Teach From Your Best Self: A Teacher’s Guide to Thriving in the Classroom

[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 i'm your host justin bader and i'm honored to welcome to the program jay schroeder jay has taught high school english and social studies for the past 24 years in both mainstream and alternative education settings in 2021 he founded the teach from your best self institute an organization with a mission to support and inspire educators while advancing a new model for revitalizing education and he's the author of the new book

[00:37] SPEAKER_00:

Teach from Your Best Self, A Teacher's Guide to Thriving in the Classroom.

[00:43] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

Jay, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:47] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Justin.

[00:48] SPEAKER_00:

It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I'm excited to talk with you about this concept because I think you've taken maybe some ideas that will sound familiar, but in some very interesting new directions. What does it mean to teach from your best self?

[01:01] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so when the concept first came to me where I could talk about it, I saw two parallel lines, one above the other moving horizontally. The top line is you could consider the best self. I'm the most present. I'm open. I'm curious. I'm calm.

[01:18]

I'm able to respond to situations rather than react. I have full access to my whole brain. My whole neocortex is involved. Whatever teaching tools and strategies I've learned over the course of my career, I have access to all of them and I have access to my creativity. Lots of times under pressure or stress or adverse situations, we can drop from that best self and come closer to the bottom of our range. And when that happens, I lose access to my neocortex.

[01:46]

This is often associated with a stress response, a fight, flee, or freeze situation. My whole nervous system changes. I go into a very reactive survival mode. And anybody doing a very high stress situation is susceptible to falling from their best self When they get overwhelmed when they feel over pressured and staying there too long is really depleting and it's also not a good place to try to teach a classroom of. students from.

[02:14] SPEAKER_00:

I know in the book, you go into some of the neuroscience and the biology behind that and what's going on behind the scenes in our bodies when that's taking place. What do you say to the idea that that's just how being an educator is, that being in this perpetual state of overwhelm is just kind of the cost of being in the education profession? Because I've heard that, especially these last couple of years, that, well, what do you expect? That's how it is. Do we have to accept that reality of just overwhelm and being overburdened in that way?

[02:41] SPEAKER_01:

I don't really think so. I think there's a myth in education, which is that students will learn based on what teachers do. And the way to get students to learn more is given teachers more in different, we're trying to refine the recipe of doing, which ends up just adding more on the teacher's plate for them to do. So that's what I'm arguing here with this book is that the self the teacher brings actually matters more than what they do. Now, one of the ways to think about this is, well, why does that matter? Whenever we've learned something, anybody, You learn something new.

[03:12]

You go through three stages. Ideal situation is at first you're excited about what you're going to learn. You feel pumped. So for instance, about a decade ago, I taught myself how to sew because I wanted to sew my own clothes. I thought that would be awesome. So I'm excited about this idea to sew my own clothes.

[03:29]

Then I start trying to learn it. Frustration, discouragement. Oh my gosh, this is way harder than I thought it was. That process, my brain's literally trying to make new neural pathways. And I feel that in my emotional body as frustration and wanting to give up because the brain wants to conserve energy. And so I have to deal with my own resistance in order to learn something.

[03:52]

If I can get to the other side, pride, accomplishment, confidence. Now in schools, we actually take the first step off of the equation and Usually because we don't take the time to try to energize the students about what we're learning. We just start teaching them and they don't really have a lot of intrinsic motivation to learn what we're trying to teach them. They didn't sign up for it. They didn't say, I really want to learn this. So we plunge them into this frustrating stage.

[04:18]

And the only thing that's going to get them through as a teacher standing by their side, that they trust it's made it safe to fail. It's made it safe to struggle. This made it safe to explore. And that teacher saying, I believe in you, you can do this. The only way you have that teacher is if you have a teacher in their best self, because if the teacher is reacting to, oh my gosh, my students are resisting this assignment and they start falling into, I talk about hurt spots in the book too, but either a hurt spot or a stress reaction. And then they start resisting the student's resistance.

[04:55]

That's going to actually exasperate the situation and make everything worse. Next thing you know, we have teachers and students. Nobody's in their learning brain. And we're trying to teach this class. All teacher has access to at that point are tactics of control, trying to control the students, which just creates more resistance. And it creates this ugly cycle where nobody's really effectively learning.

[05:17]

So it actually matters a great deal that teachers are in their best self and have access to all their faculties and are able to respond to whatever the students give them.

