In this episode of the Just Schools Podcast, Jill Anderson and Dr. Jon Eckert engage in conversation about the profound impact of educators and the importance of recognizing their contributions. Jon tells us inspiring anecdotes of teachers who have made a lasting difference in students' lives, reflecting on the transformative power of kindness and support in education. Jon recounts a personal experience from his own schooling, to emphasize the enduring influence of a compassionate teacher. They explore the...
In this episode of the Just Schools Podcast, Jill Anderson and Dr. Jon Eckert engage in conversation about the profound impact of educators and the importance of recognizing their contributions. Jon tells us inspiring anecdotes of teachers who have made a lasting difference in students' lives, reflecting on the transformative power of kindness and support in education. Jon recounts a personal experience from his own schooling, to emphasize the enduring influence of a compassionate teacher. They explore the crucial role of validation and collaboration between educators and parents in nurturing children's well-being and development. While acknowledging the challenges educators face, such as burnout and high expectations, they also highlight the resilience and hope inherent in the teaching profession. The dialogue focuses on the significance of prioritizing joy, growth, and meaningful connections in education, beyond mere academic success. Ultimately, the conversation stands as a heartfelt tribute to educators, celebrating their tireless dedication and profound impact on shaping young lives.
To learn more, order Jon's book, Just Teaching: Feedback, Engagement, and Well-Being for Each Student.
To learn more, order Jon's book, Just Teaching: Feedback, Engagement, and Well-Being for Each Student.
The Just Schools Podcast is brought to you by the Baylor Center for School Leadership. Each week, we'll talk to catalytic educators who are doing amazing work.
Be encouraged.
Connect with us:
Connect with us:
Baylor MA in School Leadership
Jon Eckert: @eckertjon
Center for School Leadership at Baylor University: @baylorcsl
Mentioned:
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
Mentioned:
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
Transcription:
Jill:
Hi, my name is Jill Anderson and I'm the director of the Center for School Leadership. Jon is with me here, and we're going to flip the script today, and I will be asking the questions. Jon has heard and experienced so many incredible stories from educators across the world. And so to celebrate the Teacher Appreciation Week, we wanted to share some of those stories to encourage and to inspire the good work that each of the educators out there are doing to help each student flourish. So we'll go ahead and get started with the first question. Can you share a story or two of an inspiring teacher?
Jon:
Yeah. So as we always talk about, we have the best job in education because this is what we do. We just go all over the world and find good things that are happening and try to highlight those, elevate those, and spread those ideas. And they're always built around human beings. And so these stories of cool things happening, I have a ton of those and we'll share them throughout the episode today. But I have to go all the way back to my first grade because that's now I guess about 43 years ago, that would be, that I was in first grade, and this is still as memorable as something that happened yesterday to me. And that's where the power of an educator comes in into the life of a student, where that educator comes alongside and helps that kid become more of who they're created to be. So this happened.
The first part of it, it's not such a great teaching example, the second part is good, so stick with me. So I'm in art class. I love art. It's one of my favorite parts of the day. We're getting ready for Halloween, so we're making witches and so we're having to cut out the circle part of the head. And Mrs. Fleshy, the art teacher who've been doing it for quite a while and was a little grumpy, but she's been managing elementary kids in art for probably 30 years, so that could wear anybody down. But she's going around and passing out the scissors. And I don't know if people that are listening, if you're old enough to remember this, but left-handed scissors were always green-handled scissors. And so I knew I was left-handed, but I'd also been diagnosed with dyslexia. And so I had a really hard time knowing which hand was which. I had a hard time reversing words, you could put was and saw on top of each other.
And I knew they were different, I couldn't tell you how. Six and nine, B and D they felt like they were invented by Satan just to confuse me. And so I get the scissors and she's watching me because I think she didn't believe I was left-handed. And I put them on my right hand. She's like, she snatched them from me. She's like, "Oh, you're not left-handed." And she gave me the silver-handled scissors.
Jill:
So sad.
Jon:
And I was like, "Ah, but I..." And she's moved on to the next person. And so then we're trying to cut out these circles. And if you remember the old scissors at least, if you had them on the wrong hand they did not cut. And so I'm sitting there so frustrated because I cannot get the scissors to cut the paper with my right hand, which I know I'm supposed to have on my right hand and I can't cut with my right. So I try on my left and then they really don't work. And so I start to cry because I'm that frustrated. And Mrs. Fleshy from the front of the room, she says to me, and I can still hear her, I can still smell her too actually, "Jon, if you're going to be disruptive, you need to just get out of class." I'm like, oh. So I go out of the class, I sit in the hallway and just tears are pouring down. And fifth graders are walking by me and sixth graders, and I'm just completely mortified but I can't stop.
My first grade teacher, Ms. Thayer comes walking by and she's also been teaching for 30 years. I always say the best teachers in a building and the worst teachers in the building are typically the most veteran teachers, because they're either amazing and they have all that expertise or they're kind of just waiting for retirement. So you have that. So Ms. Thayer comes by and she sees me and she grabs me by my hand. And she takes me back to the room and we sit knee-to-knee in those little first grade chairs. And she asked me to tell her what happened. And so through those halting sobby breaths, I get out what happened? And she just looks at me and she says, "Mrs. Frischi shouldn't have done that to you." And then she gives me this big hug. And from then on I would run through a wall for that woman.
And 43 years later, I still get chills thinking about the way she saw me, knew me and loved me in that moment just by breaking adult code saying, "Hey, that was wrong. And I know you weren't trying to be disruptive." And she gave me that hug and I was like, "Hey, I am forever loyal to you, Mrs. Thayer." So many other stories we see all around the world but I just thought I'd start with that one, because I don't think I've ever told that story very publicly. And so I was like, hey, Ms. Thayer needs to get honored wherever she's at now. I'm sure she's up in heaven at this point listening to this podcast.
