lyons I guess are there any other like either challenges that folks have faced and you wanted to talk through, or is there just anything else that you wanted to share before we move to wrap up? 0:28:42 - Soraya Ramos Yeah, okay, so I don't. I'm like I was like thinking, I'm like how honest can I be? And and I think I've realized how naive I've been in most of my career as an, as an educator, and in the best way, like my, my naivete is more of like I don't think people would be capable of doing this or, you know, like we're all in it for the kids and and and it's a very naive way of thinking and and um, one of the things that I realized at a different level of is through, uh, bowman and deal, the, these folks have these, these four frameworks of what it means to be a leader, and one of the frameworks that they say that leaders have to learn how to navigate is the political, is the, and that's like they call it, the jungle, where it's like people have different agendas and people have different ideas of what they want from a project or from a collaboration or whatever it is. And I think that for me has been this language, this world, where I have to think about understanding humans in a different way that the political realm introduces a not so flattering side of of humans and our motivations and and our behaviors, and also attached to people's wellness, right, like if, like they are reflections of who they are internally is kind of what they project at work. So one of the things for me is like how do I read situations, what is being said that isn't being said out loud, and how do I move accordingly? Because sometimes being honest is not the way for me Speaking. Sometimes spaces aren't ready to hear that, sometimes spaces aren't ready to hear that, especially when you have power involved. And so that, for me, is something I'm still learning is how do we navigate the political realm and understand humans and not letting it get too personal, like taking it personally is understanding, like what people are and aren't capable of, and knowing who to trust. I think that for me right now is how do I learn to build trust and who to trust in, especially when we're doing this kind of work in education? 0:30:55 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that's such an important challenge to name because I think a lot of folks I've certainly been there felt that and I love that you trace the arc of similarly me but going and being like everyone's awesome and for the right reasons. And there is no political agenda, there is, and so I think it reminds me of Heifetz, Graschau and Linsky talk about in their adaptive leadership. Stuff is like naming the stuff, like having an activity as a leader where you kind of sit in the meeting and like, okay, observe what's not being said, like observe where the avoidance is happening, where a joke's being made to deflect, like that kind of thing, Right. And and so it's like that's a cool tool for for folks listening to this episode, like just try it, like try that out and just kind of notice, or invite folks to notice like what is not being said, right, what is being avoided. And I think that's a nice opportunity to kind of, like you said, it might not be that in the moment we shout it out, but it's a nice like jot it on a post-it note, hand it in at the end of the meeting, right, We'll like we'll get there because we should, Absolutely, I agree, yeah, and so I think just to close this out, this is a wonderful conversation. I don't want it to end but I recognize everyone has things to do and I'm sure you have a busy schedule. So what is one thing as we kind of wrap up that listeners have been listening tons of ideas shared but they want to kind of take one next step as they end the episode, kind of going into their day or getting ready for next week or whatever that they can kind of world do. 0:32:33 - Soraya Ramos I want to live in, how do I want it to feel, how do I want it to sound for for myself, for kids, for young people, etc. And how can I be the creator of that? How can I contribute to a world like that? So I think that self-awareness piece goes back to that is, if I'm walking into this meeting, how do I want to walk in, what do I want to contribute in terms of my own energy, my motivations? How is this contributing to the world that I do or don't want? And I think being that is a start and something that can feel like it's a forced, but like how can I be that light, or how can I be that positivity or that understanding mind in the workplace where I don't have to get to the point where I'm disrespecting people and I'm still living by my values? So I think it really begins with the self and the world that you want. So then, how are you going to start being that in that next meeting, in that next, in whatever collaboration you're in? So it's really difficult because we have difficult days, but like, how do I, how do I still stay with, with dignity, right, like dignity and respect is for me really important. So knowing what people's values are and making sure that they're actually living aligned to those values, and catching yourself when you don't, because we're also imperfect, so the misalignment will happen. But just knowing that, like what am I contributing to this world and how can I, you know, be self aware. 0:34:09 - Lindsay Lyons I love that for multiple reasons. One just for the leader lens, but also, like this could be a guiding question for schools, like how do teachers engage with that question? How do students live out that question Right? Like how can we just be in community with one another in alignment with our responses to that question? So good. And so I think the final two questions I have for you one is super fun just could relate to education, but could totally not. So, whatever direction you want to take it, you mentioned, like we're all kind of learning. We're on a lifelong path of learning all the things about life. What is something that you have been learning about lately? 0:34:44 - Soraya Ramos Oh, have been learning about lately. Oh, I have not been learning any hobbies recently, but I think what I'm learning is just my role. As I get, as I'm getting older, my roles are changing in my life and who I take care of, and and and being a caretaker this past month. And for me it's just understanding that, like life will always be lifing, it's always going to be doing what it wants to do. But at the end of the day is, how am I centering myself to and my needs first, so that we're all, not we're all, so that I'm strong enough to care for others when I, when I can and I need to? So I think that's one thing that I'm really learning how to practice, whether it's an acupuncture appointment, whether it's that massage that I've been like thinking about months ago, a walk has been huge. I think learning how to slow down is the biggest lesson for me, because I used to be a runner and it felt like if I didn't do 10 miles, I didn't do anything like it, like it had to feel hard for it to feel like it mattered. And now I'm like a walk and being patient and being in silence, like that's actually hard for me too. So maybe those are some of the lessons that are coming Like. Life is always evolving, my role and my responsibilities are with that too, so how do I always remember myself though? And it could be, and a walk is enough, sufficiency, yeah. 0:36:14 - Lindsay Lyons Everything you said deeply resonates. Thank you for that, and I think, finally, folks are going to just want to get in touch with you or follow your work, so what's the best place to get in touch or see what you're doing? 0:36:25 - Soraya Ramos I am on LinkedIn, so that would be one way. I'm trying to be better at staying on it every single day, but that could be that is one way to reach me as well on LinkedIn, and I would say that's the best way. Like is more reliable way to reach me, so I'm happy to connect with anyone who's out there who'd like to just kind of be thought partners or like if folks are going through similar things that that I shared some of the things on this podcast. I would love to just even having like a mirror or a window into like what are? you experiencing OK, how did you resolve it? Or et cetera. So I would love to get in touch with folks if they're they're willing to. 0:37:02 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Sorry. I thank you so much. This was such a wonderful conversation. I appreciate your time thank you, lindsay. 0:37:08 - Soraya Ramos I appreciate you having us and me and my other colleagues that have also come up in the episode, but thank you so much for inviting me into this conversation. I really appreciate you absolutely. If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
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Leading change is challenging, and resistance is part of the work. To support you in leading change thoughtfully and effectively, I’m turning a blog post I wrote 5 years ago into a podcast episode! Enjoy the (slightly adapted) original blog post below, and check out the podcast episode for additional ideas I’ve learned from brilliant teachers, coaches, and leaders in the field over the past half a decade.
Principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, team leaders, have you ever had an exciting idea that you just know will be so good for teachers and students, but the biggest barrier is a lack of buy-in from teachers or other stakeholders? The phrase, “but this is how I’ve always done it,” may have become your greatest nemesis, right along with “I don’t have time for this.” Getting buy-in to a new initiative is hard work. In this post, I share 4 research-based strategies school leaders can use to effectively lead change. The first few suggestions may sound familiar. I’ll repeat them over and over because they are critical to successful change management. Have one clear vision. Choose 1-2 goals for the year (or more years—3 to 5 years is ideal for major initiatives). Research on Massachusetts turnaround schools found the schools who did not make gains lacked prioritization of a couple key areas, instead focusing on too many things at once (DESE). These 1-2 goals should be data-informed, high-leverage, and co-created with stakeholders or a representative stakeholder team. Manderschild & Kusy (2005) write about vision, citing Kouzes and Posner’s finding that a clear vision leads to “higher levels of [employee] motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps, and clarity about the organization’s values, pride, and productivity,” (p. 67). They also note it is important to measure progress towards the vision within performance evaluations. If it’s a priority, make sure your feedback to teachers and evaluation of their growth reflects that priority. Make space on teachers’ plates. We can’t add to teachers’ plates without taking something off. If it’s a priority, something else can go. I talk more about this in my post on how to support teacher leadership, where I share a free quick guide on how to carve out time in the school day for teachers to grow, learn, collaborate, and invest time in new initiatives. I’ve shared blog posts and podcast episodes to support teachers in re-thinking how they spend planning time to make space for individualized professional development. If it’s helpful, use the search bar of this website to find these resources and send them to teachers to help them make that shift. Connect with teachers’ hearts. The prominent adaptive leadership scholar, Ronald Heifetz, says, “What people resist is not change per se, but loss,” (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). Teachers’ identities are tied up with their jobs. With the role of teachers shifting from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” it’s reasonable to expect there may be a bit of a loss of identity. Ultimately, we want to help teachers see the value of this shift—that students benefit more when we teach them how to be learners, not simply what to learn. However, immediately after introducing this shift, it’s important to empathize with and speak to that teacher identity and sense of loss. Use that to paint a picture of how the new initiative or vision speaks to their passion for student learning (because, if it’s a good initiative, it definitely will). If teachers don’t seem ready for a change, Anderson (2012) says, talk (and listen) to them, share the data to let them discover the issue and urgency themselves, and share research on the topic to lend credibility to what you’re trying to do. Just don’t forget the heart! Kotter & Cohen (2002) warn that many change initiatives fail because they rely too much on the data end of things instead of inspiring creativity by harnessing the “feelings that motivate useful action” (p. 8). The image of the Kübler-Ross change curve below may help you recognize where teachers are, emotionally, during the change process and how you can support them during each stage. (Retrieved from Dave Saboe, 2018) Create dissatisfaction with the status quo. I love Dannemiller’s adaptation of Gleicher’s formula: change = dissatisfaction x vision x first step > resistance. This formula accepts that resistance happens, but it can be overcome as long as teachers can recognize their dissatisfaction with the way things are now, there is a clear vision for how this can change, and there are acceptable first steps we can take. These variables are multiplied, meaning if any one of them doesn’t exist, resistance will win (because any number multiplied by 0 is 0). If there is no dissatisfaction, leaders must create it! Mezirow (1990) notes adults need a disorienting dilemma to jumpstart transformative learning (learning that requires a paradigm shift and asks us to critically examine our assumptions rather than just learn a new skill). A disorienting dilemma forces us to examine our assumptions. Presenting teachers with information that makes teachers just uncomfortable enough to realize, “the way I’ve been thinking about this isn’t working anymore,” will help them try on other ways of thinking and be willing to rearrange how they see the world. This is most effective in the context of group dialogue, as folx are able to briefly “try on” others’ ways of thinking. So, go ahead and create a disorienting dilemma! Also, remember that major