Kathryn Kennedy 8/1/24 Kathryn Kennedy 8/1/24

#blog: What About Teaching Actually Matters?

by Trinity Wilbourn

Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)

What can teachers look for in a K-12 education system of urgency, efficiency, and transactional outcomes to know they are keeping students' and their own humanity at the center?

I used to have a blog with the tagline, “All I have to give is who I am.” Dramatic, yes. Also, true.

The only thing unique amongst all the books, all the social media, all the online content, all the A.I., is me.

I’m the only me there will ever be.

When I first started teaching high school, back when I was 22, I brought passion but little sense of my “me-ness” (or what my therapist calls my “ish.” As in, when I’m being most myself, I’m being my most Trinity-ish self). I didn’t know my “ish,”—my voice, my needs, or my boundaries. I was trying to be a “good teacher,” something I could not define but felt certain I was missing. With each passing year, the students schooled me in the truth that what they needed, more than my knowledge or good teaching skills, was to feel heard and seen, to feel connected to someone who could hold the line when they forgot how.

I spent 11 years in public education, teaching online, brick-and-mortar, and blending learning courses before I lost my job last year due to lack of funding. It’s been a year of reflecting on what about this all-consuming career felt so good and what felt so hard.

Teaching is a difficult job for many reasons, but it’s also rewarding in all the ways that matter most, and I think that’s why teachers stay.

We have big hearts.

We get into teaching because we care to care for kids with our whole hearts. And then our hearts get exploited, and we end up saying yes to everything, at the expense of our well-being. We end up too burnt out to get the help we need to not be burnt out. And if we do admit we need help, we risk undermining our qualification to do our job.

It feels like an impossible barter: keep our jobs and lose ourselves, or keep ourselves and lose our jobs. Keeping the job means we can’t listen to our needs because that means less time spent on our students. If we do something for ourselves, we navigate a backlash of guilt. Whoever stays longest after school doing unpaid labor wins points, and whoever leaves their classroom to go pee loses. Teacher dehydration is a thing.

Education is not a system that favors those it purports to serve. It profits off of teachers’ willingness to not take care of ourselves, and then offers professional development on how to take care of ourselves.

This is what sucks about reading teaching advice with words like “balance” in the title. We are trying, but the ground is not level.

The odds are not stacked in our favor, nor is our labor compensated the way it should be. As teachers, we deal with bureaucracy, institutional abuse of power, endless workload, endless paperwork, inadequate resources, poor physical space, looming threats to our safety (cue the active shooter drills), large class sizes, lack of mentoring, student behavioral challenges, increasing demand to be all things to all people while navigating parental criticism and watchdogging, curricular censorship, high stakes testing expectations, lack of recognition and celebration, and incongruence between what we are told will happen and what actually happens (or doesn’t).

We work in a system where it’s not okay to name that things are not okay. A system where it’s not okay to not be okay.

And yet, if we are not ok, how can anything really be working?

Our students learn from us what it looks like to be human. We have this incredible chance to be in this baffling business of becoming more alive, more aligned, more in our “ish” together. When it’s working, there’s nothing quite like it.

When it’s not, it’s a recipe for burnout.

When we get out of tune with our “ish,” the students can feel it—they can feel the dissonance and their nervous systems interpret the dissonance as a potential threat (like the way your brain feels when you hear an unresolved chord). The reasoning and relational centers of their brains shut down and they move into dysregulation. A human in dysregulation cannot learn.

Plus, we co-regulate each other, so if we get dysregulated, we impact the students because they are attuning to us, the guide in the room (for more on how attunement affects educational success, read about Dr. Bruce Perry’s neurosequential model of the 3 R’s: regulate, relate, and reason).

Anytime we teachers choose to care for ourselves, to treat ourselves like we are the thing that matters most, we’re able to then show up in ways that help our students know they’re also what matters most. Together we create mutual care and co-regulation, learning and teaching in this infinity loop of reciprocity. It’s the best feeling—this sense of being curious readers of each other’s lives, a devoted band of humans committing to the work of exploration and growth alongside each other.

It’s easy to forget about what really matters in teaching.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer responsibility of the job and the demand to produce quantifiable results. It can feel like swimming upstream to keep the students at the center, to not be sucked into the whirlpool of urgent efficiency and transactional outcomes. And even when we do manage to keep the students at the center, the job can still feel thankless and results-less, like swimming in circles. The lack of confirmation that what we’re doing is working makes us feel like it’s not working, so we work harder. The students deserve our very best, and the needs are endless. And around and around we go.

This is what I’ve been reflecting on: when do we know if what we’re doing is “working?” The long-game of teaching makes it hard to know, so if we can’t know if what we’re doing matters, then what matters?

To sustain myself in this career, I had to redefine when something was “working.” Working became things like: A student who normally didn’t show up to class, showed up. A student falling in love with their first book. A student wanting to eat lunch with me because they felt safe to talk in a smaller environment and they knew that about themselves, and then they knew how to advocate for what they needed. A student risking writing their first poem and then reading it in front of the class, and the whole class clapping, like they were saying, “Yes, we see you doing a brave thing. You are not alone. Your voice matters.” So many tiny things. So many pieces of what matters.

I think the work is “working” when we, as teachers, create the kinds of classrooms where it’s okay to risk seeing and being seen, where it’s okay to practice becoming more human.

Remember that Maya Angelou quotation, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel?”

When we are resourced and in our “ish,” we can be present to see our students, to hold the line for them, to hold their gaze. We can help them feel seen because we know how to do it, because we’ve been practicing.

When we teachers treat ourselves like we are the thing that matters, we model for our students the most important lesson we could ever offer: they are the thing that matters.

And when a student learns that they are the thing that matters, guess what happens? They treat other people like they are the thing that matters.

It’s love. It’s community. It’s taking care of each other. It’s treating every living thing like they are the thing that matters. It’s making this world more joyful, loving, and free.

And around and around we go.

About the Author

Trinity Wilbourn, M.Ed.

Facilitator and Coach

Trinity is a Denver-based educator and independent consultant with over 20 years combined experience creating and presenting curriculum, training facilitators, and coaching individuals, classrooms, and peer support groups, including 11 years teaching in online, brick and mortar, and blended learning environments.

Trinity works at the intersection of social emotional learning, mind/body coaching, mindfulness, and the science of nervous system regulation. She has taught humanities, world lit, U.S. lit, creative writing, drama, reading recovery, philosophy, advisory/life skills, integrated services, as well as running her school’s GED program and founding one of the first mindfulness programs in her school district. Additionally, she has over a decade of experience building a community organization focused on identity exploration, resiliency cultivation, and long-term holistic health for educators, activists, and community space-holders called Arkitekt. She is a mind/body coach trained through The Embody Lab, a Mindful Schools-trained mindfulness instructor, and a SourcePoint Therapy holistic healing practitioner.

Her passion is to equitably and inclusively coach educators to reclaim their joy, move from the relentless pace of burnout to a generous rhythm of work and life, and co-create vibrant communities of learning that act as humanized practice rooms for people to become more congruent and fully alive.

Kathryn Kennedy 7/28/24 Kathryn Kennedy 7/28/24

#blog: Seven Small Changes to Support Your Mental Health This School Year

| By Kathryn Kennedy |

Originally published with Gale.

