PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Steve [Intro]: 00:00 Hello and welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. Instructional coaches and leaders create the environment that supports teachers to continually imagine, grow and achieve. They model an excitement for learning that teachers in turn model for students. This podcast is dedicated to promoting the important aspects of instructional leadership. Thanks for listening.

Steve: 00:28 Mindsets to Explore For the Start of School – Part one. I was invited to join Cory Camp from SIBME Coach rRplay podcast to discuss mindsets that we might explore as we return to school. I always appreciate the way Cory invites and extends my thinking and shares her own. Enjoy
listening, and consider sending me your thoughts and questions.

Cory : 01:01 And welcome to another episode and a whole new season of the SIBME Coach Replay Show. I’m your host Cory Camp, and we’ve taken about a month and a half or so off and here we are back again with one of my favorite guests, Steve Barkley. And I love our topic for today, Steve, because I know a big conversation last year, last semester, and especially as we’ve gotten – I actually just got my kiddo’s state test results in the mail yesterday. And is this idea of, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us as we come back in to the schools, a lot of folks are going back in person this year. We are returning to normal if there is such a thing and I know you and I are going to talk a little bit about that, but really it is a stressful return I feel, for a lot of our educators.

Cory : 02:00 We’re excited. We can’t wait to get back into our classrooms and be with our students, but we also have this stress of this idea of, the learning loss, the COVID slide, and how do we overcome that? How do we get right into that? And so, as we think about our return into schools and thinking about maybe moving from a problem-focused mindset and reframing the problems, reframing the mindset. You wrote an amazing blog on this, which we’ll make sure folks get access to the full blog, but you got a couple of big ideas around it, four big ideas for thinking about reframing the problem and reframing our mindsets. And so let’s start with this first one, especially around this idea of kind of coming back to school and thinking about the learning loss. So I’ll kind of let you take it from there.

Steve: 02:57 Thanks for having me Cory, it’s always always great to be with you. So a little bit as a jump in here. As soon as we were looking at coming out of COVID, which who knows when that is now, but as soon as that was raised I was sure we didn’t want to go back to normal. And in many ways for me, what COVID did was, it shined a light on strengths that we had and it shined a light on problems. I don’t know to what extent it really created new ones. They just kind of stood out there.

Cory : 03:42 Push them to the forefront, right? Like social-emotional learning –

Steve: 03:50 Yea it was always important.

Cory : 03:50 It was always there. Really shine a light on it.

Steve: 03:53 The inequity in technology and you know, it’s not like that problem didn’t exist, so it kinda shined the light on it. So I really
had been thinking about this. How do we refocus? How do we have have the different mindset? So the first one of the four ideas that I pulled up was focusing on love versus fear. And very interesting, this is the one that triggered me to write the blog. And it came from a friend of mine Adam Fishman, who is leading a group on climate change. And he sent out this this rather lengthy blog that he realized he had to change his mindset and that his mindset had been getting people to hate the bad things about the climate.

Steve: 04:50 And he realized instead, he needed to switch to get people, to focus on the things that they love and they’re going to lose.

Cory : 05:00 Right.

Steve: 05:01 We don’t focus on these things that they love. So it was a lot easier to get energy out of people by focusing on nature, focusing on who are the people that grow the crops and how do we get the crops in that approach rather than the fear approach. And I’m sitting there reading this piece and I’m going, wow, that that’s the issue we’ve got for teachers. If everybody’s putting learning loss in front of the teacher, the last thing I want to do on an opening day of school, when kids are finally back and I’m looking to build all this excitement is to have this picture in my mind of just how far behind are these kids? Are we going to get caught up? And communicating that to the kids.

Steve: 05:45 And so my issue was, let’s fall in love with the fact that we’ve been waiting to have kids here in the room with us. We’re finally here. We’ve been waiting to do all exciting things with kids. We’re tired of all the kids who were on Zoom and not clicking on the camera. So what are all the things and how does that change your mindset if you walk into the school excited about all the things we can do and all the things we can accomplish in moving ahead.