transformation is usually made up of a lot of little changes over time. You won’t shift mindsets in one meeting, but you can present the disorienting dilemma and let the disorientation start to sink in. When teachers are sufficiently disoriented, they will be seeking new ways of thinking, and you’ll have an opportunity to introduce those new ideas. To think about possible disorienting dilemmas for teachers, consider presenting a situation in which two values that teachers hold are in direct competition. For example: A teacher finds themselves working 60 hours each week to complete lesson plans and grade student work. This positions their personal well-being in direct conflict with their love for student learning. Let teachers recognize the discontent, explore the underlying assumptions, come to the conclusion that transformational change is the way to overcome the discontent, and start exploring different ways of thinking that could address this dilemma. Once teachers get here, you can take them through the final steps of making an action plan, testing it out, building capacity for this new approach (through PD, coaching, and other support), and integrating this practice into teachers’ lives and ways of being. (The summary, “Mezirow’s Ten Phases of Transformative Learning” has a bit more detail on the transformative process.) Change is difficult, and it takes time. These research-based ideas will get you started, but the real work is in how you bring teachers into the change process. You’ve got this! To help you lead change using the principles of shared and adaptive leadership, I’m sharing my Leadership PD Playlist with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 190 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to episode 190 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Today we're talking about leading change and getting quote buy-in, and we'll talk about why buy-in is in quotes in the title of this episode in just a moment. So first I just want to name that leading change is challenging and resistance is part of the work, I'm sure, as a leader whether you are a teacher leader, a team leader, a school or a district leader, a leader of your community, a leader of fellow students, whoever is listening leadership is challenging in all of its facets. And to support you in leading change thoughtfully and effectively, I'm actually going back to a blog post that I wrote five years ago and so we're going to turn it into this podcast episode today, thinking through the lens of both shared and adaptive leadership, which are concepts I talk about and try to think about how to apply in specific scenarios throughout this podcast and blog. So enjoy, feel free to check out a slightly adapted initial version of the blog post in the show notes or the blog post. There we go For this episode today at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 190. Okay so, leaders, if you have ever had an exciting idea that you just know it's gonna be so good for teachers. It's gonna be so good for students, but people are not buying in and the biggest thing you need to do is, in your minds, convince them right, get that buy-in. So this phrase buy-in is an interesting one and I've heard since writing this blog post. I knew at the time to put it in quotes because I wasn't a fan, but I have learned a lot of other different phrases in the intervening five years, just really leaning into words I used in other spaces. But I have learned a lot of other different phrases in the intervening five years, just really leaning into words I used in other spaces like co-create design together, thinking about the idea of shared leadership. But in more regular kind of verbiage, thinking about Ayanna Pressley is like the people closest to the pain it should be closest to the power, right, those are the folks who have the solutions, the ones who are living it. So when I think about this, I think about you know, the phrases that we also typically encounter that make us think well, we just need people to kind of come over to the good side and see the path forward and get in line right. So we often hear things like maybe this is how I've always done it and it's going to take a lot to change. I don't have time for this. Right, there's a lot on people's plates, particularly when we're talking about education. Right, it seems often that there is a scarcity of time, right, and we've talked about that actually in recent podcast episodes about kind of mind shifts around that. But I think looking at the research, specifically the leadership research, and identifying four research-based strategies that you can use to effectively lead change in a very, you know, sustainable but also really justice-centered and kind of shared leadership way, is where we're going to go today. So the first few may sound familiar and I'm just going to keep naming them because they're super important in the change management and what I prefer the term leadership in leading change literature. So first is to have one clear vision. So if you choose one goal for the year maybe two, you know, or even you know, not even just the year three to five years out, one goal for three to five years, the same one. That's really ideal we found in the literature from major initiatives. So research on Massachusetts turnaround schools actually has found that the schools who did not make gains it's in part because they lacked prioritization of a few key areas. So they actually were trying to do too many things at once, really. Now DESE, specifically Massachusetts Department of Education, is saying if you're in turnaround, if your school needs a revamp, a turnaround plan, whatever, one goal, one to two goals, right. And those goals, of course, should be data informed, they should be high leverage and here's the clincher they should be co-created with stakeholders. Or, because often we maybe lead districts or schools that have hundreds, if not thousands, of stakeholders. When we include students and staff and family and community members, right, and all the people, at least a representative even, are there a proportionate number of students or young people relative to adults? That is actually the case in the school or the district or the community, right? So if we actually are proportionally, as a school community, majority students, we should have the majority of students on our representative leadership team, right? Of course there's a lot of nuances to getting folks in the space for having those conversations, making sure that students are compensated for that work and family members are compensated and teachers are compensated for this work, and that's a whole other episode. Feel free to tap back into the archives to find that, but today we're going to stay focused on this piece, so also want to bring in the research from Mandischild and Kuzi, who talk about vision, and they cite big leadership names, kuzi and Posner, who find that you know the clear vision really leads, to quote, higher levels of employee motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps, employee motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps and clarity about the organization's values, pride and productivity end quote. So lots of things come out of that clear vision. We have this kind of energy surge that generates more energy and a ripple effect across the staff. I would also say this probably extends to stakeholders. They were writing specifically about leading employees in a business environment in this research, but also, just you know, stakeholders in general are going to be really excited when they co-create the vision, which means if you have students co-creating the goal, students are then going to act in ways that support the goal right. So we have less of a behavior issue or whatever issue, because it's do this, as I say so, and it's really hey, you co-created this thing that we wanna work toward together. Let's do it Like, let's do the thing you helped create this. You're gonna work harder, right? It is a little bit of seemingly like a duh kind of moment for lack of a better phrase off the top of my head, but also I think it needs to be said in the research for us to truly kind of believe it, particularly when we're working with young people. Like oh right, yeah, like just a reminder that this is how human motivation often works right. So that shared leadership base again, we're coming back and back to that. These researchers also note that it is important to measure progress towards the vision within performance evaluation. So if it's actually a priority, this is really our one goal. We want to make sure that your feedback as a leader to teachers and your evaluation of teacher growth, your evaluation of student growth, the kind of like observational criteria you're looking for or listening for or wanting to experience and witness in classroom spaces and school spaces, are reflective of that priority. So it's all in alignment and doesn't feel like the separate thing. People do get initiative fatigue. That is very, very real, particularly in the intervening five years since COVID has happened and lots of things have changed and we just want to make sure we're doing kind of the less is more idea that I tell teachers all the time. We want to do that as leaders as well. Ok, next, and again, I think this is an obvious one. That's the word I was looking for obvious Make a space on teachers' plates. If we are asking teachers to do things Similarly with students or with families, right, we want to make space for them to do that, right. So we already are overloading people with things to do. So we can't really add to teacher's plates without taking something off. Right, if it is a priority. Same for us, right, if it is a priority for you as a leader. Something else needs to go so you can devote the appropriate amount of time and energy and resources to it. We can't just keep adding on. That's a recipe for burnout and in a time right now where teacher shortage is a very large issue, we don't want to contribute to that problem. We want to make space for the priorities and not add to the to-do list. There are several resources that I've shared blog posts and podcast episodes about thinking about prioritization versus adding to your to-do list. How do you spend appropriate planning time making space for all the things that really help move the needle, and what does the research say are the things that move the needle? All of that? So feel free to use the search bar of my website, lindsaybathlionscom, to find these resources. Forward them to teachers, whatever is helpful, but I do think the big takeaway here is prioritization, not adding to the to-do list, right? We all have the same amount of time in the day, so it's really about what do you want to make the priority today? We're not going to add time to your workday leaders and teachers talking to everybody here, right, but we instead want to see what is the most important, I also think on a student level, on an instructional level. We don't want to just keep giving students more and more and more things and overwhelm them. We're seeing really high rates of anxiety and lots of things from students that we don't want to add to it, but we want to maintain that curricular challenge. The thing there is again prioritization Do fewer things better, right. The thing there is again prioritization do fewer things better, right. As I have heard the brilliant folks say Angela Watson, there we go at her podcast. So that's two, all right. Just to recap, these are have one clear vision make space on teachers' plates. Now. Number three is to connect with teachers' hearts. I'm consistently referencing teachers here because I think in traditional mindsets around leadership, it is feeling sometimes like teachers need to buy in and the resistance leaders face in leading change is with teachers, but I actually am talking about all stakeholders here. Again, this was a blog post written five years ago, so, going off of this, we really want to update my language here. Again, this was a blog post written five years ago, so, going off of this, we really want to update my language here. So the prominent adaptive leadership scholar, ron Heifetz, says, quote what people resist is not change per se, but loss, end quote. I think this is hugely important. Even just a recognition of this fact is important. So I've actually had someone comment on this blog post just to say that this is the thing that resonated with them and to just say you know that's. I really appreciate that being brought up right. This idea of resistance is lost huge in the adaptive leadership space. And again, that just that simple acknowledgement that teachers' identities are tied up with their jobs right when they shift, for example, from like stage on the stage mode, when they're talking at the students, when they're imparting knowledge right to a more effective pedagogy of the quote guide on the side approach right, or coaching students. I'm helping facilitate student ownership of the learning. That's hard and for a lot of teachers there's going to be maybe a feeling of a loss of identity. Well, what am I even doing if my students can do it all by themselves? Right, but we ultimately want teachers to see the value of the shift, that it is not about their loss as kind of the sage on the stage of the imparter of knowledge, of the kind of know-it-all person, but actually you're moving into a more important and challenging. Really, you got to be like on your feet to do this. Well, you have to. That's not a great phrase. What am I thinking? On the ball, on the you know, on top of things, ready for anything, just kind of quick to respond. And you have to have this confidence and breadth of experience to be able to respond to what's happening in the classroom. Right, we can't prepare for it all when students learn the learning. So we want to coach teachers to see the value of this shift specifically and that students actually benefit more here when we teach them how to be learners, not just what to learn. And it is important to empathize with and speak to that teacher identity and sense of loss of that right. So again, we just want the humanity coming through here. We can use that empathy to kind of paint a picture of how the new initiative or the vision