Jill:
Yeah, I definitely had not heard that story, but that's such an amazing story to share it because of the validation, it's all it took. It was just to sit at your level and understand what you were going through and that was it. So it's not very hard to do, but it takes some time and thought to say, "Okay, I need to take a minute and see what this kid's going through."
Jon:
Exactly.
Jill:
So how can we celebrate teachers?
Jon:
So I think at the center, you're the director. It's great by the way having somebody else ask the questions because that's usually my role. So thank you for doing that. I think what we do is we just keep elevating the good work that's happening all over the place. There are amazing things happening that we see in the US. I've been to Australia, to England, I go to New Zealand this summer, and we're seeing amazing things happening with educators in public schools and private schools. And so just honoring the work of the profession and taking the time to listen and observe. I'll give you two quick examples where there's this reinforcing cycle of this relational component. That's where the hope always is, is in relationship. Teaching's one of the most human things we do. And so, I was in South Carolina last year. I was in a rural school and was in an early childhood classroom for at-risk kids and walked into this room and in the corner there's this tiny little wheelchair, which there's not much more depressing than a tiny wheelchair.
And then a little guy who's less than 30 pounds laying on this mat, and he was just recovering from a seizure. And so he was really exhausted. He's trying to make eye contact with this teacher and he's making this noise. He's not verbal and he's making this noise, and you can tell he just wants the teacher's attention. And she's working with a small group of kids in the other corner. And she notices and she goes over and she just scoops him up, gives him a big hug, his head is on her shoulder and he's looking at me and he is so happy. And so the teacher just kind of offhandedly looks at me and she said, "Hey, sometimes we just need some snuggles." And that kid in that moment was seen, known and loved in that really simple way. And so I've given you a first grade example. I've given you an early childhood example.
I want to jump ahead to validating what a high school teacher did. So she's got seniors, I'm not sure, I think she was either an English or a history teacher. And she was sharing this story at one of our professional learning sessions that we were doing last year. And she was recounting the fact that the office had called down to her room to let her know that her father had fallen and had a brain bleed they thought. And she needed to get to him as soon as possible. And so her students that were with her, they heard this because it came through. And before they would let her go, they all got around her and put hands on her and prayed for her before they would let her leave to go be with her father.
Jill:
That's so amazing.
Jon:
So that loving relationship, that part that we do it's not just a one way street. That comes back to us. It's not why we love kids so that they will love us back and it's not our job to be their friends, but when we see them, know them and love them, that gets reciprocated for us in a way that's just truly life-giving. So I think anytime we can find those life-giving things and lean into those and then elevate those to let people know all the amazing things that are happening in schools. We hear all the negative stuff because media has a negativity bias to it. But there are amazing things happening in classrooms all over the place. And so how do we see those relationships and the way kids are becoming more of who they're created to be because of the work that's going on in the classroom?
Jill:
Yeah, absolutely. Those are great stories to be able to share. So on that note, how do we bring more joy to the profession?
Jon:
So I think part of it is celebrating the right things. So when we think about joy or wellbeing or flourishing, sometimes people think of that as meaning freedom from struggle. And that's not what it is. To me, joy isn't circumstantial. Joy is in this deep abiding hope that there is more. And that joy isn't freedom from struggle but it's the freedom to struggle well. So how do we help educators see what they're doing in the lives of students that allows them to have the energy and fuel to do more? What does that look like for them? And then how do we celebrate that, because I think we've oversold wellbeing over the last few years that like, "Okay, that's really hard for you. You don't have to do that right now." And when we do that, that robs kids of the joy that comes from doing something that they didn't think they could do. And then they do it and they do it well, and there's great joy in that. So if we rob kids the opportunity to struggle, we also rob them of the opportunity to have joy.
And so if we think about happiness as being something that we want kids to always feel happy, they're not going to grow very much. And we know all the way back to Vygotsky's own approximate development, the distance between what you can do on your own and what you can do with assistants where you push and stretch is where learning is. So learning is productive struggle. So how do we build that in without making it be a burnout thing? And we don't avoid burnout by getting Jeans day on Friday. That's nice. But where we really find meaning and joy is in celebrating the growth that we see. So if you want an educator to stay in education, help them see what's happening in my view as a Christian that the Lord is doing through them in the lives of a student. That's what gets you up in the morning, how do we keep seeing that and keep building on that.
Jill:
Absolutely. So you've talked a lot about using the phrase just a teacher. Can you talk a little bit about that, how we avoid using it as just a teacher and how we can switch that around to just teaching?
Jon:
Yeah. So the book Just Teaching, Feedback, Inclusion and Well-being for Each Student, plays on that phrase that, oh, I'm just a teacher, or, oh, they're just a teacher. And as educators we 100% have to stop referring to ourselves as just a teacher. Education is the profession that makes all others possible. There is great power in that role, and everyone has experienced this. If they've had a good teacher or their child has had a good teacher, the difference that makes. There is huge power in that. And we steal ourselves, we rob ourselves of that when we refer to ourselves as just a teacher. And so when we talk about just teachers, we're talking about teachers that teach for justice and flourishing by making sure each kid is seen, known and loved. And you do that by making sure they're well, that they're engaged and they get feedback. That we give them the opportunity to stretch.
It's not to work ourselves into oblivion. It's not just continuing to add more and more to our plates. I think in some places burnout has become a badge of honor and educators think everything requires the extra mile. That's not it. How do we put the work on students that allows them to do the work that will allow them to flourish? And we take the work that's ours, but our job is to coach them through that, not do it for them.
Jill:
Exactly. Yeah, and even as a parent, I'm not a teacher, I haven't been a teacher, but as a parent I can see that in my own kids. And it's so hard to watch them go through that struggle, but once they get to the other side you're like, okay, this is a good thing that I did to help them grow in that area.
Jon:
Yeah. Well, we all know nobody wants to be stretched. It's no fun to be, but we all appreciate the benefit of the stretching on the back end.
Jill:
Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of being a parent, how as a parent can we support teachers in the best way?
