Allison Rodman, the founder of The Learning Loop, explores how we create professional learning where trust sets the stage for vulnerability – a key to teacher learning. Professional learning is an ongoing daily process that should be supported by what might be labeled a professional development workshop. Effective professional learning positively impacts student learning outcomes. What commitments need to be held by district level staff, building leaders, instructional coaches as well as teachers?

Find Allie at The Learning Loop.

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Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.340] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:29.810] – Steve
What Earns Your Teacher’s Trust in a Professional Learning Session? Allison Rodman, the founder and chief learning officer of The Learning Loop, is returning to our podcast. Allison provides consulting and support for professional learning to schools, school districts, businesses, and nonprofit organizations internationally. She describes the goal of her work as helping adult learners view learning as an ongoing activity, strengthen their professional and organizational capacity, and create deliberately developmental organizations. I reached out to invite Allie back to the podcast when I read a recent post of hers where she asked this question: What earns your teacher’s trust in a professional learning session and what loses it in the first 10 minutes? Having many years of experience engaged in professional learning activities in different school settings and within different organizations, I was anxious to hear how Allie’s insights compared with mine.

[00:01:46.660] – Steve
Welcome, Allie.

[00:01:48.120] – Allie
Thank you so much, Steve. I appreciate the invitation. It’s wonderful to be back.

[00:01:52.790] – Steve
So as I was reflecting, I’ve been in this field a long time, and at the start of my career, schools were using the term, “in-service day,” and teachers complained terribly at the time of being in-serviced. Before I was in this business, I was one of those teachers being in service. Then we switched to the language of professional development, but being developed didn’t sound like the right thing either. So how do you describe what’s meant by professional learning? And is there a difference with that term in education and outside education?

[00:02:37.820] – Allie
Anytime I look at a district or organizational calendar, it’s very natural to see certain blocks colored a different way for what we’ve come over time to term these PD days, right? And I think that’s the same across industries. It’s a training day, it’s a professional development day. But what we sometimes forget is learning, particularly as a professional, isn’t limited to those blocks and boxes. And because of that, we approach them as these events rather than ongoing learning experiences. So as we make that shift from in-service to professional development to what most educators would refer to now as professional learning, it’s incredibly important that we think about that time and that space not as something being done to people, but instead in which they’re active participants and engaged collaborators in the space. And I don’t think we’re at that point just yet.

[00:03:36.250] – Steve
So I want to check a piece of what I think I’m hearing there. The learning is an ongoing thing. And the particular day of early dismissal or the day that the kids didn’t come in is an extra chunk of time to plug into that ongoing learning. So it’s either setting up something that’s going to come or it’s following up something we’re in the midst of. But from day to day, we don’t get that chunk of time. And so this special day is that chunk of time.

[00:04:09.950] – Allie
Absolutely. It’s that protected time, the one that gets its place on the calendar. But I think unfortunately, in doing that, we also sometimes forget that learning doesn’t stop. There are times when I pop into the classroom next door, I have a great conversation at the copy machine, or I just happen to catch a colleague in the hallway. Those conversations and engagements are just as meaningful, if not more meaningful, than the time that we’ve specifically slated on the calendar. When I think the real challenge arises is that as leaders and facilitators, and even sometimes the teachers ourselves, we get so focused on that day or that chunk of time that we forget all of the learning opportunities that we have to prepare for that time, to follow up after, to really think about how we keep that learning loop going. So when I work with facilitators, they’re hyper-focused on the slide deck, the resources, the materials, And then we step back and I say, well, have you even communicated to teachers or participants why you’re having this learning experience in the first place? Or is it just a PD day because that’s what your calendar tells you that it is?

[00:05:21.380] – Steve
Yeah, and it’s kind of the trouble we have with the connections of credits to PD time spent. People end up focused on collecting the credit versus the learning piece.

[00:05:41.130] – Allie
And that’s just it, right? We need X number of hours to maintain our certification, or we need X number of hours to meet state requirements or compliance requirements or school improvement requirements. My question isn’t how many seat hours, it’s the quality of learning that’s actually happening in that space, right? Because we can all go to a classroom and watch cartoons together for 3 hours, but it’s not going to produce high-quality learning for our students on Monday morning. Whereas sometimes that conversation by the copy machine might hold more value and more merit than the time that we’ve specifically blocked out on the calendar. So I think it really does call upon us as leaders and facilitators to get back to the why. Why are we making time for this? Why are we protecting time for this? And how are we best utilizing that time and that space that we have with teachers as well as the other educators across our system?

[00:06:32.900] – Steve
Well, in that statement that I pulled and caused me to reach out to you, you stated that trust in the learning activity needed to be earned, and I’m assuming not lost, when you talked about the first 10 minutes. So how do we build and support that trust?

[00:06:57.100] – Allie
One of the first things we need to do is make space for the learners in the room themselves. We will sometimes design professional learning in much the same way that we design our student learning, where it’s incredibly scripted, minute by minute by minute, that we don’t allow space for the problems to surface, the troubleshooting conversations to take place. And if we’re going to use that professional learning time as nothing more than a strategy dump, it’s not going to make its way into practice come the next day, week, or month, because we’ve gotta allow room for the people in the space to be able to have the tough conversations, to be able to openly share, hey, this may not work in my classroom and here’s why, or I have doubts about this leadership practice and this working in my building and here’s why. But unless there is time specifically allocated for those conversations amid the resources, the tools, the planning, we’re not really making space for that learning to grow. And when I talk about trust, it’s, yes, about that space, but it’s also about creating an environment where people can feel vulnerable and they can share, I don’t think this is gonna work, or, I did that and it blew up.

[00:08:15.150] – Allie
Can you help me figure out why? So instead, we come into classrooms often in chairs that are way too small for our adult bodies.

[00:08:24.740] – Steve
[laughter] Or the cafeteria table. That’s the one that’s worse to me.

[00:08:29.520] – Allie
The dreaded cafeteria table.

[00:08:30.950] – Steve
No back support. [laughter]

[00:08:31.830] – Allie
[laughter] Yeah, no back support, hard as can be, tables stuck together where you literally feel like you’re stuck, right? Mentally as well as physically. And we just give people stuff. And I’m not saying that this stuff is bad, right? I never want to leave a professional learning session and say, well, that was great and I had some really good conversation, but I don’t have the tools I need to be successful in my classroom or my building. So I don’t want to default completely to the other end of things where we don’t appropriately prepare for our professional learning sessions, or we don’t come equipped with the resources necessary for educators to be effective in their practice. But I also don’t want to go through every single minute and every single tool without allowing time and space for the real conversations to happen, because if Teacher A isn’t talking to Teacher B about what it looks like for their cohort or their section of students, you could design the most amazing professional learning in the world, and it’s never going to find its way into a classroom the next day.

[00:09:35.500] – Steve
So I’m thinking that successful professional learning, and I define that as eventually, I can show a positive impact on students. To me, that’s when I really know that the professional learning was effective. But to make that happen in a school system, it requires a commitment from lots of people in different roles. So I’d kind of like to throw those roles out to you one at a time. And if you would, what kind of commitment do people at that spot need to make? So let’s start with district-level staff. What commitment would you say district-level staff has to have in order for professional learning opportunities to be valuable?

[00:10:26.250] – Allie
District-level staff have an obligation and a professional responsibility to be incredibly clear on your goals and what your students need, because that needs to be the driver for everything. So you can bring in the most dynamic speaker within your field who gets people completely riled up and excited and energized, but if their message isn’t directly tied to where we need to be moving educators and ultimately students, you’re not meeting your professional responsibility. And there’s a need not only to identify what that is, but also to clearly communicate it. So is your strategic plan just a PDF that lives on the website? Do you go over student data once or twice a year because you’re obligated to do so, or do those metrics truly drive all of the decisions that you’re making? Not just in terms of the curricular programs that you’re purchasing, but the individuals who you might be bringing in to facilitate professional learning, the degree to which you are training the adults within your system to facilitate that professional learning in order to build more internal sustainability.

[00:11:44.270] – Allie
There’s just as much an obligation to be making those leadership moves as there is to go to the board meeting and report out on progress towards the strategic plan, right? It can’t just be – I think about sometimes, years ago, we would go through those curriculum development or redevelopment processes, and we would have these beautiful curriculum documents that would live in binders somewhere in the district or somewhere in our school, but it didn’t always find its way to day-to-day classroom practice. And I think there’s a parallel here with professional learning where we can design the most robust, intentional, and thoughtful strategic plans, district goals, mission, and vision, but if that’s not the through line that’s driving the professional learning work with our educators that we hope ultimately then makes that impact that you described, Steve, in the classroom, then we’ve missed the mark at the district level.

[00:12:41.860] – Steve
How about building-level administrators and instructional coaches?

[00:12:47.710] – Allie
When we think about that building-level leadership, yes, they need to be aware of the goals and they need to share some of that responsibility for carrying those goals out day to day. But they’ve also got to think about what their communication with teachers and other staff members looks like around those goals. So when you’re sending out that weekly update over email, are you just saying, today or tomorrow is our PD day for this quarter? Or are you clearly communicating what the goals and the learning objectives are for that day? Are you perhaps prepping or priming educators before they come into that day or that series of sessions to reflect on their own practice, to think about what are some of the gaps that they might be able to not only surface with colleagues, but hopefully fill through collaboration on that day so that teachers don’t just wake up in the morning and say, yep, I got a PD day today, right? But instead, they have a really clear direction on the purpose for the day and how they might develop their own skills as well as the skills of their colleagues to make that time as valuable as possible.

[00:13:56.660] – Steve
And okay to add that they should be there.

[00:14:00.600] – Allie
Yes, right. And I want to flesh out that word be, right?

[00:14:06.200] – Steve
Yes, thank you. Not standing in the doorway.

[00:14:10.440] – Allie
So like step 1 is yes, you came to the session, right? Like you are there, you are physically present. Are you psychologically present?

[00:14:20.020] – Steve
Right.

[00:14:20.380] – Allie
Or are you just kind of grading papers or doing things in the background, right? Because I think this is where we make that shift in the system of the responsibility from districts to building leaders to then teacher leaders and the teachers that are engaging in the professional learning is that it’s not just a matter of showing up, it’s about how you’re bringing your full self to the work and actively engaging in that meaningful conversation with your colleagues. But to be fair, it’s really hard for teachers and other staff members to do that if the through lines have not been clearly communicated, right? What are the goals? Why am I doing this? Kids ask us in the classroom all the time, “When am I ever going to use this? Why are we doing this?” And that communication is important not just for our students, but for the adults in our system as well.

[00:15:10.180] – Steve
It was a lot of years ago, but the picture is still seared in my head. I had teachers, I think, from 3 schools in a district together and the session was just going extremely, extremely well in that people were actively engaged. And I got to this one spot and I wanted to make a point and I said, now this carries over to administrators as well. And I said, where are the administrators?