or the change. Whatever is happening speaks to their passion for student learning. Right, because of course we won't be doing things that are bad for student learning in terms of our change efforts. And you know, ultimately we are going to connect with why they became a teacher in the first place and just helping them kind of co-create that vision of what that looks like in their classroom, with the research backing, but also with kind of their hearts as part of it, kind of their hearts as part of it, and so we can kind of counteract that loss of identity and almost like recreate a new, better, stronger identity, if that makes sense. Now, if teachers don't seem ready for a change, anderson says talk and listen to them, share the data, let them discover the issue and the urgency themselves. So kind of share that research, share the student data, kind of create that disequilibrium of oh okay, I want this, but my current actions are producing these results. Right, I see research out there on this topic that's saying we should do this and then write that the kind of path is created for them. You're basically just bringing them up to speed with what you have witnessed, seen, reviewed, whatever, and making sure that you're kind of showing. This is the stuff in front of me, this is the stuff that I'm noticing, that I'm learning about, like, join me on the journey and, of course, don't forget the heart, right? So leadership scholars Cotter and Cohen warn that many change initiatives fail because they just rely too much on the data. Fail because they just rely too much on the data. They are incredibly data focused to the extreme so that they actually lose and don't inspire. They fail to inspire the creativity that is necessary for change initiatives by quote, harnessing the feelings that motivate useful action, right? So when we're motivated to do something, when we're excited about the possibilities for change, when we're feeling really creative and feeling like we can affect change efficacious I believe that word is then we are motivated to action, we are motivated to co-create the plan. It just kind of erases any of that resistance or at least drastically reduces that idea of resistance to change. So again, pulling people along, not pulling people go creating kind of lifting each other up, inspiring each other, motivating each other, connecting with our hearts and our creativity, is the way to go. So in the blog post I have added an image of the Kubler-Ross change curve so common in kind of leading change spaces and it may help you if you want to take a glance at it. It may help you recognize where teachers are emotionally during the change process and how you can support them during each stage. So I'm just going to narrate this so so folks who may not have access to the blog posts or have difficulty viewing the image can understand. So we have kind of this change curve that starts with like denial and our impact kind of is going to go kind of down and then up in terms of negative, positive. So we are in kind of in a denial state. We're kind of like medium impact. We are in a state of kind of maintaining the status quo. Our reaction is kind of shock, it's not happening. The approach here the recommendation for leaders at this stage, when people are in a state of denial, is to communicate information. Next, after communicating information, people might move to a frustration space where the impact is even less right. We're not impacting much. We may have kind of a state of starting to enter a state of disruption, though still perhaps in a little bit of a status quo state. We may see some of that remaining shock and denial, but we're also entering anger and fear territory. The approach for folks entering this space is to really watch, listen and support. We're going to continue watching, listening and supporting when folks may move into the next stage, which is depression. That is kind of the low point of the impact. So we're in kind of the negative swing and then we're going to start going back up. So imagine, kind of like a U curve here, we're at the bottom of the U, we're going back up the other side. Now people are moving into the experiment phase of the change curve and this is a state of exploration. The reaction is okay. I've accepted that this is what's happening and as a leader, you want to give time and space here to explore, for people to test out things, really truly experiment, have that informed risk-taking be celebrated, not penalized right, and then folks will move to decision, which is where we're just starting. We have a little bit of that exploration stuff but we're just starting to rebuild. We are in a state of rebuilding. We are committed that is folks' reaction. We are committed to the path forward and your approach as a leader is to celebrate. We are celebrating that co-creation that's happening. We've had folks co-creation that's happening. We've had folks kind of move through all these phases. There's a lot of emotion involved. We're kind of connecting to their joy of learning to experiment, trying things, taking risks and kind of coming to that decision I'm going to co-create and eventually move to integration. We're like, yes, this is the path forward, it's part of how we do things. I am fully so. That's the Kubler-Ross change curve. Again, speaking to that idea of connecting with teachers or, more broadly, stakeholders' hearts. Okay, the fourth strategy here, that is, research informed is create dissatisfaction, create dissatisfaction. There we go with the status quo. So I love Dana Miller's adaptation of Gleicker's change formula quo. So I love Dana Miller's adaptation of Gleicker's change formula which states that change equals dissatisfaction, times, vision, times, the first step. All of those three things dissatisfaction, vision and first step need to be larger than resistance. So what this formula does, just to break it down, is it accepts that resistance happens but it can be overcome as long as teachers or stakeholders more broadly can recognize their dissatisfaction with the way things are. Now there's a clear vision for how it can change, how it can be better. We know it's possible and there are first steps that are acceptable to us that we can take. So the fact that the formula for our math folks out there is includes multiplication right. Change equals dissatisfaction times, vision times. First step is all greater than resistance, right? Multiplication then means that if any one of those dissatisfaction, vision or first step is zero, like it doesn't exist, then resistance will win, because any number multiplied by zero is zero, and so of course, any resistance will be greater than zero, right? So I love that kind of formula, noting all three of these things are critically important for change dissatisfaction, vision and first step. If there is no dissatisfaction, if people are like, yes, I'm good with the status quo, they're in that kind of denial stage of the Kubler-Ross change curve, then leaders can create it, and in fact Mesrose says they must create it. Right that adults actually need a disorienting dilemma that's what he calls it to jumpstart transformative learning. So this is learning that requires a paradigm shift, like a totally different way of looking at a problem or engaging, I should say, with a problem, and it asks us to critically examine our assumptions rather than just learn a new skill, right? So imagine I'm thinking of a parallel here to curriculum. You give your teachers a new curriculum and you say, okay, learn it, do it. Okay, that might be fine if that curriculum is the same kind of pedagogy, the same kind of way of teaching they've been teaching. If that curriculum is actually drastically different they've been lecturing history lessons, reading from a textbook, and now we're learning through inquiry whoa, that's going to be different. That's actually going to require a paradigm shift. It's not just like a new skill that. It's like okay, boom, boom, boom. It's like I need to view learning and the act of teaching differently than I have before, right, so it's got me critically examining assumptions. It's got me in a disorienting dilemma, right, like I see the way I've done things and I see the way I'm going to do things and I see the research saying that actually, that new way is going to generate student learning, more student learning, better student learning and I need to kind of have that moment of whoa, okay, change needs to happen. I need to recognize that. I need to examine my assumptions. That's what the disorienting dilemma does. It forces us to examine our assumptions and so presenting teachers with information that makes them and this is the key just uncomfortable enough to realize that quote according to Mesereau, the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore. End quote that idea, that aha moment. Oh, the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore. That's going to help them try on other ways of thinking Again. Think about that experiment phase from the Kubler-Ross change curve and be willing to rearrange how they see the world. So this is the most effective when we're actually in group dialogue in a context of like a team, for example, a whole staff, where folks are just able to briefly try on other ways of thinking. Sometimes it can be really, really challenging when you do anything with adults, with students, that is brand new and you're like, okay, go ahead, do the thing. We're like I don't even know where to start, like I've never had this opportunity, I've never tried this thing before, I've never even witnessed other people doing this. So I'm not sure how right and so being in that group space is going to give folks just time and possibilities to kind of experiment and be in that experiment phase of trying on other ways of thinking. Okay, so go ahead and create a disorienting dilemma for your teachers and remember that major transformation is usually made up of a lot of little changes over time. So you won't shift mindsets in one meeting, you just won't. So reduce that, lower that expectation of this is going to be real easy, but you can present the disorienting dilemma and let the disorientation start to sink in. When everyone is sufficiently disoriented, then they're going to be seeking new ways of thinking and you're going to have an opportunity to introduce those ideas right. So, again, we're presenting the data, we're creating the disorienting dilemma, we're presenting the research and we're remembering to connect with people's hearts and we're going to invite them to ask questions to seek out new ideas. We're going to put them in a group right. Invite them to ask questions to seek out new ideas. We're going to put them in a group right. Try on different ways of thinking, experiments, celebrate the risk-taking and to think about possible disorienting dilemmas for teachers. If you're like I'm not sure what that even looks like, lindsay consider presenting a situation in which two values that teachers hold, or stakeholders again more generally hold where those two values that teachers hold or stakeholders again more generally hold, where those two values that they hold are in direct competition. For example, teacher finds themselves working 60 hours each week to complete their lesson plans, graded student work, all the things they have to do. This positions their personal well-being, which is important to them, in direct conflict with their love for student learning important to them, in direct conflict with their love for student learning. So let teachers recognize the discontent there, right? That's not good. I want to be personally well and I want my students to be helped. Explore the underlying assumptions. Example this is the way it has to be. There's no way I can be personally well and help my students Aha, let's explore that, critically, examine that. Let them come to the conclusion that transformational change is the way. We need a paradigm shift. We need to do something differently to overcome the discontent and then start exploring different ways of thinking that could address this dilemma. Share what other teachers who do have a better balance of well-being and student learning right. See what other schools are doing structurally right. Start exploring different ways of thinking. Once teachers get here, you can take them through the final steps of making that action plan collectively. Make it. Don't put it just on the teacher right. But how can I help? How can the structures help? Test it out, build capacity for the new approach, provide support, provide structures, provide coaching, pd, whatever is needed. And then it becomes integrated again Kugler-Ross curve integration into a daily practice of the teacher's lives or ways of being or the person's lives, right? So I'll link to Mesereau's 10 Phases of Transformative Learning if you're more interested in that in the blog post. But that is kind of where we're kind of pulling a lot of this stuff from is Mesereau's work with disorienting dilemmas. In conclusion, there was a lot there and change is challenging, it's difficult and it takes time. And these research-based ideas they're going to get you started. The real work is in how you bring teachers, students, families, all stakeholders into the change process right. The process is just as important as the final action plan or whatever is implemented right. It is about the process. It's about community shared leadership, adaptive leadership. Get at those underlying beliefs, do it together, co-create right. And to help you with this, to help you kind of build up your shared leadership, adaptive leadership muscle, I'm going to share with you my leadership PD playlist. It has videos, it has podcast episodes, it has templates and resources and activities that you can grow your leadership capacity. So to grab that resource you can go to lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash one, nine zero. Until next time, everybody.
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In this episode, we speak with Jason Tate, who is from the UK and works in an American International School. In this conversation, he dives into the critical aspects of creating safer and more inclusive educational environments by actively listening to student voices.