Cory : 06:21 And I think that’s so valuable. And as we think about our role as instructional leaders, we really are the leaders in this reframing. That message comes from us. Our teachers look to us to support and then reinforce and walk the walk. We can’t say, “oh, don’t worry about the learning loss” and then shove data and all kinds of things in front of their face and say, how are we going to fix it? We really do have to come from that place of love over fear.

Steve: 06:52 Where are we and where do we want to go?

Cory : 06:56 Yep.

Steve: 06:56 And let’s go, let’s be excited about going there rather than shining this light backwards. It has pushed me to get teachers thinking
that it’s about speeding things up and not remediating. And the more that I’m focused on loss, on what kids didn’t get last year, the more likely I am to take that remedial approach and that’s not going to put anybody in the right mindset for moving ahead.

Cory : 07:27 And I were just talking backstage about this this big idea around acceleration rather than remediation and the importance of that and the questions that are coming around from that. But I also think there’s something also here in this point, this love versus fear. My nephew and niece are visiting here this afternoon, they’re all outside having pizza for lunch right now. And when they came in, I said, “hey, you guys excited for school to start?” They start a day before my kids do and they’re just a town over. And I was really surprised because my nephew has not necessarily been one for school, was like, “I can’t wait. I’m excited.” And I was like, “are you sick? Are you okay?”

Steve: 08:10 [laughter]

Steve: 08:10 But I think our students are also leaning into that excitement. They’re excited to be in a school to have some space away from their
parents or their siblings.

Cory : 08:20 And, to kind of just move back into the school is now a little bit more exciting for them qnd I think we’ve got to lean-in to that too. Lean-in to the strengths and the things that they’ve learned over the past 20 some months and you know, build upon that. So I definitely love that. So let’s think differently about learning losses that I’m hearing here. What else, because I know that that was just kind of the snowball, that was the tip of the iceberg.

Steve: 08:56 And then, I found an article that said we needed to think about schools as an ecosystem in an acorn. So when I dug into the
ecosystem piece, and this came from as a Sam Chaltain and in my blog, I give all the links to all of their original stuff. And he was talking about seeing an ecosystem rather than an assembly line. And I have always been big on the ecosystem. I’m a big Margaret Wheatley fan and Wheatley always talks about the way a system works as is much more like the way a school system should work. The way a school should work is much more like an ecosystem than it is an assembly line, but it has way too many assembly line pieces in it. And this has always spoken to me because I paid my way through college, on the assembly line.

Steve: 09:51 I worked in the cardboard factory and it was a machine three blocks long. And at one end of the machine, giant rolls of paper were fed in and three blocks away, it spit out piles of cardboard. And my job was to catcher pile and stack it. And one day I saw a piece of cardboard jammed under a belt that I thought it might knock a belt off and I wasn’t running over and shut down the system. And a little while later, very shortly later, a supervisor was screaming and yelling, “what did you do?” And I said, “I thought,” and that’s as far as I got. And he informed me that catchers don’t think they catch. This is your job, this is your piece. And and it dawned on me when I when I began teaching, there was kind of this feeling.

Steve: 10:35 I started my student teaching and I watched the teacher for two days and then I tapped her on the shoulder and she stepped out and I stepped in. It was like, oh my God, I’m back to being a catcher. And so it really hit me now if go back to the learning loss, are we worried about a learning loss because we’re really thinking that a fifth grade teacher can’t take the kids from where they are when they come into our classroom and move ahead? I mean, are we really thinking that she can only handle the assembly line delivery of here’s where kids are supposed to be in order to in order to start your program? I’ve been a big proponent of the only way to serve kids today is as a team and ecosystems are teams. It’s all interconnected. And I think coaches need to dedicate a major chunk of time to building the team relations of the school. And I’ve often said if I were an administrator, when I had my coach partnership meeting with with my coach, that would be one of my expectations, that the sense of team across the school will increase because the work that the coach is doing,

Cory : 11:56 And it’s so interesting because I’ve also always thought that our work should be more of an ecosystem and that was really because I came into education as a special educator and I didn’t feel connected. And I felt like I was – you worry about the boxes on your assembly line, I’ll focus on them on mine. And it doesn’t really work, right? We’re not building boxes. We are growing children, humans who are going to build into our society and grow our society. And so love this idea of thinking about our ecosystem and thinking about the implications of that assembley line. So how do we start to move away from that mindset and into this ecosystem? And I also love what you say about coaches having a secondary focus or maybe maybe a primary focus on the team aspect.

