Beyond Self-Care: Leading a Systemic Approach to Well-Being for Educators

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Gail Markin. Gail is a counselor, teacher, author, and speaker who's committed to promoting well-being in the education workplace. She works as an education consultant, helping educational leaders embed and support well-being in their workplaces, drawing on her wealth of professional experience. And she's the author of Beyond Self- Leading a Systemic Approach to Well-Being for Educators, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:41] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:44] SPEAKER_00:

Gail, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:45] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you for having me today.

[00:47] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm excited to speak with you because I think you've taken an approach that is much needed when it comes to this topic, which of course deserves the attention that it's getting. What prompted you to write this book and to take this particular approach to the topic of self-care for educators?

[01:00] SPEAKER_01:

I think at the time I was working in supporting well-being, I was working mostly with social emotional learning in the school district I was working in. And we had this awareness of wanting to do something around staff well-being. We were reading in the research on how much that impacts student well-being. And so we started working on the adult well-being in that sense. And we were also noticing...

[01:24]

How often educators weren't all right. It's a passion work, right? It's a place where people join and become educators because they're passionate about this work and more and more noticing people struggling with that. And so it was a combination of the research, the impact that if we take care of the adults in the building has on student success and also student well-being. And also noticing it for the adults and how important that is. And the more I got into it, the more I talked to people, the more I realized it was something that people wanted to talk about.

[01:57]

People were looking for answers around and it was an opportunity to put together the research and what we were noticing in practice. So the stories and the research together.

[02:08] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Gail, take us into some of the research. What does the research say about self-care, about well-being for educators? Because we hear a lot that sounds like, you know, drink plenty of water type advice that may not be bad advice, but just may not be especially research-based. As you did the research for this book, what did you discover?

[02:25] SPEAKER_01:

Well, first of all, I discovered, and this comes out in the why part, right? We mentioned it a little earlier, the impact that it has on student achievement, student well-being, if we take care of the educators. Really interesting research done around stress contagion in the workplace. So in classrooms where they looked at teacher stress levels, self-reported stress measures, and they took cortisol levels from students so they took saliva samples actually like who knew middle school kids loved giving their spit you're probably not surprised anyway they actually measured the cortisol levels the stress hormone in the students and what they found is a large correlation between teacher self-reported stress and students levels of stress hormone of cortisol in their body and You know, we don't know that it's the chicken and the egg thing.

[03:17]

We don't know who started it. But in some ways, it really doesn't matter. We know that they're connected. So that finding in itself was amazing to me. But we also know that if people are well, just in general, if people are well, they come to work more, they're more successful in the work they do, they have stronger and better relationships. They're healthier.

[03:37]

They live longer if they're well. And we spend about, you know, a third of our lives at work, especially in education. We need to be well there. We need to be able to thrive and to do our best work. So for the kids and for ourselves. So I could go on about the research in all the different areas, but those are the things that really got me interested.

[03:59] SPEAKER_00:

Bottom line is it can't be ignored, right? This matters.

[04:01] SPEAKER_01:

it really, really matters, right? Like this is our lives. We often thought of workplaces as, you know, our regular life and then our work life, like they were somehow separate, but really this is our life. And like I mentioned, if we spend about a third of our lives at work, it matters because it matters while we're at work for the work that we do with our colleagues, ourselves, and our students. And it also goes into our home. Like we don't just sort of leave it.

[04:27]

It's not as, you know, here's this section and here's the other section. We take it home with us. So it's our real life.

[04:33] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk about the leadership side a bit, if we could, because we've come across a fair amount of advice. And I think teachers have heard a fair amount of advice from their districts along the lines of take care of yourself, get plenty of sleep, don't drink too much, keep your stress level down, drink plenty of water. At the same time, we're often speaking out of both sides of our mouths in terms of the work and the stress that we pile on to teachers and other educators, just in the name of all the other priorities that we have as organizations. I was intrigued by the fact that the subtitle of your book mentions a systemic approach. What does that mean? How do leaders need to think systemically about teacher self-care?