Jason brings a unique perspective as an educator and co-founder of The Student Voice, an innovative reporting tool that helps students share their experiences of harm so educators can implement appropriate interventions. This tool works to fulfill the UK’s statutory requirements for safeguarding—ensuring student safety at school, online, and in the community—but its concepts can be widely applied in all educational settings. The Big Dream Jason’s big dream is to cultivate an educational environment where we safeguard students by doing things with them and listening to their voices (instead of telling them what to do and ignoring their perspectives). He believes this can be accomplished by building strong, trusting relationships between educators and students and deeply understanding the lived experiences of each individual. Mindset Shifts Required One key mindset shift for educators is to shift from a traditional top-down approach to one that values and integrates student voices. This involves recognizing that listening is a process aimed at understanding, and interventions should be designed collaboratively with students. Additionally, educators need to see safeguarding students' well-being as an ongoing, cyclical process that requires continuous learning and adaptation. Action Steps To create an educational environment that prioritizes the student voice, Jason recommends the following brave action steps: Step 1: Focus on ways to include the student's voice and commit to the process. This requires authentic buy-in from leadership, teachers, and all educators in the system. Models like Laura Lundy’s pathway to encourage student participation or Hart’s Ladder of Participation can be an excellent starting point for schools to prioritize this. Step 2: Implement practical tools and models in your school and classrooms. For example, Jason shares a discrimination reporting tool used at his school, where students can offer information about their lived experiences at home, school, or in the community. This lets students have a voice and share when they feel comfortable and the information they give helps educators understand patterns and implement interventions. Step 3: Develop and execute interventions collaboratively with students. Harm can often happen away from adult supervision and in the community, and it’s not always realistic or practical to simply increase supervision in community spaces. Often, it’s equipping students as active bystanders to reduce harm amongst their peers, or it could be equipping community members. Interventions need to be collaborative, reviewed often, and targeted specifically where harm happens. Challenges? Educators need to be authentically committed to this work. Just paying lip service or being tokenistic will not work—students see through it straight away and it can damage the culture. So, true buy-in amongst educators and staff members is key to ensuring everyone is committed to safeguarding. Authentic engagement means listening to students, getting their feedback, and continually revising things in response. One Step to Get Started The first step is an obvious one: ask your school—why do we want to do this? What’s the purpose of this? Start by identifying and working with champions within the school who are enthusiastic about integrating student voices. Then, begin with small, manageable initiatives, such as pilot programs with specific grades, to gain early victories and build momentum for broader implementation. Stay Connected You can learn more about Jason’s work to safeguard students on The Student Voice website. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Jason is sharing a page of case studies from The Student Voice with you for free to see how it works in action. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 189 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Jason Tate. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:06 - Jason Tait Great thanks for having me. It's really a real pleasure to see you and to talk about what we're going to go through. Thank you. 0:00:11 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely. I'm really excited and I think you bring a really interesting perspective. Being for primarily United States-based audience, like an external to the US perspective, is really, I think, going to help a lot of folks listening. So I'm curious to know, before we actually dive into the main conversation here, what is important for listeners to know about you or just keep in mind about the topic in general before we dive in. 0:00:35 - Jason Tait Yeah, so I actually have quite a good connection with America and the States, although I'm from the UK myself. I work at an American international school, so I'm fairly familiar with the American education system and all the differences that means compared to the UK system. But because I'm based in the UK, we have a series of statutory requirements that we have to follow in and around the whole area of what the UK would call safeguarding, which essentially means making sure that schools keep young people and children safe, both in school but also deal with any online issues, and also I was sponsored for helping them to stay safe in the community and also at home. So there's a fairly extensive framework which is statutory. So it's an English education law that schools are required to do this and look after the children under their care, and all that through all their different lived life experiences. 0:01:28 - Lindsay Lyons I love that framing for today's conversation and thank you for defining that for us. I think that'll be really powerful to think about, especially in line with like this next question I usually ask them. Dr Bettina Love talks about freedom dreaming in the following way. She says it's dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and so when I think about safeguarding and I think about, I think there are clear ties here and I'm curious to know, like, with that in mind, what's that? What's the dream that you hold or or, um, that you kind of aspire that students will experience in this? Yeah, sure. 0:02:02 - Jason Tait I think that's a really, really good connection with the work we do. So, um, specifically with the area safeguarding, my own sort of philosophy and view is is that if you're going to safeguard and look after anybody but in our case with education, it's obviously young people and children that you need to work, not you don't do stuff, you don't do things for them, you don't do things to them, but you do things with them. And if you're going to work with our young people and children and students to safeguard them, you need to listen to their voice. But listening is a process, not an outcome, and the outcome of the listening process is to understand their lived experiences. So schools, quite rightly, have sets of rules and regulations young people and children have to follow. So you've got to be on time to class, do your homework, be respectful, all those things which means a school runs as a decent organization. There's no anarchy, otherwise we'd be able to function as a school. But for children, they have a whole set of lived experiences which may or may not be impacted by those rules. So what is their home life like? Are they popular on social media? Have they been bullied? Have they been harassed? Are they experiencing discrimination and if they are experiencing all of those harms, or a variety of those harms, what are they doing differently to keep safe and to live their own life? And we need to understand that before we can help, support them and intervene in a meaningful way. Because the real danger is that adults will interpret a young person's behavior and get that interpretation wrong and then they get the intervention wrong as well. Instead of being a source of support and help, they can actually become a hindrance and also can add to the harm and certainly not build trust. Because all of this it's central to all of this any effective safeguarding framework. You need to be built on a culture of trust between the very strong, healthy, trustful relationships between the adults responsible for safeguarding the young people and the young people themselves. 0:04:10 - Lindsay Lyons There is so much here that is so good and I think a lot of times are not part of our default thinking as educators, at least not in my default thinking as an educator formerly trained. So I want to highlight a couple of things and I'll ask a mindset shift question in a moment connected to them. But I love that you mentioned the with them like that. I love listening as a process, not an outcome, and I love the idea of if you don't understand and you don't seek to understand you, you're actually probably not helping. You're actually doing the opposite, like that's. That's fascinating to me and I think about a lot of times we say things like student voice but we don't actually mean deep understanding and seeking to understand and work with in community and partnership. And so I'm curious to know is that a big mindset shift? Or how do you kind of like coach educators or folks in the space around that, taking on that mindset? Like where are they coming from? How do they get to this appreciation of? 0:05:12 - Jason Tait like we're doing this with students. So we have a very specific model that we use to help educators with that and we have a very clear guiding principle and one rule. So a guiding principle is that we seek. We will not understand a young person's life unless we understand the social rules that govern that young person's life. So we seek to understand the social rules that govern that person's life. So why say, if you take like online life and social media, why do they behave the way they do online? What are the rules that's governing their lives to help keep them safe online? They might take part in an online bullying because they see someone else doing it and they don't want to be the target of that harm. So they will join in with the harmer. But they're doing that not because they agree with the person carrying out the harm. They're doing that because they don't want to be the target themselves. So if you can understand that, then you can have a more effective intervention. And our rule and this ties in with teaching and learning is that we seek to understand and if you understand something, therefore you're learning. So if you go back to what all schools are about their teaching and learning approaches to teaching and learning. Safeguarding in this way is just like teaching and learning in terms of science, math, english, anything else you do in a school. We're looking to learn all the time about the young people we're looking after and if we learn then we'll understand. So, having that growth mindset, we're tying it back into what makes a good teacher. A good teacher wants to learn right. So hopefully teachers can make that connection with well safeguarding is just the same as me teaching English or math or science, whatever it is, history, whatever it is. I teach and our cyclical model which comes out of all of that is that schools provide brave spaces for young people to share information on their terms. So it's when the young person is ready to share, not when we need them to. It's when they're ready to share and then we seek to understand the information they've shared. Then we work with them to develop the intervention on whatever level. That is. So if, if you have a culture of bullying in grade seven, work with grade seven to overcome that culture of bullying. So it might not be working with one kid and one case of bullying. You might have a culture of harassment or a culture of discrimination. So work with the students who are involved in that Work with them to fix it. And then the final part of the cyclical model is that you go back and check to see if that's worked. So has your intervention been successful? And all the time, in all four stages of the model the cyclical model you're using the voice of the young person, so you're being really authentic about what you're doing. It's not tokenistic at all. It's saying to young people you are part of this community and without your voice and in every aspect of the process of supporting them, oh, that's such a great process and I love that it's cyclical right, Because you're constantly doing it. That's perpetual. It's always in motion. Yep, amazing. It's not linear. There's no start and end, because a school is an organic community. It's always growing and developing. That's why schools are great places to work. They change all the time. It can be the same place, but in a different school year on year because the new set of kids, new teaching, new issues, new new curriculum everything changes all the time, so they're organic and they're constantly growing. That's why your process needs to be constant makes so much sense. 0:08:46 - Lindsay Lyons I I also love how you reference a lot of lundy. I mean in indirectly. 0:08:51 - Jason Tait I feel like here yeah, sure, well, lundy's a big influence on the work we do, for sure. 0:08:55 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, Do you mind speaking to that just a little bit yeah absolutely For people who might be unfamiliar. 0:09:00 - Jason Tait Yeah. So going back to your early question about how you support teachers actually supporting your community with empowering the voice of the student, laura Lundy's work is I was lucky enough to talk with her and meet with her a few times and read her work obviously and her model is very, very it's very straightforward. It's very straightforward, very easy to understand but gives a clear pathway for institutions to develop a culture of student voice. And her big thing is participation. So it's rather that student voice, it's student participation in how you can involve young people in the community and view a school as a community and more than just a school, because I think all schools would recognize that you are a community of learners and Lundy's model really gives you a really nice framework in which you can do that and guide you in how you can do that and assess that and put that in place. Another good model which you may be familiar with is Hart's Ladder of Participation. So Hart's Ladder is really great. So I don't see the ladder as hierarchical. But where Hart's Ladder is really useful is you can look at the issues you might be facing so young people share information. Where hearts ladder is really useful is you can look at the issues you might be facing. So young people shed information and we often go back to hearts ladder and pick the rung on the ladder that we think will match the issue that we're facing. So that's a really that's a really nice guide to to deal with issues sort of case by case hearts. 0:10:26 - Lindsay Lyons I can give you that guidance, we feel on specific issues and cases I love the of heart's ladder as just kind of something you can pick a rung of, as opposed to a hierarchy. That's really wise. I like that a lot very cool and, and so I think you've done a lot of things with the student voice, with different different things in terms of what does it look like when we put some of the big ideas that you've talked about into practice, like, how do we literally do it? um, can you talk through a little bit about what schools can do to make this a possibility in their their communities so, um, let me give you a case study we're working on right now at my school. 0:11:05 - Jason Tait So we give our, so our tool. We provide the young people and children in our school with a map of their school, a map of the community, a generic map of a home which matches the socioeconomic background of the young people, and a discrimination reporting tool so they can share information on any of their lived experiences school, in the community in which they live, at home and in relation to any forms of discrimination, and so we've been running that since 2018 as a tool that the kids can use. Over the last couple of years, we've really picked up on a pattern of, because when you get the context of where harm happens, you can understand patterns right, so you'll deal with an individual case, but when you get a series of cases which have a similar context, then you have the ability to change the context to prevent future harm, and that's the really exciting stuff for us. So the case study we're working through right now is that we we've seen a pattern of um, we call it child-on-child relationship harm, so issues of bullying, sexual harassment and discrimination. The common theme is it takes place away from adult supervision, it takes place amongst groups of students and it can take place online and in person and it's very rarely one-on-one, it's very often in group situations. So what we've started to introduce is an active bystander program for our whole community. So to disrupt the context because adults aren't there, we need to empower young people to deal with it there and then. But they need the skill set to do it safely and the confidence to do it safely. But research has also shown that if you can have a successful active bystander program, it can really reduce instances of harassment, discrimination and bullying. So we spent the second half of the last school year and we'll really strengthen it going into the first semester of the coming school year and training our community to be active bystanders and so they will have a skill set to disrupt the context of child and child relationship harm, as it happens. And then we'll track the data to see. We'll go back and say go back to our young people, say, has this approach worked? Have we managed to support you in managing those relationship harm issues that you've you've shared with us, that you experience? In other words, have we changed the context to prevent future harm? So if we go back to that model, we've got the information through the brave space. We think we understand the issue. We've developed our intervention and provided training, and now we're halfway between the training piece and checking if we've been successful. 