Cory : 12:54 That’s something I’ve been talking a lot with my coaches is yes, your work is one-on-one and when we think about our coaching cycles, we’re typically thinking about that, but then you should also be looking for opportunities to support the collaboration of that one teacher with the rest of their peers and help them peer coach and build their capacity so that way you aren’t having as the coach to be the only instructional support for each teacher as an individual, but you can really maximize your efforts. Create tiered systems of support for your teachers, where they’ve got team support and peer support and coach support. And that’s all aligned with the support from the administrator.

Steve: 13:36 Years ago, I worked with a district designing a mentor program for new teachers, and they were trying to decide how long the mentor program should last. is mentoring a sort of one-year program or an 18 month program? And they finally decided when the new teacher threw open the doors of her classroom and said, “you may all come in.” That was the end of mentoring. And the job of the mentor was to grow the teacher into that level of confidence and professionalism that they could actually enter in to that peer coaching relationship with everyone. And that is that is an ecosystem that needs to be built.

Cory : 14:19 Yeah, absolutely. We do need to focus on our own small part of the environment, but it is serving the larger environment there.

Steve: 14:31 And I have to know how my part fits in.

Steve: 14:34 Right. Exactly.

Steve: 14:35 I’ve always been big on a teacher has to have at least a three-year commitment to kids. A three-year commitment means, you’re engaged with the teachers and the kids the year before you’re working with them. The year you’re working with them, you’re engaged with the other staff who are working with kids. So if I’m teaching freshmen English, I’m working with teachers who are teaching other freshmen courses and then I have to follow up because it’s not until I get engaged with that person next year that I really understand what happened in the year that the kids are with me. If you want to know how successful you were, go talk to next year’s teacher.

Steve: 15:14 That tells you a lot more than any test you gave during the year they were with you.

Cory : 15:19 Absolutely. And reminds me of my friend Amy McNair and she always talks about designing learning experiences rather than lesson
plans, because experiences stick with you. And so if you really want to see if you did a good job, yes, looking at how much did that student retain into the next year, how do they continue to grow? I think that is – I love this idea of this three year commitment piece.

Steve: 15:44 Rhere’s another word you used that I wanted to connect back. You used the term growing and growing really connects you to the term ecosystem, and it really connects you to the term environment. And I just recently found a a quote from Ken Robinson that I that I put into a slide, but he says that teaching is like being a gardener. You can’t force the plants to grow. The best you can do is to create that environment.

Steve: 16:24 As a teacher, I’ve got to create that environment for the kids. So let’s click back. The love part becomes critical and then as a coach, I need to create that environment for the teachers. So that’s another reason I promote the team is that team helps the coach create that environment just the way the teacher would want the kids in the classroom to help create the learning environment you want.

Cory : 16:50 And think for coaches, as we are celebrating the small wins and successes with an individual you might be working with, how are you also shouting that from the rooftops? Building that collective efficacy, connecting them with other people who might benefit then from my small win because they’re struggling to get that same win. I’m a little closer in my mental model to where that teacher is so I might be a better support than maybe a coach. And so just as a instructional leader and as a coach, thinking about how am I connecting the individual systems across the ecosystem together through team learning through multiple means of sharing and communication and collaborating. And I think, I mean, tell me if you think I’m wrong, Steve, I think with all the technology that everyone was kind of forced into learn last year, I think we’ve got quite a few great tools to help people do that.

Steve: 17:54 Absolutely. Increase that whole communication and connected piece and teaming piece.

Cory : 18:01 Absolutely. And I want to go back to what you said about the teacher being committed for kind of the full three years at minimum, because I think that leads us into your next tip for reframing and that’s long-term versus short-term. This is that ACORN conversation which was really interesting to me. I was like, oh, I’ve got to learn more about this ACORN idea.

Steve: 18:28 We’ll pick up exploring the ACORN concept in part two of this podcast series. The link to the blog that Cory mentions concerning reframing the problems is found in the lead-in to this podcast. A big thank you to Cory for sharing her insights around coaches supporting reframing. Remember to consider sending me your thoughts. Thanks for listening.