[00:15:34.350] – Allie
Mm-hmm.

[00:15:35.840] – Steve
And not a hand went up in the room. People’s heads turned around to look and I thought I may as well have pulled a pistol and shot myself in the head because the air just like, sucked out of the room. And I just told everybody how important this is.

[00:15:53.730] – Allie
Exactly.

[00:15:54.620] – Steve
Everybody in the room just got a message of the importance of what it was that we were doing.

[00:16:00.230] – Allie
Or equally embarrassing is when you have administrators come to the session, and I’m saying this as a former leader myself, right? So I’m owning this, but you come to the session and then you just kind of sit in the back as an observer as opposed to commingling, being an active and engaged participant, and really thinking about what does this mean for the people doing the work with students every single day. So one of the things that I’ve started doing when planning professional learning sessions, as well as supporting facilitators who guide them, is running parallel tracks for what are some of the things that teachers can be thinking about with this prompt or this activity, but then what is the parallel responsibility of leaders that they should be thinking about in terms of their own action planning, instructional leadership, coaching, etc.?

[00:16:51.160] – Steve
So I’m working with a school right now that is going to be putting some teacher leaders out there leading the facilitation of professional learning for the first time. What would you say are some of the critical things for those folks to keep in mind?

[00:17:09.650] – Allie
I’m gonna take one step backward for a second, Steve, and talk about the professional learning for those folks.

[00:17:16.350] – Steve
Good.

[00:17:16.510] – Allie
Because I think, we see these individuals and they are absolute rock stars in the classroom with students, but we never take the time to make that correlation between andragogy and pedagogy to show them that adult learning can be different than student learning. So we just kind of put them in a room full of adults and hope that all goes well, saying, okay, you’re great facilitating for students, I’m sure you can handle a room full of adults. And that is absolutely not the case.

[00:17:47.000] – Steve
Sure.

[00:17:47.320] – Allie
So a lot of the work that I do with teacher leaders specifically, is building not only their facilitation skills, but their communication skills, mediation, problem solving. So I think that’s part of the first step is making sure that we are equipping them so that they can ultimately facilitate the content, the strategies, the conversation in a way that’s effective. But we can’t miss that piece of the puzzle. We spend so much time on teacher preparation and leader preparation and then just assume that those folks can lead professional learning experiences, and that’s not always the case.

[00:18:25.080] – Steve
That’s a great place for coaching to fit in. being able to provide those folks coaching pre and post to them taking on those activities.

[00:18:35.590] – Allie
Absolutely. Thinking about how are we helping them to see what was a really good facilitation move versus, we might have been able to draw some of the participants in that workshop or that PLC in a little bit more if we had made this one shift in our practice.

[00:18:51.470] – Steve
And speak a little bit – what’s the message that should be going out to teachers as they as they walk into a day for that learning to happen?

[00:19:03.430] – Allie
One of the things that you mentioned earlier in the conversation, Steve, is this idea of trust. And I think that too often trust is missing from those professional learning engagements for a variety of different reasons. It’s always been a compliance exercise, or I’ve got to get those seat hours. But I would encourage teachers to really think about how they’re entering those spaces and those opportunities as real opportunities to learn. But that means that you’re going to have to have some trust in the facilitator and you’re going to need to have some trust in yourself and your colleagues. And when we talk about trust from a research-based standpoint, it’s really the juxtaposition of 2 different factors that I often walk through with leaders and with facilitators. One is this idea of vulnerability, whether that’s individual vulnerability or shared vulnerability among the group. That I can come into that space and not have to put on the face that everything is perfect when it may in reality very well be a dumpster fire, but instead can walk in and say, you know what, this was a really hard week, or I’m really struggling with this section of students.

[00:20:12.730] – Allie
And that applies whether it is your first year of teaching or your 20th year of teaching. We’re all allowed in the profession, and I think we forget this sometimes, to struggle and to admit our challenges. But none of us are going to grow unless we can be vulnerable enough in those professional learning spaces to have the real authentic honest conversations with each other. And the second part of that is, it’s interesting because it’s kind of ironic, but the second part of building trust is strength. Being able to show each other, you know, hey wait, I did this, so I think I can do that. Or, you know, I made this move, maybe I trust this facilitator to be able to make this next one. Because when we talk about self-efficacy and ultimately collective efficacy, it’s built from those mastery experiences of being able to say, okay, I moved from point A to point B, or I tried that strategy and my classroom didn’t completely implode. I’m going to trust the facilitator that I can move now from point B to point C. And we develop that sense of strength and self-efficacy not only from seeing ourselves do that, but also from seeing colleagues do that.

[00:21:24.120] – Allie
So when teachers come into those professional learning experiences, I think we have a responsibility not just to ourselves and our own growth, but to one another to be able to share that progress and highlight that progress, not just keep it kind of hidden behind the four walls of our classroom. And sometimes, unfortunately, that’s what happens.

[00:21:45.660] – Steve
So the bingo word for me when you got to it was vulnerability, because I was sitting here with the word on the tip of my tongue and you punched it out there. If I look at it in a classroom, a teacher has to create a classroom environment where kids are comfortable enough to become vulnerable for learning to happen. And so you’re really establishing that that’s the professional culture we need to create in the school for the staff to show up feeling comfortable enough to be vulnerable. Because without that vulnerability, the learning is not going to happen.

[00:22:34.350] – Allie
And I think it’s really hard for our profession specifically because of the nature of what we do. So we’re not on a production line creating widgets and hitting particular sales targets. We’re essentially waking up every single morning, coming to our places of work, and helping to grow humans, right? So there’s a lot of complexity, and that’s why we talk about teaching and leading not just being a science, because there are very scientifically driven ways to learn, but also in art, we need to think on our feet. We need to be responsive to what’s happening in the room. And because of that, whether you’re sitting in the teacher role or the teacher role or the teacher role or the leader role, there is this incredible amount of pressure to keep it all together, to make it look like all of the plates are spinning, the balls are in the air, and In that, I think we develop the mindset and unfortunately the automatic response that we’re not vulnerable, we don’t have any challenges, we’re the expert in the classroom or the expert in the building because people are counting on us. But we need to create professional learning spaces where those guards can come down, where we can have the real conversations and just say, yeah, this lesson was really darn hard.

[00:23:58.010] – Allie
I’m struggling. How did your students respond to it? What does your student work look like? What adjustments do we need to make in our grade level, our content area team, or across the building so that we can all develop our effectiveness in this particular area? But that idea of vulnerability and admitting we don’t have all the pieces, we don’t have everything together, is so hard for us.

[00:24:24.960] – Steve
Sounds like you’re describing professional learning communities.

[00:24:30.750] – Allie
Professional learning communities. And it’s hard because I think that term means so many different things.

[00:24:36.230] – Steve
A real professional learning community is what you were describing.

[00:24:38.530] – Allie
Correct, right? Because I think we’ve slapped that term PLC on pretty much everything, just to be like, okay, it’s a collaborative space. But when we think about that real definition of a professional learning community, where there’s the vulnerability, the collaboration, the Data-driven conversations. Yes, we, we need to show up and be fully engaged and, and have the tough conversations, not just come into a room on a Tuesday afternoon, leave with a packet and a couple of strategies we can use with our students, but really understand what’s the intention behind that strategy. Where have other teachers struggled that I can learn from and grow from? And that’s the part that too often is missing in our professional learning sessions and that ultimately erodes trust.

[00:25:27.800] – Steve
That’s why my work with professional learning communities, my key question is, what do the kids need us to learn?

[00:25:36.060] – Allie
Yes.

[00:25:36.220] – Steve
So when that group of teachers sits down and you’re looking at data or you’re looking at the student work or you’re looking at your standards, that’s the question you’re asking yourself. The student needs are what’s going to drive my learning. Talk a little bit about how instructional coaching and peer coaching fit into professional learning.

[00:25:59.530] – Allie
You mentioned earlier the idea of district and building leaders being in those professional learning sessions, and I think it’s equally important in the cases where instructional coaches may not be facilitating those professional learning sessions that they’re in them as well, that they hear firsthand what are the strategies that are being recommended to teachers or that teachers are being given an opportunity to explore, what are some of the challenges that they’re surfacing in the course of those sessions, because then you want that through line to carry into the coaching that you do. I think this is sometimes why we feel as though education and our education of teachers specifically feels like the flavor of the week. I remember as an administrator or as a teacher, anytime my leaders would go to a conference, I would just get incredibly nervous and be like, okay, what are they bringing back this time? Right? Like, you knew it was inevitable. It was going to be a program or a tool or a strategy. You just kind of waited. And then those of us who had been around long enough sort of waited a little longer to see what was actually going to stick 3 months later.

[00:27:08.960] – Allie
So as a coach, we want to be that connective tissue that helps the through lines stick, so that it’s not just this one workshop that I went to, or this one PLC that I happen to be a part of, but instead it’s truly an integrated ongoing conversation about my practice. So that when that coach comes into my classroom and sees me struggling in a particular area, or sees an opportunity for refinement in another, they’re able to point back directly to that professional learning experience and say, “Hey, do you remember when we sat shoulder to shoulder and looked at this strategy, or we watched that video together? I think there’s a perfect fit for that in your practice or in your work with this particular section of students.” As opposed to our learning with adults feeling like this PD day here, this PLC over here, your curriculum meeting, your grade-level meeting, your instructional coach, we truly have a responsibility at all levels of the system to make sure those pieces are interconnected and that that interconnectedness is actively communicated to the people doing the work.

[00:28:20.180] – Steve
So, yeah, this may be a curveball question. I don’t know, just toss it out there. What are you processing as your thoughts of how AI might be impacting the field, I guess, of professional learning?

[00:28:39.320] – Allie
It’s the word of the week, right? I think about when we would sit down with Sesame Street as little kids, and it was like, today’s letter of the week is… Well, today’s letters of the week in education right now are certainly AI. It comes up in every conversation I’m having with leaders and teachers. And yes, it certainly comes up in these conversations about professional learning. much like the concerns that we have about AI in our student spaces, I think there are similar concerns that we need to be aware of about AI in our adult learning spaces. And I say this as someone who very much uses aspects of AI when appropriate in their professional work, but does so cautiously and intentionally. And I think that’s because I’ve seen the product of what can happen if you’re not asking the right questions, if you’re not being a thoughtful consumer, or if you’re not really strong on the design end of things. So we think about a teacher that just kind of plugs in, “Give me a small group instruction activity for X, Y, and Z.” Well, that’s great, but does the agent know who your students are, what their instructional levels are, what they specifically need, what the data is showing.