0:13:56 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that is so good. And I'm thinking about the default. My default response just the way that I have been experiencing schools and thinking about how people usually intervene in something like that was oh, we just add adults so that students are never alone. Right, we just add adult supervision. That's not it. We have to empower the students and support the students to be able to do it themselves. That's so good. 0:14:20 - Jason Tait But I think in this particular case that because the type of harm happens away from adult supervision, that solution seemed the right one for us. In different contexts, with different issues, adults may be part of the solution. So it's so. We work one of the schools that I work with. They have a mcdonald's restaurant on the corner of the street opposite the school. So they provide and there's harm happening in that restaurant, with the kids pouring out of school, going into the restaurant. So they provided training to the mcdonald's staff and safeguarding, so they they then report back to the school if any harms happen. So it's, it's working out, understanding where the context of where the harm happens, then develop your intervention from there. So, and because you have, then, because you then have community safeguarding, your community gets involved and that strengthens your culture because you're saying it's not just the teachers, it's our community. You know it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a town to change a generation that is brilliant, okay, I. 0:15:30 - Lindsay Lyons I love this idea of training community members and truly partnering. We talk a lot about being connected to community and stuff that's legitimately connected to the community. You are on the same page there. I love that, and I'm wondering about folks who are doing this work or who maybe are at an earlier stage of that cycle maybe they're, um, just starting to get information and have never been through that cycle of partnering with students to determine the action step like are there challenges to this work that you've seen? 0:16:04 - Jason Tait oh, yeah, 100, yeah, yeah, you have to be um, you have to want to do authentically so. So if you pay lip service or tokenistic, that will not work and kids will see through you straight away and that can actually damage your culture. So you have to be genuine about it and be prepared to listen, and maybe listen to things you don't want to hear, because kids will tell you if you. But then also you have to be prepared to act on what they've said, because it's almost, it's almost better not to ask if you're not, if you don't act on what they've said, because you've asked the question, you've done nothing. That's almost. That's. That's really negative, that's that's. That's the road you shouldn't go down. I'd suggest um, yeah, so you need to be authentic about it, um, and be prepared to listen and be prepared to be surprised, right? So there's things the kids will tell you. We learned. So we always ask kids what's going well as well. That's really important, and so we were shocked by what they thought was going well and there's good stuff. But we never. We just took it for granted, but it meant so much to them. So those little things, you can make a really big difference in a school community's life by just doing the little things, understanding them and do more of them. 0:17:21 - Lindsay Lyons So, asking the good, stuff as well as what's not going so well, is really important as well. I'm curious just to infuse listeners with a bit of joy. What are some of the things that people? 0:17:29 - Jason Tait said. One of the things we learned was um, this is crazy. So our we have a really lovely art department at our school and at recess and at lunch times they stay open and we'll have some light supervision. They'll be there but in the background and they do some art material. That's, the kids can go to hang out and do a bit of art if the weather's not nice outside, and stuff like that. The kids loved that and we thought that was okay, so okay. But they just like that was the best thing in their day where they could do art together, hang out, use a teacher there, but they could just do art, chat, talk and they just loved that. We never knew that, we never appreciated that, we never came close to understanding that. I was sure we just said, right, we'll do, we'll do more of that and just a simple thing like that, which doesn't mean much to us but meant the world to those kids yeah, it's, it's just. 0:18:20 - Lindsay Lyons I think that's a. That story is so emblematic of why it is so important to just ask the question of the students, to just listen to what they have to say, because they teach us so much more than what you were mentioning earlier the false interpretation yeah, for sure that kids are my best teacher. 0:18:38 - Jason Tait No doubt about that absolutely, absolutely okay. 0:18:41 - Lindsay Lyons So now I'm envisioning someone listening who is really excited about this idea but might not be certain about how to get started. Or, you know, maybe seeing that you know there's there's um, like a statutory element to being in the UK and there's like this kind of community support or expectation of this, whereas it might not exist as much in the US like what is kind of the very first thing you would encourage someone to do to get started and get the ball rolling here, or more than one thing if you think yeah sure. 0:19:11 - Jason Tait So I think the first it sounds like a really obvious question. But just work with your school and your school leaders and say why do we want to do this? Yeah, what's the purpose of this? And link it back to your mission and your school values so it becomes part of your mission, becomes part of your strategy, becomes part of your school. If you can identify the clear and everyone thinks yeah, student voice, you should listen to kids, that's obvious. Well, sit down and unpack what that actually means and how that can benefit your community. So if you recognize that you have relationship issues, if you have issues of bullying substance, misuse all the stuff that kids experience, like the risks that we know they go through. If you want to understand that, then student voice is a very good vehicle which gives you that level of understanding. And once you make that almost a philosophical, strategic commitment, then the rest can take care of itself. You can look at my tool, the student voice tool. You can look at Lundy's model for participation, hart's ladder. You can work out what it is that you do. A lot of schools do surveys and there's a place for surveys, but they're point in time right and kids' lives move on very quickly and the influence of their lives move on very quickly. So what's going to be your means for young people to be able to use their voice and what's the vehicles in which they can use their voice in your setting, and how can you develop that and work with the young people to develop it as well? Because if you can work with them to develop your student voice, they will see that you are serious about it and they will feel you're authentic about it. 0:21:04 - Lindsay Lyons So once you've got your systems and processes set up and your approach set up, they will buy into it and they will work with you on it don't want to use the term buy-in, but like buy-in from a teacher level, right, like the commitment or the authentic you were saying authentic authenticity, right, like of of the teachers. And so I'm wondering about a leader who has a staff that's kind of mixed. There are like some people are really excited, want to authentically partner with students, and some folks are like I am not really ready to hear the hard things, like I'm ready to listen but only to maybe some things and I'm not really prepared to hear the full truth that students are speaking or maybe to follow up on that. How would you advise a leader to kind of negotiate that dynamic in their staff? 0:22:03 - Jason Tait Yeah, I think that's a fairly common reaction to a lot of initiatives in schools and and you start with your champions. So start with the people who back that and start with the people who want to buy in with you. And maybe start with your juniors and seniors. Start with a couple of grades, work with them, get your early victories right. So when, when you have an issue, come in, deal with it really well. And feedback. So with all the student voice stuff that comes into our school an advisory, every thursday, I will feed back to the advisors and advisees and say this is what we're looking at this week, this is what's come in, this is what we're doing. Have a discussion about that, talk about it. So you're just really transparent, get the elephant out the room as far as possible without breaching confidentiality. But I'll be straight. So if we have an issue of a culture of, say, misogyny or sexual harassment, we'll say in these grades this is what's coming through, guys, what do we think we need to do about that? So it's all out in the open. You discuss it, you talk about it and then you start to develop as a community so those teachers that may not be buying into it can start to see right, okay, this is what's happening in the place where I work. Do I want to work at a place that has that? No, maybe I don't. How can? How can we fix that? How can we do something about that? So you bring people slowly along, but start with your champions, start all the people that buy into it, and then give yourself the gift of time and then plan and develop your action plan, your strategic plan and and review that constantly and look for your indicators of success and your timelines and just keep reviewing that as you go along. 0:23:55 - Lindsay Lyons I love that your tool and the idea of constantly having that information, that input from students, of here's what's going on, here's my lived experience, gives you the opportunity to share the information regularly. To say I think it was Mesereau who says, like you need a disorienting dilemma when we're trying to lead change. Right, we have this. Whoa. I thought I was living in this community and working in this community everything was peaceful, right. And then I just remember, um, in one of my classes I used to teach feminism to high school students and one of the boys was like, yeah, but like, sexism doesn't really happen here. And then all of the girls were like here. Let me tell you about these yeah, that's right. 0:24:25 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's true. But also you like, we're talking about the harmless kids experience. They will tell you I get too much homework for my ap classes. I don't like pizza on a friday, you know you, you get everything. So we talk about everything, right and soon. We've had to work hard, but we've got kids moving from complaining to advocacy and starting to appreciate the difference, because we will kick back and say stop complaining. It's a privileged environment. The pizza is great on a Thursday, so you get them to. But it's also a really good social media tool as well. So we will get kids who will say things that they shouldn't say. Well, not that they shouldn't say. They express themselves inappropriately, right, so you can hold them to account safely for that. It's a safe form of social media as well. So they'll learn how to use their voice. So when they go onto platforms and go into the real world, hopefully they don't get in trouble with their employer, because they've had the support from us on how to use their voice correctly. 0:25:26 - Lindsay Lyons So there's lots of educational benefits, as well as all the safety pieces we've talked about as well I love that so much when we think about student voice, as often people you know describe a student voice or leadership building in youth as like this future benefit. But it's like both right it's the future benefit and it's like because you're doing it now, you're enabling students to have that voice and participation in the moment they're in school and it benefits the later because they did it authentically when they were there. 0:25:53 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's a big part of our vision with this work is that if you can teach kids to use their voice appropriately and see the action is taken when they do, then hopefully they can take that learning into the society they live in and the community they live in so they can be a positive, contributing member of the community they go on to live. So the real, really important we feel obviously we're buyers, but really important educational value in the work we're doing as well. 0:26:21 - Lindsay Lyons That's amazing and, oh my gosh, there's been so much. I think listeners are going to get a ton out of this episode. As we move to close, I I ask one question just for fun. This can be related to our conversation and your work, or it could be something totally random, but because everyone that listens and tunes in really is a lifelong learner, I'm curious to know what's something that you have been personally learning about lately wow, like I say, I love to learn. 0:26:46 - Jason Tait There's so much that's going on right now. So we've just gone through a general election in the UK, so what I've been really learning about is our political system and different, what democracy means, what that looks like, again, how people can use their voice. Uh, is democracy simple? Is it straightforward? How that can be abused and does the real picture come back out, how to get clear information, clear understanding and how people may abuse or use that system. And is democracy a resilient enough process to provide the freedoms that we all enjoy? So that's what I'm really been thinking and reading about and reflecting on right now um, right there with you. 0:27:29 - Lindsay Lyons The united states is a kind of similar similar position right now interesting times oh yeah, and what powerful times to learn alongside students. I always think about students, like you said students teach us so much. Students can are going to teach us how to like get through this, because the same old way is not working. So it's like give us something new. Let's go. 0:27:53 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's right. I'm on board with you with that one for sure. 0:27:57 - Lindsay Lyons And the last question I have for you is really, I think people are going to be very interested in the tool you have. It is. I have not heard of anything like this and I work with different survey organizations and people who do the point in time but not the ongoing system. So how do folks connect with you? Learn more about the student voice, all of those things? Yeah, sure. 0:28:16 - Jason Tait So just jump onto our website, the studentvoicecouk. You see all of our stuff there and you can sign up for demos. We've got lots of our case study page. We have lots of live videos about things, how our schools have used it. We've got tons of blogs about the work that we do. Um, we're very accessible. We do lots of video, lots of online work, with people around the world talking about it. So go to our website, check us out, have a look and then get in touch through the website. We'll happily talk to you and share all that information we can transparent about what we do excellent. 0:28:49 - Lindsay Lyons I will link to the page and also the case study page so I think people will get a really a nice vibe of what you do and what is possible for their communities by looking at that yeah, sure, yeah, absolutely, that'd be great jason, thank you so much for this conversation today. 0:29:02 - Jason Tait It was such a pleasure yeah, lindsey, it's been great talking to you. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you for the opportunity. It's been really kind of you, thank you.