It’s almost time to head back to school. How did that happen?! Where did the time go?! I know we ask that question every year, but seriously, summer sometimes feels like an epic time warp! Am I right?! Nevertheless, I hope you thoroughly enjoyed the summer not only with your family and friends but also with yourself.
As we start the school year, you may feel a bit of excitement and perhaps some trepidation stirring inside of you about what the year is going to bring. You’re not alone. That’s totally natural, especially given the unpredictability we’ve all experienced over the past few years. We’ve endured a lot and continue to do so, and healing and supporting ourselves takes time and continuous intentional effort. Healing prolonged stress and trauma does not happen overnight; it’s an ongoing journey, not a final destination.
Before we start back to school, what if we laid some foundational supports for ourselves? I know, I know … oftentimes, once the school year starts, our best-laid plans derail quickly! But what if we start small, using seven strategies that can be foundational for sustaining your mental health and well-being throughout this school year and beyond? And—BONUS—you might already be doing some of these! Here they are in no particular order.
1. Clear your plate.
We as educators, as you know, have a lot on our plates all of the time. What if we take some time before heading back to school to intentionally look at what we have on our plates? Is there anything you can let go of, either personal or professional? Is there anything that you can ask your school leader to take off your plate? Is there anything that’s not absolutely necessary? If so, take it off your plate to make room for things that will help you sustain your mental health and well-being. And make this intentional plate-clearing process a practice every month (if not more often) throughout the year. Look at it as a time to reflect and reevaluate your plate to see if there’s anything that can be cleared.
2. Play every day.
Back in 2019, collaborative research from The Genius of Play and Fundamentally Children found that 75% of children were not getting enough play.1 If that’s the case, can you imagine the percentage of adults? According to Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play,2 “Play that is based on our inner needs and desires is the only path to finding lasting satisfaction in our relationships and professional work.” There are many benefits of play: it boosts creativity and problem-solving abilities; reduces stress; builds resilience, improves relationships; nurtures community; and much more. Given all of the benefits, it’s important for us to bring play back into our lives. So how do you get started doing just that? The activities that we find fun are unique to each of us. The National Institute for Play encourages adults to:
- Identify what is playful for you.
  Everyone is different, so find what works for you!
- Develop lifelong play habits.
  Habits typically take 40 days to become routine in our lives, so try to incorporate play at least once a day for 40 days to see what sticks!
- Recognize how you feel when there’s not enough play.
  Practicing intentional check-ins to see how we’re feeling is important, and doing specific check-ins on how we feel when we play and not can help us see the benefits of play in our everyday lives.
- Model healthy play habits in your communities.
  Establishing a sense of play and modeling it for others, including the other adults and little ones in your professional and personal lives, can help make play an integral part of our day-to-day lives.
3. Define and establish your safe spaces.
According to trauma and somatic psychology research, to heal ourselves and support our well-being, we need to have a felt sense of safety.3 This means safety in mind, body, and all other critical aspects of our being and lives. As you begin the school year, think about these various elements of your safety and identify ways you can support yourself to feel safe. Just as our students need to Maslow before Bloom, so do we as adults. And safety, inside and outside of ourselves, is priority number one!
4. Build and bolster trusting relationships.
Once we have established a felt sense of safety, we can build and bolster relationships with others we trust. Trusting relationships provide us opportunities for co-regulation. Co-regulation is a way for your nervous system to work with another being’s (human, animal, plant, or otherwise) system to calm and ground. The more relationships we have that support co-regulation, the better.
5. Create and cultivate your supportive communities.
Taking relationships one step further to create and cultivate a supportive community allows for more opportunities to support overall well-being. Each community or network you are part of provides specific support for each component of your well-being. Take some time to reflect on the communities you’re a part of and how they support you, as well as how you support them (giving back is just as important as getting support from others). Are there any communities that you think you’d like to add or even create to provide yourself better support?
6. Learn something new.
Stepping out of our comfort zone and learning something new can spark creative energy, which in turn provides us a chance to reclaim our power and voice, and heal. Each day, see if there’s something small you can learn that is novel to you to help light up your curiosity!
7. Explore and engage in short restoration activities.
We as educators are busy a majority of the time. When possible, take short bits of time to downshift, to rest, to reset, and to restore your mind and body. Perhaps you can check out yoga nidra, restorative yoga, yin yoga, and guided meditations that take anywhere from five to 60 minutes. These restorative activities help to refresh yourself and cultivate renewed energy.
This is definitely not an exhaustive list, but I hope these and other small changes can help support you as you jump into this school year and many more years to come!
1. The Genius of Play. (22 Jul 2019). “75 Percent of Children Are Not Getting Enough Playtime, According to New Research.” PR Newswire.
2. National Institute for Play.
3. Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Meet the Author

Kathryn Kennedy has cultivated her two primary passions for 20+ years. She serves as founder and executive director of Wellness for Educators and is the founder and principal consultant of Consult4Ed Group. Her recent publication, The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional Movement for Wellness, is the first in a four-part book series.

Kathryn Kennedy 6/5/24 Kathryn Kennedy 6/5/24

#blog: Unwind and Recharge: How to Downshift into Summer after the School Year

| By Kathryn Kennedy |

Originally published with Gale.

Final assessments complete—check!
Cleaned up learning space—check!
Bulletin boards taken down—check!
Organized digital files—check!
Packed up Marvin (the class bearded dragon) and his cricket and spinach treats—check!
All of the end-of-school-year tasks are complete—check!

You’re ready for summer! All systems go! Full speed ahead!

But wait …

Have you been in GO mode, or even SUPER GO mode, since the beginning of the school year with little time to rest and recharge? Do you feel like a human doing instead of a human being? The majority of educators like you were under a lot of pressure and stress already, and then the pandemic hit! You were forced into overdrive and had to stay there to take care of everyone around you like you usually do and not have enough time to care for yourself. The difference with the pandemic and the stress and overwhelm caused by it was that the high-speed mode you were in never let up; instead, it increased and sustained for over three years.

The field of mental health tells us that some amount of stress is good for us and that we have the ability to deal with short-term stress by using healthy coping mechanisms, such as sleep, boundary setting, deep breathing, and emotional release, among others. However, we are not equipped to sustain good health when stress continues for an extended amount of time.

According to research, when we are in a state of prolonged stress for over six months, and we can’t or don’t slow down to take the time to heal and work through the emotions associated with our stressful and/or traumatic experiences, we can succumb to burnout and in some cases experience symptoms of anxiety, depression, and even post-traumatic stress disorder.[1] In these prolonged stress states, our ability to learn and function can go completely offline.[2],[3]

The fields of neuroscience and neurophysiology have found that prolonged stress or trauma (using Dr. Peter Levine’s definition, “Trauma is anything that our system can’t handle or process,” anything that puts us outside of our ability to cope[4]) is not only a cognitive experience, but also a bodily experience. Research from Dr. Stephen Porges and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explains how the body stores the majority of these stress and trauma experiences that eventually lead to aches, pains, and illness in us. This is why it’s vitally important to take the time to heal. Van der Kolk and other neuroscience and neurophysiology researchers also talk about hypervigilance arising when your mind and body are on high alert for an extended time; this leads to our nervous system getting used to that overwhelmed state and consequently staying there if we don’t take the time to downshift and heal.

So instead of jumping into summer and continuing in “GO” mode, what if we slowed down a bit to reset, to downshift into a calmer state of being? After a time when stress has set up camp in our minds and bodies for an extended stay, we can choose to take the time to heal. What can you do to downshift and heal your prolonged stress and/or trauma? Here are three ideas:

1. Guided Meditations

These practices have been used for thousands of years in a variety of cultures and disciplines and can support healing on a cellular level. Research on yoga nidra, or “sleep with a trace of awareness,” has been shown to have a significant impact on stress, sleep, and overall well-being[5] and the feelings of sleeping for three to four hours when only practiced for 45 minutes. Below is an example from the Wellness for Educators’ Wellness Library. This practice involves a bit of storytelling, where you go on a journey to a forest. For this practice, I suggest listening to the audio recording available:

To fully reset the nervous system, enjoy guided meditation once a day for at least a week.

2. Artistic Expression

In its many forms, art can support the healing process and your nervous system in general.[6] Art, such as painting, drawing, and coloring, has been shown to raise serotonin levels; impact brain wave patterns, emotions, and nervous system; interpret, express, and resolve emotions and thoughts; and allow for nonverbal communication of emotions and experiences. Sound or music can release dopamine, a naturally occurring happy chemical in our brains. If you’re not a fan of singing, humming and/or listening to music also help to support the vagus nerve, which in turn can help support the nervous system. Dance and movement practices also provide opportunities for nonverbal communication and release of emotional energy. Through the use of journals, gratitude notes, and poetry, to name a few, writing can also be a healing support. Writing can ease emotions attached to trauma and prolonged stress and can offer another form of unspoken expression.

3. Intentional Movement

Movement is important, but in the healing process, it helps to intentionally check in with the cognitive side of how the body is feeling and what emotions might be arising as we move.[7] As you’re engaging in movement, ask yourself the following, observing without judging:

What do I notice in my mind?
What do I notice in my body?
What do I notice in my feelings?
What do I notice in my thoughts?
What do I need at this moment to feel supported? (Observe without judgment and give yourself what you need to feel supported.)

This last bullet is especially important because as educators and human doings, we tend to bypass our body and mind’s requests for us throughout the day and throughout our lives. In this practice, you can choose to make a conscious shift to listen to and support yourself.

You can learn more about intentional movement in a recently published book called The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional Movement for Wellness.

The suggestions for healing prolonged stress and trauma shared above are definitely not an exhaustive list of supports. I encourage you to find what supports work best for you and add those to your day-to-day living.

So before you dive into the hustle and bustle of the summer, set aside some time to downshift. Enjoy your summer, and come back even more refreshed for a new school year in the fall!

[1] Schwartz, A. “Stress, PTSD, and Your Health.” Dr. Arielle Schwartz (blog), June 17, 2014. https://drarielleschwartz.com/stress-ptsd-and-your-health-dr-arielle-schwartz/.
[2] Porges, S. W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.
[3] Van der Kolk, B. A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
[4] Levine, P. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997.
[5] Moszeik, E. N., T. von Oertzen, and K-H. Renner. “Effectiveness of a short Yoga Nidra meditation on stress, sleep, and well-being in a large and diverse sample.” Current Psychology 41, no. 8 (2020): 5272–5286.
[6] McNiff, S. Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2004.
[7] Hanna, T. “What is Somatics?” Somatic Systems Institute. Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences V, no. 4 (Spr-Sum 1986): 4–8. https://somatics.org/library/htl-wis1.