[00:30:01.990] – Allie
All of those are very important variables that seasoned teaching professionals know and integrate into strong instructional planning. The opposite side of the same coin is what we’re doing for adult learning. And you can’t just go into an AI agent and say, I’m leading a workshop on formative assessment that’s 60 minutes long, and I want to integrate this particular strategy. Because what you’re going to get back is a bunch of junk, quite honestly, no different than a teacher who’s doing that level of planning or prompting at the classroom level. So some of my work recently has been working with facilitators and professional learning designers specifically to use those AI agents more intentionally and responsibly by first, identifying what are the right inputs. Are we even describing this group of learners? Do you even know, right, this group of learners that’s coming into the space? And then how are we judiciously kind of weeding through the responses that we get back to make sure that we’re personalizing and tailoring for the learners that are actually showing up in the room? Because that’s how trust is built. You’re hearing the voices, you’re seeing the reactions, you’re incorporating the human element of the work to make sure that that takes up as much space as the design element, whether that’s AI-designed or human-designed.

[00:31:33.650] – Steve
Yeah, I would say myself, when I find that I’ve done something effective with AI, it’s caused me to put more time into thinking about what I was doing than had I not. So whatever time it may have saved me in that it designed the chart I was looking for, it raised 3 other questions, or caused me to raise 3 other questions and look at, look at another direction. But a lot for us to figure out.

[00:32:10.490] – Allie
Yeah, it can be a really strong thought partner because I’ll give it – and I have been doing this work for years. So we give it all of this information, we’re pre-thinking through our intent, the way that we want to reach a particular group of teachers and leaders, and we’re sharing all of that. But as you described, it then comes back with 3, 6, 7, other questions where I’m like, wow, that’s some really good perspective-taking that I haven’t had an opportunity to take, and I do need to make a value judgment here about Is this the best use of time? Is this the right facilitation move? Is it the most appropriate strategy or tool? So when given the proper inputs and the right level of intention and thought, I think that’s where I see AI being a valuable tool in this professional learning space, is that thought partner to kind of push us outside of the box to think a little bit differently than perhaps we have, because ultimately, teaching and leading are very isolating professions. We stick a teacher in a room with 30 kids and they close the door, right?

[00:33:14.480] – Allie
We put a teacher, we put a leader in a building and they’re responsible for all of the people within that space. And we don’t get enough time for that thought partnership. So while at the end of the day, I would love for that thought partnership to be that human connection as much as possible, I also think there is some value in having that other tool to bounce ideas off of, to think things through perhaps a little bit more critically than we might do independantly or in our office.

[00:33:45.330] – Allie
I knew that I could count on you to come on and trigger my thinking, and I’m sure the thinking of the listeners on here. Any closing thoughts you’d like to share here as we wrap up?

[00:34:03.940] – Allie
First of all, thank you so much for the invitation, Steve. I always love having these conversations together, and you certainly push my thinking in in new ways, so I’m truly appreciative of that. I would say the final thought is to not focus on that one block of PD or the multiple blocks of PD that are on the calendar and only design for that. We have to think about what does that ongoing learning loop look like for educators across the system. So whether you’re leveraging internal expertise to facilitate those sessions or you’re bringing in an outside speaker, or you’re working with someone else in a different district or even another field, we’ve got to move beyond the idea that the PD day is just the PD day. The trust is built when that PD day is appropriately planned for, designed, facilitated, includes the voices and perspectives of the people in the room, and then ultimately doesn’t drop off when the day is over. But instead, coaches continue to come back to the content from that day. Leaders continue to frame their work within the strategies, the tenets, the approaches of that day. That’s when we see the true adult learning continue beyond just the days that we have it slated for on the calendar.

[00:35:26.730] – Steve
Well, Allie, what’s the best way for listeners to follow up with you, keep track of the work that you’re doing, maybe drop you some questions that they have?

[00:35:37.160] – Allie
They are more than welcome to reach out to me on social media at The Learning Loop, as well as on my website, www.thelearningloop.com. I do send out a weekly newsletter with free resources, tools, and some of the thought questions, much like you and I explored today, Steve. So I would love to connect with folks in any of those spaces.

[00:36:00.410] – Steve
The newsletter that caused me to reach out and connect back with you. So, I encourage listeners to look that up. Thanks so much.

[00:36:11.590] – Allie
Thank you, Steve. I appreciate it.

[00:36:15.170] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn @SteveBarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

Recently, I was preparing a 30-minute kickoff for a school district entering its second year of professional learning community (PLC) implementation. During the first year, teachers had discovered many of the benefits that come from having dedicated time to work with colleagues. They shared strategies and resources, problem-solved around student needs, developed greater consistency across classrooms, and built stronger professional relationships.

Those are important outcomes. But they raised another question for me: When does a professional working community become a professional learning community? Teachers can work together very effectively without necessarily learning together. A team can coordinate lessons, share materials, develop common assessments, discuss students, and solve immediate problems. All of that is valuable. But the L in PLC asks for something more of us. It’s why I stress the PLC question, “What do our students need us to learn?”            

Schools need both. The issue is whether time designated for professional learning moves beyond getting work done to generating new learning.

As I prepared for the district’s second year of PLC work, I developed a six-part framework to help teams move from identifying a student need or desired outcome to engaging in a collective inquiry process.

Goal — What change do we want to see in student success? This could be overall growth in a content area or growth for an identified group of students who are currently underperforming. In addition to content standards, the goal might focus on critical life skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, or critical thinking.

Student learning-production behaviors needed — What would students need to do differently to produce the desired outcome? Students cause student achievement. What students do as learners—thinking, practicing, questioning, persisting, collaborating, revising—produces their learning.

Hypothesis — What do we believe teachers might do differently that would increase the student behaviors needed to produce the desired outcome? The hypothesis connects changes in teacher actions to anticipated changes in student learning production behaviors.

Teacher moves — What specifically will we do differently to test our hypothesis? These are the instructional actions, strategies, prompts, structures, or responses that teachers will intentionally implement.

What might we look for? — What evidence would indicate that student learning behaviors are changing? These signs provide early indications of progress. If they aren’t appearing, we have reason to revisit our hypothesis and teacher moves rather than simply waiting for the eventual outcome.

What is the PLC learning? — What are we discovering about the relationship between our actions and students’ responses? What seems to be working, for whom, and under what conditions? How can we use that learning to determine what we try next?

Here is an example of how the framework might unfold around a goal of increasing students’ problem-solving attempts before requesting teacher help or giving up. Notice that the PLC doesn’t begin by deciding what teachers should do. It first identifies what students need to do differently and then builds a hypothesis about the teacher actions that might produce those behaviors.The hypothesis in this example isn’t a prescription or a promise that these teacher moves will produce the desired student behaviors. It is the PLC’s best thinking about where to begin. The learning comes from putting that thinking into action, observing students’ responses, and returning to the PLC with evidence. Perhaps students begin persisting longer but still turn quickly to the teacher rather than using peers or other resources. Perhaps the strategy works for some students but not others. Each finding gives the PLC something new to explore.

That’s why I see the framework as a cycle rather than a plan to be implemented:

Desired outcome → Student learning behaviors → Hypothesis → Teacher moves → Evidence → PLC learning → What do we try next?

Effective PLCs stay engaged in this cycle. They remain curious about what students are doing and how students are responding to changes in teacher practice. Both evidence of progress and evidence of a lack of progress inform what the PLC decides to do next. The learning gained from that inquiry can then be applied to future teaching and learning situations.

In strong schools, that PLC learning doesn’t remain within the team. It is shared across the school—and perhaps across the district—so that the learning of one group can benefit other colleagues and students.

A professional working community asks, “What are we going to do?” A professional learning community adds, “What are we learning from what we do?”

When we enter a coaching conversation, we need to consider two layers. One is visible: the lesson design, the teacher’s actions, student participation, questions and responses, and evidence of learning. The other is less visible. It includes the teacher’s beliefs and assumptions, confidence and uncertainty, previous experiences, fears and concerns, values and intentions, sense of responsibility, and hopes for students – an “invisible thread.” -(Randi Brown)

Read Randi Brown’s article, “Supporting Teacher Growth Through Trusting Relationships”

Find Joellen Killion’s insights on Heavy Coaching in this previous blog.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.340] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:29.760] – Steve
What the Observation Doesn’t Show: Coaching the Invisible Behind the Visible. A classroom observation gives us access to what happened. Coaching requires curiosity about what sits behind what happened. When I provide training in coaching skills, I stress the importance of understanding the teacher’s agenda before an observation. The teacher’s agenda includes more than the instructional plan, the desired student learning behaviors, and the intended learning outcomes. It also includes the thinking and the person behind the plan. A teacher’s decisions may be influenced by what they believe about teaching and learning, what they value for their students, the confidence they have in themselves and in their learners, and experiences that have shaped their practice. Some of that thinking may be readily expressed. Some of it may emerge only as the teacher reflects and the coach keeps listening and finding out.

[00:01:46.520] – Steve
I describe my goal in a pre-observation conference this way: I want to be able to observe the lesson first through the teacher’s eyes before I observe it through my own. I may never see everything the teacher sees, but the more I understand what matters to the teacher and what has shaped their choices, the less likely I am to impose my own meaning on what I observed. Randi Brown reinforced that thinking for me in an Edutopia article titled, “Supporting Teacher Growth Through Trusting Relationships. She writes, “Every classroom is its own small ecosystem, and the teacher is at the center of that ecosystem. Their experiences, confidence, fears, values, heartbreaks, and sense of purpose quietly shape everything that grows within it. Students don’t simply respond to instruction. They respond to the human being leading the room.” That requires me as a coach to know something about the human being leading the room. Brown suggests that when we enter a coaching conversation, we consider 2 layers. One is visible. The lesson design, the teacher’s actions, student participation, questions and responses, and the evidence of learning. The other is less visible. It includes the teacher’s beliefs and assumptions, confidence and uncertainty, previous experiences, fears and concerns, values and intentions, sense of responsibility, and hopes for the student.

[00:03:46.090] – Steve
Brown calls this second layer the invisible thread. We observe the visible thread, but we coach at the intersection of the visible and the invisible. Consider an example. A coach observes a teacher asking questions designed to uncover what students recall from previous lessons. Understanding that’s going to be important for today’s learning. After only a few seconds of silence following a question, the teacher calls on a student. When the student hesitates, the teacher rephrases the question and then supplies much of the answer. This pattern occurs several times before the teacher introduces the new learning. The coach can accurately record each of those actions, but the observation alone does not reveal what is driving them. The teacher may be worried that students are confused. Silence may cause the teacher to feel that the lesson is unsuccessful. The teacher may be trying to protect students from embarrassment. Previous attempts at waiting may have led to disengagement. The teacher may doubt that students will respond without prompting, or the teacher may be feeling pressure to cover everything planned for the day’s lesson. The visible behavior is real, but the meaning is not self-evident. That meaning is unlikely to be uncovered by directly asking the teacher to explain their beliefs, fears, or past experiences.