Jon:
Well, I think we need to view our role as teachers, I'll start there, as being a partner of the parent and helping that kid flourish because regardless, in my view there are parents that do bad things for kids. But no parent wants to do things that harm their kid. They care about that kid more than anything else on earth. And sometimes as a teacher you sometimes scratch your head, well, I don't know why we're doing that. And parent-teacher conferences are always this eye-opening moment of, I can't believe that kid gets to school every day because of some of the stuff that goes on. But 95% of parents want what's best for kids. And I would say teachers are there too, nobody really goes into teaching because they want to harm kids. That's not a thing. So if we can keep our child the focus of the interaction and not get on the defensive as teachers or parents about hey...
Because it's sometimes hard, especially if parents didn't have great experiences in schools, it's hard for them to come back into school and hear feedback that feels critical because it feels like they're being judged as a parent. And nobody wants to be judged or evaluated, we all want to get better. So how do we make getting better for the kid be our joint mission as parents and educators? And I think I'll go back to the joy piece, if we want our kids to experience joy and be the kind of human beings we want them to be, then we have to give them opportunity to struggle well. How can they stretch? And so that's where parents and educators can be great partners in that, what's the extracurricular activity that you need to really shine? You're not great in math, great, work harder at math. You can't just not do that. You're going go-
Jill:
Not do it, yeah.
Jon:
But then, oh, you really love art. Well, lean into art. What can you do there? You don't do art instead of math. You want to be a well-rounded human being that does it. The other thing I would encourage parents to do and this'll come into, I think you'll probably ask me for a book recommendation at some point, but as you think about who your kid's becoming, don't try to parent and engineer all of the pain out of their lives. You can't do it.
Jill:
That's good.
Jon:
You can't do it. And so how do you put those guardrails on where they know you're safe, they know that they are loved and nothing they do will change that love. However, some things they do may change how much they please you. So it's not like everything you do is fine. We just love you. You're all great. No, you can make some bad decisions that I am not going to be pleased about and I'm going to tell you. And here is wisdom from an adult who's been through all these things too, and here are some thoughts. And so the one place when I said that I was like, we really have to be smart with smartphones and social media. That is an introduced thing that didn't affect us as parents, and I'm so grateful I didn't have it. That world that's introduced there, the more as parents we can partner with schools to figure out the best ways to use technology. And how to create some freedom from it because it is oppressive. And no matter how much we think we're training them how to use it, adults aren't good at using their smartphones.
Jill:
I definitely am not either. I have to use the focus feature to be able to avoid it when I'm trying to do work.
Jon:
Right. If you've caught yourself, and I know I've done it when you and I have been talking, if you catch yourself talking to someone who's an embodied human being right in front of you and you get a buzz on your phone and you're paying attention to that, what are we doing? We're saying that's more important than this human being. So if adults are doing that, we really need to think through what that's like for people with underdeveloped frontal cortexes that allow them to discipline themselves with it. And so I think we really need to be thoughtful about that as parents, how can we do that in a way that allow our kids to really enjoy being with each other and figure out how to navigate life with other people?
Jill:
Yeah, absolutely. And I was going to ask you about book recommendations. I feel like you're leading into Anxious Generation. Is that the one that you were going to talk about?
Jon:
Well, we've been talking about... I just read that book last week by Jonathan Haidt, and I've been citing his article in the Atlantic from last summer about schools should ban smartphones, like hard stop ban smartphones. He also has the recommendation that anybody under the age that's not in high school should not have a smartphone, flip phones. Other ways to communicate fine, but no smartphones till high school and no social media until you're 16. And it's really hard to disagree with that. From what I've seen, I feel like kids are so much freer when they have that. And he gives an example in his book about his six-year-old daughter who's on her iPad, and she can't figure out what's going on that there are engineers in a multi-billion dollar industry whose job is to keep her paying attention to the iPad no matter what, because the kid is the product. That's what they're selling to advertisers, that's what they're selling. And she says to her dad, "Dad, can you take this away from me? I can't get my eyes off of it."
Jill:
Wow, that's really powerful.
Jon:
Yeah, and so I think that's really where we're. So The Anxious Generation, he has a lot of reasons why we're anxious. It's not just smartphone's bad, it's smartphones disrupt and stunt development for kids because we're not having the human interactions, everything's mediated through social media which is not real. So instead of looking, when I grew up in the '70s and '80s, especially for girls, you walk by the checkout at the grocery store and you see these models that are airbrushed and they look perfect and all this. Now, girls go on and they see that and these are their competition at school, and it's not real but it feels real. And so they curate their lives to look like something they're not, which just breeds all kinds of anxiety because it's not an embodied interaction. They're saying, "Oh yeah, I know that person. That person's like this. They're not like they're real or what it looks like on Instagram." So it's devastating. And then for boys, it's less the social media, it's more the gaming and the pornography that kids are finding at ages 10 and 11 where it's just wide open for them.
Jill:
So young, yeah.
Jon:
And again, there are features that are meant to try to limit it but if you can put in a fake birthday, you can get to just about anything. And so there's a lot of responsibility in technology, but I don't see them making a change because the incentives aren't there for them to change. I think as parents, we have to be the parents and say, "Hey, collectively, we're not going to do this." Because if you're the only parent doing it, that's really hard. And in the book, he suggests that get 10 families together that are going to commit to this, that we're not going to jump on this boat of social media, early smartphones all the time. And I think as schools, we have to make the hard decision to say, "Hey, for eight hours a day we're giving you a break from these" and not just don't have them out, because that becomes really hard to enforce in schools.
It's these get turned into a pouch that's locked for the day, or these go into a smartphone locker for the day and then you get them at the end of the day. And parents, I would just encourage you to support your schools if they do that. A lot of parents are fighting it because you want immediate access to your kids. You have it, call the office. There are adults charged with taking care of your kid. Trust them to do that. If you trust them for eight hours a day, you can trust them to get an important message to your kid.