Meet the Author

Kathryn Kennedy 5/6/24 Kathryn Kennedy 5/6/24

#blog: Are You an Educator on Fire? AI Can Help You Chill Out

by Vickie Echols

Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)

Used wisely, AI can ease the burden of administrative tasks, help you prioritize well-being, and grant more time for the work that only you can do.

When I was a school principal and also a classroom teacher, some days brought a relentless onslaught of demands vying for my attention. I would usually arrive early to feel more in control, but I would still find myself bracing for the whirlwind of the day. Emails piled up, urging me to make them a priority. The calendar pinged with constant reminders of staff meetings, parent-teacher conferences, and student check-ins. The to-do list seemed to multiply with each passing minute. It felt like I was constantly playing whack-a-mole, with new accountability expectations, changing curriculum, and issues popping up faster than I could complete them. When I caught a break during the day, I’d sip my lukewarm coffee, survey the situation, and feel a gnawing sense that even the most heroic effort might not be enough to keep me going.

Does this sound familiar to you? Do you ever wish you had your own personal assistant who could help you prioritize and make the whirlwind more manageable?

Exploring Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can transform not just day-to-day work, but it can also help shift your outlook on wellness in education. It is the digital assistant waiting in the wings, ready to ease the burden of administrative tasks and grant you more time.

You might be thinking, “AI? No time for that!” But hear me out. Understanding AI is exactly what busy educators need. The dream of a trusty sidekick to share the workload isn’t just wishful thinking. This innovative technology can help conquer the daily deluge, reclaim precious time, and help us find a healthy balance.

Navigating AI Responsibly

AI can be a powerful tool, but it’s important to be mindful of safety. When interacting with AI,

prioritize critical thinking;
actively question and evaluate responses;
double-check the information against reputable sources and your own understanding; and
remember that your interactions with AI platforms may be stored for improvement purposes, so avoid adding personal identifying information.

Getting Started

Popular AI models include OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Stable Diffusion, and others. While I don’t endorse any particular one, I recommend trying out several platforms and using them to compare your experience.

After logging in to one of the AI platforms, you can immediately start interacting with it by typing in a prompt, which is a question or a statement. The machine is designed to understand and generate human-like text as if you are having a friendly chat.

AI can open doors, but it can also show you how to open them. I recommend building a support team to gradually learn and explore these new tools together. This collaborative, scaled approach fosters better results. And then you can use AI to help you figure out how your team can learn more about AI . Here are a couple of examples to get started.

Example #1: Invite a Supportive Team

Use AI to write an invitation that entices others to join you in the exploration of this tool. It can create an invitation that clearly outlines the purpose, agenda, and logistics of the discussion.

The prompts below will help you get started. Just copy and paste the text into the conversation box or tweak it to match what you need.

Write an invitation to school personnel to join an inclusive discussion exploring the potential of AI in education. We will address concerns, share insights, and explore innovative ways to leverage technology for administrative tasks in the classroom and school. Emphasize that it will ultimately give us more time for what matters most. Insert these details: [add date, time, location, optional attendance].

Follow up this prompt with additional prompts that include your thoughts or questions; think of it as a conversation. When you finalize the email—tweak the response to match your personal style and voice.

Example #2: Generate Discussion Questions

For your first meeting, keep the conversation flowing and cater to your group’s unique dynamic with a good set of questions. Try this prompt designed to spark questions from the AI chatbot. You can easily adapt it to fit your needs.

Create a set of open-ended questions to use in a discussion session with educators. We will talk mainly about using AI for various administrative tasks in the classroom and school. Ensure these questions foster inclusivity, empathy, and meaningful dialogue. Take into account that some may be unaware, curious, or apprehensive about using AI as a tool in education. Include questions that address concerns and ways to safely use AI in school.

Diving Deeper with AI

Those two examples will get you started. As you get more comfortable with AI platforms, explore other ways to apply these tools in your educator life. Start with those issues that address your biggest need. The key is to find what works for you and your team. Integrate AI into your routines at a comfortable pace. I found AI can help in the following ways in a school setting:

Collaborative Decision-Making
Supportive Relationships and Trust
Personalized Professional Learning
Data Analysis and School Improvement
Parent and Community Engagement

Journey from Burnout to Balance

The journey from burnout to balance is not an easy one, but with the right tools and mindset, it is an attainable goal. You can harness the power of AI to regain control of your workload, reduce stress, and cultivate a healthier, more sustainable approach to your professional life. Compelling evidence points to the need for schools to adapt to the changing needs of both students and educators. It’s time to acknowledge this reality and work toward a future where educators don’t just survive—they enjoy the journey and thrive!

I invite you to walk alongside me on this journey of discovery and unlock the potential of AI to empower your work and well-being. I found it life-changing, and I hope you will too. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know! I'm actually so excited about the possibilities AI can offer that I wrote a whole book on it! AI for School Leaders: 62 Ways to Lighten Your Workload and Focus on What Matters will be published by ISTE later this year. I wrote the book to share what I've learned about AI; you’ll find practical ideas and strategies that can benefit you and your campus community—right away!

About the Author

Vickie Echols

Educator and Author

Vickie Echols is a seasoned educator with over forty years of experience spanning the PK-20 continuum. She earned a bachelor of arts degree from Texas A&M University and a master’s degree from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. Now a consultant with Wellness for Educators, she is an accomplished author, coach, and consultant with a current emphasis on school and district transformation and harnessing generative AI to boost sustainable productivity. Her book, AI for School Leaders: 62 Ways to Lighten Your Workload and Focus on What Matters, will be available in the fall of 2024. You can message her on LinkedIn or her website.

#blog: Educators’ Light and Shadows: The Power of True Rest and Pause

by Taylor Ann Gonzalez

Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)

Teachers are applauded for all they do but their inherent humanity is ignored when they are not given time to rest and recover.

Like the school bell that marks the beginning and end of a year, our journey may have its ‘ding’ moments, but we all know teachers work their magic year-round. Teachers are “on” from before the first day of school until after the final bell rings. And after the final bell signals the end of the school year, that is when educators are cleaning, reflecting on the last year, and then immediately planning for execution for the next year.

As many of us in the social justice and social change sector know, project plans are the frameworks that help move the needle of our work forward. We need ample time for research and design, reflection and adjustment, execution, and then integration; rinse, repeat…

Unfortunately, educators don’t have this sacred portal of carved and built-in time for resourcing, planning, or designing. Researchers such as Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson have summarized studies that reported 0.7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching. Further, in his book, Life in Classrooms, researcher Philip Jackson said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments. Are we going the math here? The mental fatigue teachers face daily rivals that of the World Series when all bases are loaded and the last batter is walking up to the plate. But not just one time a year. All day, every day, all year long.

It’s safe to say that teachers are applauded for our production and execution.

We’re applauded for the ‘doing,’ the ‘outcomes,’ with little to no kudos for the toll it has on us.

This is only further underscored by the stereotype that teachers have summers off or that they work shorter days. We could riff on that, but that’s a digression for another post.

/////

During my second year in the classroom, my first as a second-grade teacher, I tore my meniscus. The meniscus is a C-shaped pad of cartilage in the knee that acts as a shock absorber. Ahead of the surgery, I planned nearly a month of substantial, informative, engaging lessons and experiences for my students. I made copies, bought math tools, and set books aside so that someone could comfortably support my students’ learning so I could support my body’s healing.

Less than a week post-op (no, truly, my surgery was on a Thursday and this happened the following Tuesday), I got a call from my principal to “Please, come back!” Even though all the plans were put in place weeks ahead of my scheduled absence, the substitute was pulled in another direction.

To reiterate, less than a week out of major knee surgery, I was requested to come back to the classroom: a classroom on the second floor of a building without an elevator.

Instead of focusing on my healing, I searched frantically for a wheelchair I could borrow and solidified logistics with my administration to be able to teach a room of second-graders while completely doped up on pain meds, without the ability to hold myself up. Oh! And, my principal informed me that I had been bold in asking for time off in the middle of the year instead of during a break… as if I could have planned that or would want to plan that.

That healing experience was less than ideal, however, what I want you to take away is that instead of holding my firm boundary, I was asked to push it down and cast myself aside, all to prioritize the service of others.

To this day, I hold anger and resentment around that. I told myself, if there was ever a next time, it’d be different.

/////

Fast forward to 2022. Two orthopedist visits later, an MRI confirmed that I had a tear in my shoulder labrum. To be able to compete and train in the ways I wanted to, I would need to undergo surgery. I knew this healing experience would be different. I wouldn’t push down my needs, or my wants; instead, I would use this as an opportunity to slow down, to be in alignment with the season of slowing down, and see how I may move, live, do, and be different.