[05:13] SPEAKER_01:

First, I will say that there's three interconnected parts of well-being that I talk about in the book and that I think we have to acknowledge all three. And the first one is around the self. So that's the self-care things that you talked about. Those would be the traditional ones around self-care. Take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, all those things.

[05:32]

But the other part of that that I think we really need to look at when we're talking about self-care is the social emotional parts of self-care. So these are those beautiful things that we teach the students, but that no one ever necessarily taught us as adults when we were in school. And so I think those are the self parts that schools and leaders and school districts are starting to notice that we need to add to the self-care regime, so to speak. And starting with themselves, by the way. So as leaders, these are things that need to be shared, but also practiced. And these are the things like self-awareness, how we regulate our emotions, where we feel emotions in our body, all those beautiful things that, like I say, we teach the kids.

[06:15]

So there's that. And the reason that I call it beyond self-care is that you can't stop there because wellbeing is not just how I take care of myself. I could be the most self-cared person in the world. So I think this is a fictional person, but let's just pretend it's me. Like I could do sleep well and exercise and eat well and meditate and be connected with my feelings and all those things. But if I go into a workplace where I don't feel connected and or that I belong there, or that I have something of value to contribute, or if there's something within the system that's getting in my way, I won't be well.

[06:51]

So even though I'm probably going on and on and on to this one question, I'll tell you the other two parts that I think you do have to acknowledge. And that's the other. So other is around the amazing and beautiful research around belonging. and connection, and how Daniel Coyle talks about belonging cues, how we let people know that they matter, that they're valued in the workplace. So that's around how we look after each other. And then that third one is the system.

[07:17]

So self, other, and system. And system, I think we're sometimes afraid of because we see the education system as being this sort of big... monster that can't be changed. You know, I get that part.

[07:30]

We are based on a model of many years ago, a hierarchical system that's based on sort of an old business model in many ways. And yet there are things we can do to change that. Small things can have a large impact on wellbeing, small sort of systems changes and the larger ones have to start somewhere.

[07:49] SPEAKER_00:

So Gail, for school leaders, I think one of the tensions that we face is serving as something of a gatekeeper for workload that, you know, the district always has these improvement priorities. We have our own improvement priorities as a school, you know, state and provincial and federal policymakers have priorities that they want teachers to implement. And of course, that's not to mention vendors and researchers and parents and everyone else in the world who wants a piece of educators time. So as leaders, we play a little bit of a gatekeeping role. And I feel like we have the opportunity to be the problem or the solution to play a role in keeping some of those systemic factors at bay, keeping them in a healthy range. So what are some things that you've seen school leaders do to watch out for their teachers, to go to bat for them, to make this a doable job so that if people are taking care of themselves, we're not undermining that through the workload that we're putting on people?

[08:40] SPEAKER_01:

I think one of the first keys is asking, asking questions about it. And I think questions to the people that you're leading, of course, but also wondering about when, like you say, many things sort of come down and principles are often sort of in the middle of that, which of course can lead to a whole other conversation about principle well-being, which is fascinating topic in itself, being in that position. So I think one of the things is, opening up communication and asking questions. I think particularly around wellbeing, how do things impact your wellbeing that sometimes we're not even aware. So I use for an example in the book, a story of a computer program, for instance, and it was a teacher who was wanting to set up a team. It was back before we were all on all these online teams.

[09:29]

And it was just sort of at the beginning of that and tried and was a person who was pretty good at digital technology and things like that. And So try to set up a team and took a while and then had to go get some help from somewhere. And what it turned out to be is that that person didn't have the authority, I guess, to set up a digital team. And when they found that out, they were basically told, their boss, who at the time had, I don't know, 30 employees or something like that, could do that for them. And the idea was there was a system that was impacting well-being, not only in the time that it took and the bit of stress, it wasn't huge stress, trying to do something, realizing they weren't allowed to do it, but also that feeling of, do I have value? Do they think I'm not quite bright enough to do this?