Jill:
Right. I've seen the attitude change just with my own kids. I have an 11-year-old, and so she recently got in trouble and got her phone taken away for a week. And she was an amazing kid. She's creative, she was drawing, she was involved in conversations, engaging, and then she got her phone back and we're like, Where did Bella go? Look, we haven't seen her." So it totally changes who they are. So yeah, I've seen it myself. So what advice would you give educators out there?
Jon:
So you've already picked up on some of it, so I'll just try to sum it up into a sound bite. Lean into joy, but don't think of joy as being lacking struggle. Where are you seeing growth in yourself as an educator? Where are you seeing growth in your classroom? Lean into that, celebrate that, that's where joy is. And so even when you talk about smartphones, it's not banning something. It's inviting kids into deeper engagement, into that human... When kids get to a camp and they don't have phones for a week and they get to try new things and get to be with other people like, oh, this is great. It's like the veil has come off, the haze that they're in is gone. It's like, oh, they look around there's this amazing world and these amazing people. And so I think we need the same thing for our classrooms. We need to lean into really why we got into teaching in the first place, and that's to help other people grow and become more of who they're created to be.
Jill:
Yeah, absolutely. So on the flip side, what would be the worst advice that you've heard?
Jon:
This is hard to say. I got an article out called The Wellbeing Myth, and I think we have oversold wellbeing. And I think it's bad advice to say that kids can't learn if you don't make sure everything's okay. I think we need to focus less on some of those, even the SEL stuff, social emotional learning pieces have been oversold. It's like do hard things together, that works. There was another line, this again goes back to Haidt's book, it maybe Haidt's book or it may be Bad Therapy. I've got two books now coming together in my head. But that parents, adults, or whatever, can help kids learn how to make friends. The way you learn how to make friends is you try to make friends. And it's great to have somebody that you can talk to, "Hey, I tried this and this didn't work very well and whatever." But there's not a recipe for making friends. Okay, be kind, do unto others as you want them doing to you. There's some basic principles. But you know how kids learn those? By trying to do it.
So I think teachers and parents, I think sometimes we need to step back a little bit and let kids play more and try stuff more. The average kid in elementary school in the US right now gets 27 minutes a day of recess. That is tragic. That was the height of my day. I would go home with my basketball and kickball stats every day for my three recesses. I look back and I was like, recess was the greatest thing ever. And I might've learned more at recess than I did in the classroom about how to interact with human beings. So like, hey, step back. Give them some space. That's wellbeing. So worry more about the virtual world and worry less about the real world. Let the kids... Haidt has this great line, let them get bruises, not scars.
Jill:
I love that. That's really great. So what would you say is one of the biggest challenges that you see for educators in the year ahead?
Jon:
We have a really hard job as educators because so much is expected of educators. Every policy decision, every government action is like, we'll do this through schools because there are schools in every community. So more and more it gets layered on top of educators all the time. And it makes sense from a policy perspective. It's like you have a beach head into every neighborhood, but educators can't do everything. And when we try, we don't do any of it very well and we end up burned out. And so we are seeing amazing educators leave the profession and other people not wanting to go into the profession because teachers aren't making education look like a very appealing job, even though it's the greatest job ever. It doesn't look like that to students. And so that's a challenge and it's a vicious cycle that's continuing. So much is asked, I burn out, it doesn't look like an appealing profession and that's a challenge.
Jill:
Absolutely. So I want to end on a positive note, what's the thing that makes you the most optimistic as you look ahead?
Jon:
So our whole deal at the center is to focus on adaptive challenges and improvement that we can make. And so these are short cycle data collections, what can you do in 90 days that makes a difference for kids? And we're seeing teams of educators in schools literally all over the world, we're in 45 plus countries and all 50 states. And we're seeing people make improvement. Now, I don't like talking about solutions because I think solutions are often too pat and too oversimplified where improvement is, well, if you've got a dumpster fire, put the fire out first. You're not building the Taj Mahal while the fire is burning. So it's how do we make those gains and then that builds momentum, especially when you see teachers and students doing together. So I'll end with this really encouraging note that I saw last week. Well, I'll give you a specific example of something that just was super inspiring to me and then a system example. Is that okay?
Jill:
Okay. Yeah, that sounds great.
Jon:
All right. So the system example was in South Carolina, we've been working with these schools that are doing collective leadership all over the state for eight years. I'm the program evaluator and researcher so I've been studying this high school, Blythewood High School. And this year when they had their showcase of the progress they've made each year, they brought the students to do it. So I was in a session where juniors and seniors in high school were talking about the collective leadership of their educators, and the way that was affecting their system as students. And the way they were leading alongside educators. I was like, Oh-
Jill:
That's really cool.
Jon:
This is the dream. The kids own it. It's not buy-in, they own it. The other story I'll give, and this was maybe my favorite classroom visit from the last year where this makes me optimistic. Brad Livingstone, who's our first gent, he's the husband of our president, Linda Livingstone and I was in his history classroom. And he's an amazing history teacher. He teaches World War II history and Vietnam War history at a local school. And the teaching's amazing, I was there for the Do-little raids. It was amazing World War II, so I enjoyed that. But at the beginning of the class, he's having students report out how many veterans they thanked the past week. So every Monday morning they report in how many veterans they thanked for what they did. And he got them doing this, and he's done this for years in all the different schools he's been in. He drives a van full of them to HEB in the middle of the day at the beginning of the semester.
And he said, "Go out and find people that are my age or older and ask them if they served in the military. And if they do, introduce yourself, thank them for their service."
Jill:
That's awesome.
Jon:
And so they go out in teams and do that, and then he's like, "Now it's on you. You got to do this." And you got to get 50 this semester. And if you get 50, the goal is to get 1000 thank-yous in the course of the semester. That fundamentally changes the community. It doesn't just change the classroom. It doesn't just change the kids, that changes the community. Once you get to 50, you get a vial of sand from Normandy that he's collected. The kid who has the most thank-yous in a semester gets a vial of sand from Iwo Jima, which is in his way of saying it is the most difficult soil to get in the world because the only way you're allowed to go to Iwo Jima is if you are connected to Japan or you're a military liaison to Japan for the United States. That's the only way you get on that island. And so a veteran brought him back some sand from Iwo Jima. So one kid each semester gets that sand.