Post-op, I was quite literally forced into rest. I wasn’t able to go for a run and escape my day. I wasn’t able to get on my yoga mat and tune out. I was very much told to sit, heal, relax.

As I moved through this major healing experience, I witnessed how my body didn’t just crave this deep rest but was indulging and luxuriating in it. The magnitude of quiet allowed me to embrace aspects of myself that I had built walls around: shame, judgment, criticism, and fear.

As I noticed these walls, I became curious.

What was this shame? Where did this shame reside and live in my body? Have I always felt this way? When and where did it begin? Who received feedback in ways that felt wrong? What parts of self have been neglected, turned off, told they don’t belong?

As I navigated these waters, I noticed they were dark shadows that were begging to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be witnessed, and perhaps...dare I say, to be honored.

I came to understand that holding space for darkness didn’t dim the light; oh no, in fact, it allowed me to see the light more clearly.

/////

I realized that my injury was a metaphor for the highest level of being comfortable in my body, embodiment. It forced me to take a magnifying glass to who I was, and how I was moving in this world—physically and emotionally. And I’ll be honest: this focus on production/doing/outcomes that I was living daily as an educator wasn’t me. It didn’t fit, and I needed to make big changes in my life.

As educators, we’re shown the ideal social media spotlight of what is a successful teacher and we’re holding up a bar of expectations that we can’t possibly meet 24/7. We become hyper aware of all the things we’re not doing or could be doing better. Most critically, this unrealistic image of a successful teacher sends the message that there’s something wrong with us, shaming our selves into burnout.

What’s wrong with being inherently human? It doesn’t fit the description of what a “good teacher” is.

I know other educators out there are told they’re not doing enough; those are the ones who risk burnout, lose their shine for education, and leave the profession. The more we tell ourselves this narrative of not enoughness and only applaud when things are shiny and bright, the darker the shadows become.

I know my story of healing from this shape-shifting, pushing down, or shame around our authentic human BEINGness isn’t just my story.

I know there are educators and teachers out there who desire a new way to live, be, teach, and lead.

The entirety of our experiences—the dark shadows, the bright light, and the entire spectrum in between—should be explored, tasted, and showcased.

To truly heal, to truly embody who we are as humans, as educators, and as teachers, we must allow ourselves to rest, to unplug, to disconnect. And not for an emphasis on being able to do more, to plug back in, or to connect. But merely because we’re human, too; we deserve carved containers of rest and pause.

About the Author

Taylor Ann Gonzalez (she/hers)

CEO & Founder, Body Alchemy Project

Taylor Ann Gonzalez is a human BEing, runner, trauma-sensitive yoga teacher, and lifelong educator. She believes that the body remembers AND can unlock the healing within us.

#blog: Unpacking Teachers’ Invisible Backpacks

by Taylor Ann Gonzalez

Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)

For teachers to thrive, they need to know that their basic needs—food, water, restrooms, sleep—will be met on a daily basis. It's not as easy to achieve as it should be.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a known theory of motivation. Maslow's theory states that our actions are motivated by specific physiological and psychological needs that progress from essential to complex. The base level of this pyramid is our physiological needs which are equated with human survival—food, water, shelter. According to Maslow, we must meet our physiological needs first.

As educators, we are aware of the invisible backpacks our students carry. However, what about our own invisible backpacks?

If I asked you right now, do you have your basic needs—food, water, shelter (warmth/rest)—would you say that your needs are met? I’d bet you would most likely say “yes.” Yes, you know where you call home. Yes, you know you have food in the kitchen. Yes, you live where you can run your tap water and drink it immediately. This allows your nervous system to evolve from survival to thriving, from physiological to self-actualization.

In the grand scheme of things, this makes sense. Right? Our nervous system should know it can exhale and calm down because our own needs are being met. However, I’d push back on Maslow and let him know that I think he’s missing a critical component.

You can know you have access to all the basic needs and still have an activated sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop, fatigue, flood)—overwhelmed, struggling, burning the midnight oil so that even a “small” thing throws us into a tizzy.

Why? Because—and here’s my push to Maslow—you need to know not just in the grand scheme of life, but on a daily basis:

When you’re eating ALL your meals
When you’re able to use the restroom
When you’re able to and how long you get to sleep
When you can access potable and drinkable water

As classroom educators, we don’t always know when this will happen. Roll with me, and let me know how many of these may resonate:

Lunch is spent shepherding your class in/out of the cafeteria.
Lunch is spent making last-minute copies and revising lesson plans.
Lunch is spent running to the bathroom AND eating something very quickly.
Lunch is spent with remediation work or acceleration work.
You are holding in your bladder because your next “break” isn’t for another two hours and the thought of calling down to the office, yet again, makes your skin crawl.
You didn’t sleep too much last night because a student is having trouble at home and you’re not sure what more you can do.
You stayed late after school to help with extracurriculars so by the time you get home, you’re exhausted and starving.
You brought grading home with you and are on the couch eating leftovers while trying to maintain focus.
You’re coaching an athletic team, or maybe a debate team, after school; you haven’t had lunch, and you are unsure when you’ll get dinner.
You skipped breakfast because you weren’t that hungry anyway, and it’ll be a few hours until you make it to lunch.

I mean, I can keep going here, but I think you get my drift.

This is exhausting. This is depleting. This is not sustainable.

How can we meet the needs of students on a daily basis, if our needs as educators are in limbo or not being met at all?

Already we’re experiencing elevated physiology, with the added layer of not having the carved container for nourishment, sleep, and connection → it’s no wonder that even with our physiological needs met in the grand scheme of things, we are struggling as we move toward Maslow’s idea of self-actualization.

This isn’t linear, it’s foundational and evolving. We have to know WHEN food, water, and shelter are happening on a DAILY basis not just in the grand scheme of life.

When we have the set containers:

It allows us to turn on our parasympathetic nervous system—rest and digest.
It allows us to turn on our groundedness.
It allows us to turn on our focus to the task we’re engaging in.

Test it out tomorrow and see what it’s like when you begin to empty your invisible backpack.

Carve your container for breakfast. Eat before you leave the house.
Take your lunch. Throw headphones on, and read. Focus on what you’re eating.
Leave at your contracted time. Leave school work in the building.
Have a nourishing and enjoyable dinner.
Make a list of all your have-tos and must-dos.
Drink water throughout the day (at least three cups).
Use the restroom—call the office if you need coverage. Allow your body to be a body.

Students can feel our energy. They will absorb not only what we teach them but also what we show them through our presence. Show up nourished and fulfilled. Show up regulated and overflowing. Show them that it’s possible so that they can see it represented for themselves too.

About the Author

Taylor Ann Gonzalez (she/hers)

CEO & Founder, Body Alchemy Project

Taylor Ann Gonzalez is a human BEing, runner, trauma-sensitive yoga teacher, and lifelong educator. She believes that the body remembers AND can unlock the healing within us.

#blog: How Teachers Can Unwind and Recharge after the School Year

by Dr. Kathryn Kennedy

Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)

Mental health research shows that we are not equipped to sustain good health when dealing with ongoing stress, and teachers have had little time to rest and recharge lately. Three practices can help.

Final assessments complete—check!
Cleaned up learning space—check!
Bulletin boards taken down—check!
Organized digital files—check!
Packed up Marvin (the class bearded dragon) and his cricket and spinach treats—check!
All of the end-of-school-year tasks are complete—check!

You’re ready for summer! All systems go! Full speed ahead!

But wait…

According to research, when we are in a state of prolonged stress for over six months, and we can’t or don’t slow down to take the time to heal and work through the emotions associated with our stressful and/or traumatic experiences, we can succumb to burnout and in some cases experience symptoms of anxiety, depression, and even post-traumatic stress disorder. In these prolonged stress states, our ability to learn and function can go completely offline (see Dr. Stephen Porges’ The Polyvagal Theory and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.)

The fields of neuroscience and neurophysiology have found that prolonged stress or trauma (using Dr. Peter Levine’s definition, “Trauma is anything that our system can’t handle or process,” anything that puts us outside of our ability to cope) is not only a cognitive experience, but also a bodily experience. Research from Dr. Stephen Porges and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explains how the body stores the majority of these stress and trauma experiences that eventually lead to aches, pains, and illness in us. This is why it’s vitally important to take the time to heal. Van der Kolk and other neuroscience and neurophysiology researchers also talk about hypervigilance arising when your mind and body are on high alert for an extended time; this leads to our nervous system getting used to that overwhelmed state and consequently staying there if we don’t take the time to downshift and heal.

1. Guided Meditations

These practices have been used for thousands of years in a variety of cultures and disciplines and can support healing on a cellular level. Research on yoga nidra, or “sleep with a trace of awareness,” has been shown to have a significant impact on stress, sleep, and overall well-being and the feelings of sleeping for three to four hours when only practiced for 45 minutes. Below is an example from the Wellness for Educators’ Wellness Library. This practice involves a bit of storytelling, where you go on a journey to a forest. For this practice, I suggest listening to the audio recording available:

Educator Wellness Roundtable · Yoga Nidra - 40 Minutes

To fully reset the nervous system, enjoy guided meditation once a day for at least a week.

