Critical Skills for Critical Times: A Conversation With Laura Thomas

,: 2022

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[Start of recorded material: 00:00:01

Elana:

Hello, and welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. My name is Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my career to helping education brands build their brand awareness and engagement. Each week, I sit down with educators, EdTech entrepreneurs, and experts in educational marketing and community building. All of them will share their successes and failures using social media, inbound marketing or content marketing, and community building. I'm excited to guide you on your journey to transform your marketing efforts into something that provides consistent value and ultimately improves the lives of your audience.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week, I am very excited to be sitting down with Laura Thomas. Laura is an amazing human being, and we are going to talk about that first and foremost, but I am so happy to be able to connect Laura with all of you that are listening, because she has so much wealth of knowledge in education, higher ed, all of the things. I love – we're going to talk about her breadth from being an educator, higher ed, EdTech, all of the things. Laura currently works at Antioch University New England. She's the director of Experienced Educators program, and I'm going to let her tell you what she does and what the program is, because it's awesome, and that's really a little bit of what the show is going to be focused on, too. We're going to be talking about her specific program and all of the different aspects of it, so more to come there.

Laura comes from the wonderful world of K-12 education. She taught high school English, she did debate, theater – which I never knew, Laura, how fun – and speech for nearly a decade. Today, we're going to be infusing all of that expertise and talking about all things project-based learning, diving into a term called Critical Skills Classroom, which combines PBL, social and emotional learning, and 21st-century skills. But before we get into all of that, which is very exciting, and I know that not many people are familiar with that term and I love the blended aspect of all of those things. We all come from the world of Edutopia, and that's how I know Laura, but two of the core tenets of what they really loved and still, to this day, advocate for is project-based learning and really being socially competent as human beings, too.

Before we get into that, I would be remiss to not mention all of these things about Laura. Laura, if there's things I don't mention that are good for context, you can add them in later. Laura has also completed a four-year clinical experience as a school librarian in a 60-student, K-6 school. I think that's really important as she starts to talk, because I never knew that about you, and I think that's awesome. Laura has published pieces in EdWeek, The Journal of Staff Development, obviously, Edutopia, that's how I know her. Facilitating Authentic Learning, she wrote that book from Corwin. She serves as a community facilitator, a consulting editor, and she is a blog writer herself for Edutopia, and she's an ISTE community leader. She's one of these people you meet and you just feel like you're a slacker. That's pretty much it.

first tweet mentioning you in: 2012

Laura:

Oh my gosh!

Elana:

That's amazing. That's amazing.

Laura:

Wow!

Elana:

In: 2012

Laura:

Yeah. I wonder what made you –

Elana:

ing you, apparently. Then, in: 2013

Laura:

Absolutely.

Elana:

Laura, this is my moment where I make people a little bit embarrassed because I talk about how much I love you all. Laura, you are someone I admire so, so much, I want you to know that. I consider you and your husband, John, another educator that works for Edutopia, like dear friends. I find you incredible humans. I feel really blessed to have you in my life, and your constant strive for helping education, improving education is something that I don't have words for, so I just want to share that with you. I feel so lucky that you're here sharing your wisdom with me, I get to learn alongside you, and people get to learn from you. I want to welcome you to All Things Marketing and Education.

Laura:

Thank you. Wow. Now, I'm like, "What do I say after that?"

Elana:

Yeah. I mean, you've got a lot in your bio. I think I hit the most of it, but I would love to be able to start with you on, I find your path in education fascinating. I'm curious, why education? Did you just wake up when you're in second grade and say, "I want to be a teacher"? How did you get into this world of education?

Laura:

No, no. I come from a long line of teachers. My father and his aunt were both teachers. I grew up in that education world. He was a PE teacher and a health teacher and a free sport coach. The life I lived was definitely not the life I ended up experiencing as a teacher. I didn't really decide to go into education until I was in high school. It was always one of those things I thought, "Well, I could do that. Maybe I could also be a movie star or an author or who knows," I had a lot of ideas back then. My sophomore, junior year of high school, I had to take a basic speech class. It was a requirement in the state of Missouri then, which is where I grew up, that every student had to take a public speaking class to graduate.