And I'm sitting in there and this kid has thanked 75 veterans that past week. I was like, "How did you do it?" And he said, "Well, I go to football games and I watch for how people stand up and salute the flag during the national anthem. And then I go find them." I was like-
Jill:
That's awesome.
Jon:
...how amazing is that? So those kinds of small changes are the kinds of things that change our community in a society that feels like it's super broken and polarized, that changes people. And so that's the hope.
Jill:
That is such a cool story. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for sharing all the other stories, and I really hope that it was an encouragement to all the educators out there. We are so grateful for the work that you do on a daily basis and making a difference in the lives of each student.
Jon:
Yeah, thanks for all you do, Jill. It's great. We have a great job.
Jill:
Yeah, we do.
Hi, my name is Jill Anderson and I'm the director of the Center for School Leadership. Jon is with me here, and we're going to flip the script today, and I will be asking the questions. Jon has heard and experienced so many incredible stories from educators across the world. And so to celebrate the Teacher Appreciation Week, we wanted to share some of those stories to encourage and to inspire the good work that each of the educators out there are doing to help each student flourish. So we'll go ahead and get started with the first question. Can you share a story or two of an inspiring teacher?
Jon:
Yeah. So as we always talk about, we have the best job in education because this is what we do. We just go all over the world and find good things that are happening and try to highlight those, elevate those, and spread those ideas. And they're always built around human beings. And so these stories of cool things happening, I have a ton of those and we'll share them throughout the episode today. But I have to go all the way back to my first grade because that's now I guess about 43 years ago, that would be, that I was in first grade, and this is still as memorable as something that happened yesterday to me. And that's where the power of an educator comes in into the life of a student, where that educator comes alongside and helps that kid become more of who they're created to be. So this happened.
The first part of it, it's not such a great teaching example, the second part is good, so stick with me. So I'm in art class. I love art. It's one of my favorite parts of the day. We're getting ready for Halloween, so we're making witches and so we're having to cut out the circle part of the head. And Mrs. Fleshy, the art teacher who've been doing it for quite a while and was a little grumpy, but she's been managing elementary kids in art for probably 30 years, so that could wear anybody down. But she's going around and passing out the scissors. And I don't know if people that are listening, if you're old enough to remember this, but left-handed scissors were always green-handled scissors. And so I knew I was left-handed, but I'd also been diagnosed with dyslexia. And so I had a really hard time knowing which hand was which. I had a hard time reversing words, you could put was and saw on top of each other.
And I knew they were different, I couldn't tell you how. Six and nine, B and D they felt like they were invented by Satan just to confuse me. And so I get the scissors and she's watching me because I think she didn't believe I was left-handed. And I put them on my right hand. She's like, she snatched them from me. She's like, "Oh, you're not left-handed." And she gave me the silver-handled scissors.
Jill:
So sad.
Jon:
And I was like, "Ah, but I..." And she's moved on to the next person. And so then we're trying to cut out these circles. And if you remember the old scissors at least, if you had them on the wrong hand they did not cut. And so I'm sitting there so frustrated because I cannot get the scissors to cut the paper with my right hand, which I know I'm supposed to have on my right hand and I can't cut with my right. So I try on my left and then they really don't work. And so I start to cry because I'm that frustrated. And Mrs. Fleshy from the front of the room, she says to me, and I can still hear her, I can still smell her too actually, "Jon, if you're going to be disruptive, you need to just get out of class." I'm like, oh. So I go out of the class, I sit in the hallway and just tears are pouring down. And fifth graders are walking by me and sixth graders, and I'm just completely mortified but I can't stop.
My first grade teacher, Ms. Thayer comes walking by and she's also been teaching for 30 years. I always say the best teachers in a building and the worst teachers in the building are typically the most veteran teachers, because they're either amazing and they have all that expertise or they're kind of just waiting for retirement. So you have that. So Ms. Thayer comes by and she sees me and she grabs me by my hand. And she takes me back to the room and we sit knee-to-knee in those little first grade chairs. And she asked me to tell her what happened. And so through those halting sobby breaths, I get out what happened? And she just looks at me and she says, "Mrs. Frischi shouldn't have done that to you." And then she gives me this big hug. And from then on I would run through a wall for that woman.
And 43 years later, I still get chills thinking about the way she saw me, knew me and loved me in that moment just by breaking adult code saying, "Hey, that was wrong. And I know you weren't trying to be disruptive." And she gave me that hug and I was like, "Hey, I am forever loyal to you, Mrs. Thayer." So many other stories we see all around the world but I just thought I'd start with that one, because I don't think I've ever told that story very publicly. And so I was like, hey, Ms. Thayer needs to get honored wherever she's at now. I'm sure she's up in heaven at this point listening to this podcast.
Jill:
Yeah, I definitely had not heard that story, but that's such an amazing story to share it because of the validation, it's all it took. It was just to sit at your level and understand what you were going through and that was it. So it's not very hard to do, but it takes some time and thought to say, "Okay, I need to take a minute and see what this kid's going through."
Jon:
Exactly.
Jill:
So how can we celebrate teachers?
Jon:
So I think at the center, you're the director. It's great by the way having somebody else ask the questions because that's usually my role. So thank you for doing that. I think what we do is we just keep elevating the good work that's happening all over the place. There are amazing things happening that we see in the US. I've been to Australia, to England, I go to New Zealand this summer, and we're seeing amazing things happening with educators in public schools and private schools. And so just honoring the work of the profession and taking the time to listen and observe. I'll give you two quick examples where there's this reinforcing cycle of this relational component. That's where the hope always is, is in relationship. Teaching's one of the most human things we do. And so, I was in South Carolina last year. I was in a rural school and was in an early childhood classroom for at-risk kids and walked into this room and in the corner there's this tiny little wheelchair, which there's not much more depressing than a tiny wheelchair.