Steve [Outro]: 19:00 Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud on iTunes and Podbean. And please remember to rate and review us on iTunes. I also want to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter @stevebarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTSteve [Intro]: 00:00 Hello, and welcome to the teacher edition of the Steve Barkley Ponders Out loud podcast. The complexity of teaching is both challenging and rewarding. And my curiosity is peaked whenever I explore with teachers the multiple pathways for facilitating student engagement in the exciting world of learning. This podcast looks to serve teachers as they motivate coach and support their learners.

Steve: 00:31 Supporting students’ emotional needs as they return to school. Whether it’s now, for a summer program, or looking ahead to the fall, teachers are responding to students who have experienced something that none of us as educators have ever experienced in our own schooling backgrounds. Joining us today on the podcast is Phyllis Fagell, who currently works as a school counselor, as well as providing therapy to children, teens, and adults in a private practice. She’s the author of a book titled, “Middle School Matters,” and a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines with columns for parents and for teachers. So welcome Phyllis. Thanks for joining us.

Phyllis: 01:28 Thank you for having me.

Steve: 01:29 I’m wondering if you could start us off with some discussion about the impact that this past year has likely had on students.

Phyllis: 01:42 I don’t think there is anyone, teacher, parent, student, who hasn’t been deeply impacted by this past year. Everybody’s life just was turned inside out and upside down overnight and if anything, we have seen the incredible resilience that students exhibit, I think even given the uptick in mental health problems, anxiety, depression, perfectionism, phobias, excessive worrying, even given all of that or avoidance or school refusal, I still think that we have seen how remarkable kids are and how quickly they adapt and change to different circumstances, because it’s really hard to overstate just how much they’ve been through.

Steve: 02:26 So I’m wondering if you see similarities and differences when we’re thinking about the younger, early childhood kids, elementary, then the middle-schooler and then looking at teenagers, what’s likely to be similar across the board and other things that are different?

Phyllis: 02:48 Academically, I am seeing that the younger elementary students are having a harder time learning on Zoom, paying attention on Zoom without that feedback from the teachers. Older students are able to adapt to learning online much faster. In fact, some of them have even done better. They’re able to work at their own pace, they’re not having to navigate quite as many social interactions over the course of the day, which for some, can be overwhelming. On the other hand, for older students, there has been a real reluctance to turn on the video camera, which makes it harder for teachers to gauge understanding, to see when a student is confused, for kids to feel connected to their peers. I have a lot of middle schoolers who would like to be on camera, but because it’s an age when kids are so self-conscious, they’re not willing to turn theirs on if the other students don’t turn theirs on and that’s been a major issue in terms of helping students stay connected and engaged in the material.

Phyllis: 03:35 The middle-schoolers also are more likely to appear disengaged from learning and a lot of parents and even a few teachers have expressed concern that it might be hard to get them excited or enthused about the content again, but I don’t think it has much to do with the academic content. I think it has to do with the fact that kids don’t have a lot to anticipate or look forward to because of the amount of uncertainty we’re wrestling with. And if there is less to look forward to with anticipation, with positivity, they can sometimes come across as flat and that extends to school. And so I’ve been reminding teachers not to personalize when students seem less engaged, they’re less engaged universally and across the board.

Steve: 04:28 Yeah. The teacher’s interpretation of that then leads to how the teacher responds. So it’s kind of like a double whammy.

Phyllis: 04:41 Definitely. And middle schoolers to begin with, don’t always respond to teachers in a way that leaves teachers feeling a sense of warmth and connection. Middle school teachers are a unique breed because they really have to understand the developmental phase and understand that a child who is embarrassed might lash out or a child might be prone to misinterpreting an interaction as negative that actually is quite neutral. And so teachers have to be particularly conscientious with tweens to make sure that their body language, the words they choose, how long they pause before they answer, that all of that is in alignment or a middle-schooler is going to be very quick to go straight to the negative, particularly now, because everybody’s sensitivity is heightened. We have masks, we have social distancing, we have hybrid situations and cohorts, and nobody is at their peak.