I went into my public speaking, my Speech 1 class, and it was being held in, what we would now call, the family and consumer sciences kitchen classroom, which was fine, I was not concerned about that. I walked in and the room was populated with people who terrified me. All people of completely different social strata. These were just people that ... public speaking is terrifying, but public speaking in front of these people was never going to happen, so I turned around and went to the counselor's office and said, "I need a different class." Luckily, the counselor flipped through the book because this was pre-computers. He said, "Well, there's this class, there's this forensics class." I was, "I don't care what it is. Just put me in something else." At that time, I remember thinking, "Forensics, are we going to be cutting up dead bodies? I'm not really sure I'm down with that," but it's still better than public speaking with the people in that room. It turned out to be forensics like speech and debate and taught by this wonderful woman, Trudy Kinman, who has since retired.

Trudy changed everything. She was the first teacher I had in high school that really seemed to like kids. She liked her students. She wasn't afraid to tell us the truth about the impacts of our behavior and our choices. She talked to us like a colleague, but she also had really high expectations for us. What Ted Sizer would, years later I would read his words that the goal is to ... how did he say it? "I trust you, but I expect much of you." That was Trudy's stance. It also was where I found my voice. I discovered that I was a pretty good public speaker. I didn't know that before that. Went to some tournaments, and I got involved in some plays, and it gave me a social life. It gave me people that are still some of my closest friends.

I remember having a moment at my senior year when it was time to start applying, and I thought, "Well, what do I really want to do?" I was actually talking to Trudy about this at the time. She said, "Well, when you think about the things that matter to you, the things that have been important to you as a person, maybe that's a place to start." I thought, "The most important thing to me has been being a part of this speech and debate community, it's changed my whole life." That's when I decided that I was going to major in education. I remember walking to Trudy with the catalog from the University of Missouri, which was where I went, and A, it was just a paper catalog, and I was, "Trudy, what do I major in?" She flipped through and she found it and she circled it, and that was that. I went to school and never questioned that it was the right decision. Have still never questioned that it was the right decision. The students that I had in those years are still people that I keep track of and adore. Even the students that hated me then, I hear from periodically saying, "Well, I hated your class, but I use it a lot." I feel like, "Well, that's worth something." Yeah, that's how I got into education.

Then, my senior year of high school, though, there was another student that was interested in education. Her name was Meredith McLaughlin. Meredith had very subversive ideas about everything, she was wonderful. Her parents had been big activists in the '60s. She came to everything from this activist stance. Meredith and I wanted to do an independent study our senior year in education. We didn't know anything about education, really, except what it was to be students. We wanted to be ready when we got to college. We had a little office that was an unused office space. Every day we went to this room, and we had things that we read, and we talked about big ideas in education, and we imagined the kind of schools that we wanted to have, the schools we wished we'd had, the schools we wanted to teach in. That was really where I was introduced to the work of Ted Sizer. It was where I was introduced to some really, I don't know, some first of ideas. It's where I first read teaching as a subversive activity. Yeah, it just set me on my path.

Elana:

That's amazing. I love asking that question for people that are so grounded in education, because I always make the assumption that you just have this linear path and you chose this, but it felt like it chose you. Some people always say it's a calling, but I don't know. Do you think that if you didn't have that teacher, would have you jumped into education with that?

Laura:

I don't know. I think that –

Elana:

[inaudible: 00:13:12

Laura:

I am less inclined to believe that it's a calling and more inclined to believe that the opportunities to do your life's work present themselves to you, but the circumstances under which you do that work are very variable based on the people that are around you and the circumstances of your life. Had I not had that class, had I not connected with that person, I don't know. I don't know. I might not be in education. It's hard to imagine doing anything else.

Elana:

I know, because you've also beyond teaching so many various topics and being involved on the brand side, and then now in the world of higher education, it's really cool to see your career progress and how you approach everything with a passionate learner's mindset, too. We're going to get into that. Why don't we jump right into Critical Skills Classroom? Because I know it's something that you were very passionate about, and when you talked to me about it, I was, "Wow! This is cool. This exists?" It integrates some of my favorite core concepts together. What is it? If I'm an educator, how can I get started? Why do you think it's fundamentally different from other things that we've had in education?

Laura:

Well, there are a lot of different ways that people describe Critical Skills or the Critical Skills Classroom. One of the things that we try to be really careful about when we talk about Critical Skills is defining what it's not, because this is one of the things that I think makes it very unique. It is not a model. It's not an instructional model. It's not a school change model. It's not a product. What it is is a stance, it's an approach to classroom practice. It combines, as you said, PBL, though we use "problem-based learning." PBL, SEL, externally imposed standards, we call it, we focus on the collaborative learning community as a really huge piece of this, and then also experiential learning. SEL fits under the collaborative learning community. It also fits under our learning standards focus. We call it the four pillars or the four broad ideas that underpin Critical Skills.