And then a little guy who's less than 30 pounds laying on this mat, and he was just recovering from a seizure. And so he was really exhausted. He's trying to make eye contact with this teacher and he's making this noise. He's not verbal and he's making this noise, and you can tell he just wants the teacher's attention. And she's working with a small group of kids in the other corner. And she notices and she goes over and she just scoops him up, gives him a big hug, his head is on her shoulder and he's looking at me and he is so happy. And so the teacher just kind of offhandedly looks at me and she said, "Hey, sometimes we just need some snuggles." And that kid in that moment was seen, known and loved in that really simple way. And so I've given you a first grade example. I've given you an early childhood example.
I want to jump ahead to validating what a high school teacher did. So she's got seniors, I'm not sure, I think she was either an English or a history teacher. And she was sharing this story at one of our professional learning sessions that we were doing last year. And she was recounting the fact that the office had called down to her room to let her know that her father had fallen and had a brain bleed they thought. And she needed to get to him as soon as possible. And so her students that were with her, they heard this because it came through. And before they would let her go, they all got around her and put hands on her and prayed for her before they would let her leave to go be with her father.
Jill:
That's so amazing.
Jon:
So that loving relationship, that part that we do it's not just a one way street. That comes back to us. It's not why we love kids so that they will love us back and it's not our job to be their friends, but when we see them, know them and love them, that gets reciprocated for us in a way that's just truly life-giving. So I think anytime we can find those life-giving things and lean into those and then elevate those to let people know all the amazing things that are happening in schools. We hear all the negative stuff because media has a negativity bias to it. But there are amazing things happening in classrooms all over the place. And so how do we see those relationships and the way kids are becoming more of who they're created to be because of the work that's going on in the classroom?
Jill:
Yeah, absolutely. Those are great stories to be able to share. So on that note, how do we bring more joy to the profession?
Jon:
So I think part of it is celebrating the right things. So when we think about joy or wellbeing or flourishing, sometimes people think of that as meaning freedom from struggle. And that's not what it is. To me, joy isn't circumstantial. Joy is in this deep abiding hope that there is more. And that joy isn't freedom from struggle but it's the freedom to struggle well. So how do we help educators see what they're doing in the lives of students that allows them to have the energy and fuel to do more? What does that look like for them? And then how do we celebrate that, because I think we've oversold wellbeing over the last few years that like, "Okay, that's really hard for you. You don't have to do that right now." And when we do that, that robs kids of the joy that comes from doing something that they didn't think they could do. And then they do it and they do it well, and there's great joy in that. So if we rob kids the opportunity to struggle, we also rob them of the opportunity to have joy.
And so if we think about happiness as being something that we want kids to always feel happy, they're not going to grow very much. And we know all the way back to Vygotsky's own approximate development, the distance between what you can do on your own and what you can do with assistants where you push and stretch is where learning is. So learning is productive struggle. So how do we build that in without making it be a burnout thing? And we don't avoid burnout by getting Jeans day on Friday. That's nice. But where we really find meaning and joy is in celebrating the growth that we see. So if you want an educator to stay in education, help them see what's happening in my view as a Christian that the Lord is doing through them in the lives of a student. That's what gets you up in the morning, how do we keep seeing that and keep building on that.
Jill:
Absolutely. So you've talked a lot about using the phrase just a teacher. Can you talk a little bit about that, how we avoid using it as just a teacher and how we can switch that around to just teaching?
Jon:
Yeah. So the book Just Teaching, Feedback, Inclusion and Well-being for Each Student, plays on that phrase that, oh, I'm just a teacher, or, oh, they're just a teacher. And as educators we 100% have to stop referring to ourselves as just a teacher. Education is the profession that makes all others possible. There is great power in that role, and everyone has experienced this. If they've had a good teacher or their child has had a good teacher, the difference that makes. There is huge power in that. And we steal ourselves, we rob ourselves of that when we refer to ourselves as just a teacher. And so when we talk about just teachers, we're talking about teachers that teach for justice and flourishing by making sure each kid is seen, known and loved. And you do that by making sure they're well, that they're engaged and they get feedback. That we give them the opportunity to stretch.
It's not to work ourselves into oblivion. It's not just continuing to add more and more to our plates. I think in some places burnout has become a badge of honor and educators think everything requires the extra mile. That's not it. How do we put the work on students that allows them to do the work that will allow them to flourish? And we take the work that's ours, but our job is to coach them through that, not do it for them.
Jill:
Exactly. Yeah, and even as a parent, I'm not a teacher, I haven't been a teacher, but as a parent I can see that in my own kids. And it's so hard to watch them go through that struggle, but once they get to the other side you're like, okay, this is a good thing that I did to help them grow in that area.
Jon:
Yeah. Well, we all know nobody wants to be stretched. It's no fun to be, but we all appreciate the benefit of the stretching on the back end.
Jill:
Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of being a parent, how as a parent can we support teachers in the best way?
Jon:
Well, I think we need to view our role as teachers, I'll start there, as being a partner of the parent and helping that kid flourish because regardless, in my view there are parents that do bad things for kids. But no parent wants to do things that harm their kid. They care about that kid more than anything else on earth. And sometimes as a teacher you sometimes scratch your head, well, I don't know why we're doing that. And parent-teacher conferences are always this eye-opening moment of, I can't believe that kid gets to school every day because of some of the stuff that goes on. But 95% of parents want what's best for kids. And I would say teachers are there too, nobody really goes into teaching because they want to harm kids. That's not a thing. So if we can keep our child the focus of the interaction and not get on the defensive as teachers or parents about hey...
Because it's sometimes hard, especially if parents didn't have great experiences in schools, it's hard for them to come back into school and hear feedback that feels critical because it feels like they're being judged as a parent. And nobody wants to be judged or evaluated, we all want to get better. So how do we make getting better for the kid be our joint mission as parents and educators? And I think I'll go back to the joy piece, if we want our kids to experience joy and be the kind of human beings we want them to be, then we have to give them opportunity to struggle well. How can they stretch? And so that's where parents and educators can be great partners in that, what's the extracurricular activity that you need to really shine? You're not great in math, great, work harder at math. You can't just not do that. You're going go-
Jill:
Not do it, yeah.