[00:05:39.860] – Steve
The invisible thread tends to emerge more gradually in the stories that the teacher tells, the concerns that they repeat, the choices that they defend, the possibilities that energize them. And the risk they hesitate to take. The coach’s observation notes tell us what occurred. Listening to the teacher helps us explore why it occurred and what the teacher might want to do next. Observation produces evidence. Conversation produces meaning. Consider how a conversation might unfold following the observation in which the teacher gave students only 2 or 3 seconds to respond. The coach might begin: You asked me to pay attention to how students responded as you checked their understanding from the earlier lessons. What did you notice?

[00:06:45.650] – Teacher
They didn’t seem to remember very much. I had to keep prompting them and almost pull the answers out of them.

[00:06:52.990] – Steve
Their silence suggested to you that they weren’t recalling the earlier learning?

[00:06:58.390] – Teacher
Yes. When no one answers, I assume either they don’t know or that my question wasn’t clear, and that’s why I rephrase it.

[00:07:07.240] – Steve
So when the students don’t respond, you’re feeling a responsibility to do something that gets the lesson moving again?

[00:07:16.230] – Teacher
I do. I’m conscious of how much I need to cover, and I don’t want the lesson to stall before we even get into the new material.

[00:07:25.610] – Steve
So waiting actually creates 2 concerns for you: that students may not understand and that you may not get to the new learning that you’ve got planned.

[00:07:36.130] – Teacher
Exactly.

[00:07:38.180] – Steve
Would you like to hear something that I noticed as you were waiting?

[00:07:42.780] – Teacher
Sure.

[00:07:44.370] – Steve
Most of your pauses were about 2 or 3 seconds. Twice I noticed students beginning to raise their hands just as you started rephrasing the questions. I’m wondering what you make of that.

[00:08:00.010] – Teacher
Hmm, perhaps I’m reading their silence too quickly. They may be thinking, and I’m interpreting it as not knowing.

[00:08:09.250] – Steve
Yeah, silence might mean that they don’t know, but it might also mean that they’re processing.

[00:08:16.660] – Teacher
Yes, and they may have learned that they don’t need to struggle very long because I’ll eventually give them enough of an answer.

[00:08:24.920] – Steve
So you’re wondering whether your efforts to keep the lesson moving might unintentionally be reducing the thinking students need to do.

[00:08:36.480] – Teacher
That’s uncomfortable to consider, but probably true. I’ve always felt that keeping the discussion moving was my responsibility.

[00:08:46.940] – Steve
Stepping back may require you to sit with some discomfort while students discover that you aren’t going to do the thinking for them.

[00:08:56.340] – Teacher
They may need to become comfortable with that discomfort too.

[00:09:01.510] – Steve
What might you want to try?

[00:09:04.290] – Teacher
Well, I could let the silence last longer. I might ask students to just jot down what they remembered or talk to a partner before responding. I could also tell them why I’m changing what I do.

[00:09:18.580] – Steve
What might I observe as you try that?

[00:09:22.650] – Teacher
Watch what the students do during the silence. Do they begin writing, look back at their materials, signal that they’re ready, or turn to a classmate and see whether more students contribute without me pulling the answers from them.

[00:09:39.100] – Steve
The invisible thread wasn’t apparent from the observation alone. The coach could see that the teacher usually waited only 2 or 3 seconds, frequently rephrased questions, and sometimes supplied the answers herself. The conversation revealed what the observation could not. The teacher was interpreting silence as confusion, felt responsible for maintaining the lesson’s momentum, and worried about covering the planned learning. As the conversation continued, the teacher began to question whether her efforts to help students might actually be reducing their responsibility for thinking. The coach didn’t diagnose that belief or confront the teacher with it. Careful listening, paraphrasing and relevant observation evidence allowed the teacher to uncover it herself. Trust is necessary for coaching to have an impact. At the same time, trust grows through experiences like this. When teachers experience the coach seeking to understand before responding. Joellen Killian’s distinction between light and heavy coaching provides an interesting lens for examining this conversation. Light coaching tends to focus on support, resources, encouragement, and assistance. Heavy coaching pushes more directly toward examining beliefs, assumptions, decisions, and their impact on student learning. The coach is supportive throughout this conversation, but the coaching becomes heavier when the teacher begins examining her belief about responsibility and the possible effect of her choices on students.

[00:11:53.950] – Steve
Support and challenge are not opposites. Support makes the challenge possible. The teacher’s willingness to examine an uncomfortable possibility is evidence of trust, and the coach’s response to that vulnerability can deepen the trust further. The decision is not whether light or heavy coaching is better. The decision is what will best support the teacher’s learning at this moment. An earlier question for the coach might be, what do I know, and what do I still need to find out about this teacher? That kind of knowing isn’t established in a single pre-conference or coaching cycle. It develops as the coach keeps finding out. Each conversation provides another opportunity to discover what the teacher values, what they are working toward, what concerns them, where they feel confident, where are they uncertain, and what they may be ready to question. Each time a teacher experiences a coach seeking to understand before responding, another piece of the invisible thread becomes visible and trust grows. A classroom observation gives us access to what happened. Knowing the teacher helps us explore what sits behind what happened and what might happen next. Observe what is visible. Stay curious about what is invisible. Coaching begins with knowing, and knowing begins and continues with finding out.

[00:13:57.270] – Steve
As you enter your next coaching observation and conference, consider how the invisible thread combines with the visual to maximize your understanding that guides your coaching support. Reach me at barkleypd.com with your questions or insights. Links to Killian’s and Brown’s articles are in the podcast lead-in. And as always, thanks for listening.

[00:14:26.770] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn @SteveBarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

Thomas McKenna, in his ASCD blog, Sensemaking in Science, describes how he, as a researcher, experienced firsthand what it means to pursue a question that genuinely puzzles you. He spent countless hours observing, collecting messy data, and wrestling with questions that had no clear answers. The process was iterative and uncertain. Initial observations led to new questions, different approaches, and unexpected results that challenged his assumptions.

“Real science isn’t about students confirming what they already know—it’s about making sense of what puzzles and intrigues them.”

                                                                                                      (Thomas McKenna)

McKenna identifies how science educators increasingly view learning as a process of sensemaking. Rather than beginning with explanations that students are expected to absorb, teachers create opportunities for students to encounter phenomena, ask questions, gather evidence, develop explanations, and revise their thinking.

If we believe students learn more deeply by making sense of what they encounter rather than simply receiving someone else’s explanation, shouldn’t the same be true for teachers?

Another statement from McKenna caused me to dig further into the similarities between science education and instructional coaching: “We didn’t give answers upfront. We positioned students as capable investigators with their own ideas worth exploring.” The goal is not simply for students to learn today’s science content, but to kindle the curiosity that fuels lifelong learning.

Effective coaches take a similar approach, positioning teachers as capable investigators with their own ideas worth exploring. Rather than providing answers upfront, coaches create opportunities for teachers to question, investigate, and construct their own understanding—habits that fuel career-long professional learning.

McKenna provides a list of ten ways to value wonder and create environments where curiosity thrives by shifting how we frame learning experiences and interact with student thinking. I pulled four that I believe have a direct carryover to effective coaching.

1. Start with phenomena, not explanations.

In science, McKenna encourages teachers to begin with something students observe that puzzles them and give them space to wonder before providing an explanation. Coaches can take a similar approach by helping teachers begin with what they observed rather than immediately interpreting what happened.

A coach might ask, “What did you notice?” “What did you see or hear from students?” “Was there anything that surprised you or puzzled you?” The coach can stay with the phenomenon before moving toward an explanation: “What else did you notice?” “How many students responded that way?” “When did you first see it happening?”

Only after the phenomenon has been described does the conversation move toward making sense of it: “What are you thinking might be happening?” “What are you wondering?”

Starting with the phenomenon keeps the coach from making sense of the classroom for the teacher. Instead, the coach creates the opportunity for the teacher to notice, wonder, and begin constructing an explanation.

2. Ask, “What does this remind you of?”

In science, McKenna suggests inviting students to connect new observations to experiences and understandings they already have. Coaches can do the same by helping teachers place what they are noticing into a broader context.

After a teacher describes what they observed, a coach might ask, “Have you seen students respond this way before?” “Does this remind you of anything you’ve noticed with this class or other groups?” “When have you seen students respond differently?” Those questions can help a teacher recognize patterns that might otherwise remain unnoticed. A teacher might say, “Now that I think about it, they tend to ask for help quickly whenever the task is open-ended. When the steps are clearly laid out, they work much more independently.”

The coach can then probe the connection: “What do you make of that difference?” “What might that tell you about what students are experiencing when the task is less structured?” Inviting teachers to connect current observations with previous experiences honors what they already know while also helping them examine that knowledge more closely. Sensemaking doesn’t begin from scratch; it builds from what the learner already knows, has experienced, and is beginning to notice.

3. Honor learners as experts.

McKenna encourages science teachers to recognize that students bring knowledge, experiences, perspectives, and different forms of expertise to an investigation. Instructional coaches can approach teachers in much the same way.

Teachers possess knowledge that a coach does not. They know their students, the history of the class, what they have previously tried, how individual students tend to respond, and what they were intending when they made particular instructional decisions. That knowledge becomes an important part of the sensemaking process.

A coach might ask, “What do you know about these students that might help us understand what we’re seeing?” “What have you already tried?” “What were you considering when you made that decision?”

Honoring the teacher as an expert doesn’t mean assuming that the teacher’s interpretation is necessarily correct—or that the coach has no expertise to contribute. It means approaching the conversation with the belief that the teacher possesses important knowledge that needs to be surfaced and explored. When coaches position teachers as capable investigators with expertise worth contributing, teachers are more likely to be active participants in making sense of teaching and learning rather than recipients of someone else’s analysis.

4. Make revision a normal part of learning.

McKenna reminds us that scientists revise their thinking as they encounter new evidence. The same should be true for teachers investigating teaching and learning. Sensemaking isn’t about arriving quickly at the right explanation. It is about developing a hypothesis, testing it against what happens, and being willing to revise that hypothesis as new evidence emerges.

A coach can help a teacher turn an initial interpretation into a hypothesis worth investigating. “What are you thinking might be happening?” “If that’s the case, what might you try?” “What would you expect students to do if your hypothesis is accurate?” “What evidence might cause you to revise your hypothesis?”

Making revision normal keeps coaching from becoming a search for the right answer. Instead, teacher learning becomes an ongoing process of developing hypotheses, gathering evidence, revising thinking, and generating new questions.

Perhaps one of the most important questions a coach can ask themselves is: Am I making sense of what happened for the teacher, or am I creating the conditions for the teacher to make sense of it?

Coaches certainly have expertise to contribute. There are times when sharing an observation, offering information, or suggesting a possibility can advance a teacher’s thinking. But if we move too quickly to our own interpretation or solution, we may unintentionally take away the very thinking that produces professional learning.