The whole thing came about in the '80s, which people say, "How could it possibly still be relevant?" It was created in the '80s in response to A Nation at Risk, which – a lot of people don't remember A Nation at Risk. It was one of those "the sky is falling" education reports that comes out every so many years. In response, a group of business leaders and a group of educators met separately and said, "What do we want kids to know, do, and be like?" Being New Hampshire, "live free or die," all education is locally-controlled or generally locally-controlled, and there, at that time, was a lot of respect, and I think still a lot of respect for the work of the local schools, local educators.

When it came to the content piece, math, reading, science, whatever, these two groups of people said, "We trust that these standards exist, this curriculum exists, this is all good." Then they focused on the stuff we really want kids to know, and that's where we came with what we call the Critical Skills and the fundamental dispositions, which are the same lists that you've seen over and over and over again since then. That 21st-century skills, or if you go into any school right now and you'll see habits of a learner or our shared virtues or whatever it is, there's going to be this list, and it's going to say things like communication, collaboration, problem solving, organization, self-management. It's this same list or variations on that list.

Then, knowing that we had this list, the educators said, "How do we do this in a way that doesn't make it yet another thing to do? Because we don't have time for another thing to do." This was in the '80s. "We don't have another thing to have time for now, we really don't have time." What they did was set about creating an approach that embedded the intentional teaching of each of these skills and dispositions in the context of experiential, problem-based lessons – experiences. The great thing about it is that it was teacher-created, and it continues to be teacher-created. As we continue to learn more and more about how people learn and what makes learning effective and what keeps students engaged, we just keep discovering that this works.

As times have changed, as the needs of learners have evolved, as different places have different contexts, the approach flexes with that, because it's not a plug-and-play thing. It's a set of ideas, it's a stance, and then every teacher does it a little differently. If I walked into ten different Critical Skills teachers' classrooms, there would be some basic things I would see that are the same, but the specific ways they approach it could be wildly different, and they're all doing it right. That's the other thing; we don't get really into "right." There's just the way that you do it that works for you. The basic idea of it is these four broad ideas, and then we have other ways that we slice it. There are nine characteristics, there are the things that we expect teachers to do, the things that we might see students doing, but in reality, those can be very different depending on context.

Elana:

That makes sense from a framework perspective of what's included, but I'm also trying to figure out logistically, how do I get started? Who is it best for in terms of grade level? My biggest wonder is, what type of educator gravitates towards this? Is there a common problem there, like student engagement or actually becoming a well-rounded human that has all of these Critical Skills? What's their problem they're seeking? What is the general grade level? Then, how do they even get started? Because it sounds too good to be true.

Laura:

Yeah.

Elana:

[inaudible: 00:20:41

Laura:

Yeah, it does. It is a big thing. It's a lot to take in all at once. The typical teacher is all kinds of teachers. We have found that more experienced teachers are in a better place to get their arms around this, so folks have been in the classroom for a few years, a couple of years. I think three years is what I would normally say, but we've definitely had folks who've come in, even in their initial prep, have taken part in one of the events or one of the institutes, and they've done great. A lot of it depends on the kind of schools you came up in and your comfort with these different kinds of instructional approaches, because this is very learner-centered.

It also requires the teacher to accept that, as an educator, as a teacher in a classroom, we are also co-learners. We are learning in front of the kids. We're learning with the kids, and what we're learning is the kids, and also how to teach in this different way. The kinds of teachers that typically jump into this are the teachers who can get on board with that idea, the teachers who are open to the idea that they're constantly evolving and changing and learning any way. We've had everything from pre-K all the way up to graduate school. We've had folks who work in education-adjacent fields, like zoo educators and museum educators and trainers, corporate trainers. We've had all kinds of folks do this, mostly because they want to get out of the "oh, I'm going to read PowerPoint slides to you" approach to their work.

Typically, they start in a couple different ways. They either come to one of the immersions, one of the institutes, which we run those all over the place. Over the years, we've had from 200 institutes in a year to 300, depending on what's going on in the world. The institutes are typically five days, though sometimes they're two sets of three days. We do them in schools sometimes, so we do them based on the school's needs and structures. That's really where we start. It is an immersion. We teach the model by living the model. Folks come in, and over the time that they're in the course or in the experience, they live in a Critical Skills Classroom. We start by intentionally building community and talking about what it means to build community. We get very clear on our definitions of quality: quality conversation, quality audience, quality work. This isn't what we give to them, it's what we create as a community in terms of our definitions, and those are also ways that we build community, because nothing builds community like meaningful work.