[05:28] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk about that idea of hurt spots a little bit more. Tell us about that.

[05:32] SPEAKER_01:

I noticed in myself, and usually you don't notice this too much unless you're close to people, but there would be particular triggers that people would act, or in my own case, I would feel out of proportion pain to something that someone else wouldn't be very bothered by. And so I've done a lot of learning about that sense. And so I call these hurt spots, but This is actually very trauma that we carry forward from our childhood. So this relates to ACEs, adverse childhood experiences. And so if I have some of these ACEs and they get triggered by a current situation, my whole system lights up as if I'm experiencing that trauma now. And my tendency in my brain is to blame whoever is triggering me.

[06:18]

Like you're the cause of this. Because I don't have the context to realize, hey, this is actually from this, and this isn't about this person right now. I just need to go take some time or go through some kind of process to heal this trauma. But instead, we end up blaming. Now, usually, hurt spot reactions, besides the pain that they cause, is also they're accompanied by stress reactions too. So I'm losing access to my neocortex.

[06:43]

I'm going into fight, flee, or freeze. And they're really difficult places to try to teach from. And so I wrote about those because it's so much a part of the map of teaching and learning because students have them as well. Teachers have them. And if we don't include them as this is part of the dynamics of the classroom, then we're not going to be able to effectively fulfill the promise of what education can be.

[07:11] SPEAKER_00:

I think that's so important to recognize that this is not just something that students bring with them into the classroom, but many of us as educators bring those as well. And I think this is something that we've been aware of for a while, the idea of adverse childhood experiences and the idea of trauma. We've been aware of them for a while. But sometimes we're not really sure what to do other than be understanding. And sometimes being understanding doesn't really do much for us. It can help us understand, but it's not necessarily a strategy.

[07:40]

So when we're feeling that way or when we're noticing that a student is reacting in that way because of something that we've accidentally touched on, what are some strategies from the book that can really keep us on track and keep things from going off the rails?

[07:54] SPEAKER_01:

So, you know, being aware of it actually matters quite a bit. Though when I was first introduced to the ACEs, it was like, okay, now I understand this. What do I do with it? The research says that the best way to help a student move from this kind of hurt spot reaction place is a calm, safe environment. And if I'm in my best self, I'm going to create my classroom as that kind of safe place for students where they feel a sense of belonging, where they feel safe to sort of get themselves back. What I think we feel pressure to do as educators a lot of times is to push on that kid because the kid's not engaging probably productively in the lesson at this point.

[08:39]

And so as soon as I start pushing on them, I'm actually inviting a big power struggle because literally they are not in the right mind for learning, period. And so what that student needs is to not have any demands placed on them so that they can shift into their best self, you know, as efficiently as possible, but it's going to take a little bit of time. And I need to know going in that if I start pushing on a student, they're going to get their heckles up and we're going to have a battle. And that's going to likely trigger me into a stress or hurt spot reaction as well. And then I've undermined the learning environment for the whole class.

[09:14] SPEAKER_00:

I think we've probably all both seen other people be that person who pushes the student. And we've probably all been that person as well of, you know, I think I'm having high expectations or I think I'm keeping my class on track, but I'm really accidentally kind of stepping on a landmine and provoking a situation that if I had realized what was going on, I could have stepped around that.

[09:35]

How can we think about that caution and that wisdom in a way that is encouraging i think when people criticize that you know just that kind of awareness and that caution they say things like well you know we need to have high expectations why don't you have high expectations for that kid and sometimes we look at the people who say that and say well why don't you have better social skills at getting along with you know kids who maybe are walking in with a lot of baggage how do we understand that issue as far as expectations and needing to move things forward versus that awareness

[10:11] SPEAKER_01:

So your question brings up a couple of things. And one of them is we have to get real about what's even possible. In education, I think we're expected to do things that aren't possible. If a student is having a hurt spot reaction, it is not possible for them to learn or engage productively in that moment. They're literally, their brain is not in that zone. So the best thing that I can do to hold high expectations is to support them to shift into a learning space as quickly as possible and then work with them from there.

[10:49]

What's really struck to me is there's a lot of pressure in education. There's pressure on educators. Well, there's pressure on school leadership. Administrators are under a lot of pressure. And that pressure trickles down probably, I think, from the school board to district leadership to district building leaders to teachers, but then it trickles to students. There is enough pressure in learning at a high level by itself.