2. Artistic Expression

In its many forms, art can support the healing process and your nervous system in general. Art, such as painting, drawing, and coloring, has been shown to raise serotonin levels; impact brain wave patterns, emotions, and nervous system; interpret, express, and resolve emotions and thoughts; and allow for nonverbal communication of emotions and experiences. Sound or music can release dopamine, a naturally occurring happy chemical in our brains. If you’re not a fan of singing, humming and/or listening to music also help to support the vagus nerve, which in turn can help support the nervous system. Dance and movement practices also provide opportunities for nonverbal communication and release of emotional energy. Through the use of journals, gratitude notes, and poetry, to name a few, writing can also be a healing support. Writing can ease emotions attached to trauma and prolonged stress and can offer another form of unspoken expression.

3. Intentional Movement

Movement is important, but in the healing process, it helps to intentionally check in with the cognitive side of how the body is feeling and what emotions might be arising as we move. As you’re engaging in movement, ask yourself the following, observing without judging:

What do I notice in my mind?
What do I notice in my body?
What do I notice in my feelings?
What do I notice in my thoughts?
What do I need at this moment to feel supported? (Observe without judgment and give yourself what you need to feel supported.)

You can learn more about intentional movement in my recently published book called The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional Movement for Wellness.

So before you dive into the hustle and bustle of the summer, set aside some time to downshift. Enjoy your summer, and come back even more refreshed for a new school year in the fall!

Dr. Kathryn Kennedy (she/her/hers): With one foot in digital and online learning and the other in mental health and wellness, Kathryn has been cultivating two primary passions for over 20 years. She serves as founder and principal consultant of Consult4ED Group and founder and executive director of Wellness for Educators. She is author of the forthcoming book The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional Movement for Wellness (expected publication date: March 28, 2023), which serves as the first in a four-part book series.She lives in Ithaca, New York. You can follow her on Twitter at @Kathryn__EDU and @well4edu.

Kathryn Kennedy 5/25/23 Kathryn Kennedy 5/25/23

#blog: In This Evolution of Learning, Focusing on Student Strengths is #SelfCare

by Dr. Rebecca Itow

Cross post from the NGLC blog.

Teachers’ daily work to learn from students and reshape our understanding of what learning looks like and what teaching feels like is a form of self-care.

Mom arrived early, so the two of us waited together as her student finished an exam. It was the end of a long day and this parent—who teaches high school English by day and university writing by night—shared that she was exhausted. I know this mom as a colleague—we had worked together a decade earlier to develop a then-new model for asynchronous online collaboration, and her contributions have been central in several academic publications. She is one of the best teachers.

So when I asked how her year was going and she responded with a defeated reply, I was concerned. She shared what was weighing on her mind, body, and heart and diminishing her identity as a teacher: a student had submitted an AI-generated paper. The weight of the offense was sitting hard on her chest, she was taking it personally. More than the cheating, she was dismayed that the student did not seem to have the desire—or, more devastatingly, she worried that perhaps she had failed to teach the skill—to "sit with his ideas." She wondered whether as a society we are losing the skill of generating our own ideas, sitting with a blank page, and allowing our sparks of insight to bubble up and spill out onto the page.

I made some feeble attempts to help. Could she have the student critique the AI-generated content or use ChatGPT to generate ideas?* But that wasn’t the point. From her vantage point, this child, who could not or would not execute a fundamental skill that English teachers work to cultivate, was a huge banner showcasing her failure as a teacher.

I have been thinking about this moment for weeks. What is happening? I spend my days working with teachers to develop innovative approaches to learning, and yet this story is not unique. Every day, teachers share that they feel defeated and more-than-stressed, that the students can’t, the students won’t. And I don’t buy the narrative that teachers are negative or power hungry or any of that nonsense.

I wonder if we are experiencing a kind of evolution in learning. Maybe rather than try to outrun our technology, convince students to learn and act as we did or cleverly curb technology-assisted behaviors (as I tried to do above), perhaps our work and our focus should be to identify the new ways and types of thinking our technology affords us. Maybe we should learn from our students how to think and learn and act in innovative ways instead of making them conform to us.

Back in 1995, Edwin Hutchins, a professor emeritus in cognitive ethnography, distributed and embodied cognition, human-computer interaction, and multimodal interaction at UC San Diego, wrote about the way a pilot uses cockpit tools to relieve cognitive load so they can focus on the more complex maneuvers of flying a plane. We use calculators to perform simpler mathematics, which opens opportunities for more nuanced mathematical thinking. And the worriers were right—we may not practice the underlying logic to solve complex problems the way we did with a slide rule, but we can think differently and solve more complex problems in nuanced ways. We can see the world through new lenses because we have offloaded those cognitive tasks to our tools.

Perhaps our work is becoming less about teaching content and more about teaching the skills necessary for interacting in a networked world.

Our profession has trained us to train our students to think and learn as we did, which positions us to fail because we are looking for evidence of learning that is bound by traditional brick-and-mortar conceptions of knowing and learning. But the brick-and-mortar setting is really not where our students are primarily learning today. They are online, engaging in virtual information sharing for formal (i.e., school) and informal (i.e., social) purposes. They use amazingly powerful tools to connect to the world, build relationships, and shape their understandings.

So let’s position ourselves for success. Rather than look for how to “fix” students’ behaviors around the newest (and honestly, pretty cool) technology, let’s find out why they are using those tools in that way in our classes. Is that how they use those tools in all settings? My Mom says that if we operate under the assumption that no child wants to be bad, we can uncover the why behind their behaviors.

Maybe this egregious act of using ChatGPT to write an essay isn’t about us educators at all; maybe that student finds the blank page so intimidating and they really wanted to submit something so they didn’t feel stupid in front of their peers and their teachers. Maybe they think that what the AI wrote is actually pretty great and have opinions about it. By asking the student why instead of punishing the what, can we learn together and develop new ways of thinking? Perhaps our work is becoming less about teaching content and more about teaching the skills necessary for interacting in a networked world. We cannot predict the ways our students will walk through the world, but we do know that the future will be networked and require students to be nimble as they engage in an interconnected world. Professors Michael Xenos (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Kirsten Foot (iSchool at University of Washington) predicted in 2008 that students will be co-constructors of knowledge, and we must help them prepare to move forward rather than look behind.

It is well documented that educators’ identities are wrapped up in our work. We define ourselves and our self-worth through the success of our students. But our standards and structures are centered on potentially outdated notions of what learning looks like of what teaching feels like. This not only sets teachers up for failure—it is the opposite of self-care.

As I wrote in 2020, it is time to reconceptualize what learning looks like and what teaching feels like.

We do actually know what we are doing. And rather than look for the deficits in our students around how they are not meeting the (outdated) standards—the ways in which they cannot or will not—we can look for their strengths. We don't need to criticize ourselves for what students cannot or will not do. Our daily work to learn from our students and reshape our understandings about what learning looks like and what teaching feels like is the #SelfCareExample. Looking for and learning from students’ strengths is a way to practice self-care. We must each engage in this practice and share it with others. Walk down the hall and share your stories with a colleague. Tell them that they are not alone in this struggle. Be the example for others and ask them to do the same for you. You are so capable. You are powerful. Let’s give ourselves the gift of focusing on our students’ strengths so that we can celebrate their good work and their innovative ways of learning, knowing, and thinking.

*I used Google’s AI, Bard, to help me generate a title for this blog post. I first asked Bard to help me create a title about experiencing an evolution of learning, and it gave me some good ideas. Then I refined my prompt by asking to make sure “evolution of learning” was in the title, and then again to mention teaching identities. While the title you see here is uniquely mine, I used Bard to spark my thinking. I was stuck and knew what I wanted to capture, but couldn’t quite get there. The way I used Bard to get “unstuck” is a good example of how I used this tool to help me articulate the messy thoughts in my brain, and lower my stress level by using Bard’s inspiration to create a title that caught your attention!

References

Hutchins, E. (1995). How a cockpit remembers its speeds. Cognitive science, 19(3), 265-288.

Itow, R. C. (2020). Fostering valuable learning experiences by transforming current teaching practices: practical pedagogical approaches from online practitioners. Information and Learning Sciences, 121(5/6), 443-452.

Xenos, M., & Foot, K. (2008). Not your father’s Internet: The generation gap in online politics. Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth, 51-70.

About the Author

Dr. Rebecca C. Itow (she/her) is principal of IU High School Online. She earned her Ph.D. in learning sciences from Indiana University and was a public high school teacher. Driven to facilitate safe spaces for learners to navigate their academic journeys in valuable and valued ways, Rebecca researches, designs, and implements responsive online pedagogical practices in digital learning environments. Her work guides current university and community partnerships that innovate online teaching, learning, and design.