Then, we start engaging in what we call challenges. Now, I see that the word challenge is used in a lot of different contexts. The Critical Skills Challenge has been the foundational instructional practice in the Critical Skills Classroom forever. It is a problem that we give folks to solve, and we feel like the problem is a little bit more impactful than the project as the frame, though I know it's interesting depending on who you talk to. Some folks say that problem-based learning is a subset of project-based learnings, and other folks flip it. I don't really think it matters that much, that's why we just say PBL, because it doesn't matter what the P is. We just want you to get engaged in meaningful work with your classmates or with your colleagues.

We give folks a problem to solve and the challenge they do, those get increasingly messy over the course of the immersion, so that they mirror the experience of a year in their classroom. Over five days, we basically mirror a year. We keep stepping back and forth. We'll do a thing where the participants are doing the challenge and the facilitators are behaving as the teachers. It's not play-acting; we're doing meaningful work together. Then, after that particular challenge is done, we step back and we talk about the moves that everybody made, and we model the reflection and the assessment piece, and then we step back and talk about that. It gets a little meta.

Elana:

Yeah.

Laura:

Then, we move on to the next piece. The visual that we use, those Hostess cupcakes that have the loops on the top, that is how we look, that's how we consider our linked challenges. Each challenge is a loop, and then the space between the loops is what we call reflect and connect. It's this space where we look back on what we did and then frame up what's coming next and build on what we just did in order to better to prepare for what comes next. That's all the lived experience in the immersion.

Elana:

Interesting.

Laura:

That's where most people begin, I think.

Elana:

Yeah. Just hearing you talk is – you have to go all-in for a big change like this. This isn't just something that you can take off a binder, and that's why, when you're using these terms – and for some of you that are maybe new to the world of education or EdTech, we have things like SEL, social-emotional learning, project-based learning, PBL, or problem-based learning now. All of those, even irrespective of integrating them thoughtfully like you're thinking of in the Critical Skills Classroom, they take a mind shift, and they take constant practice over time. I love how you talk about, you go and you think about the year, and you practice and you reflect. Sure, for all of you educators exhausted right now listening to this, this does take time, but if you think about your career, what are the things you're most proud of and how does it fundamentally shift your relationship with students in learning?

Laura:

Yeah. This is not a plug-and-play thing, we say that a lot. The model or the example we use is talk about a big box of Legos. You can get the set of Legos that you buy at the store, and it's in a box, and there's a picture on the front, and there's instructions, and you build the thing on the box. That's awesome. Then, there's the big tub of Legos that you get from your cousin. That's a whole bunch of Legos, and there's also probably some Connects and some Hot Wheels cars and half of three Barbies and some Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys, they're all thrown in there together. You open that up, and if you know how to use all those tools, you build really cool stuff. We are more the big box of Legos from your cousin than we are the box with the picture on the front.

We also recognize that if somebody just gives you a big box of Legos or that cousin box, and you don't know what any of those things are or how to use them, you're not going to be able to use them; it's going to take you longer to learn how to use them creatively to make the thing you envision in your head. We try to be really clear that there are novice, intermediate, and advanced levels in all of this work. When we look at these nine characteristics, students frequently work as a team within a collaborative learning environment. Well, we're very clear that those are going to look different at a beginner level, at a novice level, than they are at an expert level or at an intermediate level, and so we articulate that in our materials right up front that as a beginner, this is what you should expect to see.

When we say beginner or novice, we don't mean the first six weeks that you do this. You're a novice at this for a while. Taking small steps is everything. If you take a whole bunch of small steps, you go a long way. Career as an educator is a long time, so you have a lot of time to evolve, and you're going to get better at it, and your learners are going to get better at it. Over time and with experience, you'll be able to do things that are more complicated. I think one of the things that teachers really struggle with is that they see videos and they see classroom examples that are amazing, teachers doing amazing things, and they think, "I want to do that," and so they try to jump in right there. Well, they're not ready, and their kids aren't ready, and it doesn't go well, and they decide, "Well, my kids can't do this, or I can't do this. This doesn't work for me. I tried that PBL thing once, and it didn't work," and they'll never do it again.