[11:13]

Pressuring students is not the best way to get them to learn. Pressure just creates resistance or compliance at the best case scenario. But if I'm pressuring a student and they're complying, or maybe they're bought into grades, that's like, where's the learning in that equation? But if I can relate to them in my best self, at least they're going to want to do well for me because we have this relationship and then they can go through those three stages of learning a few times successfully. and start developing some confidence in themselves as learners. So that's the way to start building, holding high expectations is supporting students to move through those three stages.

[11:49]

A lot of the times that I teach high school, by the time I see kids, they're giving up already at stage one. They flip through the pages of the story, oh, too many pages, they're done. Because they've gotten burned so many times at stage two, they don't believe in themselves enough to finish, to get through to the third stage. So they're already quitting. The more we can support students, this also relates to this idea of lifelong learners, which we all talk about, but what does that actually mean? It means that I could take a really difficult new project and I can stick it through all the way to the end because I know I've done it before.

[12:24]

And I think schools, we can be training grounds to give young people that capacity that's going to set them up way better for their future than if we just try to pressure them or judge them or shame them or belittle them or criticize them for not doing what we want them to do in

[12:38] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about the kind of being aware of ourselves and then what we do when we find that we're in a state that is not our best. I think there's been a lot of discussion over the past couple of years about taking more time off, about being okay with using mental health days and things like that. And certainly there are times when, when that is the appropriate solution, when some time away is helpful. Having said what we just said about applying pressure to students and how that can backfire, how do we approach that for ourselves? Because certainly every teacher, every administrator is going to face days when it just feels like I would rather avoid this day. And yet I know the days will keep coming, even if I avoid today.

[13:20] SPEAKER_01:

I see all of these ways that I could answer that question. So I'm just going to do my best. In the teach from your best self model, you can imagine a triangle. that the top of the triangle is the teacher coming from their best self or, you know, administrator. At the bottom on the left, students relating to students in ways that help evoke the student's best self. On the bottom right, creating a classroom environment that tends to bring out the best in both students and teacher.

[13:51]

If I remember that's what matters most, maybe some things don't get done that day. But if I was able to bring my best, and by my best, I don't mean constant composure. It's authentic. Hey, you know, letting a fellow colleague know, boy, I'm kind of hurting today. This is hard. I don't need to pretend to be in my best self.

[14:10]

I just need to bring the best I have in that moment and know that if I do that, things are going to go better than they would if I didn't. And we're not reaching for perfection here. I'm maximizing. As a classroom teacher, If I'm having a rough day, but I bring the best that I have, I'm maximizing my students' ability to bring their best to me because the selves that we bring is contagious. And students, because of mere neurons, they're going to relate to me from their best self. My job suddenly is much easier if my students are related to me from their best selves because now I don't have to fight them, right?

[14:47]

If I'm creating a classroom learning environment that brings out the best in all of us, Now, every bit of that triangle is synergistically. In other words, it supports the other modules on it. So one of the things I talk about is we have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention as educators. And if I'm having a really rough time, I may have less that day to invest. And I may even feel like I don't have enough for what it takes. But if all I do is think about that triangle, And I invest my time, energy, and attention into what can I do to make sure that I'm bringing my best today, taking care of myself.

[15:23]

What can I do to support the students to bring their best selves? What can I do to create a learning environment? The day's going to go better than we thought it would. So in the book, There's strategies and tactics for all of those three corners that we can do, and any one of them is going to be better than kind of diverting to the default, how we would normally be.

[15:43] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I should say you have both kind of in the moment strategies as well as kind of longer term strategies. longer term, what does it look like? Part four is all about creating a resilient best self. And you talk about radical acceptance. What's some of the longer term work that we can do, especially if we think about making this a job and a career and a profession that we can stick with long-term? Because I think that's something a lot of people have been questioning lately is really, do I have the energy to keep going long-term in this?

[16:13]

And how do I build my capacity to be able to endure?

[16:15] SPEAKER_01:

You mentioned radical acceptance that So the first part of the book really lays out the challenges. So I'm doing my best to create this map. These are the challenges we face. And so given these, what can we do? The second part of the book are approaches that we can take in the face of those challenges that will maximize our ability to stay in our best self while on the job. And I think that's important because there's a lot of times we're told, hey, do this self-care strategy, but I don't have time to do it.