McKenna’s description of students as “capable investigators with their own ideas worth exploring” offers a powerful image for instructional coaching as well. When teachers are encouraged to notice closely, connect what they observe to what they already know, draw upon their expertise, develop hypotheses, and revise their thinking as new evidence emerges, coaching becomes more than a process for improving a lesson or solving a problem.

Coaching becomes an opportunity to strengthen teachers as curious, reflective investigators of teaching and learning.

“We don’t have a teacher shortage. We have a shortage of sustainable, team-designed teaching jobs.” – Roger Osorio

Positive results emerge when educators genuinely share students and responsibility, collaborate around instruction, distribute expertise, and possess meaningful decision-making authority. Teaming can create the daily observation, feedback, and reflection opportunities that make peer coaching part of the work rather than an added activity. Teaching is a team sport.

Find Roger Osorio on LinkedIn here.

Tune into the The Ensemble School Podcast here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.340] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:29.790] – Steve
Transforming the “One Teacher, One Classroom Paradigm.” Here’s a statement on LinkedIn that caused me to reach out and invite Roger Osorio to join our podcast: “When educators burn out, we offer wellness seminars or we hand them an AI copilot to write lesson plans faster. We treat a structural architectural failure as an individual endurance problem.” Now, listeners who frequent this podcast or my blog know my mantra: teaching is a team sport and a public act. So Roger’s description of transforming the one-teacher, one-classroom paradigm jumped out at me. And a pre-podcast check-in with Roger has me really looking forward to our conversation here today. Roger Osorio is a former middle and high school math teacher, a Penn Graduate School of Education faculty member, and a professor of entrepreneurship at Sarah Lawrence College.

[00:01:46.330] – Steve
He’s hosting a new podcast, The Ensemble School, where he’s exploring how we move from isolated solo teachers to orchestrated educator teams, teams that produce transformational learning experiences. Welcome, Roger. So glad you’re here.

[00:02:04.130] – Roger
Thanks so much, Steve. I’m really glad that we connected around this topic.

[00:02:08.370] – Steve
So Roger, you shared with me early on that you were led to teaching from experiences you had tutoring students. What was it that you dicovered from theose experiences?

[00:02:18.070] – Roger
Yeah, so I’ll take you back to the original context. I was working in corporate right out of university. I went to Penn State, graduated with finance and international business degrees, and I was part of a leadership development program at a company. So it’s one of those fast-track programs where they rotate you around the company for about 3 to 4 years. And things were going really well. In fact, I had landed a really great job right out of the program where my client was Anheuser-Busch. So I was having a blast to say the least, going to all of their parties and getting all access passes. The dream job for a single 25, 26-year-old guy. Like, this is the perfect job. But I had this little part-time job on the side where I was tutoring math at a local learning center so that I could pay off my student loans a little bit faster. And along the way, I fell in love with what I was doing in those 6 to 8 hours a week versus the 40 to 50 hours that I was putting into the day job. And as fun as the day job was, there was something so fulfilling about what I was doing in the evening.

[00:03:21.570] – Roger
And as I got more into the work, what I discovered was that the problem that students were having wasn’t with math itself. It wasn’t the topic. In fact, I often tell students, especially my math students, that math is really easy. It’s actually, they make it sound hard. It’s one of those subjects that I feel like people want it to seem special and hard. So those who are really good at it, you know, like, oh, they feel special. But I tell my students, I go, I promise you, it is not that impressive. And once we get into it, you’ll see why. And what I found the real problem was, it wasn’t the topic, it was confidence or a lack thereof.

[00:03:54.990] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:03:55.630] – Roger
Students that I was working with in these learning centers, their confidence had been beat down. I mean, it was beat to a pulp and there was not much left. And so what I did was when I got in there, I sensed that and I got to work on that. And I discovered that when you help a student rebuild their confidence in math, then your job, your only job as a tutor, and later I learned this as a teacher, is to get out of their way. Because now you’ve got somebody who knows how to learn, because we all are hardwired to know how to learn, and now they have the confidence to move forward even when things don’t go well or things aren’t going perfect. And that inspired me to do more with this. Tutoring wasn’t enough. I wasn’t getting my fill anymore after some time with tutoring, and I needed more. And that’s where I thought to myself, what if I reinvented myself from this guy who’s doing sales and marketing at a big corporation to a math teacher? And so I got onto that journey in 2008. I quit my corporate job, and I started to pave that path.

[00:04:54.460] – Roger
And I had no idea what it was going to look like. I had no idea how long it was going to take. But I got to work. I started a tutoring business so I could tutor more hours than just the learning center. So I had the learning center hours, I had my own business hours, and then I went back to school. I got a master’s in psychology focused on executive coaching, and that was because I felt that that was the only topic or the only degree that helps you learn how to grow people. When I looked at all the master’s in education, pedagogy, administration, classroom management, a lot of really interesting topics, don’t get me wrong, but I go, but which one of these shows you how you grow a human? How do you develop a human? And I found that to exist and live in executive coaching. So I did that. And 4 years after I quit my corporate job, almost, almost to the day, was when I landed my first opportunity in a classroom, like a formal classroom.

[00:05:48.140] – Steve
So Roger, in a piece that you wrote that I had the chance to read, you stated that teachers leave the profession – and I want to put this string of words out and phrases out here that you use – that teachers leave the profession after dealing with profound isolation, unsustainable emotional load, and structural burnout. So would you define those a little further for us? And I guess both what did you experience as a teacher and what did you see in your colleagues that leads you to those words?

[00:06:26.840] – Roger
Yeah. So one of the reasons I wanted to be in the classroom, in addition to doing more, like I said, with students, was because I had been reading a lot of articles as I got into the education world that would often suggest that teachers were the problem. They don’t care, they don’t even know what they’re teaching very well. You’ve got the wrong teacher in the wrong room. Long story short, a lot of blame being placed on teachers, and it was almost like the easy answer. And I felt like this is a little too easy and a little too convenient. And a lot of these articles are pointing to these problems, YouTube videos on the same topic. I mean, there were a lot of things that I thought, man, this is really strange. How can we blame teachers so easily? Well, I thought one of the best ways to find out is to get in there. And when I got in there, I started working with teachers. In my first teaching experience, I had teachers on the team that were probably like 4 to 5 years out of university, and then I had some that were 20+ years.

[00:07:24.120] – Roger
So I had a nice range, a nice variety there to learn from. And one of the things that I learned from working with them was that there was a – well, one, the article was not 100% wrong. You know what? Yeah, I could see how teachers could seem like the ones to blame, but the story didn’t go deep enough. And what I discovered was that these teachers had been beat down. They had been burned out, beat down. Actually, I should probably add that to the list because in reality, one of the things I felt after I got in there was like, wow, we get beat down. We get beat up a bit here. And I’m sure it’s not the same in every school, but depending on the school and the circumstances and what’s happening in that moment, there could be a situation where you feel like you’re getting bullied quite a bit. And, and by the way, not feel, you are being bullied. And so I realized, wow, these teachers in some cases are just, they’re done. They have no energy left. But they also in some cases just didn’t have a way out.

[00:08:24.270] – Roger
They had committed so much time to this career. And it was really hard for some of them to leave. Those are the ones that I found were there for 20 years. They’re like, I’ve got nothing else I could be doing. And there’s really nothing else I’m trained for, I’m educated for, or anything like that. And I can’t take a break from this. Whereas the younger teachers in some cases felt like, well, maybe I could do something else. And so I felt like that’s what helped them leave because they too felt the same thing. Because a teacher on day 1 versus a teacher on day 3,000 of their career has the same exact job. Nothing really changes.

[00:08:55.120] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:08:55.300] – Roger
The only thing is that you’ve been in it 3,000 days versus 1, or 300 days or 3,000 days versus 1 day. But the experience is more or less the same. But I felt that the younger teachers felt that they had more options. And you know what? As the years went on, yeah, I mean, with the internet, with a lot of things that they could do online, training on their own time virtually. I mean, yeah, more opportunities were presenting themselves. So I think that was a little easier to get out when things got really bad. And yeah, the burnout was there, of course. All the duties, I mean, I’m preaching to the choir here, but all the duties you have to do, it’s not just teaching. I mean, you get hired to teach math, but I’m monitoring snack time, I’m monitoring lunchtime, hall duty, whatever it is, or dismissal time or homerooms and all these extra things that we have to do. And then there’s not really much time to prepare for class unless I decide to do that on my own after dinner at home or early in the morning at 5 AM, then maybe I can get some of those things done.

[00:09:50.510] – Roger
But you feel like, am I really a professional here? I mean, I’m not being treated like one. I’m not even given the time. Whereas if I was an L&D professional at a company, I would have plenty of time to prepare and I would only be doing it for a short period of time and then I’d get some rest in between. And it’s a very different experience. So yeah, I saw this and I thought, wow, you’re really burnt out. And then of course the isolation. I mean, you’re in a room by yourself all day for the most part, except for a few moments where you get to eat lunch maybe with your colleagues, assuming you don’t have duty right before or right after that, and you’re just inhaling your lunch so that you can get back to paying attention to all the students, in which case I can’t talk to my colleagues in that moment. Or if we run into each other in the teacher’s lounge while we’re trying to prep for a class in those few precious minutes we get to prep.

[00:10:34.230] – Steve
So I came into the profession in a team experience, and I had all my teaching in a team experience. And it wasn’t then until I began to consult and do professional learning for other teachers that I was finding that different environment. And then, to my surprise, when I would talk to people about teaming, because I’ve just always historically been sold on it, I wouldn’t want to choose to be in a classroom by myself. A lot of people saw it as infringing on – it’s kind of like my classroom, my kingdom kind of thing.

[00:11:17.530] – Roger
Yeah.

[00:11:17.790] – Steve
And it struck people. So you’re using a phrase that I want you to work through for folks. You’re using the phrase, “distributed educator teams.” So can you paint a picture of how you see that?

[00:11:32.870] – Roger
Yeah. So think of maybe one of the ways that Arizona State University’s new Education Workforce Initiative explains it is imagine unbundling the teacher role and then creating roles that take different pieces of that. Now, it doesn’t always look like that because a lot depends on the particular school, who’s on their staff and how they are. And this is one of the things that I’m learning as I attend more events where I get to hear from teachers and leaders that are going through this and have gone through the transformation. It looks different from school to school. But that said, imagine distributed as, I mean, here was my original inspiration into this: In 2015, I pitched a similar idea to the school I was working in at the time, and it was shot down pretty quickly. And in all fairness, you know, it seemed like a pretty crazy idea. Even I recognized it was a bit of a crazy idea at the time. I’m glad that today it’s a little less crazy, but the way I saw it was we were up against Netflix when it comes to the attention of students. My students, I would always ask them about their lives outside of school and all that.