What we try to be really clear with is that in the same way that you would never let your kids try something once, fail, and then never go back to it, you can't either. You are engaged in an experiential learning process. When we look at those loops, they have actually three levels to them. There's the student content piece, the student skill disposition piece, and then the teacher piece. Alongside the students, while they're learning academic content skills and dispositions, the teacher is learning how to teach this way. Your kids are going to get better with their content, and they're going to get better with the skills and dispositions, and you're going to get better at designing these kinds of challenges, you're going to get a better feel for it, just like with any tool, but it's not overnight. It's also really exciting, really rewarding, and once you get your feet under yourself with it, I don't know, it's not as exhausting. You don't fight the classroom management battles, you don't have kids falling asleep in class, you don't have the lack of engagement.

Elana:

Yeah. That's why I ask the question around challenges, because sometimes when you're so underwater as an educator, you've got these things you're like, "OK, I have student engagement problems." You have fundamental "house is on fire right now" problems. I think you talking so eloquently about what it is, it immerses all of us into a different way, a different approach, and almost likens to what your conversations were with your colleague of, "What if we could teach? What would be the best way?" We all, as educators, come in going, "Gosh! What is the best way?" Somewhere along the way, all of these bureaucratic things you have to do, all of these things get stuck. It's a great moment to pause and reflect on, "Am I proud of what I'm doing? What can I do to work within the system?"

Laura:

Yeah.

Elana:

That's what inspires me. On the EdTech side, for all of you that are not educators listening and are marketing towards educators, I want you to take away just all of the concept, that's concepts that Laura is talking about, how intentional she's thinking about reflection and moving forward and how hard the work is. But like you said, at the end, it becomes this beautiful well-oiled machine or this dance of just giving and taking, and having that educator be a learner. If you're an EdTech company, how does my product fit in this? Did I even understand all these terms? It's really important that you listen to educators and understand the evolution and the intention of the educators' practice.

Laura:

That's one of the things I've really liked about the process, I guess, of the ongoing process of the evolution of Critical Skills. I've definitely had experiences as a teacher where I went to a training and they gave me a book, and I had two days of training on a thing, and then I went back and I was supposed to do it. Other teachers went to the training five years later and it was the same book and the same everything, and they came back, and it was even the same edition. They hadn't changed. They literally just pulled another book out of the box. All of our materials are teacher-generated. The model itself or the approach itself is teacher-informed. All the folks that I work with are practicing classroom teachers. We come together periodically and talk about, "How is this working? What are you creating? What new challenges, what new tools, what new processes? How is this working in your current context, especially pre-COVID into COVID, now that we're COVID phase two?" I'm not going to call it post-COVID, but we're in this other land where we're trying to live with it.

All of these things are having huge impacts. We talk about that, and that informs our training. When you look at the materials that we create, it's all Chartpak AD Markers pretty much, and then pictures of Chartpak AD Markers, because we know that our teachers don't all have access to the same technology. Some of them don't have access to much tech at all. We know that teachers who have the technology available to them, the teachers who are facile with the tech, will figure out how to use the tech available to them to replicate what we've done with Chartpak AD Markers. But at the very least, everybody has access to something to write on and something to write with. Even if it's an overhead projector, they've got something, or a chalkboard and chalk. We really respect the ways that teachers modify this to fit their own context, and we just ask that they feed that back in so that it can inform practice in the future, because none of this makes any sense if it doesn't work for teachers.

Elana:

Yeah. I know that we can talk a lot about the Critical Skills Classroom. I think that listeners might have a lot of questions, too, because you've piqued their curiosity. Oh gosh, there's a lot. There's amazing things and probably very well thought out, and the guidance that you have provided, even just a little bit, is super helpful. For those of you that want to go to the Show Notes, we'll be putting in some information about the Critical Skills Classroom. Laura, if there's any resources that can get their feet wet or be able to even just say, "Can I do this little?" I know it's a bigger mind shift, but if there's little things that can introduce them into what the difference is, send them my way, I can put them in the Show Notes as well.

Laura:

OK.

Elana:

I would love to be able to shift to another area of your expertise. I was fascinated that you've always been a person to me around social justice and equity, but I didn't know where it came from, and I started reading your bio, I'm like, "Oh, that was your primary area of study." Yeah, one of your areas and particularly in rural schools. I know you are never not shy to speak up for what you think is right in your opinion on things. I'm wondering if you want to talk a little bit of wherever you want to talk about of where social justice and equity is right now within K-12. I know that's a gigantic question, but is there something that comes to mind you're like, "I really do want to talk about this or this?" There's a lot of weaponization happening in terms in education. I don't even know where to start, but I think sometimes people are so scared to talk about these things that we never talk about them, and then the louder voices that aren't afraid take over. I hate that, too. Yeah. I'm just going to throw that bomb at you and you can decide where you want to go.