Steve: 05:34 I had a chance to read an article that you had written and you you included in it, some suggestions for for teachers and I’ve pulled a couple of them. I’d like to just play them back to you kind of one at a time and have you respond to them with with a little detail. So one of the ones that really caught my attention and I’ve actually shared it with other folks since I’ve read it in your piece, you use the term to balance between predictability and novelty.

Phyllis: 06:13 Yes. So in the wake of a trauma, and there is no question, this past year constitutes a trauma, kids do crave consistency, predictability, routine. If every morning you have a joke of the day, or if you have a quote of the day, continue to do that. Kids need to know what to expect, especially because they’re marinating in so much change. But on the other hand, and this goes back to this idea that kids seem flat, or that they seem disengaged. They don’t have a lot to anticipate. They don’t have a lot to look forward to. And we want to be finding ways to infuse fun, some levity, some laughter into the classroom. The examples that I can offer from my own school because of the need to have smaller cohorts, we had to turn both our cafeteria and our gym into classrooms. And so the cafeteria has these two open air classrooms, open ceiling classrooms.

Phyllis: 07:10 And periodically the teachers will allow the students to write notes on paper airplanes and fly them over into the other cohorts classroom.

Steve: 07:18 [laughter]

Phyllis: 07:18 And in the gym, the classrooms each have a basketball hoop. How often do you have a classroom with a basketball hoop? And so sometimes they ball up the quiz they just took and they throw it in the basketball hoop, or they do a contest that ends with throwing a piece of paper into the basketball hoop or a ball into the basketball hoop. And these are just small ways to add some fun to the situation. One of our advisory teachers always asks a different student each day to bring in a joke and kids love to make adults laugh. In fact, one of the sixth graders shared with me the joke that she brought in the other day, it was “what do you call two octopus who look exactly the same octopuses who look exactly the same?” And I said, “what?” And she said, “itentacle”, which was just great. And we want to be giving them opportunities to just lighten the mood and for us to laugh too. I think teachers have been through so much and they too also really benefit from some fun and some novelty.

Steve: 08:18 Yeah. I just listened to an interview with some teenagers who were asked to make their suggestions as to ways that teachers could best cause their engagement. And there’s something about humor and and I guess the novelty fits in there that the kids interpret as the person being real. So even a joke that the kids see as ridiculous, there’s a sense that the teacher is making him or herself vulnerable and there’s a piece of realness there.

Phyllis: 09:05 I think that’s a hundred percent accurate. I spoke to an eighth grade teacher at a public school in the area where I live, near me in Silver Spring, Maryland and she told me that she tells her students that she has struggled in the past with mental illness. She tells them that she has a therapist. Her students even know that her therapist’s name is Manuela and she will share anecdotes from her conversations with Manuela. Now, every teacher isn’t going to be comfortable disclosing that level of personal information, but it’s authentic for this teacher to do so. And her goal is really to communicate to the kids, I’m fighting to get through every day just like you are and I’m a helper and I’m fighting for you. And the students as a result, are really quick to share what they’re going through.

Phyllis: 09:53 So she’s had a student tell her that they were struggling with insomnia. She’s had a student explain that the reason she comes to all of the classes and participates in all the lectures yet never complete an assignment is because she’s too anxious to get started. So she was able to help that student get some mental health support. She had another student who came in one day and said that his father had COVID. And it was a significant disclosure because his grandfather, and the class knew this, had recently died in El Salvador of COVID. So they understood why this would be such a huge issue for this student. And the class stopped everything to support this kid and to talk about it. And I think that is something that we want to make sure we’re doing as students return or as we’re on Zoom, because no-one’s going to learn if they are in a heightened state of anxiety, they have to feel that connection, that warmth that teachers like them before they’re going to engage in the learning.

Steve: 10:53 Yeah. A word that you used here caught my attention. It’s authenticity. So the students seeing their teacher as authentic, I guess, brings a more authentic response back from the student.

Phyllis: 11:08 Yes. I had a seventh grade student tell me that she was sick of adults, teachers and parents saying to her, “you’re going through a lot.” And I said, what would you like them to say? And she said, I want them to say we’re going through a lot and emphasize that we’re all in this together.