[16:45]

It's stuff that I'd have to do outside of my workday. But part two, these are things to integrate while you're teaching and practice while you're teaching that will help maximize all three points of that triangle. So when you get to the fourth part of the book, the radical acceptance is built into the second part because I have to radically accept my students. And I learned this, this was like an awakening, like getting hit on the head with a two by four about my second year of teaching. I came into teaching with these very grandiose ideas of how my students would be. They would all be scholars, of course, and be super interested in my teaching.

[17:22]

And my discussions would be fantastic. And they would be really engaged in it all. I saw the movies, so I had the model. I knew what it was going to look like for me. And it didn't at all. And I realized, oh my gosh, it was this one day after a horrible day.

[17:38]

It was awful. I had this idea in my head of what I thought my students should be. And instead of accepting my actual students, I just judged my actual students because they weren't measuring up to my idea. So we tend to have these ideas of how they should be. And that gets our affinity, you know, like our allegiance is to the idea. And I was telling myself I was holding high standards, but really what I was doing was judging my kids for not measuring up to my idea.

[18:10]

And of course, in that atmosphere that I created in my classroom of judgment, of messages of you're not really enough that's sort of built into my approach when i'm coming from that they didn't like it and so they're going to push back i called it putting people in a box of should we have this idea of how they should be and we put them in that box and we say you should fit into this box of my standards of how i think you should be once i let go of that i realized i would never be able to help these students unless I accepted them as they were, and then I could help them get better from there. So when we get to the fourth part of the book, I turn it on them ourselves, because we have to have that kind of mindset to ourselves in order to grow. If I'm judging myself, putting myself in a box of shit, then I'm not really, it's like I'm freezing the pain and trying to disassociate from it.

[19:10]

As opposed to letting it work its way through me. And so in that fourth part, in terms of radical acceptance, I talk about this really dark time in my life where I just said, okay, I surrender. I'm going to feel exactly what this feels and accept all of it. And it really shifted my whole path, my whole direction. Radical acceptance has been used. I've learned since therapeutically.

[19:33]

Marsha Linehan uses it for a lot of success working with, I believe it's people with really deep psychosis issues. So it's found its way into psychology as well. But learning, you're starting from this place that I am good enough. My best is all I can do. And the best has to be enough because that's all I can do. So if I'm coming from my best self and I'm bringing my best, that's actually trustworthy.

[19:58]

I can trust that. More than my ideas of how I thought it should be. I do get into expressive writing in part four as well. And that is like one of the only things in the book where I'm saying, hey, this is something that's worth taking the time for in your life to help build this durable best self, especially for those of us that have adverse childhood experiences and notice hurt spots getting in the way, feeling ourselves reacting out of proportion to situations and having that get in the way of our teaching. Expressive writing is a hugely powerful tool to help us go back and rewrite those old stories that are dogging us and holding us back.

[20:38] SPEAKER_00:

You also make a link between reflective writing and decision fatigue. And I was excited to see, this is a deeply researched book and you reference John Tierney and Roy Baumeister's work on decision fatigue, which I'm a big fan of. Take us into that connection.

[20:52] SPEAKER_01:

It gets a little mushy, but there's reflective writing and then there's expressive writing. And so expressive writing is what I talk about to go back in and rewrite the narratives. Reflective writing, one of the things I can do with that is help align myself with my own kind of core values. One of the things I talk about in the book is the difference between, and I'm kind of arbitrarily making this distinction between decisions and choices. Teachers make so many decisions and decisions are really, they take a lot of our energy. And so we can become mentally exhausted from making too many decisions.

[21:29]

Decisions are often made. This is going to be a weird concept, but if you think of ourselves, not as being one thing. but actually there's a whole bunch of aspects in us that often want and need different things at different times. So, you know, if you can imagine you, part of you wants to go to the gym and work out and get strong, and another part of you wants to sit and eat ice cream and watch Netflix. And we all face these different aspects that kind of war amongst ourselves. So when I am trying to make decisions from an internally conflicted place, it costs me energy.

[22:05]

So much about teaching your best self is how can I minimize the expense of energy and maximize the results? So I don't want to have that expense every time I make a decision, especially when I'm making thousands of them a day. So one thing that reflective writing can do is help me get really clear about my own deepest core values. From this deepest place that I can get to, I can make choices from there. And these choices are going to be aligned. It's like all of these lined up because it's from a deep place.