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In this episode, we speak with Charle Peck, a former high school teacher turned mental health professional. She shares her professional insights and personal stories that sparked the need to dive deeper into mental health practices, and how she’s seen it transform students and schools.
Charle was a high school teacher for 18 years and saw how students struggled with their mental health. She was led to get a Master of Social Work degree to understand what was going on, jump-starting her career in mental health. Her teaching experience informs her current work, blending the teacher and mental health professional perspectives. Charle is the co-creator of Thriving School Community and the co-author of Improving School Mental Health: The Thriving Community Solution. The Big Dream Charle has a lot of hope for the future because she’s focusing on the solutions to the mental health problems we face in schools. Charle believes that by addressing the root causes of mental health challenges and integrating sustainable practices into daily routines, educators can create a balanced and supportive atmosphere for both teachers and students. Mindset Shifts Required To create an education system where mental health is front-and-center, Charle identifies a few mindset shifts that need to occur. The first is that we need to stop getting stuck in language—some states don’t allow words like “trauma” or “SEL,” and the focus on words takes away from what’s actually going on. So the mindset shift is focusing on what’s going on beneath the behavioral issues like absenteeism. Another mindset shift is focusing on practical solutions—what are solution-oriented approaches that fit into your daily classroom practice? Instead of adding more and more to educators' plates, the mindset shift is around integrating mental health practices into your daily routine. Charle shared some real-life stories of students she worked with and the lessons she learned, namely to humanize each person and understand where they’re coming from. It’s an important mindset shift: take time to see people where they are and help them from that place. Finally, Charle talks about the mindset shift of educators seeing this as a skill to learn. With the right tools, they can be equipped to support mental health in their classrooms. Action Steps Improving mental health in the school system can seem complicated, but there are actually some very practical steps educators can take to prioritize it. Charle recommends these action steps: Step 1: Ask yourself and other educators what you need to make your jobs better. Mental health starts with the educators, with the adults, before you can make an impact on the children. So check in with yourself and other colleagues to find solutions to problems and meet needs that improve your work environment. Step 2: Humanize others and understand their “story spiral.” There’s always more to the story—behind each bad behavior is someone’s home life, relationships, traumas, etc. So, humanize them, and take time to see what’s going on, getting to the route of a problem and not just focusing on the behavior. Step 3: Equip yourself with knowledge and skills. Mental health practices, tools, and strategies can all be learned and improved on. Be intentional about learning them for yourself and your students. Charle’s 9 Essential Skills Course is a great place to start. Challenges? One common challenge—perhaps the biggest one—is the feeling of overwhelm among teachers and leaders. Decision fatigue is a very real experience, and educators are overwhelmed with the decisions they face and how to make the right decision. Charle believes that impactful professional development sessions will help reduce overwhelm and decision fatigue. The other challenge educators face is how to help others make decisions quickly. Teachers need to be equipped with the tools and dialogue to use with students to help them make the right decisions for themselves. One Step to Get Started One practical first step for educators is to identify and reflect on what you need for yourself to make your job better and do better. What keeps coming up over and over again? What’s the emotional charge you get when you just think of something? Identify the problem and the unmet need underlying it. Then, bring it to your first professional development session at the beginning of the school year, discuss it with colleagues, and use your collective wisdom to find solutions to these problems. Stay Connected You can find out more about Charle and her work on her website, Thriving Educator. There, you can also access resources, a podcast, and self-paced courses like The 9 Essential Skills Course. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Charle is sharing a School Mental Health Audit with you for free. It helps you identify strengths and areas of growth in your school to better prioritize mental health. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 188 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript here. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Charlie Peck, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I am thrilled to have you today, thank you, Lindsay. 0:00:09 - Charle Peck I am so happy to be here. Truly, this is going to be such a great conversation with you and your audience. 0:00:14 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, and I am just so excited about the topic that we're talking about. Mental health is so important for everyone, and I just think a lot of people are looking for sustainable answers to how do we actually do this well, so I'm very excited to get your expertise on this. The first question I have, though, is like what should people know about you or kind of keep in mind in our conversation today, beyond the traditional bio sense of things? 0:00:40 - Charle Peck Yeah, that's important because I think what's unique that I keep hearing about my lens is that I was a teacher for 18 years in a high school classroom, which led me to this work and because my students were struggling so much with mental health. I didn't understand why. So I kept asking why, which led me to get a master of social work degree so that I could understand structurally what was going on, historically, what was going on the generational trauma and all those contributions from society, childhood, that were contributing to their struggles. So when I was one of those teachers sitting in a PD session and I heard mental health professionals speak to us, I was one of those people, one of those teachers rolling my eyes because I thought you don't have the teacher lens. So it's important that you understand I do have the teacher lens and the mental health professional lens. 0:01:29 - Lindsay Lyons That is so critical. I think they're just, in general, pd can really just gloss over the top of people's heads when they're like I just you don't know what it's like in my shoes and it's like, oh, I know I do, I'm speaking right to it. So that's, that's really incredible. I love that you framed that to start. And then I think, conceptually, regarding the content, I one of the big things I really love to ground the episodes in is the sense of equity and justice, and so Dr Bettina Love talks about this idea of freedom dreaming with this quote that I am in love with dreams grounded in the critique of injustice is how she describes freedom dreaming. And so, with that, what is that big dream that you hold for education? 0:02:09 - Charle Peck Well, I'm hopeful. I mean, a lot of us get stuck in the problem. Many of us get stuck in the problem and, trust me, I understand what those major issues are contributing to mental health in our education system. It's stemming from society, from education, and it's stemming from our families, and they're all meshing together. But I'm hopeful because I'm focusing on solutions for that, and so what that means to me is we've got to meet the needs of everybody, and I do believe that there's a way to do that, lindsay. So that's what I'm excited about. 0:02:38 - Lindsay Lyons Nice, oh, that's great. Okay, so I think with that there's a lot of things that maybe people have their minds wrapped around in terms of mental health that maybe needs a little unpacking, and so I'm wondering if there's any kind of key mindset shifts that you have noticed either teachers or leaders go through and you're like, ah, that's the thing that kind of unlocks the transformation. Is there kind of a mindset shift that you coach on or that you've seen work with folks? 0:03:08 - Charle Peck Yes, oh my gosh, there's actually so much there. So let me simplify in a couple of ways. Number one we need to stop getting stuck in language. So there are some states I can't use the word trauma, I can't use the word SEL, I can't. I mean equity, you know. I mean DEI. It's like a bad word in some states these days, and so I said listen, let's not get stuck in that language, let's just understand the importance behind it and how we're going to function better. So it's not getting stuck with all the semantics and all again the problems. It's how do we shift our mindset into focusing on solutions that will meet the needs of the people who have an unmet need? So it's showing up behaviorally, it's showing up in absenteeism. So we need to look at what those problems are and shift the mindset about what's going on underneath, and that's really no secret. I mean, we've been talking about that for a long time, but sometimes we need to be reminded about that, Lindsay. And so we need practical solutions for this, something that's just going to integrate into our daily practice, and that is the mind shift that usually helps me capture leaders and their educators I'm working with, because they're like oh yeah, so it's not one more thing that I have to do and I said, no, it's not. It's let's wrap our head around something that will integrate right into your daily practice to attack this problem that keeps showing up for you, and then they're ready to adapt it and then actually use it, and then remember how to use it. So that's the key. Those are a couple of things that I coach on all the time. 0:04:37 - Lindsay Lyons I love that you said that, because one of the things that I think people in in a lot of spaces, but in equity spaces particularly, it's like initiative fatigue where it's it is one more thing I'm already like my plate is full, I'm already doing too much, and so to just say, well, we're doing this thing, how do we do it better, makes it sustainable so that we don't have to. I mean it. Also really, I think the beauty of our jobs is like it works us out of a job when people can just do it really well, right, like we stick with them, we coach them, and it's like you got this, you don't need more PD because it's now part of how you do things, which I think is beautiful. Like that's the, that's like what we hope for as coaches. Right, it's like you can go do this thing and do it well forever now. So I think, thinking about those actions, I would love to know, like, what are those practical things that teachers can do? That Like if a leader is thinking okay, I want my teachers, I want my staff to have these practical strategies. Like, what can they do? What are the things? Tell us all the things, yeah. 0:05:34 - Charle Peck So it is based on a framework of nine skills, and those nine skills came out of. Well, what are the nine? Nine just happened to lead to a number in a matrix that we use, but it's like what keeps showing up with regards to mental health. What are the problems? So, if we identify the problem and understand why that's not working, then we can come up with a new solution. So that was the approach we took. So one of the problems is negative self-talk. Okay, oh my gosh, if you're a leader, how often do you hear negative self-talk? And, by the way, you might be that person stuck in negative thinking too. So one of the ways we attack that is what is your story? Spiral, what are you telling yourself about a situation that's based on a lie? Typically I mean typically these spirals we get into those narratives. You've heard the word narrative a lot. Same idea story, what story are you telling yourself does make you spiraling out of that control and saying and doing those things that you walk away regretting that you've done. So when we carry that around with us, that affects our function. So the approach I take, lindsay, is how are we functioning and how can we function better? What's keeping us from functioning at our best. So I bring it right down to the human level and that's what their skills are. So the story spiral is one, and then we help people unravel their story spiral and I'll tell you a quick story about that. To help and this is what I talk about in my sessions I always tell about a student named Madison who was that troubled kid right, and one day she got up out of my class, went to the bathroom, I think, didn't come, didn't ask my opinion, she didn't ask me to do that and she certainly didn't sign out and she was gone almost the whole period and then eventually came back. I tried to talk with her. Long story short, we had a tumultuous relationship, student-teacher relationship and it didn't feel good. I was kind of not nice to her and she certainly didn't work for me and do all the things she