#blog: Building the Bridge through Courageous Conversations: An Interview with Shomari Jones and Paul Sutton

by Shomari Jones, Bellevue School District, and Paul Sutton, Pacific Lutheran University

Cross post from the NGLC blog.

Educational equity leaders (and podcast hosts) Shomari Jones and Paul Sutton examine courageous conversations, what they are, why they are important, and how to have them.

Could you introduce yourselves?

Shomari: Sure! I'm Shomari Jones. I am the director of equity and strategic engagement for the Bellevue School District [Washington].

Paul: I'm Paul Sutton. I'm associate professor of education at Pacific Lutheran University [Washington].

How did you meet and start working with each other?

Paul: I've been working with Shomari for several years now. We work on various projects together, but mostly, the thing that we do together is this podcast, this little project that we started. Coming out of COVID, we started having conversations with each other just about stuff that we are noticing and just issues that were surfacing, and so we decided to start recording it. That turned into this podcast that we have called Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream, which is Shomari and I talking about all things related to equity and education; we bring on guests, and it's fun.

Could you talk about your work around engaging in courageous conversations? What are they?

Shomari: Courageous conversations are opportunities for us to engage with each other, seeking opportunities and ways to learn and grow within ourselves and within relation to one another. We start with this compass.

Credit: Creative Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools and Beyond by Glenn E. Singleton

The compass in and of itself is just a tool that we utilize to express that sometimes when we come to the table, we're coming to the table from a different space than the person who we may be engaging with. And we really boiled this down to four spaces in which you traditionally come from. You don't have to only come from one specific space. You can have a couple of different spaces that you react to immediately. But most often we gravitate to one. So for example, I tend—specifically, when engaging in conversations that are complicated—I tend to show up a lot of times in my emotional space. After some practicing, Paul, I’m actually seeing that I no longer hardcore die in the emotional space. It's interesting to see how I've progressed through my continual practice. Instead of landing in emotions, we want to evaluate and assess where you are in each one of these categories so that you can be centered. Because centered is a way that we will most achieve opportunities to build bridges and build relationships with other individuals.

And so just looking around the compass, oftentimes we either fall into the feeling or the emotional quadrant, the believing or the moral quadrant, the thinking or the intellectual quadrant, and the acting or the relational quadrant. And there's nothing wrong with any of them. We want you to experience all of them, but just note this example from my personal experience:

I was in conflict with the community in which I serve around building a body of work, specifically equity, that I thought was really important to the success of our students. This particular part of the community was not in agreement with what my beliefs are. They were operating from and coming to the conversation in their feelings quadrant. I was operating from and coming to the conversation in my head or in my thinking/intellectual quadrant. And when we engaged in discussion, we were not seeing eye-to-eye. We were planes crossing in the air, without having any opportunity to build relationships or build bridges.

So, what would have been best served for me is to maybe show up in my thinking and take time to think about my beliefs a little bit, then explore my emotional quadrant, and then proceed to my action quadrant. Because if I’m seeking to transform someone else's belief, I need to meet them where they are.

Paul: Courageous conversations really revolve around coming to the table with people who think differently than you, revealing needs, shining light on fears, identifying preconceived beliefs or understandings, and spending time building a pathway to better comprehend each other’s perspectives, creating an atmosphere of patient listening that blends the elements of mercy and truth. I really want to know where you're coming from and why you're coming from there as much as I want you to know where I'm coming from and why I'm coming from there.

The goals of courageous conversations are to:

Gain wisdom to see from a bigger perspective.
Gain understanding that will help establish truth in relationships.
Build bonds and bridges, and a lot of times, cross-sectional with individuals who may not come to the table believing what we believe.

Ultimately, if we continue to share or shirk our responsibility to involve all different perspectives and all different voices, we will not be moving together.

Shomari: These conversations can sometimes be challenging, and they can sometimes be revealing and make us vulnerable, so these three guidelines kind of provide us with some rules or norms about how we can be in that space:

Stay engaged.
Be authentic by sharing honest feelings.
Maintain confidentiality.

Remember these five anchors to take care of yourself during difficult times in courageous conversations:

Quiet your mind.
Notice the sensations, the vibrations. What's going on in your body?
Accept the discomfort.
Stay present.
Safely discharge the energy that remains.

Paul: I hope that folks who are reading this just find some small part of their life to lean in and just give it a go and see what happens. Enjoy the wallowing and enjoy the awkwardness and know that every time you do that, you just get a little bit better at it.

Shomari: Yes, that's awesome, Paul. To gain wisdom to see from a bigger perspective, I involve myself in conversations with others, especially those who I don't see eye to eye with for a multitude of reasons. I was told once that I am not going to be ever capable of changing who you are. You have to change who you are. I can provide you with a perspective. I can take you on a journey alongside me. I can show you the way, but until you make the decision that you are going to be the one who changes for you, it just won't happen. And so to gain wisdom, to see from a bigger perspective—to me, [this] involves me walking and taking a journey with you to a place where we can both come to an understanding and an agreement. And I want to gain some understanding that will establish trust in the relationship; relationships are built on trust. That trust is going to allow me to continue to come back to the conversation with you.

Because of that established relationship, I can pause and not be salty [laughing]. And start off from a space of listening and then engaging, which would help to lead to a quicker bridge to the other side and to gain knowledge so that you can take the next steps, right?

I want to encourage you all who have the opportunity to read this, to reach out to us if you want to practice, to find pathways to try this and practice this at home with your loved ones or with—let's not try it on your boss first. Let's practice a couple of times before you take it off, and then suddenly, you don’t have a job anymore [laughter]. Let's practice in some spaces where you feel the least amount of negative impact as possible so that you can continue to build up that courage to engage in courageous conversations.

About the Authors

Shomari Jones is the director of equity and strategic engagement for the Bellevue School District. He is a co-host of the Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream Podcast.

Paul Sutton is an associate professor of education at Pacific Lutheran University and co-host of the Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream Podcast.

#blog: “Keep a Swing in Your Step and a Song in Your Heart": Music as Self Care

by Dr. Rebecca Itow

Cross post from the NGLC blog.

Educators know they need #SelfCare, but how can they do that in a profession that inherently encourages putting others first? These examples make self-care concrete and implementable.

We're all a little tired of hearing that we need to practice #SelfCare. We're told as educators to take time for ourselves, to take time off, to say no. Well let's face it, the reality is we are in a profession where we care for growing humans through their learning. We cultivate relationships and use our experiences and our presence to make those relational connections with students and families stronger. Our positions as educators inherently encourage us to put others before ourselves.

And while we are all trying to give ourselves a little #SelfCare, our efforts are met with a conflicting narrative in local news and within communities that educational institutions are subversive, and that the educators within them are bad actors, teaching too much of this but not enough of that, that we are not serving the children in our care well (e.g., Contorno, 2023).

We educators really do need to practice filling our cups so we may fill the cups of others (well4edu.org), but doing so is challenging amid the social and political conflicting narratives that add even more layers of stress to our teaching efforts. Sometimes it can feel like we don’t have the time and tools to practice #SelfCare as we support the children in our communities, strive to meet their individual needs, and reconceptualize what teaching feels like and learning looks like, as I’ve written about before in an article for the Indiana Association for School Principals.

Perhaps what we need is not just a promotion of #SelfCare, but a useful and useable #SelfCareExample (or five) that can make this notion of #SelfCare concrete and implementable.

I'm still no good at taking time off. But I've gotten pretty great at giving myself moments to take time away, even if I'm sitting at my desk.

A Lifetime of Strategies

I have Tourette Syndrome, OCD, and ADHD. In the very beginning when the source of my behaviors was a mystery, my wise parents helped me build strategies for controlling impulses, staying focused, and using what could be a debilitating set of challenges as stepping stones rather than roadblocks.

I have carried those strategies into my adult life. They have evolved as I have grown.

When I stepped into my first classroom as a teacher, I quickly realized that all of the beautiful energy, excitement, and behaviors that are the manifestation of students’ learning and growth—while inspiring—made it challenging for me to filter sensory input, control my tics, and focus on the task of teaching. I had to figure out a way to make my body and my mind be still so that I could do the good work of facilitating a welcoming, engaging, and wonderfully challenging learning environment.

Over time, I developed a large set of self-care strategies that simultaneously helped me be a successful teacher while improving the learning environment for my students. These strategies continue to evolve, and I use them daily. I’d like to share one #SelfCareExample in this blog post and more examples in future posts. Rather than try to mimic what I do, I encourage you to use my examples as inspiration to develop your own set of self-care strategies. What works for one person won't work for someone else, so make these your own.

I offer here examples of how I build space within my professional routines, throughout my day, to breathe. I'm still no good at taking time off. But I've gotten pretty great at giving myself moments to take time away, even if I'm sitting at my desk.