[00:12:38.260] – Roger
And one of the things I learned was, at least at that time, I’m sure there’s different things now, but they would binge watch Netflix after school. I mean, spend hours watching it. And I’m thinking, wow, I’ve got to compete against Netflix. And it’s really hard. I mean, they’ve got incredible production teams, producing amazing series, and I have to beat that with my math homework. I don’t think I’m gonna do so well if I’m by myself. And so I had become really close friends with the theater instructor at the school at the time, and I thought – as I got to know his world a little bit better, I wondered, what if we assembled ourselves into a team that was distributed by strength and split up and divided by strength, just like a production team. The writer doesn’t do the acting. The actor doesn’t do the directing. Well, sometimes, but you have all these different roles that come together in order to create and produce this outstanding show or this outstanding performance. And I thought, what if we came together like that? And part of that meant unbundling the teacher role.

[00:13:42.460] – Roger
What are all the things that we have to do? Well, the teacher has to build the lesson plan. So that means you’re preparing slides or the days that the things you’re going to go over in the lesson and all of that. You have to deliver the lesson. You also have to create and design homework assignments and assessments. You have to grade and give feedback on those assessments. You have to do after-school interventions. You have to work with the students who are struggling. You have to communicate with the parents. I mean, if you think about it, there are a lot of roles here. There’s a communication specialist. There’s an assessment specialist. There is a data analyst role in here. There is a scriptwriter of sorts, you know, the person who writes the lessons. There’s a facilitator, the person who takes that lesson and brings it to life on stage, the actor, if you will. The roles are distributed, and that’s what is meant by team-based. If we looked at education and teaching as a team sport or as a team activity, then there are different positions that we can play, and we can then play to our strengths as well.

[00:14:38.300] – Steve
So I’m going to give you 2 very silly examples.

[00:14:42.790] – Roger
Go for it.

[00:14:43.820] – Steve
I team taught first grade. And this is a lot of years back, okay? But so we would have the kids practice their sound with a picture. And so we would put an activity on the board for the kids to do while we were meeting with small groups. And if I tried to draw a picture of something that the kids had to do the first letter, all the kids said was, “what is it?” [laughter] And so fortunate to work with a colleague who could step up there and sketch up all the things. And never was there a phrase from the kids asking what the picture was. They knew immediately. And then I used to flip to the other piece of something needed to get done, but somebody had to go out with the kids for recess. So once it got to winter, Diane would stay in the room to do anything to not have to go out for recess.

[00:15:46.790] – Steve
I’d be out there running around with the kids having a great time. And I used to say to folks, “who do you want to be out to recess with?” Diane, who’s holding the whistle looking for one kid to misbehave so she can blow the whistle and say, “we’re going in,” or Steve, who’s having so much fun he’s probably going to keep us out 5 minutes longer? So those both flashed through my head as you were laying out the sophisticated examples.

[00:16:12.490] – Roger
That’s it right there.

[00:16:14.670] – Roger
I mean, look, when we think of team sports, right, and when someone is not performing well, when someone can’t get that shot to go in, someone else can pick up the slack. Or when someone is better at something, they assume that role, and the other person can now focus in on what they do best rather than everyone trying to do everything at once, which is what we ask teachers to do. Another metaphor or comparison I use for schools right now is, it’s – teachers are like solopreneurs. I mean, a school is like a coworking space. I mean, it might as well be a WeWork, but with only offices, no open spaces. And we each have our own little office and we run our own little business with our, you know, 25 to 30 customers. And that’s it. And from time to time, we run into each other in the bathrooms and at the canteen, and we’ll have some lunch together, and then we’ll go back to our offices and we’ll run our own business.

[00:17:06.710] – Steve
I’ll give you a historic book that you’re too young to know about that you can look for. It was called, “The Shopping Mall High School.”

[00:17:16.920] – Roger
Ooh, The Shopping Mall High School. Okay.

[00:17:18.770] – Steve
And it just fit your description – that in effect, the teachers at a high school were like the store owners at a shopping mall. So they have a common parking lot. But when they get inside the store, they’re actually in competition for the customers.

[00:17:40.860] – Roger
Okay, I just got it right here.

[00:17:42.540] – Steve
If you think about it as a high school, a student who takes an extra year of a language now doesn’t have room in the schedule for the art class that they might take. And so it was actually structured in a way that had teachers not just working solo, but actually going to the next step of being competitive.

[00:18:03.140] – Roger
You know, you’re absolutely right. And I felt that as well in my classroom teaching experience. And I only spent 4 years in the classroom, 2 in an inner city public school, 2 in an all-girl private school. So I did get to see different environments. So in those 4 years, I saw different things. And by the way, we could have a whole podcast on the similarities as well. But we’ll save that for another episode.

[00:18:26.910] – Steve
I’ve been there.

[00:18:27.550] – Roger
Yeah.

[00:18:28.060] – Roger
So, but this competition piece, absolutely. There was this attitude where people felt that, hey, do you consider your class more important than mine? Is math more important than English? And one of the things I used to tell my students, and I started doing this at the all-girls school, I used to tell the girls that, look, I don’t care if you like math or not. My feelings aren’t hurt if you don’t like math or if that’s not your thing. If your thing is English, if your thing is art, if your thing is dance or performing arts or whatever it is, great. I want you to have that thing that you really enjoy. I’m not trying to compete that. In fact, if you allow me to, I will help you do the absolute best you can up to a point so that you don’t have to dilute your efforts in the other thing. I’d rather you spend more time on the other subjects, not mine.

[00:19:21.530] – Steve
Powerful.

[00:19:22.420] – Roger
But you’re gonna have to listen to me. You got to trust me because I will make sure that you get – now you’re not going to be an A student, so let’s set that right away. That’s not your goal. And it shouldn’t be your goal. But we’re gonna go for that B, maybe even a strong B. And look, if you get into that A range, amazing, we’ll celebrate that too. But we’re celebrating at the B level already. And that’s what we’re working towards. And I want you to be outstanding over there. I want you to be an A over there, because I’m not trying to compete. I don’t want to take you away from the thing that you enjoy most and you do best, because please, you should do that. I’m here in teaching because I reinvented myself because I fell in love with this and I’m pursuing what I love. Who am I to tell you not to pursue what you love as well? So yeah, that competition thing is there and it’s tough because it’s embedded into the environment. To your point, I pulled up the book here.

[00:20:09.050] – Roger
The subtitle is, “Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace.” Wow. What a title. And by the way, I did just make it. It was 1985, so I was already 4. I was 4 years old.

[00:20:26.970] – Roger
I Just made it. [laughter]

[00:20:31.460] – Steve
[laughter] So you’ve got a degree in psychology and you studied executive coaching. How do you think your understanding that developed in those areas, how does that align with the structure of a distributed educator team?

[00:20:50.890] – Roger
So, when I pursued the master’s in psychology focused on executive coaching, like I said, what inspired me was that I felt that what they described in this program was a recipe for growing people, for helping them go from where they were to where they wanted to be. And when I got into – when I continued tutoring while pursuing my master’s and then eventually teaching, I started applying coaching methodologies to really help these students grow and develop in really big ways. And I learned that, like I said, it’s not just the curriculum. Which in a way, suggests there are other roles necessary in a school besides just the subject matter experts. There are roles for coaches, there are roles – and when you look at a student as a coach, you look at a lot of other things. You’re looking at a lot of things. You’re considering their home situation, you’re considering what causes them anxiety, because as a coach, my job is to help you move from where you are to where you want to be. And if there is something blocking the way, from going from where we are to where we want to be, then I got to help you remove that blocker.

[00:21:55.500] – Roger
That’s the job of a coach. And so sometimes that blocker is confidence. Sometimes it’s an issue at home, sometimes it’s an issue in another class. Sometimes it’s an issue in that you did not understand something years ago in math that is now holding you back from getting this topic.

[00:22:10.770] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:22:11.090] – Roger
There are so many things. But if you’re one person, it’s going to be really hard. To help the student with all of those things, because any student could have many of those things going on at any given time. As a team, I mean, we are just better empowered and better equipped to be able to help the entire student. Yesterday I was on a call with Arizona State University’s new education workforce folks, and they had a panel of teachers who talked about these other things that come up, these other issues that come up for students at home and all of that. And if it wasn’t for a team-based approach, they wouldn’t have time to catch that or address it. Even if they caught it, they wouldn’t be able to address it. But now they do, because someone else can take that on while someone else focuses on the work or the class or teaching up front or whatever it might be.

[00:22:59.870] – Steve
Well, I followed Arizona State’s program from time to time. You’ve studied it a little closer than I have. What are some of the results that they’re reporting are happening in the schools that they’re working with?

[00:23:17.200] – Roger
Yeah, I don’t have the numbers right in front of me, but a few of the areas where improvement has been seen by the team that they’re measuring – one is they are seeing more retention. So teachers are staying in the profession. So when they look at the schools that have already implemented this and they’ve had it for a few years, they have seen that turnover has gone down, retention has gone up. They’ve been able to keep more teachers, which is a really, really big one. Now, they haven’t always seen that necessarily job satisfaction is necessarily up. But it’s not crazy down either. It’s not down, let’s say. It’s about the same. So there’s still room to improve. But things like retention, they’re hanging in there a little bit longer. Burnout is also being cited as something that has gone down, and teachers report not feeling so burnt out, not feeling so isolated. Obviously, that one is more by design. You’re working on a team now, so you can’t feel that way. But that’s an important one, even if it is by design taken care of. And so, right away, you’re seeing that the person in the role is better equipped to handle the role, to hang in there longer.

[00:24:24.370] – Roger
I mean, if you think of somebody just getting beat down every single day, at some point you just run out of steam and you got to go. You’re like, I can’t do this anymore. Especially if you have a way out, you’re going to leave. And in some cases, even if you don’t, you just realize, I can’t keep doing this. But if you’re not isolated, that means you have other people you can talk to, someone you could share some of what you’re going with, and they see it too, and they’re there with you, and they can pick up some of the slack when you’re going through a tough time. So those are the main areas where they are finding teachers are becoming more – maybe the best word to sum all that up is resilience.

[00:24:58.620] – Steve
Yeah, good word. Good word. Yeah, I was going to say from my team teaching experiences, somebody else seeing you struggling with that student and having the empathy.

[00:25:13.830] – Roger
Yeah.

[00:25:14.030] – Steve
And somebody else seeing you be successful with a student and join that celebration. I struggled with a non-reader for months early in my career. And the day he broke the code, the next day, a group of teachers came in my room with a cake and a champagne bottle.

[00:25:40.190] – Roger
Wow.

[00:25:40.850] – Steve
And that’ll drive you through unbelievable amounts of days of struggling.

[00:25:49.100] – Roger
Yes.