needed to do. It just wasn't good. So at the end of the semester, when it changed over, I went to our school counselor and I said Beth, can you please tell me where Madison is in her next class, because I want to go find her and make amends. And Beth said well, she passed away. Madison passed away, okay, and so I didn't get to make those amends with her and, more importantly, I didn't get to create a space that she could have done well in and had a positive experience in her short time left with us and this is a teenager. She had a terminal illness the whole time and I had no idea. So there's a lot of problems with that, about communication and all that confidentiality. But here's what I learned, and this is what led me to thinking about the story spiral and thinking about how can we reflect better upon our teaching practice as a result of something like this. Thank goodness I learned this early on and it was. There's always more to the story. If you think about the kids that are sitting in front of us, or leaders. If you're thinking about the staff who keeps coming back with the same, similar problems, what is it that's underlying that? You're missing something, and here's the key is that we may never know what that is. So we need to give grace to everybody and humanize them, and that's what changed my entire career, so that reframe was huge. I actually, in workshops, we use a story spiral. We have people identify their story spirals, or at least one of them, because we're walking around with a bunch of them and then we walk them through a process to unravel that story spiral, say they need to do it in the moment and that way they're not bobbled down with all of those stress hormones all day long. So there's others like power dynamics. It's really crippling us in our roles as leaders is when we feel like there's a power imbalance. By the way, teachers feel that, parents feel that, we all feel it. But when I work with principals specifically, we identify with that power imbalances and I help them realize that they've reached a limit, how they've reached their own limit, and not to expect other people to respect that limit, that they need to do that themselves so they can eradicate all of this expectation and disappointment that they feel. So there's just simple ways to get through it like that and it's actually all based in evidence. It's just a way to simplify it in practice. 0:09:51 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love so much of this. I have several connections. If it's okay with you, I just want to ask you. 0:09:57 - Charle Peck I know that was a lot too. It's a lot. 0:09:59 - Lindsay Lyons It's so good. I thought about the unmet needs first of all, like how easy is it to you're reading a picture book with your first graders or something or you're reading a picture book with your first graders or something, or right? Or you're reading a novel in high school, right? And to be able to like unpack what is this character Like? Why is this character acting this way? What is their unmet need Right? Like there's ways to do this in so many spaces and I don't think it's always necessarily like, like you said, it could just be the personal, like adults do this introspectively. It doesn't always have to be like there's this huge conflict with this child and like you know, like I have to do it right now. Like there's so many ways to sustainably practice this and familiarize students with the practice as well. As what is your story spiral? Oh, I just love the possibilities. Also, I love the phrase story spiral, very cool. I also was thinking about Dr Becky. I've been listening to her a lot because of Becky Kennedy, because of the toddler situation I'm in right now, and she's always saying MGI, most generous interpretation of like a situation right, like what is the most generous interpretation of this behavior, right, and it sounds like that's what you're saying, right. So like if I can reframe what's happening in the moment, like what possibly could be happening, or, like you said, if I don't know what's happening, what is the thing that I could possibly like generously ascribe to this behavior to then make me able to respond in a way that is caring and supportive? Does that feel like aligned to what you're coaching on? 0:11:27 - Charle Peck It's definitely aligned and I will say this because this is a problem that we all have too is well, I don't want that kid getting away with this, or I don't want that adult, that teacher, getting away with this, and so it's not. It's not about that. It's about let's humanize them, because that way we all soften our approach, and I don't mean we get soft and allow people to walk all over us or the system. That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, I have a background in trauma and the first thing I say is we don't let trauma be an excuse for behavior and decisions. Right, we do have to have some accountability there, so I'm not taking that away. It's important that we understand that. It's about leadership is about how do we grow people we're working with and let them flourish in the strengths that they have and not have all of these expectations of them to be great everywhere all the time. It's what are they good at? What do they need to do their job better? I mean, how many leaders ask their teachers what do you need to do your job better? When I ask teachers this, it's usually nothing huge. Now sometimes they're like well, I need a smart board and that's expensive or I need a 10 day vacation in the middle of the school year. Well, we can't do that. But often I will tell you it's supplies Like it. It's really simple things and they love that. They're just asked and considered it's so it can be so simple. It's really investing in human capital again. 0:12:50 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, even just acknowledgement or, you know, a gratitude like thank you for doing this thing that you're doing, working hard, yeah, totally Like very free, very easy, not super time consuming things. 0:13:02 - Charle Peck That's exactly right. We just need the reminder and permission to do some of those things again. 0:13:07 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely. I love the phrase that you've been using with like humanize, and it makes me think a lot about the story you shared, and thank you for sharing that story. That is hard on all accounts for you, for the student, for you know the whole dynamics. I really appreciate you, your vulnerability and sharing that with us and with listeners, and so I'm thinking about the humanity that sometimes we do lose in the power dynamics in the. I'm overwhelmed with tasks and I'm just thinking about a to-do list of things in the pressures of. You know, my administrator is in my room and the thing that they are probably looking for is obedience from students, maybe not like sense of belonging or other things, and so I appreciate that you named the communication and all of the other pieces, but I love the humanizing portion as like the central piece of that. When we engage with individuals as if they are human beings, right, and have things going on. Like you said, everyone's got a ton of story spirals going on. I feel like if there's a takeaway from this episode, it is like at least remember the humanization of all people, right, that's. 0:14:12 - Charle Peck I just really appreciate that, Thank you, oh, I'm glad, and I'm glad you said that, because what's hard is when we get we get wrapped up in all of the things to do and we get stuck in our own insecurities. That's one of the things we address is our own insecurities. We're stuck in our own heads there and that keeps us again from engaging in the role the way we need to do it effectively. So if we could just realize that we're all trying to make these connections and try to create a culture of connectedness and support of each other Boy, imagine what kind of place that would be to thrive. I mean, imagine if we did that in every environment. When we try to do that at home, we need to do it in our schools. I believe we have an incredible responsibility to help raise our kids and help share the burden with parents, and that's where we're going to do that is in our school system. So not everyone agrees with me, but I'm challenging that. 0:15:11 - Lindsay Lyons I totally agree with you. I think about the number of times that my toddler says the teacher's name instead of my name. They're like no wait, mom. Or the number of times I've been a teacher and they've called me mom. It's just like interchangeable. 0:15:23 - Charle Peck Yes, yes. And imagine, if you're, if the parents in your community knew that you had their back and said listen, I'm going to help you with this. Not you're the problem, You're the reason they're behaving this way. So I mean we've got to look at the different environments that they're engaging in. How many times have you heard of that teacher that that kid really behaves well in that class but not in the other classes? So something in that environment is different, and typically it's the adult leading that environment, and you know that too, as leaders. You is different, and typically it's the adult leading that environment, and you know that too, as leaders. You know that from school to school, you know how people respond to you, and so if we could just check ourselves and be humbled and then reflect on that a little differently than we're used to. 0:16:08 - Lindsay Lyons That's kind of what we do. I love that idea of being humble, being reflective, like this idea of curiosity. I mean I think of how many teachers have faced that exact sentiment like oh, it's not happening in this class, and have gotten defensive over that, like, oh well, I'm not doing anything wrong because we take such pride in our work, we work so hard. Right, that makes sense, sense. And if we approach it with all of those attributes that you just described and we're like, hmm, let's go over there, Like let me learn, let me be curious, I think it's a very different vibe for the student and ultimately, for the teachers too. 0:16:41 - Charle Peck It really is. They will appreciate that leadership, that style of leadership. And, oh my gosh, so many people are walking around just angry I mean angry holding on to so many things. A lot of that stems from childhood. That is now showing up in their role. I'm telling you, insecurity is a huge piece to this and we work with leaders and excuse me, and help them identify those insecurities that they have brought into their role with them and help kind of just take those away, help them process that. It's not a therapy session, it's a let's take a look and it actually doesn't take that much time to do. And it's practice over time where we build proficiency in doing that. And then we do that with our teachers, and then we do that with parents and build these bridges, and then we teach this to students. I mean, this stuff is all applicable to kids too. So that's the reason I know this and the reason I came up with this is and, by the way, Dr Cameron Caswell and I she's an adolescent psychologist she and I came up with the skills together, we wrote the book together, but I remember being a teacher and thinking, gosh, I'm not a therapist, I'm lacking tools, but as I taught in some of those reframes I did on my own and some of those things that I learned to do and then incorporated them made my teaching practice so much better. And in a leadership role I was like, wow, look at the adults who are just engaging with me in a different way. And so here's what I say. When those kids got to come to my class you know those kids who are placed in certain teachers' classrooms I was kind of that teacher. I had an elective class and they were put in my class, sometimes because they didn't really have any other place to belong, and I always said it's not because I was awesome, it's because I became skilled. And so I think our educators I know our educators just need some more skills to deal with this, to have that practice. I mean, when I'm working as a therapist, I'm thinking why is this so easy to teach kids and adults in a therapy session that they're now using in their lives? Why are we not equipping teachers better in teachers' colleges in their courses as pre-service teachers, and why are we not giving them the tools now so they can show up more confidently? That's what they're lacking. When they're having these problems with student behavior, it's because they don't know what to do. So we need to equip them with things that they can easily do. That infuses into their everyday practice. I know it, I've lived it myself. So again, that's a little bit of a rant with all of that, but there's just, it all connects and it's also possible. 