Laura:

Well, that's interesting, because a few years ago, I did a presentation at ISTE. Well, one year I did a presentation called Becoming Badass. This was pre the Badass Teachers Association. That was just about learning how to not be afraid as a classroom teacher, because I feel so many of the things that we do are driven by fear to some degree, or a lot of teachers have an imposter complex. I'm not here to diagnose anybody, but I know just from talking to teachers, there are so many teachers who think they aren't as good as they are. They really believe that. They don't want anybody to know what they're doing, because they don't think they're doing a very good job, when in reality, they're doing an amazing job.

Then, the following year, I did a presentation called Becoming Badass: Leadership Without Fear. That really dug into that idea around fear and how it impacts the decisions that we make, particularly around resistance. When I look at social justice and education, it's awfully hard to talk about social justice and education and not tap into this idea of resistance. When I say resistance, I'm talking about the kind of toxic, emotional, visceral, knee-jerk, "no way in hell" kind of response that we get from certain quarters. An idea gets to a certain point, it catches the zeitgeist, it becomes really popular, and just about the moment that it peaks, somebody decides that this thing, this new thing must be the embodiment of everything that they're afraid of. And so then, as you've said, they weaponize it. Suddenly, this thing that was really just about helping kids, just about helping families or communities or educators, just about keeping people emotionally safe, becomes something we're afraid to talk about and that all lives in fear.

One of the things that I encourage folks to consider as they are experiencing new ideas is that the brain trends to the negative, that when we are presented with anything new, our brains have evolutionarily been designed to view new as a threat, which was really helpful back when something new could eat us, so it was a good thing that it frightened us and we ran away. But we are past the saber-tooth tiger stage as a species, and so, to continue to let our fear be the thing that steps forward first when approached with a new idea, it's not a great way to live your life, and I see it in classroom teachers as well. I see it in administrators and families and communities. A new idea comes up and people think, "No, it's not what I experienced. No, it can't possibly be good."

As a leader or as an educator, if I can figure out really what people are afraid of and I can address that fear, then I can help the part of the brain, that old part of the brain that is so reactive, I can help it calm. Then, the part of my brain that can learn and predict and synthesize different ideas, that part can come online and I can begin to engage with this new idea. As long as I'm afraid, I can't engage with it. There are a lot of folks who live their lives completely bathed in that fear. I also recently read something about brains getting addicted actually to adrenaline and cortisol. I have no idea if this is actually scientifically true, but it was interesting premise that anger and stress and fear can actually trigger a hormonal response that the brain becomes addicted to, and so then we seek out new things to be angry at because we're jonesing for a fix, for lack of a better phrase.

I think that when we talk about any of these ideas, whether it's a pedagogical change, whether it's a – even changing a school's mascot, the resistance that comes from that, it's fear. There's a fear in there. I think, for a lot of folks, the fear is, "I've done harm to people, and that's not how I view myself. I'm not a person who hurts other people, and so if this thing I've done, my whole life was actually hurting people. Does that make me not a good person?" Well, the idea that I'm not a good person is terrifying. Terrifying to the point that I will reject it, and it's terrifying, which then triggers the fear of response, and then you see how that spirals.

Elana:

It's just exhausting is what it is, too.

Laura:

It is, yes.

Elana:

I appreciate your thinking about it on a higher level, too, like what's truly happening and what you've seen the patterns over time and over time. I just, in the morning, was scrolling through Facebook, listening to some educators, and one educator from Florida, she showed a picture of her entire elementary school library. It was beautiful. It took her 20 years to build it up. It was these great different books from all different genres, picture books, more advanced books. She said she's now required to inventory them all to make sure that they do not have anything subversive or something that might subject young minds in a different way. She said, "Do you know how long that would take me?" And I am just utterly exhausted.

What happens with fear is, I feel there's always someone on the short end of the stick, and there's somebody always that gets disempowered. If I were there, I'd be like, "Are you kidding me? You don't trust me from somebody who is a professional at decades of experience? This is insulting." I retreat and maybe just want to get away. That's why we're seeing teacher burnout, we're seeing teachers just leaving. The point where you don't even have words, you just leave.