Steve: 11:26 Powerful. Powerful.

Phyllis: 11:26 That empathy piece is huge.

Steve: 11:28 Yeah. Thanks. Another another one of the suggestions that you made in the article was the need to tamp down pressure.

Phyllis: 11:38 Yes. And even in pre-pandemic times, I’ve often told parents who were anxious about their child’s achievement that nobody performs better because they think the stakes are high. And right now, I think our goal should be to ensure kids can demonstrate their learning, whatever form that takes. Some might want to make a diagram, some might want to do an oral presentation, some might want to write a book report, some might want to take a quiz. I don’t think we should get caught up in the details or be rigid. This is a time to offer grace and flexibility. Nobody knows their student’s full backstories, but as a counselor, I can tell you that pretty much everyone has something going on. And if we want to keep them engaged, if we want to keep them excited about learning and feel connected, we want to make sure they feel confident. And it’s kind of like that student who said that she wanted to participate, she wanted to be part of the class, she wanted to do well, but she was too anxious to get started on her assignments. We need to take a deep dive and figure out what’s going on with our students and give them an opportunity to feel that sense of accomplishment, to feel that they can master the material.

Steve: 12:48 And one last one, you talked about the importance of relationships. And I think you’ve labeled both relationship between teacher and students, but also student to student.

Phyllis: 13:02 Yes. I think it’s hard to overestimate how critical it is that students have someone that they trust, that they have a person in the school. I had a teacher at a school recently say to me, I did what you said. I asked the students who is the person that you would go to in times of crisis? And I even asked them the same followup question you told us to ask, which was, if you can’t come up with someone, please come talk about it with me. And a student couldn’t come up with someone and she did come and say to me, I couldn’t come up with somebody who I would go to in a crisis. So now what do I do? And I said, well, that student just told you that you are you’re her person. You are the person that she would go to in a crisis.

Phyllis: 13:51 And so self identify as a helper, let her know that if you can’t, you’ll find the right person to help her. But right now, I think we want to be making sure that no one’s falling through the cracks. A counselor may or may not be the one to spot that somebody is in emotional distress. There’s just such a high case load for counselors. I think the average across the country is more than 400 students per counselor. It could be that an art teacher sees that a student is drawing really dark self portraits. It could be that a child writes about depression in a poem in English class. It could be that a paraeducator sees a kid standing alone outside during recess. There are a lot of different ways that we can see that a kid is struggling. And as teachers, as counselors, as administrators, we all need to be communicating and talking to one another so that we can share that information and problem solve together. Maybe find a student a mentor if they need one.

Steve: 14:44 Yeah. Paying attention is what I’m really hearing there because it’s too easy to be overwhelmed with everything and miss clear signals that are there for us.

Phyllis: 14:56 Yes. And sometimes it’s really obvious. We just went back to full-time in person today. So before today it was K through
four was here in the morning. Five through eight was here in the afternoon daily. And as of this morning, our middle schoolers showed up too first thing in the morning. And most of them were super excited. I asked them if they had had to press snooze on their alarm, I had wondered if we would have a hard time getting up in the morning and most of them actually said, no, I couldn’t go to sleep at all. I was so excited. We get to eat lunch together. The cohorts are now allowed to mix outside. It feels more normal. And there was this joy actually that was permeating. And yet there was one student who came out of the car crying. And that was a very – it doesn’t get clearer than somebody crying, that they’re struggling. And it’s not hard to tell when somebody is really joyful, but there are a lot of different emotions in between crying and joyful and we want to give kids opportunities to express them and to problem solve with us so that we can help them get through the days, especially now as they’re returning and they’re going to be exhausted, it’s going to be a hard transition back.

Steve: 16:02 Well, Phyllis, thank you so much for for joining us today. I’m wondering what’s the easiest way that people might be able to connect with you with other questions that they might have?

Phyllis: 16:18 I’m very active on Twitter. My handle is at @pfagell and my email address is on my website, which is phyllisfagell.com.

Steve: 16:28 Okay. Well, we’ll be sure to put your your website in the, in the lead in to this podcast. So thanks again.

Steve [Outro]: 16:40 Thanks for listening in, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on twitter @stevebarkley or send me
your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.