0:19:13 - Lindsay Lyons I love that approach of this is a skill thing, right, Like I just have decided to build up these skills and I had the ability to find how to do it. I love that frame and everyone is capable of then doing it, which allows us all to grow and flourish together. Which is like everyone got into teaching because they love people and children and have care in their hearts. So like we just need the skills and then we'll be all set. 0:19:38 - Charle Peck Yeah, I mean, think about when you need to take a test. If you haven't studied and prepared, then you're not going to do well on it, but when you are, wow, you walk in there like let's do this. I want teachers feeling good about that and I want administrators feeling good about that, and I want administrators feeling good about their teachers showing up to their classrooms that way. 0:19:54 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Oh, what a beautiful dream and what a beautiful, like you said practical way to go about that. So I'm curious I think we've talked through a lot of different challenges. I'm wondering is there one kind of big challenge that you've seen people face that's fairly common, and how have you helped, kind of coach them through it or kind of what happens, or what happens with that kind of challenge? 0:20:16 - Charle Peck Yes, there's always two. The very first one is overwhelm. Teachers are overwhelmed, leaders are overwhelmed, and one of the things I already mentioned is insecurity. But one piece to this and that negative self-talk is another piece. But one of the pieces is decision-making. We have so many decisions to make in a day. We all know this. This is not new, but it's how do you make decisions that are not mindless? How do you make decisions that still align with who you are as a human and how you want to be seen to the world, and how you can go to bed at night not ruminating on what you did in that day? So part of it is let's have PD, where we help teachers do that well, and I do a lot of leadership conferences too and a lot of leadership workshops. We do this with leaders too, and it is so helpful because it's like it takes that weight or kind of all those cobwebs that are just kind of sitting in your mind and held in your body, right, and it lets those just kind of be released to have clarity, and so now you have a way to respond to that effectively. So one of the things, for example, if you know that you always want to lead with kindness and honesty. There's a process you can go through to constantly make a decision that leans back to that, and then you can create those neural networks in your brain to keep leaning back and make it more reflexive and, rather than having to practice it so much, it can be a reflective or, I'm sorry, very reflexive response, so that you don't have to spend too much time doing it and all those decisions you have to make. And the second one I will mention. So that's about us. So I always look at like, let's manage our own mental health and wellness. Let's start there as adults. That's how we're going to make the biggest change and transformations in our schools. The second one is kind of unique, where, when you have to help kids or somebody else as a leader, how do you help someone else make a decision quickly? A lot of times this can be done in crisis situations too, but sometimes you just need simple tools to do this, and so the very first one I just explained was informed decisiveness, and I wanna just like give you a picture here. It's about thinking about what you want versus what you don't want, and so the decision you're going to make in that moment is it leaning towards what you want or don't want. So you can use this for yourself, but you can also help others make this decision. Okay, so I'll tell you about Mason real quick. When I was working in the crisis unit in an adolescent hospital and this is acute care, like this is really tough stuff kids are dealing with and the cops dropped Mason off and they said this guy, if he does not comply to you and your mental health team, then we're taking him back to juvie, like we're just going to take him there. And we're like, well, that's not good mental health practice, so we're going to help him with that. So I said Mason, he was very impulsive, as we know a lot of teenagers are. It's very impulsive, and so he would hit things if he was upset. So I said let's think about what you want. What do you want? And he said well, I want freedom, and what don't you want? Well, I don't want to go to juvie, of course. Okay. So I said the next time you feel like you want to do something, come to me. So sure enough, not too much, not too much time had passed he came to me and he said oh my gosh, charlie, I want to punch this kid in the face and I'm like, well, that's not going to help you. So, but I didn't say that out loud, I wanted him to figure it out. And I said well, what don't you want, mason? Well, I don't want to go to Juby. What do you want, mason? I want freedom. And I said If you punch him in the face, is that going to lead you to the direction you want to go? And of course he said no. So I said what do you need to do? He said I'm going to. I need to go into my room and use the stress ball, calm down, use my breathing exercises, whatever works for him. And I said great, I will meet you in group in five minutes. And he did. And he showed up and he didn't punch back in the face, the face, and it's so simple. We have to have a simple tool and simple dialogue that we can use it with young kids, adults and anyone who's in the midst of stress and strain, so that it will work and they will remember to do it. And that's exactly what this particular tool did. 0:24:24 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that is so good. I absolutely love that. I love it for a variety of reasons. One, because someone who is listening can just go implement that today, right, like something super easy to do. And also I just love to circle back to your first point too that it seems like very values aligned, right, that decision-making, that's values aligned. And I think about the decisions I've made that I didn't feel good about afterwards. And it was never like a values agnostic decision. It was always like, oh, I feel bad about that because it violated one of my core values, like those are the ones that stay in my head, that stay in my body, right, and so that's. I love that approach because I think that that preemptively avoids all that additional like stress and weight because we didn't think about the values in making the decision. 0:25:09 - Charle Peck That's exactly right, and a lot of times people don't take the time and space to think about their values and so they don't have alignment back to them because they haven't taken the time to do that. It actually doesn't take very long, and that's what I love about doing the workshop. So there's a workshop that I do about. It's called Managing your Own Mental Health and Wellness pretty simple for educators and leaders, and it pulls in a few of those skills All about me, right, it's all about me. And how do I, how do I rest with that now, so that when I show up when it's busy and crazy, that I can manage it, and part of that is identifying what those values are and how do I get alignment with my decisions there, and so it does so much, it does so much. So, yeah, that's just one of the pieces, yeah. 0:25:51 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, I love it. 0:25:52 - Charle Peck Oh my gosh. 0:25:54 - Lindsay Lyons Okay, I feel like everyone listening is going to be like all right, give me Charlie's number, Like let's do this thing. So we'll talk about how you can do that in just a moment. But one thing before we move to that close what is one thing that you would encourage listeners to do once they end the episode? I feel like we've talked about a lot of things that they could do right now, in the next 10 minutes, but what's like kind of the one you want them to hold on to? 0:26:15 - Charle Peck I want them to identify the need for themselves that would help them make their job better and do better. So what is it that's keeping them over and over? There's a pattern there, there's a an emotional charge they get when they even just think about that thing. So what is the problem? And then, what is the unmet need underlying that for themselves? So, because they're leaders, I'm going to actually say two things. I want them to do that for themselves and I want them at the start, in August, or whenever they're going back for their first PD session, at the very beginning, I want them to ask their teachers what is it that you need to do your job better and you can even say under $10 or that doesn't cost anything, something like that. No-transcript no-transcript. It really is. 0:27:34 - Lindsay Lyons It's so simple and and I think it speaks to you know Mason's need for freedom, right, like it's just like everyone just wants the freedom and autonomy to be able to like get what they need and decide things and have a voice in their own like space what they need and decide things and have a voice in their own like space? 0:27:50 - Charle Peck Yes, and, and your educators will want to be in your space when you do this more, and it doesn't take much at all to do so. Yeah, it's, it's pretty simple. 0:27:57 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Okay, so my final two questions for you. One, super just for fun, does not have to relate to work, but, ken, what is something you've been learning about lately? 0:28:13 - Charle Peck Oh, my goodness, I have been throwing myself at a lot of different things. I keep throwing myself back at new practices with trauma and more neural connections of what's going on in our brain and body connection. A lot of it is refreshing, but there's a lot of new data out there. So that's kind of general. But to me and some people I know you can't use the word trauma, so just think of stress and how it shows up in your body. 0:28:31 - Lindsay Lyons So I know that's not that exciting but that's what I keep going back to. I think it's super exciting. Stuff like that relates on just like the day-to-day level very relevant, so I love relevant. 0:28:41 - Charle Peck Yeah, it shows up everywhere, everywhere. 0:28:44 - Lindsay Lyons Totally, and so the last question that I think folks are probably waiting for is where can listeners learn more about you, connect with you? I think you have resources to share, so if you want to talk about those, feel free to use this time. 0:28:55 - Charle Peck Oh, I would love to share the resource because it's absolutely free, of course, and it's a document. It's a 15-page document. Don't be overwhelmed by that. You can section it off. It's for you, as an administrator, to use with your mental health team members, so that's, with your school counselor, your AP, your school-based social worker and that rockstar teacher that has a great voice and a pulse on your whole school. Bring them into that darn meeting. And what it does is it has you do checklists of like, what is your school climate like now? So, as you're starting the year, it doesn't matter where you are in the year you still need to look at this, but you can just do checklists. And what it's there for is not to solve all your problems, but it's helping you identify the areas of need, more importantly, what your areas of strengths are, because you're doing a lot of things right. And then it helps you whittle down, kind of like okay, what is it that I need to focus on next or first in order to create a shift that we need desperately? So that is, it's called the school mental health audit. And, again, use it with your team. You also get some posters in the path of possibilities A poster of that. A visual is there that you can just hang up on the walls too. 0:30:00 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing and that's free for people, right? They can grab that for free, absolutely free. 0:30:04 - Charle Peck Yes. 0:30:05 - Lindsay Lyons Awesome. Did you want to talk at all about your course that folks might want to take as well? 0:30:13 - Charle Peck Yeah, I actually get a lot of people asking about this, because when they learn about it in the workshops, they're like how can I learn all the skills? So it's called the nine essential skills course. It's all self-paced. Some administrators are either handpicking people to take it because it's all self-paced. It's worth between nine and 12 credit hours. It's about how long it takes. There's a workbook, the slides are there. There's a video of me walking you through the slides. It's got all like some bonus items too. So if anyone wants to do that, just go to my website, thrivingeducatororg. That's thrivingeducatororg. Just click on courses and it's there. There's a few packages. People are asking me about coaching them through that course too, and that's an option as well. And some people and these are a lot of school counselors and APs actually want to learn how to facilitate this information to their staff. So there is a plan for that. They just have to ask me about it, because that's in production now. But yeah, just go to thrivingeducatororg. You can check out all that we do. We do speaking. There's courses, there's workshops, but click on the courses page. 0:31:15 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing and I'll link to that in the blog post version of this episode for folks, and I have to say this has been so exciting. I am so grateful for your time today and just all the thoughts that are immediately applicable to people's daily lives, no matter what role they hold, so I think people are going to get a lot of value out of this. Thank you so much, charlie. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much, lindsay.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
November 2024
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