Laura:

Yeah. Yeah. It's exhausting. No one can blame anybody for protecting themselves emotionally from a job that's toxic, so I get it. While on one hand, I can try to come into those conversations with as much grace as I can possibly carry to try to understand the fear on the other side of that. Like you said, there's a power imbalance there, and a power imbalance is one of the indicators of a bullying situation, and we'd never encourage someone to stay in a bullying situation if they could get out of it. There's some of this, that it's not about fear, it's about control. If we dig into it and we try to understand the fear, and we can't seem to ameliorate the thing that people are afraid of, then it's possible it's power thing and we just have to go. I've quit jobs, I've been fired from jobs, and I can say with absolute certainty that when I made a decision either to not take a position or to leave a position because it no longer matched who I wanted to be as an educator or a human being, I always walked into something better.

I think knowing who you are, what you believe in, and where your lines are is incredibly important for teachers right now. Also knowing what you're willing to give on when it comes to the whole debate about books. I was a librarian, I'm a book person. I love my books. For me, that would be a moment that I would have to – I think I would have to leave, but I can't know because I'm not in that position, and I also know that I'm very lucky to have good health insurance, and I'm very lucky to have a roof over my head and to not be living paycheck to paycheck, so I'm not going to judge anybody for what choices they make in those situations, but my heart goes out to folks who have to keep going back to a job that is eating them alive because they have no other choice. I think we have to do better by our teachers, so that we can do better by our students, but I'm not sure how.

Elana:

As we're talking right now, this is still back-to-school-ish, but I think there is a huge myth that educators come into back-to-school bright-eyed, cheery-eyed, fully refreshed. When the fact of the matter is educator burnout is always going to be, whatever we thought was an all-time high, it's always going to be moving the needle, unfortunately. Our educators have gone through the hardest, most challenging times of their lives for the last two and a half years, come back to this world that sometimes people would just say, "Oh, things are back to normal." They're not back to normal. Educators are leaving in bigger numbers than they ever have before, and there's only so much educators can take. I'm wondering, Laura, you've already spoken directly to educators around what they need to do in their heart to feel ethically and morally and have those boundaries. Is there anything you want to say to them knowing that there's some educators listening that are in it, they're in the thick of it?

Laura:

Oh yeah. Bless you. That's to the teachers who are in the thick of it and also the teachers who've chosen to leave. Everybody, all educators right now deserve thanks and praise. Even the ones who have had to step out because they can't right now. For the ones who are in the classroom right now, I think the biggest thing is to take something off your plate, take as much off your plate as you can.

We talk some about circle of concern and circle of influence in our graduate programs at Antioch. It is very tempting as a human being, and particularly as an educator, to spend a lot of energy on things that you can't control but that you care about. If that's one circle, the things that I can control or the things I care about, and this is the circle is the things that I can control, if I turn those into a Venn diagram, my work is in the intersection. If I spend all my energy on things I care about, but can't control, I burn out. If I spend all my energy on things that I can control, but aren't really important, then I become officious and difficult to be around, and I'm not really going to like what that does to me energetically. But if I can stay focused on the things that live in that intersection, the confluence of care and control, then I have a set of work that I can actually do and that I can be effective with. I can feel a sense of accomplishment.

But that overlap has to be right now, teeny. It needs to be the smallest slice that it can possibly be. "No" is a complete sentence, so if someone comes to you with a great idea or a really innovative whatever it is, and it does not feel like it's going to feed you, then, "No, no thank you, not right now," because an idea either feeds you or it feeds off you, and we don't need anybody nibbling around the edges of our teachers right now. Keep it small, smaller, smaller than that.

Elana:

For those of you not seeing in video, she's showing how small it is. Laura, I want to say that you should do a keynote about this. You've given me goose bumps. I think more educators need to hear it, because it feels selfish to say yes to yourself. We need to all think about, if we say yes now, does that prohibit me from being here a year later or six months later? It's a long game, all of this.

Laura:

Sorry.

Elana:

Go ahead.

Laura:

Sorry. But that's also because education is a feminine profession, and I think it's really hard, because so many of the folks who are in education right now are wearing so many hats. They're teachers, and they're parents, and they're caregivers for their own parents potentially. They have a second job. They have a lot going on in their lives, and because it's a feminine profession, education has always been considered women's work. I know that there are lots of men and non-binary folks who are in this field, and awesome. But culturally, it has been the work of unmarried women, and the expectation was supposed to be that your work, teaching, became everything. We're in it for the outcome not the income, which is absolutely garbage.

Elana:

I hate that. I hate it. I hate it.