Jon:
But then, oh, you really love art. Well, lean into art. What can you do there? You don't do art instead of math. You want to be a well-rounded human being that does it. The other thing I would encourage parents to do and this'll come into, I think you'll probably ask me for a book recommendation at some point, but as you think about who your kid's becoming, don't try to parent and engineer all of the pain out of their lives. You can't do it.
Jill:
That's good.
Jon:
You can't do it. And so how do you put those guardrails on where they know you're safe, they know that they are loved and nothing they do will change that love. However, some things they do may change how much they please you. So it's not like everything you do is fine. We just love you. You're all great. No, you can make some bad decisions that I am not going to be pleased about and I'm going to tell you. And here is wisdom from an adult who's been through all these things too, and here are some thoughts. And so the one place when I said that I was like, we really have to be smart with smartphones and social media. That is an introduced thing that didn't affect us as parents, and I'm so grateful I didn't have it. That world that's introduced there, the more as parents we can partner with schools to figure out the best ways to use technology. And how to create some freedom from it because it is oppressive. And no matter how much we think we're training them how to use it, adults aren't good at using their smartphones.
Jill:
I definitely am not either. I have to use the focus feature to be able to avoid it when I'm trying to do work.
Jon:
Right. If you've caught yourself, and I know I've done it when you and I have been talking, if you catch yourself talking to someone who's an embodied human being right in front of you and you get a buzz on your phone and you're paying attention to that, what are we doing? We're saying that's more important than this human being. So if adults are doing that, we really need to think through what that's like for people with underdeveloped frontal cortexes that allow them to discipline themselves with it. And so I think we really need to be thoughtful about that as parents, how can we do that in a way that allow our kids to really enjoy being with each other and figure out how to navigate life with other people?
Jill:
Yeah, absolutely. And I was going to ask you about book recommendations. I feel like you're leading into Anxious Generation. Is that the one that you were going to talk about?
Jon:
Well, we've been talking about... I just read that book last week by Jonathan Haidt, and I've been citing his article in the Atlantic from last summer about schools should ban smartphones, like hard stop ban smartphones. He also has the recommendation that anybody under the age that's not in high school should not have a smartphone, flip phones. Other ways to communicate fine, but no smartphones till high school and no social media until you're 16. And it's really hard to disagree with that. From what I've seen, I feel like kids are so much freer when they have that. And he gives an example in his book about his six-year-old daughter who's on her iPad, and she can't figure out what's going on that there are engineers in a multi-billion dollar industry whose job is to keep her paying attention to the iPad no matter what, because the kid is the product. That's what they're selling to advertisers, that's what they're selling. And she says to her dad, "Dad, can you take this away from me? I can't get my eyes off of it."
Jill:
Wow, that's really powerful.
Jon:
Yeah, and so I think that's really where we're. So The Anxious Generation, he has a lot of reasons why we're anxious. It's not just smartphone's bad, it's smartphones disrupt and stunt development for kids because we're not having the human interactions, everything's mediated through social media which is not real. So instead of looking, when I grew up in the '70s and '80s, especially for girls, you walk by the checkout at the grocery store and you see these models that are airbrushed and they look perfect and all this. Now, girls go on and they see that and these are their competition at school, and it's not real but it feels real. And so they curate their lives to look like something they're not, which just breeds all kinds of anxiety because it's not an embodied interaction. They're saying, "Oh yeah, I know that person. That person's like this. They're not like they're real or what it looks like on Instagram." So it's devastating. And then for boys, it's less the social media, it's more the gaming and the pornography that kids are finding at ages 10 and 11 where it's just wide open for them.
Jill:
So young, yeah.
Jon:
And again, there are features that are meant to try to limit it but if you can put in a fake birthday, you can get to just about anything. And so there's a lot of responsibility in technology, but I don't see them making a change because the incentives aren't there for them to change. I think as parents, we have to be the parents and say, "Hey, collectively, we're not going to do this." Because if you're the only parent doing it, that's really hard. And in the book, he suggests that get 10 families together that are going to commit to this, that we're not going to jump on this boat of social media, early smartphones all the time. And I think as schools, we have to make the hard decision to say, "Hey, for eight hours a day we're giving you a break from these" and not just don't have them out, because that becomes really hard to enforce in schools.
It's these get turned into a pouch that's locked for the day, or these go into a smartphone locker for the day and then you get them at the end of the day. And parents, I would just encourage you to support your schools if they do that. A lot of parents are fighting it because you want immediate access to your kids. You have it, call the office. There are adults charged with taking care of your kid. Trust them to do that. If you trust them for eight hours a day, you can trust them to get an important message to your kid.
Jill:
Right. I've seen the attitude change just with my own kids. I have an 11-year-old, and so she recently got in trouble and got her phone taken away for a week. And she was an amazing kid. She's creative, she was drawing, she was involved in conversations, engaging, and then she got her phone back and we're like, Where did Bella go? Look, we haven't seen her." So it totally changes who they are. So yeah, I've seen it myself. So what advice would you give educators out there?
Jon:
So you've already picked up on some of it, so I'll just try to sum it up into a sound bite. Lean into joy, but don't think of joy as being lacking struggle. Where are you seeing growth in yourself as an educator? Where are you seeing growth in your classroom? Lean into that, celebrate that, that's where joy is. And so even when you talk about smartphones, it's not banning something. It's inviting kids into deeper engagement, into that human... When kids get to a camp and they don't have phones for a week and they get to try new things and get to be with other people like, oh, this is great. It's like the veil has come off, the haze that they're in is gone. It's like, oh, they look around there's this amazing world and these amazing people. And so I think we need the same thing for our classrooms. We need to lean into really why we got into teaching in the first place, and that's to help other people grow and become more of who they're created to be.