[10:18]

And no one meant that to be the way the person felt about it. So taking that kind of feedback, right? There's a system that it actually took just the leader said, I'll do it for you, right? We'll change this quickly. That actually wasn't either a quick fix because they were going to have to do it another 30 times, right? Which every time someone needed something, they were going to have to take care of it.

[10:41]

And it didn't feel good for anybody, right? The person that was overworked as the leader, having to do this for so many people when they were perfectly capable of doing it themselves. It was a system that no one really thought about why they set it up that way. And when they really did, they just changed it, right? It was a simple systems fix that really could have turned into something that was really impacting someone's well-being. Because of course, as humans, we fill out the story, right?

[11:08]

They don't think I'm smart enough. They don't think I'm responsible enough. You know, you could spiral it into something crazy that it really wasn't. So I think just as an example, there's a systems change that impacted the wellbeing, both of the leader and of the person that they were leading. And when they just took the time to think about it, right? Like, why are we doing this?

[11:32]

So yeah, I think the questions are sometimes really important as to why is the system set up this way? And often in education, it's just because that's the way we did it or we've done it. And it's asking those questions, being curious. It's about creating space for those questions too, I guess.

[11:52] SPEAKER_00:

I think that's so important to check in with people. And as you said, just talk with people and say, what's on your plate, what's taking up, you know, maybe too much time. And it really struck me when I discovered that there are people who think very differently than I do about any kind of repetitive kind of work. Like if I were to get an annoying, let's say an email notification from a system that our district uses that I don't want, and it takes up time and like, I would complain about that right away because that would just bother me. But when I realized that to some people, that's just part of life, you just deal with it, you don't say anything about it. And people need to actually be asked, you know, how can I make your job easier?

[12:26]

How can I take something off your plate? That was very eye opening for me to realize that a lot of people just assume they have to put up with whatever they're putting up with and need almost need permission from leaders to speak up and advocate for themselves and say, hey, this is not a good situation. I need to change something to be changed to make my life easier.

[12:41] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And it brings up a couple of things for me. One of them is that there's a whole chapter on psychological safety. And as you mentioned, we often assume that our places are safe. We've said, you know, come to me with anything you need. you know, I'm here to support and all of those things.

[12:59]

But it's a natural human tendency to hold back information. If you speak up, you want to make sure that it's going to be received well. And even if there's nothing that's happened that's made you think it's unsafe to do so, our natural human tendency is to wait, is to hold back a little. Because if you speak up, it could be risky, right? You could get it wrong. If you're silent, there's really no risk.

[13:24]

You're there and you're observing. So I think creating those sort of safe spaces, or I like to use the term safer instead of safe, because Acknowledging that they're not equally safe for everybody. We all come in with different backgrounds and different experiences, but creating those safer spaces intentionally where we create a space where people know that if they bring up something difficult or uncomfortable, it's going to be okay. If they give some feedback that's, you know, hard to hear. Dr. Amy Edmondson, one of the psychological safety researchers that's most well known in this area, says it's not enough to not shoot the messenger.

[14:04]

We have to actually embrace the messenger, right? We have to show that person and everybody else, because everybody else is listening, that feedback is welcome, that ideas are welcomed. Just like we do in the classroom. Like there's no crazy ideas. Like no matter what you bring up, even if it's not the best idea, we're going to embrace that. We're going to talk about it.

[14:25]

We're going to be okay with it. So creating those psychologically safe spaces. And that's the definition of psychological safety that I can speak up, ask questions, be curious and not have to worry that it's unsafe to do so. Or I can take those interpersonal risks. So creating those kinds of spaces.

[14:42] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk a little bit about people's choices when it comes to where they work, because I think we're starting to realize as a profession now that people do have a choice about where they work and organizations are starting to see turnover in response to stress issues, in response to maybe imbalance or lack of support issues in the workplace. So from two different perspectives, first, For an individual educator who's thinking, you know what, I really am looking for a change. I have to either find a district or an organization that is more sustainable for me to work for, healthier for me to work for, or I have to leave the profession. I just can't keep doing what I'm doing. What might they look for in a prospective employer if they think, you know what, this place is just going to grind me into a powder and run me into the ground. I need to find somewhere else to work.