Music shifts my mood and helps me get into the task I'm doing.

#SelfCareExample: Use Music to Transition, Breathe, Reset

When I was a kid, I used to sign everything with "Keep a swing in your step and a song in your heart!" I wrote it on everything. Cards, yearbooks, as a doodle in my notebook … this phrase represented my basic attitude then and remains the lens I use as I walk in the world. There is a constant soundtrack accompanying my daily activities; I have different genres of music—and some specific songs—that I call up when I am excited, nervous, studying, focusing, or cleaning my house. Music shifts my mood and helps me get into the task I'm doing.

And I'm not alone. A body of research has demonstrated that music and strategic music interventions are effective in reducing stress and can be used to impact mood and as a coping strategy.

Strategically Connecting Personal Passion with Professional Practice

Being an educator is kind of like playing mental ping pong all day, everyday, and I found it challenging to move from one class period to the next, to “switch my brain” during a seven-minute passing period. As the day went on, the chaos would continue to build, my stress level would increase, and I would have more and more difficulty focusing.

I developed a crucial self-care strategy to address this challenge: to use music before, during, and between classes to help me transition from class to class. I used music to help me leave the stress of last period behind so that I could be fully present for my next group of students. And the same strategy that helped me transition smoothly throughout my day helped my students do the same, while enriching their learning experience.

I am no longer in a classroom, but I use this same strategy throughout my day as a school principal. For instance, on the drive to work I put on some music that will prepare me for the day ahead: I choose one set of songs when I need to be pumped up for a new project and other songs to help me focus and clear my head to face a challenge. And I don’t work hard at this…I really just flip through my “liked” songs until I find the ones that will move me today. (The trick to establishing and actually using a self-care strategy is to make it doable!)

The music helped us all be present and engage in the immediate learning task more fully.

When I entered my classroom—now my office—I played music that set the tone for the lesson, matched the theme, or was a musical version of whatever we were studying (my favorite). Here is an example of what this looked like:

When my students were researching the history and current relevance of superheroes and supervillains in society, music selections included the Superman theme song, Batman, and the obligatory Star Wars soundtrack. As I prepared for my day, I let my mind think about the character development discussion I would lead while listening to the Imperial March. Students walked in the door hearing Superman soar above the clouds. We all listened as the students copied the agenda on the board, and I took attendance and assessed the wellbeing of the room.

The music helped all of us leave behind the morning ride to school, that thing that happened during the passing period, the parent phone call I needed to make at lunch, that test next period. The music helped us all be present and engage in the immediate learning task more fully.

In my role as principal, I keep my music in my ears more than on an external speaker, but I still keep my soundtrack going. I skip the songs that don’t move me in the moment, and I don’t limit myself to a single genre or artist. When I need inspiration, I choose a song I’ve had on repeat for a bit and start a Spotify radio station with it.

I am bringing my team back to work in person more frequently, and will curate my playlists to inspire collaboration, positivity, and kindness to oneself and each other. As we engage in different projects, the music will shift. My staff’s contributions to the office playlists will enrich the work environment just as learners’ contributions help an educational environment blossom.

I invite you to adapt this #SelfCareExample into a #SelfCareStrategy that meets your individual needs today. It will grow, it will shift, it will evolve. As in all learning, building up this strategy will take thought and time and practice and iteration. Be open to ideas. And consider this: If the #SelfCareStrategy helps you cope, destress, or transition from one task to the next, it will likely do the same for your learning community. Multiple benefits, one strategy! That’s my kind of #SelfCare!

About the Author

#blog: A Single Slice of the Pie: Relieving Educator Overwhelm by Consolidating Roles and Expanding Opportunities for Teacher Leadership

Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)

by Dr. Kathryn Kennedy and Dr. Rebecca Itow

Teacher exhaustion is not new but it is now pervasive. Greater autonomy and consolidating roles can support educator wellness and strengthen school culture.

Educator stories of overwhelm and exhaustion are continuing to create buzz across education social media circles. The same school-level and systemic factors from the 1990s and 2000s hold true today as major sources of stress, including but not limited to high-stakes testing, excessive workload, large class sizes, inadequate resources, student behavioral challenges, initiative fatigue, and lack of support. One of the most cited contributing factors to educator attrition is educators wearing too many hats (Viac & Fraser, 2020).

Many educators have asked their schools to consider taking tasks off their plates. Because of the many requirements that schools have to meet at the district and state levels, we know that this is often not possible.

What is possible for schools, however, is the opportunity to consolidate educator roles. Doing this not only helps alleviate the pressure that educators feel when trying to juggle many roles, but it also provides teachers an opportunity to step into teacher leadership. Take a moment to think about the following examples:

A school asks an educator to shift to an SEL coordinator position that works collaboratively with teachers to support students.
An educator really enjoys writing lessons and aligning them with standards, and they feel empowered to take on a role where that is their sole job, working collaboratively with teachers to support them across various classrooms.
An educator loves working with students to set academic goals and coaching and networking them to achieve those goals, so they take on a coaching position that supports all or a portion of students in the school. Or perhaps they take on a position coordinating and supporting a group of coaches.
An educator takes on a coordinator role of a project-based learning approach for students that additionally frees up teachers to serve as mentors for certain components of student projects.

We hear often of excellent teachers who we wish could influence more than the students in their building. Another prevalent narrative is of teachers’ wish to revise or update their skills and courses, which they would happily do if they had the time and opportunity. The following example demonstrates how local and state support is helping one talented business teacher reach more students by giving her the space to learn and grow. With triangulated support this teacher is currently (a) leveraging her brick-and mortar teaching experience to (b) design useful and usable learning opportunities in virtual courses. As she does so, this teacher is (c) increasing access to both the course content and her talent, (d) building both her individual and the school’s capacity to support learners in virtual environments, and most importantly (e) recognizing that her past experience is valuable. By building a dynamic and relevant virtual course, this educator is simultaneously honing her craft while teaching more students in increasingly relevant ways.

A talented brick-and-mortar business teacher took on the brave challenge of working with a digital pedagogist to design a virtual course. She is using her years in the classroom to re-envision what learning and teaching look and feel like for the purpose of developing up-to-date, useful, and usable virtual curriculum so that more students have access to the content she teaches.

However, the teacher’s confidence to realize this goal was, at times, unsteady. Significant institutional constraints and already impacted professional routines were compounding in unsustainable ways. As a veteran teacher of a course that had recently been moved one whole grade level down, she found herself designing assignments that met the standards but were somewhat lacking in relevance given the developmental difference between the age of her former students and the age of her current ones. This combined with the challenges of learning to teach in a virtual environment and the rest of her professional responsibilities was making it difficult to focus on the challenge she undertook. In fact, the overwhelm was making the whole job difficult.

When asked how she might re-envision her role to help her focus on design and generally escape the overwhelm, the teacher envisioned letting go of enough other responsibilities to spend time updating her courses; her courses would facilitate relevant learning in both brick-and-mortar and virtual learning environments. She would consolidate her role to center around curriculum design. To try on this role consolidation, the teacher and the pedagogist spent 45 minutes brainstorming strategies the teacher could use to engage students in meaningful learning of useful and usable concepts in both learning environments.

Throughout the working session, this teacher let her creativity flow. She developed curricular approaches that (a) meet academic standards, (b) address students’ needs, (c) draw on learner’s expertise, and (d) could be made appropriate for both face-to-face and virtual settings. Her tone turned joyful as she innovated. She began designing new materials and teaching strategies. It became apparent that, if allowed to do what she loves and is trained to do—that is, if she could re-envision her role to be one that gave her enough space to creatively design —both she and her students would experience learning that is useful and usable, valuable to those learners, and valued by others. The experience is helping this teacher—and the school—build the capacity to consolidate her role, which in turn is beginning to relieve the overwhelm and reinvigorate her excitement for teaching.

And because this teacher has the local and state support to continue working and learning in this way, she is able to focus her energy on something she is passionate about (relevant curriculum design) while increasing her school’s (and the state’s) capacity to ensure students’ access to it.

This option of role consolidation also illustrates the power of educator autonomy: opening up space for educators to innovate and be creative. When educators feel empowered and supported, their job satisfaction rises, and subsequently, they are more likely to stay (OECD 2014; OECD 2019). We see this role consolidation not only as a way to retain educators but also as an opportunity to bolster educators and strengthen school culture. We’d love to hear your examples of role consolidation as a method of lightening educators’ loads. Share your creative ideas with kathryn@well4edu.org and, with your permission, we’ll feature them in future blog posts.

About the Authors

#blog: “Time does not heal all wounds…” A Call for Healing and System-Level Changes

by Dr. Kathryn Kennedy

Cross post from the NGLC Blog

“Contrary to conventional belief, time does not heal all wounds since humans convert traumatic and stressful emotional experiences into organic disease.”
–Dr. Vincent Felitti, ACEs Study, 1998

Schools that acknowledge the trauma and stress of the past two-plus years can support educators, students, and parents/caregivers to heal with three wellness and mental health strategies.