[22:38]

It's not from the surface worrying place. This is actually who I am. This is who I stand for as an educator. This is what matters most to me. And in this moment, I have this situation. I can choose from there and it won't be nearly as costly if I've done that pre-writing work.

[22:55]

And as Aristotle said, know thyself, it still works. it's still pretty important that educators get to that point.

[23:02] SPEAKER_00:

Advice that has held up over time.

[23:04] SPEAKER_01:

So it helps with decision fatigue, weirdly enough, because I'm not at war with myself when I'm making decisions. So it saves energy.

[23:12] SPEAKER_00:

Well, both deeply philosophical and deeply practical book. I understand in addition to the book, you have founded the Teach for Your Best Self Institute. Tell us a little bit about that.

[23:22] SPEAKER_01:

Originally, I was planning on doing teacher trainings about this. I hadn't had the idea of a book until the darkness of lockdown, August of 2020. And I thought, are we ever going to gather again? Because it really seemed like maybe not. So August of 2020, I started writing the book. But before that, I had been planning these trainings.

[23:43]

I led the first one in the spring of 2021. And it It was powerful. I didn't know what I had. I thought, hey, I think this is good. This certainly works for me. I don't know if I can convey it.

[23:56]

This is my pilot. I had 17 brave educators take the journey with me. And it was very powerful. It's unanimous. They were, oh my gosh, every teacher needs this. You should share this with administrators.

[24:11]

There was a lot of tears. They called it transformational. And that gave me the courage to continue building. And so Ran another four cohorts the next year and another four this year. So we're kind of slowly building this program down here in Southern Oregon where I am. And it's still working.

[24:29]

And it's been really powerful. In fact, it's one of the most rewarding experiences I think I've had in my life to work with other educators. It's also been exhausting because I've had a full-time teaching job at the same time that I'm doing all of this. But I think it's also a testimony that the stuff works because I could not be...

[24:47]

conceivably doing all of this if I wasn't able to apply the stuff that I teach other teachers to apply. It's in person. I haven't figured out a model yet for it to do it remotely. There's something very powerful about the face-to-face and we meet for a week in the summer. And that's when I go give them sort of the whole picture. But in order to change the patterns, it takes some time.

[25:11]

So we meet once a month throughout the school year. And then they can talk about, gee, I've had this and this and this happened. And then we talk about how, which principle we could use and how that would fit with this and this. And by the end of the year, they become pretty solid inside of being able to have ready access to the teach from the best self tools and principles. That's how that's the model I've done so far. One of the things that happens every time I do a training and say, well, you should have this conversation with administrators.

[25:41]

You should share this with administrators. And so this is my first chance to speak to administrators, which I'm super excited about because I know there's a lot of educational leaders that follow this podcast. And so I would just say that that triangle that I mentioned, teacher teaching from their best self, and then you've got over here, you've got the students coming from their best selves and, or at least I'm related to students to support that motion, being in a learning environment that helps us all stay in our best self and learn from there. That can be replicated at a district scale, right? Because if you have district leadership coming from their best selves and they're relating to their staff in ways that help support the best selves of their staff members, and they're creating environments, district school environments that help bring out the best selves of every single staff member, student, adult that walks into the building, I think you have a direction for sustainable education reform that will actually

[26:40]

help all of us. And my view is that if we did that and we sort of started replicating it at district wide scales, we could start to really feel the potential of what education can be. So that would be my like, Hey, It's not just for teachers. We can do this together.

[26:58] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Teach from Your Best Self, a teacher's guide to thriving in the classroom and certainly a helpful read for administrators as well. So, Jay, if people would like to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go online?

[27:13] SPEAKER_01:

Probably the best place is the website, which is teachfromyourbestself.org. I am on Twitter. That's a J underscore Schroeder. But the website has a place. Certainly, there's a big overview about the work and about what we're doing, as well as a place for them to reach out and say hello or ask questions or comments or become a part of the Teach for Your Best Self larger community.

[27:37] SPEAKER_00:

Perfect. We'll put links to both in the show notes then. Well, Jay, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[27:45] SPEAKER_01:

It's been a pleasure talking to you, Justin. Thanks for the opportunity.

[27:49] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.