Laura:

It's like a candle. It consumes itself to shine a light for ... No, do not consume yourself. There's some real internalized misogyny in that, because this idea that as educators, we're supposed to also buy into this idea, this ideal of the feminine that sacrifices everything for the care of others, and that – that's toxic. That's a toxic thing that we have to start pulling out, and the only way to pull it out, any toxic energy, is to name it and to refuse to engage with it, but to name it in the same way that we name other injustices. If somebody tells you to do it for the kids, it is totally appropriate and reasonable to say, "I love my kids, I adore my work, and I will do that for an extra $50 an hour." Or, "No, thank you. I am not going to do that." Those are all complete sentences. Don't let yourself get guilted into doing things that don't serve you. You count.

Elana:

Yes. I was recently talking to some EdTech startups about things not to say, things that are triggering to educators. One of the phrases I used is blatant heroism of educators, like you are a hero. It's not that it isn't true and that we don't overly appreciate educators, because what they do is nothing short of heroic every day, but it feels like the way you were talking, and sometimes I can't explain the nuance of it, but it justifies making sure they say yes and that they have to be a superhero every single day just to get through the mountain of extra things that they're "required to do."

We don't need our educators to be heroes, we need them to be human beings that want to come back every day, refreshed and appreciated and supported. There's so much nuance, and when EdTech folk, when you're talking to educators and thinking about that, know that there is a black and white answer, but there's all sorts of nuance in between. And if I were you, I would never choose to segment or trigger educators in such a challenging moment, and please rewind in over and over again what Laura just said around educators, because it's hard. It's a hard time.

Laura:

Yes, it is.

Elana:

I appreciate your appreciation for educators and knowing – there's so much navigation that has to occur right now. I know that we can talk about this forever, but we are unfortunately out of time. I want to have you back and just talk about all the controversial things in education, and we can turn into our badass selves and empower other educators to do the same and not feel guilty as well, and that's really important. Laura, I would like to end this podcast specifically around inspiration and hope. In all of these challenging times that we have every day, you are faced with lots of challenges in your role now, your multi-role within Antioch, Edutopia, all of the things. When you feel completely drained, what helps you replenish and say, "I got this. Next day is a new day"?

Laura:

My garden. I grew up in a very agricultural world, Northwest Missouri. My family had a farm, and I grew up surrounded by living things and tending and care of living things. This year, I had a spot of ground that opened up. We had some trees there, the trees died, we pulled them out. Suddenly there was this space with no grass, no anything, and I planted sunflowers, and then I planted other flowers, and then I planted other things, and then, well, I guess I need a bird bath out there because I've got to have a water source. This summer, it has just been this amazing. Every morning, I'm out there for 15, 20 minutes to an hour, to two hours, depending on how much attention I'm paying to how long I've been out there, and it just feeds me. It's just wonderful.

Then, the other thing, Yoga with Adriene. I've become, since the pandemic started, it's been a daily practice, and that has been huge. Just that idea of reconnecting to myself and my breath, I found those to be very, very nourishing. Those are the two big ones right now.

Elana:

Great, and you are going to have to show me a picture of your garden. I'm really curious on how it looks, and that all sounds amazing.

Laura:

It's all over my Instagram.

Elana:

OK. OK. Well, Laura, for those of the people that are listening that want to talk to you more, continue the conversation, how can they get in touch with you?

Laura:

Probably the easiest way is through social media, Twitter or Instagram. I'm @criticalskills1. I'm also very accessible through Antioch. If you go to the Antioch University website and just search on my name, I'll come right up. You can also find me through Edutopia. You can contact me through my profile on Edutopia, I believe. Yeah, I'm easy to get a hold of, and I'm always happy to talk more about any of these ideas. This is my life's work, and I want it to mean something.

Elana:

We thank you for it. Where we started out in this conversation as your evolution through education, I knew this, but the way you talked about it is, you let your gut and your passion guide you to where you feel you can make the most difference.

Laura:

Yeah.

Elana:

It truly shines through. I thank you for joining us. I thank you for sharing your passion and your wisdom with us. For all of you that are listening and want resources of the things that Laura mentioned, and we'll also highlight the top points and give you some really nice, quick skims of the Show Notes, it is going to be accessible at Leoni Consulting Group, that's two gs, LeoniConsultingGroup.com/32. You can get all the good resources there. Thank you all for spending so much time and learning alongside us. We will see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.

Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. If you liked what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can visit LeoniConsultingGroup.com/podcast for all Show Notes, links, and freebies mentioned in each episode. We always love friends, so please connect with us on Twitter @LeoniGroup. If you enjoyed today's show, go ahead and click the subscribe button to be the first one notified when our next episode is released. We'll see you next week on All Things Marketing and Education.

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