Jill:
Yeah, absolutely. So on the flip side, what would be the worst advice that you've heard?
Jon:
This is hard to say. I got an article out called The Wellbeing Myth, and I think we have oversold wellbeing. And I think it's bad advice to say that kids can't learn if you don't make sure everything's okay. I think we need to focus less on some of those, even the SEL stuff, social emotional learning pieces have been oversold. It's like do hard things together, that works. There was another line, this again goes back to Haidt's book, it maybe Haidt's book or it may be Bad Therapy. I've got two books now coming together in my head. But that parents, adults, or whatever, can help kids learn how to make friends. The way you learn how to make friends is you try to make friends. And it's great to have somebody that you can talk to, "Hey, I tried this and this didn't work very well and whatever." But there's not a recipe for making friends. Okay, be kind, do unto others as you want them doing to you. There's some basic principles. But you know how kids learn those? By trying to do it.
So I think teachers and parents, I think sometimes we need to step back a little bit and let kids play more and try stuff more. The average kid in elementary school in the US right now gets 27 minutes a day of recess. That is tragic. That was the height of my day. I would go home with my basketball and kickball stats every day for my three recesses. I look back and I was like, recess was the greatest thing ever. And I might've learned more at recess than I did in the classroom about how to interact with human beings. So like, hey, step back. Give them some space. That's wellbeing. So worry more about the virtual world and worry less about the real world. Let the kids... Haidt has this great line, let them get bruises, not scars.
Jill:
I love that. That's really great. So what would you say is one of the biggest challenges that you see for educators in the year ahead?
Jon:
We have a really hard job as educators because so much is expected of educators. Every policy decision, every government action is like, we'll do this through schools because there are schools in every community. So more and more it gets layered on top of educators all the time. And it makes sense from a policy perspective. It's like you have a beach head into every neighborhood, but educators can't do everything. And when we try, we don't do any of it very well and we end up burned out. And so we are seeing amazing educators leave the profession and other people not wanting to go into the profession because teachers aren't making education look like a very appealing job, even though it's the greatest job ever. It doesn't look like that to students. And so that's a challenge and it's a vicious cycle that's continuing. So much is asked, I burn out, it doesn't look like an appealing profession and that's a challenge.
Jill:
Absolutely. So I want to end on a positive note, what's the thing that makes you the most optimistic as you look ahead?
Jon:
So our whole deal at the center is to focus on adaptive challenges and improvement that we can make. And so these are short cycle data collections, what can you do in 90 days that makes a difference for kids? And we're seeing teams of educators in schools literally all over the world, we're in 45 plus countries and all 50 states. And we're seeing people make improvement. Now, I don't like talking about solutions because I think solutions are often too pat and too oversimplified where improvement is, well, if you've got a dumpster fire, put the fire out first. You're not building the Taj Mahal while the fire is burning. So it's how do we make those gains and then that builds momentum, especially when you see teachers and students doing together. So I'll end with this really encouraging note that I saw last week. Well, I'll give you a specific example of something that just was super inspiring to me and then a system example. Is that okay?
Jill:
Okay. Yeah, that sounds great.
Jon:
All right. So the system example was in South Carolina, we've been working with these schools that are doing collective leadership all over the state for eight years. I'm the program evaluator and researcher so I've been studying this high school, Blythewood High School. And this year when they had their showcase of the progress they've made each year, they brought the students to do it. So I was in a session where juniors and seniors in high school were talking about the collective leadership of their educators, and the way that was affecting their system as students. And the way they were leading alongside educators. I was like, Oh-
Jill:
That's really cool.
Jon:
This is the dream. The kids own it. It's not buy-in, they own it. The other story I'll give, and this was maybe my favorite classroom visit from the last year where this makes me optimistic. Brad Livingstone, who's our first gent, he's the husband of our president, Linda Livingstone and I was in his history classroom. And he's an amazing history teacher. He teaches World War II history and Vietnam War history at a local school. And the teaching's amazing, I was there for the Do-little raids. It was amazing World War II, so I enjoyed that. But at the beginning of the class, he's having students report out how many veterans they thanked the past week. So every Monday morning they report in how many veterans they thanked for what they did. And he got them doing this, and he's done this for years in all the different schools he's been in. He drives a van full of them to HEB in the middle of the day at the beginning of the semester.
And he said, "Go out and find people that are my age or older and ask them if they served in the military. And if they do, introduce yourself, thank them for their service."
Jill:
That's awesome.
Jon:
And so they go out in teams and do that, and then he's like, "Now it's on you. You got to do this." And you got to get 50 this semester. And if you get 50, the goal is to get 1000 thank-yous in the course of the semester. That fundamentally changes the community. It doesn't just change the classroom. It doesn't just change the kids, that changes the community. Once you get to 50, you get a vial of sand from Normandy that he's collected. The kid who has the most thank-yous in a semester gets a vial of sand from Iwo Jima, which is in his way of saying it is the most difficult soil to get in the world because the only way you're allowed to go to Iwo Jima is if you are connected to Japan or you're a military liaison to Japan for the United States. That's the only way you get on that island. And so a veteran brought him back some sand from Iwo Jima. So one kid each semester gets that sand.
And I'm sitting in there and this kid has thanked 75 veterans that past week. I was like, "How did you do it?" And he said, "Well, I go to football games and I watch for how people stand up and salute the flag during the national anthem. And then I go find them." I was like-
Jill:
That's awesome.
Jon:
...how amazing is that? So those kinds of small changes are the kinds of things that change our community in a society that feels like it's super broken and polarized, that changes people. And so that's the hope.
Jill:
That is such a cool story. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for sharing all the other stories, and I really hope that it was an encouragement to all the educators out there. We are so grateful for the work that you do on a daily basis and making a difference in the lives of each student.
Jon:
Yeah, thanks for all you do, Jill. It's great. We have a great job.
Jill:
Yeah, we do.
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