[15:29]

What should they be looking for?

[15:32] SPEAKER_01:

I think what they need to look for is a place where communication is open. Like I said, I think that's really, really important. I think they need to look for places where there is flexibility in our systems. So there is part-time work. There is collaboration. There's mentoring.

[15:50]

There's perspectives for advancement in different ways. If I was looking at a school district right now, I'd want to know that what was their feedback system? Like, how do we give ideas and share ideas? And that's the creative stuff, right? Are there opportunities for advancement? Is there only one route into different things?

[16:11]

Like all these kinds of questions and how do those questions get answered? Again, it's that sort of safer space. If I'm asking those questions and everyone's sort of, and there isn't answers to those, I'd wonder. Yeah, I think school districts need to start talking to our new educators and find out how they're doing in the first few years. We know we lose lots of educators in their first few years I think they also need to start talking to our people in their at their end of career, because I think we're starting to lose people there, too. How come?

[16:42]

Like, why are people retiring five, 10 years before they intended to? And how, you know, there might be some really good information there. But we need to start asking those questions and not, you know, making assumptions about it. So those are the kind of things I'd want to know about.

[16:56] SPEAKER_00:

prompts or great ideas for gathering that kind of input. I'm glad you mentioned people who are toward the end of their careers, maybe retiring early, maybe they've stepped away and come back. I think there are a number of people who maybe stepped away during the pandemic and now are considering at least coming back. And that could be a sizable portion of our workforce in this profession. Back to the question of psychological safety. It's interesting to me that sometimes we only hear the truth after people are Shaking the dust off their feet.

[17:24]

You know, like once people have actually quit, then we hear the truth. Then we hear the real reasons or the honest perspectives or on social media often we'll hear, I quit and now I can say whatever I want to without worrying about the repercussions. What I wish could happen in those cases is that I wish... that that psychological safety had been in place before the person quit, when they still had the opportunity to get what they needed from their employer.

[17:48]

Do you have any sense of why we make it hard for people or why we make it psychologically unsafe for people to advocate for what they need? Because... If you really hold our feet to the fire and say, would you rather this person quit or would you rather give them what they need? Like most of the time we would say, I don't want them to quit.

[18:04]

They're going to be very hard to replace. I would much rather fix whatever it is that's stressing them out and making their job too difficult. Why do we get ourselves in this mess?

[18:12] SPEAKER_01:

I think there's a few answers. And one is that, that I mentioned before, that basic human tendency to not want to speak up about things that are going to be difficult to talk about. I think there is also among educators at all levels of our organization, we want to be the positive person, right? And I love that about educators. We are positive people. People were enthusiastic.

[18:36]

We have all of those traits. We have a growth mindset that people talk about. And I think that's all beautiful. But I think that even when we have difficult feedback, even if we do it beautifully, right, like we do it kindly and we do it with thoughtfulness and intention and all those things, it is uncomfortable. And we sort of have that idea in our heads that that that's somehow that I'm the complaining person or, you know, that, well, I want people to know that I do love this or that I am positive. I don't know if I should say anything.

[19:08]

And then we let things go. I think the other thing, and this is not an education thing, I think this is a workplace thing in general, is we didn't ever have feelings in the workplace. That wasn't a workplace thing. We very much privileged the cognitive, the thinking, like work is a thinking place and a doing place. But we haven't done the feelings part. Right.

[19:32]

And one of the things I say in the book is that I challenge people to sort of say, I'm going to take you through this journey, feeling, thinking and acting. So if you're just in the cognitive, you won't be disappointed because the research is amazing. Like the thinking part of it's lovely. But we also have to admit that we're actually human beings are feeling beings. They think and they do as well, but they also have these feelings. And that's part of that sort of self-awareness part.