[00:25:49.490] – Steve
That’s one of the things I always said. It’s why I’ve been a big promoter of peer coaching. When you’re peer coaching and a teacher tells you about what they’re laying out in this lesson and what they want to happen, and you’re sitting in the room and it happens there in front of you, and you give a thumbs up, you can just see the teacher light up with this surge of energy. And I used to talk about that. If you waited 2 hours later to try and describe it in the staff lounge, it’s kind of lost its luster. And then most of us, if you’re going home to somebody who’s not a teacher, they’re not going to get it even if you can get them to listen to it. But that resilience, that word that you used, I think that’s really a big one.

[00:26:37.290] – Roger
I love what you shared. It’s almost like – it’s like when you are, I don’t know, you’re shooting hoops into your trash basket and you do the weirdest one off the wall, 2 walls in, and you’re looking around, no one saw? You’re like, no one’s here to see this? Am I the only one who saw this? Like, is anyone going to believe what just happened?

[00:26:56.870] – Steve
Nothing like that kid get this tremendous insight from your teaching. And that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re looking around, somebody’s got to see this!

[00:27:04.970] – Roger
Is there a camera in the room? Please, I would take a camera right now. I would love a camera right now.

[00:27:11.050] – Steve
So educator teams that you’ve defined are certainly going to require administrators to do changes. I’m wondering what kind of supports and training do you think teachers need to work effectively as a team? Because I don’t think it’s in teacher ed.

[00:27:32.350] – Roger
No. Yeah, and I’m not even too familiar with teachers because I didn’t go down that path.

[00:27:36.510] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:27:36.900] – Roger
But that said, when we think about teams – and by the way, it’s not that different even in corporate.

[00:27:43.900] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:27:44.120] – Roger
I mean, some folks and some teams organize really well, and they have the cultural foundations, they have the steps, they know how to behave, they know how to work together. In sports we see this, but one of the things that I think need to be taught is, and it really has to go – it has to start, in my opinion, in the undergraduate level when you’re pursuing your teaching degree, is the mechanics of how a team works in education. Because there are workflows, I’m sure, you know, if we go to these schools that have implemented this, and the thing that I’m noticing so far is that, again, there’s a lot of school, different schools do it different ways. So that means the workflows are a bit different. But I bet you over time, there will start to emerge like a template of sorts, something like a starting point for how teams in education work together. And when you start figuring out how educator team works, I think that needs to be taught. It needs to be one of those things that you leave knowing that, well, yeah, obviously this person then hands this off and then this group does this.

[00:28:43.190] – Roger
And then, you just kind of have an idea of the operations, if you will, of an educator team. And so you’ve got to learn a little bit more about – or teachers need to learn a little bit more about working in teams. Now, that said, that’s an ongoing thing. You know, again, going back to my experiences in corporate, we’re always being trained on topics like this, on how to work better together. You know, that means that we have team offsites, those types of things. We have a lot of things that we do in order to make sure that we’re coming together –

[00:29:10.590] – Steve
Build that team.

[00:29:11.010] – Roger
More effectively.

[00:29:11.970] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:29:12.130] – Roger
So that’s another thing that has to happen regularly. There’s gotta be team offsites. So we’ve gotta treat an educator team no differently than we would treat a marketing team, a sales team, an engineering team. All of those things. I think the other thing is, and this goes back to just more what I’ve learned personally from applying coaching methodologies to education, is teachers can also stand to learn how to be coaches. It’s an amazing opportunity for teachers if they learn not how to become an expert coach, because that’s not the job. We’re not asking you to become a full-time one-on-one coach, executive coach. But at IBM, for instance, when I was there, I was part of a program where we trained managers on coaching. And it was just a fundamental level. It was Level 1 ICF, which is the International Coaching Federation. It was their Level 1 curriculum. And we called it coaching for managers because it was applied to being a manager, which means you’re not their coach, you’re not their full-time coach, they should still get a coach. But you are going to draw on these methodologies to be a more effective manager.

[00:30:19.340] – Roger
Well, guess what? If you’re working on a team, there’s one of the things, there’s coaching up and there’s coaching down. There’s your manager coaching, but there’s also coaching your manager.

[00:30:26.740] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:30:27.290] – Roger
And I think that if teachers are equipped with this incredibly powerful skill, not only will it help them be more effective in teams, but it will also, because I’ve experienced this personally and I’ve tested this myself, it will make them more effective in the classroom. I think it’s actually one of the things that are missing in becoming an educator and going in the undergraduate level is learning how to some of the fundamental coaching skills.

[00:30:48.540] – Steve
Yeah. And, I mean, coaching’s my thing. It’s where the largest part of my energy goes. But I’ve always laid out – education majors at a university ought to be coaching each other as part of their coursework. You’re going to do a presentation in the class and I got a chance to be your coach – I’ve even talked about professors being coached live in front of their classes. Imagine you’re getting up to teach a class and before it starts, your coach is there and they have a little pre-conference with you where you talk about the kind of feedback that you want. And then you go ahead and you teach the class and then you sit down and get coaching from that person. And you get, as a professor, get to model coachability and how you use a coach. Those would all be really powerful.

[00:31:43.620] – Roger
I mean, it’s a performance. Teaching is no different than a performance, than a sport, if you ask me. Your audience, even though you may not be performing in front of 40,000 people in an arena or in a stadium, you’ve got 30 of the most important –

[00:31:59.240] – Steve
You got a tougher audience.

[00:32:01.080] – Roger
Tougher audience. They’re tougher. And you know what, if you ask me –

[00:32:05.000] – Steve
They didn’t pay for a ticket to be there. [laughter]

[00:32:06.940] – Roger
[laughter] Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s a whole other topic that, you know, I mean, they didn’t sign up. They didn’t buy the ticket to be there. You’re absolutely right. They were told, you got to show up to this place. But this is also, as we know, just our kids are so important. For me, they’re the most valuable. They’re more valuable than the audience at a basketball game.

[00:32:27.140] – Steve
For sure.

[00:32:28.440] – Roger
And if we prep our athletes, if we give them the pep talk, if we say, hey guys, everybody, this is the focus today. Today we are going to deliver on these 3 outcomes, or this is what the end looks like. And we do all of this for them so that when they get out there, they’re at their absolute best. How are we not doing this for teachers? How are we not getting teachers pumped up at the beginning of the day? And I know I’ve read of cases in some schools where they have leaders like this, leaders that get them ready as if they were getting ready for the big match, because you know what? They are. Every day is the big match. I mean, on any given day, you could absolutely make or break a kid’s – just something about them, something in them. Why not make it inspiring?

[00:33:09.540] – Steve
When you’re teaching on a team, there’s a day that a colleague walks in and you kind of look at the person and say, kids should not have to deal with you today. I could just tell.

[00:33:21.040] – Roger
Yeah.

[00:33:22.310] – Steve
How can we swing things around here? I look at it, I got things for a while. Go catch a coffee and pull it all back together. Sometimes there’s nothing to do with what happened there at school. It’s what happened at home before before you showed up at work. I mean, all of those issues have been big team to me. I do have a question on my mind as to what you’re picturing. And I know that you’re committed to moving in this direction and exploring it deeper, so I may be too early with my question.

[00:33:58.760] – Roger
Mm-hmm.

[00:33:59.790] – Steve
But I’m wondering about, is there a step-by-step slow process where a school can go through becoming more team-like and team-oriented, or do we need to close down in June and open back up in September in a different setting? Now, I’ve been influenced because when I walked in, it was a brand new school. Everybody was hired to teach on a team. I went for my last interview. There was a woman seated in the interview who was being interviewed same time I was being interviewed. And going through my mind was they’ve narrowed it down to the 2 of us. That wasn’t the case.

[00:34:43.040] – Roger
Nope.

[00:34:43.550] – Steve
They were trying to figure out whether 2 of us could work on the same team.

[00:34:47.020] – Roger
There we go.

[00:34:49.730] – Steve
Yeah. So, it was being orchestrated compared to people saying, okay, now you got to go work with these 4 people. You know, we haven’t done our homework on how we put that team together. So yeah, you have a thought as to what a process looks like?

[00:35:02.100] – Roger
Yes. I mean, well, one, you’re absolutely right. I’m just getting into this work, right? I’m doing my research. I’m talking to as many people as I can about this. But that said, you know, one of the things that I bring to this party is I have been working with startups and entrepreneurs for over a decade. And one of the biggest topics that I focus on is the prototype, the pilot, the minimum viable product is how do we test your assumptions? How do we test your ideas in very small, you know, non-disruptive ways?

[00:35:35.640] – Steve
Absolutely.

[00:35:36.130] – Roger
So that we can begin building momentum in a direction. And by the way, iterate as we go because we’re not going to get it right on the first try. So I would be the one who would come into a party like this, you know, for the team-based staffing, and I would say absolutely not – do not shut down the school in June and then reopen in the – because that’s the equivalent of saying, hey, look, I’m just going to launch my product in the way that I envisioned it. I haven’t talked to a single customer.

[00:36:00.130] – Steve
That’s right.

[00:36:00.370] – Roger
I haven’t run it by anybody. And then I’m going to hope that it all works out perfectly and I sell out, but I won’t. And so what I’m going to be looking for is what are the ways that schools can experiment? Now, from what I’ve read and from what I’ve heard from some of these teacher panels and school leader panels is that they usually start small. They start with one group, maybe one grade, and I’ve seen it configured in a lot of different ways, which is really interesting. That’s actually probably one of the things that I found most surprising was that it could look so different in different schools. For instance, one way of doing it is having all the teachers from each subject come together and be a team, which means then I’m on a team with the science teacher, I’m on a team with the English teacher, I’m on a team with the social studies, and the list goes on. And then we form and become a team. So the question then would be, okay, is there a grade that is better positioned for such an experiment where it would be a little less disruptive?

[00:36:59.320] – Roger
I always tell people in a situation like this, where would the experiment be a little bit more contained so that it can’t have negative or positive spillover effects? Because we don’t know what’s gonna come out of this, so it’s better that we not risk it. So is there a part of the school that’s already a little bit more contained? Is there a grade that operates in a little bit more isolation than the rest? Is what I would ask a school leader as they are considering something like this. I would also ask, you know, is there a grade or is there a department, maybe, if you’re looking at high schools and you’ve got a math department, is there a team that tends to be already a little bit more, I don’t know, like innovative, experimental? You constantly find them testing new things because that behavior, that comfort level is going to suit them really well in order to test this out. Because you don’t want to have to also overcome confidence issues and fears and all of that in that initial experiment, because in the initial experiment, you’re just trying to see, does this work for us?

[00:37:54.770] – Roger
It’s a different question. Then later we can worry about, okay, how do we help people prepare for this? And then that’s where training and all of that comes. So I would always advocate start small. Find that place in the school where things are a little more isolated. Find the moment. Maybe it’s isolation not by space, but by time. Maybe there’s a moment in the year that this could be tested. And I don’t know, it depends on the school and how it’s run. When I proposed it to our school, perhaps I thought a little too big back then. It was 11 years ago.