In 1998, Dr. Vincent Felitti, the director of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, and a team of doctors from the CDC and Kaiser Permanente published a groundbreaking research article focused on the effects of ACEs on over 17,000 participants. The study highlighted that our minds are not the only part of us affected by trauma and prolonged stress. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk put it, The Body Keeps the Score; that is, the body stores traumatic and stressful experiences in its tissues (2014). When not worked through, these “issues in our tissues” come up later on in life.

Source: Tori Press, @revelatori, https://www.instagram.com/revelatori/

Many in the field of education want to “go back to normal,” but many educators, students, and parents/caregivers have not had the time to heal the trauma and prolonged stress they endured for almost two-and-a-half years (and, for many, even longer).

The lack of focus on healing and the importance of it are major reasons we are seeing so many mental health concerns today, not only in the field of education specifically but also in the world at large.

Back in 2020, I feared this is where we were headed.

The Trauma of Schools During the Pandemic

As someone trained in online and digital learning, when the pandemic hit, I was involved in a number of projects focused on shifting in-person learning to online learning. At the same time, I was sharing concerns about educators’, students’, and parents/caregivers’ mental health and wellbeing.

Every stakeholder in education was thrown into something they weren’t prepared for. Educators had to punch the gas pedal and couldn’t let up. It was constant “GO” mode from the start:

School leaders had to learn about remote, online, and/or hybrid/blended learning environments in order to figure out how to best lead and support their educators, students, and parents/caregivers. Some also had to shift their schools and districts into spaces that provided just-in-time and wraparound community supports.
Teachers had to learn how to teach and support their fellow teachers, students, and parents/caregivers in a remote, online, and/or hybrid/blended environment. They not only had to learn technologies that they weren’t familiar with, but they also had to learn how to use those technologies to teach and connect with students and parents/caregivers in meaningful ways. Additionally, educators were asked to provide social-emotional learning supports for students and parents/caregivers.
Students had to learn how to learn in remote, online, and hybrid/blended learning environments using technologies in ways that they weren’t used to.
Parents/caregivers had to support their children as they learned in remote, online, and hybrid/blended learning environments.

Everyone did the best they could during all of this while the undercurrent of the pandemic, and the plethora of reverberations from it, raged on. But the education system was continuously on shaky, unsafe ground for over two years.

And now, as if that wasn’t enough, the same stakeholders who desperately need time to heal are in another “GO”-mode situation, being shamed by continuous conversations focused on “learning loss” and “learning gaps.” A recent Rand report found that pandemic learning loss is the top job-related stressor for educators (Steiner et al. 2022).

Source: Rand Corp. via The 74

In 2021, during one of the book studies Wellness for Educators hosted with educational leaders in Alabama, we heard from a number of the leaders about how they were feeling, and one of the educators stated so poignantly:

I wish everyone understood that educators are human beings also. We have the same struggles as everyone else and are susceptible to all that goes along with being human. We carry the weight of every child, faculty, and staff member in addition to what we carry ourselves. Kids are definitely first, but we as educators do matter and we aren’t expendable.
–School Leader in Alabama

Given the situation we are in now, we cannot underestimate the effects of trauma and prolonged stress. There will continue to be consequences if we do not take the time to heal.

The push to go back to normal as quickly as possible, and avoiding talking about topics like “trauma,” “social-emotional learning,” and “mental health” anymore is sending a message that what we experienced was not traumatic or stressful. But with many educators heading for the exits of the field, the system really has no choice but to heed the warning signs.

Dr. Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, explains:

Trauma has become so commonplace that most people don't even recognize its presence. It affects everyone. Each of us has had a traumatic experience at some point in our lives, regardless of whether it left us with an obvious case of post-traumatic stress…Because trauma symptoms can remain hidden for years after a triggering event, some of us who have been traumatized are not yet symptomatic…In our culture there is a lack of tolerance for the emotional vulnerability that traumatized people experience. Little time is allotted for the working through of emotional events. We are routinely pressured into adjusting too quickly in the aftermath of an overwhelming situation. Denial is so common in our culture that it has become a cliché.

3 Educator Wellness and Mental Health Strategies

It was in late 2021 that I heard some educators start to acknowledge that what they experienced was traumatic and stressful. Despite that, some schools will continue to ignore the need for healing, but those who acknowledge it can use the following guidance to support educators, students, and parents/caregivers.

1. Acknowledge educator wellness is not an individual effort, and affect system-level changes.

More than anything, the field needs to acknowledge that educator wellness is not an individual effort; it’s a system-level issue. As one of my teachers, Dr. Albert Wong, a somatic psychotherapist, said during one of my certificate programs, “Challenges within communities or systems need interventions at the level of communities or systems.” Viac and Fraser (2020) emphasized many factors that contribute to educator wellbeing in their OECD white paper. Some examples include large class sizes, low pay, and initiative overload. In addition to these, educators also need to feel heard, respected, valued, and have room to be creative, among other things. Also, issues such as racism, gender identity discrimination, misogyny, and gun violence also need to be acknowledged as issues that factor into educator wellness, as they show up at the system level as well. These issues are complex, and won’t be solved overnight, but even small steps to change these conditions can go far for educator wellness.

2. Acknowledge that when we don’t take the time to heal, it affects our ability to learn.

When we’ve experienced trauma and prolonged stress and do not take time to heal, our learning processes are affected. Specifically, the amygdala activates, and the hippocampus shuts down. The hippocampus is crucial to learning, memory encoding, and memory consolidation. As van der Kolk shared, the trauma and prolonged stress that we do not work through has the ability to affect our physical bodies but it also changes our brain and our nervous system so that we experience our lives in different ways. Schools can consider taking some tasks off of educators’ plates to provide them time they can spend in collective healing with other educators as well as time that they can take individually to refuel on their own. As one of Wellness for Educators’ former Board members, Dr. Cathy Cavanaugh, shared, “The ripples of our own healing can support the healing of others. Educators are helpers by nature. Sometimes motivation to care for oneself comes from the opportunity to help others.” Some schools and districts are partnering with organizations that can provide just-in-time therapy and coaching to support educators’ mental health and wellness. Additionally, some schools and districts are collaborating with mind-body practitioners to provide healing opportunities through practices such as play, Qigong, yoga, art, etc.

3. Emphasize that it takes a collection of tools to heal trauma and prolonged stress; provide opportunities to engage with those tools.

In his 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, van der Kolk explains that cognitive-based therapy, such as talk therapy, alone cannot be the only method to support healing from trauma and prolonged stress, especially because the body also “keeps the score.” Mind-body education and practices, such as yoga, breathwork, art, music, dance, meditation, Qigong, and more can be used to release the “issues in our tissues.” As one of The Trauma Foundation’s videos conveys, “Many of the activities that we intuitively know make us feel better—like spending time in nature, practicing yoga, dancing, helping others, and more—can help the autonomic nervous system become more regulated and resistant” (7:20).

While mind-body practices can help educators, students, and parents/caregivers heal trauma and prolonged stress, there is a critical need for schools and districts to make intentional changes at the system level. If system-level changes aren’t made and opportunities to heal are not provided, we’ll continue to see resignations, teacher shortages, retention difficulty, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, post traumatic stress disorder, behavioral concerns, learning loss, learning gaps, and more.

Kathryn Kennedy 10/16/20 Kathryn Kennedy 10/16/20

#blog: Educators: The Ultimate Testimony to Growth Mindset

Kathryn Kennedy 7/27/20 Kathryn Kennedy 7/27/20

#blog: 10 Tips to Help You Get Ready for School

Trinity Wilbourn, M.Ed.

Facilitator and Coach

Meet the Author

1. Guided Meditations

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Exploring Artificial Intelligence

Navigating AI Responsibly

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Example #1: Invite a Supportive Team

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Diving Deeper with AI

Journey from Burnout to Balance

Vickie Echols

Educator and Author

Taylor Ann Gonzalez (she/hers)

CEO & Founder, Body Alchemy Project

Taylor Ann Gonzalez (she/hers)

CEO & Founder, Body Alchemy Project

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References

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A Lifetime of Strategies

#SelfCareExample: Use Music to Transition, Breathe, Reset

Strategically Connecting Personal Passion with Professional Practice

About the Author

About the Authors

Schools that acknowledge the trauma and stress of the past two-plus years can support educators, students, and parents/caregivers to heal with three wellness and mental health strategies.

The Trauma of Schools During the Pandemic

3 Educator Wellness and Mental Health Strategies

1. Acknowledge educator wellness is not an individual effort, and affect system-level changes.

2. Acknowledge that when we don’t take the time to heal, it affects our ability to learn.

3. Emphasize that it takes a collection of tools to heal trauma and prolonged stress; provide opportunities to engage with those tools.

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