[19:57]

And then the other thing is conflict. We're not used to seeing conflict as productive, helpful, good. And it really is. Like we all thought the same way. We would never learn or make change. I go back to the classroom again, right?

[20:11]

These are all the things we're teaching the kids. And I think we're doing a beautiful job, right? Be collaborative, communicate, ask questions. Conflict's okay. This is how we handle it, right? If you have a disagreement, this is how we handle it.

[20:25]

We don't do that in the workplace. I think if we sat down at the beginning of school years, at the beginning of when groups or meetings got together, committees, and sort of said, how are we going to handle this? And hey, we're going to disagree and we're really okay with that, right? When we disagree, it will feel uncomfortable and that's okay. This is how we'll handle it. And then we expect it.

[20:49]

We expect it, like we ask for feedback, we receive it, like I mentioned earlier with a, it's okay to say it's uncomfortable to hear that, but I'm so glad you told me. Yeah, I think part of it is just normalizing those kinds of things and bringing the skills that we expect and we teach in the classroom into our committees, our meetings, our workplace.

[21:10] SPEAKER_00:

Gail, tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing with schools and districts to build on and extend the ideas in the book and implement them.

[21:18] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so right now I'm working in a couple of different ways. So one is I'm working with BC Children's Hospital. I'm sort of a practice support coach and we're doing mental health and wellness plans supporting districts in that way. And that's just such a beautiful piece of work because I think talking about student and staff well-being and overall mental health and wellness plans for school districts is wonderful work. So I'm really grateful to that team to be able to do that work. And then the other part of work that I do my own consulting with is around the staff well-being part.

[21:53]

So lots of professional development where, you know, go in and talk to leaders, teachers, district leaders, whomever is interested and wants to talk about how to do this work. And then also doing some coaching around that as well, too. So. One of the things, and I think I mentioned this already with the book, is it's about the feeling and the thinking part of why well-being is important and those three parts. But it's also about the action part. And a lot of school districts are sort of calling up and saying, you know, I did a survey or I did some focus groups to find out how people are doing, which is one of the things that I recommend, always ask.

[22:29]

But now I've got all this data. What do I actually do with it? I have to give Solution Tree, the publisher, some credit here because when I was writing the book, they kept saying, okay, you need the actions. You need the actions. And I was like caught up with the other things. I'm like, okay, actions, actions.

[22:46]

I really am grateful for that now because there are actions that you can take. And I think it's how you set up your meetings. We've mentioned that earlier. how you start things off to do your own self-awareness, how you promote that with your team, just some practices like that, that I think that we can do together. And one of the things that I really learned about working with systems is they're always going to be changing and evolving. So as much as there are specific actions, it also really matters the context, like where you are and what you're doing and what your team needs.

[23:22]

And so So be okay with the fact that it's going to change and you might get things wrong, but as you go along the process, you're kind of doing it together and you're looking for feedback and that it's a process. So yeah, that's the other part of the work I'm doing is just sort of working alongside school districts and leaders to help implement some of these things in the schools, the action part.

[23:45] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is widely available if people want to look for Beyond Self-Care. They can find that on Amazon or Solution Tree or a variety of places. Gail, if people want to find you online or get in touch with you directly, where's the best place for them to go?

[23:58] SPEAKER_01:

Probably the best place is to go to the website, gailmarkin.ca. Yeah, I have the podcast there. I did a podcast of each of the chapters. What was so funny is, you know, I have this beautiful book for education leaders, and I know that some of them are just so busy that it's like, I have the book. I really want to read it, but I can't get to it.

[24:18]

So we put out podcasts about each of the chapters that sort of talks a little bit about it as a way in for people. So that's all there and tells them how to connect with me.

[24:29] SPEAKER_00:

So again, the book is Beyond Self-Care, Leading a Systemic Approach to Well-Being for Educators. Gail Markin, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[24:37] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much.

[24:39] Announcer:

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