[00:38:21.870] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:38:22.410] – Roger
And I wasn’t as good at designing MVPs as I am now. But I proposed that we did this for the entire grade or – for the entire 6th grade. The problem was that all of us taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. And so there were rarely times where we could all, or at least 3 of us, be together in a room because chances are we were teaching one of the other grades. And so it was a bit tougher to do that. So that was probably not the best place to experiment. But then working with another teacher, we thought, could we test another part of the model? You know, in our case, in the case that I was trying to prove, it was that learning should be a production or teaching should be a production, just like a Broadway show.

[00:39:05.160] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:39:05.460] – Roger
And so I go, can we test that part of it? Can we just come together on our own, on the side, after school, just meet and put together a lesson that looks and feels so different? And, and by the way, hey, theater teacher, since you’re not on the same schedule as my colleagues, can you come in and teach with me? Because you might be available when I’m teaching or when somebody else is, you know, because your schedule is so different than ours. And you know what? That was a more doable thing and it was a little easier. So yeah, I would always say test small, find that way of slicing up the isolation, a contained, a self-contained scenario, if you will, wherever possible or as contained as possible.

[00:39:45.240] – Steve
Roger, as we close out here, any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners pondering?

[00:39:55.150] – Roger
Yeah. Gosh, I would say one is that, not only is this doable, but this is necessary. We are in a place where this can be done. This is incredibly doable. 150 schools across 17 states and 50 school systems or districts, have already implemented this for a varying number of years, some for as long as 6 years, others for 2 years. And it’s working for them. Teachers are happier. And when teachers are happy, they perform better. Anybody, I shouldn’t say teachers. When anyone is happy, they perform best. And that’s what we need out of teachers. We need teachers to be at their best more than other fields, if you ask me, because they are dealing with the most precious customer that we will ever come across, which is our students. And they need us to be at our best. I struggled with this, and I was only in teaching in the classroom for 4 years, and I left because I was just like, man, this is challenging my mental health. I never called in – I mean, I called in sick in life, you know, maybe once or twice a year, maybe if that, but I did it so often In my final year of teaching, I couldn’t believe I got to that point.

[00:41:13.450] – Roger
I didn’t know what else to do. There were days where I really just couldn’t get up to go. And even in those days, because one of the things about being a teacher is you can’t really be sick, so you have to plan the whole thing the day out so you can hand it off to somebody. And so I made sure that it was always something that I could hand off and it wouldn’t be too disruptive for my students. But my gosh, it really kicked me in the butt and I was you know, fortunate that I came into teaching from another field, so I had a way out. And, and I used that way out, and I had an opportunity to go to IBM at the time, and it was a really great opportunity. And I said, you know what, I’m leaving because, my gosh, you know, I love teaching, but I do not enjoy the job of teaching. I love teaching, but I don’t enjoy the job of teaching. I was blessed by God, and 2 years later I had an opportunity to teach again, but on different terms.

[00:42:05.770] – Roger
I was working at IBM, but I was a part-time – I got to teach my entrepreneurship course at Sarah Lawrence College. So I eventually became an entrepreneurship professor there. And then that same year, later that year, University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education recruited me to come teach for one of their executive master’s programs. And so I got to do that again, 2 teaching jobs that were balanced better because it was part-time and all of that. So luckily I didn’t leave teaching for that long. But I will say I do miss teaching math. If anytime a kid says I need help with math or I hear that happening, I’m like, “Oh, I’ll come in!” I’ll share this last story because this one just shows like, I think any teacher listening is going to say, yep, I know what you’re talking about. If you really love teaching your trade, your craft, that is. So I obviously love teaching math. I was at a speaking engagement in Toronto and it was being held at a university and it was like a 3-day event. So I had plenty of time to see the campus.

[00:43:05.660] – Roger
And so somebody asked me, hey, Roger, you know, you’re on a break break for a little bit. Do you want to go see the campus? And I go, yeah, absolutely. Let’s go see it. And they’re walking me around, giving me the tour and all of that. And I go, wow, this is super cool. And then we passed this one room inside of a building, and there’s a sign that says math tutoring or something like that. And I look inside and I go, “Oh, so what’s going on here?” They’re like, “Well, I guess it’s one of those tutoring programs just to help students with math.” So I walked in and the person continued walking thinking we were still on the tour, but I just kind went my own way, and they eventually came and caught back up with me. And I saw a table of people just kind of sitting there, and it looked like they were waiting. And I was wondering, what are they waiting for? Maybe there’s no one to serve them at the moment, and they’re waiting their turn. And so then I asked like, “Hey, what’s going on?” And they’re like, “Oh, well, I’m just waiting for my turn.

[00:43:50.880] – Roger
I’ve got some questions on my math homework.” And I go, “Cool, I can help you.” And I just sat down and I started helping. I’m here for a completely different activity somewhere else on campus. But when you’re called to be a math teacher or a teacher of any kind, I mean, it’s just, it’s what you do no matter where you are, no matter who it is that needs it, whether you’re getting paid or not. I love doing it. So I know that the people who choose this career come at it from a very different perspective. I think it’s more of a calling. It’s not a profession that just makes sense because, oh yeah, it’s prestigious, or, oh yes, I want to work for McKinsey, or I want to work for Google, or whatever it might be. It’s not about that. You don’t do it for the glamor. There is no glitz. There’s no glamor. There’s nothing like that.

[00:44:33.360] – Steve
So I know you’ve got a commitment to explore and go deep in this. You’re starting a podcast around the topic. What’s the best way for listeners to be able to follow your work moving forward from here?

[00:44:48.430] – Roger
Yeah, I would say it’d be great. I would love your support on the podcast. It’s called The Ensemble School Podcast, and you can find it on Apple or Spotify. So wherever you listen, either one of those. And of course, I would appreciate the follow and the subscribe on those podcasts just because that matters. and that counts. And then finally, LinkedIn is probably the second best place. Connect with me there if you’re a teacher or a school leader and you want to connect around these topics or just be in touch and follow some of the work. I will be publishing a lot of different things that I’m learning along the way, what I’m discovering and finding, because I want to bring this to more people. Right now it’s a very small team in Arizona State University working on this, and I want to help augment whatever they’re doing and get it into more people’s

[00:45:32.730] – Steve
Terrific. Well, know that I’ll be a cheerleader all along the way. I’ve been giving the mantra of teaching as a team sport for a whole lot of years. So thanks a lot.

[00:45:43.330] – Roger
You’ll be on my podcast in a couple of weeks. I’m going to reach out for that because I want to hear your stories.

[00:45:49.130] – Steve
I’ll look forward to that, Roger. Take care.

[00:45:51.280] – Roger
Awesome. Thank you, Steve.

[00:45:54.300] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn @SteveBarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

Guest Blog: Carla Erskin

Carla Erskin is a middle school teacher, productivity coach, and the founder of Sustainable Teaching Solutions, which focuses the use of planning periods as a practice that can be taught, supported, and strengthened. Her concept of Planning Period Literacy provides valuable insights for instructional coaches and school leaders to explore with staff. What systems can help manage time, energy, and attention? With her support teachers complete more of their work within the school day.

Planning Period Literacy: A Missing Link Between Teacher Capacity and Student Learning

There are a lot of car guys in my family. Growing up, my dad would often invite me to stand beside him while he worked under the hood of a car. I stayed around long enough to learn the basics, but I never became the car chick he probably imagined. Still, one lesson stuck with me. You take care of a car, and you do not run it hard indefinitely. You pay attention to what it needs. You perform regular maintenance. You respond when the warning lights come on. If you keep pushing the car while ignoring every sign of strain, eventually, something gives out.

I have been thinking about that lesson as teacher workloads continue to grow. Teachers are managing expanding instructional expectations, increased documentation, student needs, family communication, meetings, coverage, and responsibilities that rarely fit within the contracted workday. Many are already showing the warning signs. In a national survey I conducted with more than 400 educators, 89 percent said they had experienced symptoms of burnout. The connection to the car may seem like a stretch at first, but stay with me.

When you run a car too hard for too long, its performance begins to suffer before it stops running altogether. Teachers experience something similar. Some eventually leave because the workload has become more than they can reasonably carry. Others stay while operating at or beyond capacity.

That matters for student learning.

Teaching depends on thousands of decisions. Teachers study student work, anticipate misconceptions, adjust instruction, prepare materials, and decide what students need next. That work requires time and enough mental space to think clearly. When teachers spend the day moving from one urgent demand to another, that space begins to disappear. The teacher may still deliver the lesson. The classroom may still look productive. But the deeper work of responding, refining, and planning becomes harder to sustain.

I often say that one of the best things we can give students is a regulated and rested teacher. Teachers do not need to lower their standards or care less about their work. Schools need to recognize that teacher capacity shapes what happens in the classroom.

The planning period sits at the center of that connection.

Too often, schools treat planning time as leftover space in the day. It becomes available for meetings, class coverage, paperwork, interruptions, and anything else that needs somewhere to land. At the same time, many teachers have never received professional learning on how to structure that limited time around the work that most directly supports instruction.

This is where Planning Period Literacy™ becomes essential. Planning Period Literacy™ is the knowledge and skill teachers need to protect, structure, and use planning time as a professional practice. It includes setting clear priorities, building repeatable workflows, and deciding what to do when the available time cannot hold every task.

In my survey, teachers ranked help creating structure for their planning periods as their second-highest support need. Only administrative support ranked higher. That finding matters because the two needs are connected. Teachers need skills for using their time well. They also need leaders to create conditions in which those skills can work.

A protected planning period can give a teacher time to examine yesterday’s exit tickets before teaching today’s lesson. A clear priority can help a teacher complete the work with the greatest instructional impact before smaller demands take over. None of this eliminates an unreasonable workload. Planning Period Literacy™ should never become another way to ask teachers to do more with less. Schools still carry responsibility for protecting planning time, reducing unnecessary demands, and setting realistic expectations.

Schools can begin by examining how planning periods are actually used. Leaders can reduce the meetings, interruptions, and coverage assignments that consume the time. They can teach practical planning workflows and clarify which responsibilities deserve priority when every task cannot be completed. Teacher-preparation programs have a role as well. New teachers learn how to design lessons, assess learning, and manage classrooms. They should also learn how to approach a planning period with purpose before they inherit a workload that is already moving at full speed.

A planning period will never solve every challenge facing educators. But when schools protect that time and teach educators how to use it, they strengthen the conditions in which thoughtful instruction can happen.

My dad taught me that you cannot ignore what happens under the hood and expect the car to keep performing at its best. Education cannot keep ignoring teacher capacity and expect student learning to remain untouched.

Planning Period Literacy™ gives schools a place to begin.

Thanks Carla.