Rekindle Your Professional Fire: Powerful Habits for Becoming a More Well-Balanced Teacher

[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_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Mike Anderson. Mike of Leading Great Learning is a full-time education consultant who's worked with diverse schools across the United States and beyond for more than a decade now. He was a classroom teacher for 15 years and then a responsive classroom consultant and developer for six years. He's a Milken National Educator Award winner and was a finalist for New Hampshire Teacher of the Year. And Mike is the author of 10 books, including three that were selected as ASCD member books, including Rekindle Your Professional Fire, Powerful Habits for Becoming a More Well-Balanced Teacher, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:49] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:53] SPEAKER_01:

Mike, it's been a while, but welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:56] SPEAKER_00:

It has been a while. Thank you so much for having me, Justin. I'm excited to be back.

[01:00] SPEAKER_01:

Well, yeah, it's been almost nine years since we spoke about one of your earlier books, and we'll link to that on the website. And you've written other books in the meantime. But we're here today to talk about Rekindle Your Professional Fire. And just right there in the title, people can get a sense of where we're headed with this. But take us into kind of the origin story of this book. What prompted you to write this new book?

[01:21] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's kind of an interesting story. So years ago, I had written a book called The Well-Balanced Teacher, which was also about self-care and balance and how do we stay healthy and vibrant as teachers so we can have great energy for our students. And then I had written several other books in the meantime, and the latest one was called Tackling the Motivation Crisis. How to Activate Student Learning Without Pizza Parties, Behavior Charts, or Other Hard-to-Quit Incentive Systems. It's like the best subtitle in history in my mind. And as I was working with teachers and schools on that book, and I kept talking to teachers about the importance of autonomy and belonging and a sense of competence, that without these sort of really basic intrinsic needs being met, without those psychological needs being met, it's almost impossible for students to be motivated about work.

[02:06]

And more and more, I started hearing teachers saying, yeah, autonomy, be nice if we had a little bit more of that. Belonging, I often don't have time to connect with colleagues. Sense of competence, oh my gosh, every six months our district adopts a new curriculum. I can't get good at anything before we get on to the next thing. And so that was what prompted me to write this newest book, which in some ways is sort of a mashup of The Well-Balanced Teacher and Tackling the Motivation Crisis. So it really looks at teacher engagement and wellness through the perspective of having our psychological needs for autonomy and competence and belonging and others met through our work.

[02:43] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I love that you're rooting this in self-determination theory and applying that not only to students, but of course to teachers. And often when teachers are feeling burned out, when they're feeling like this work is not something they can stay in for a long time, It's not necessarily a personal failing. Often there are very clear institutional failings or institutional conditions that make teachers feel that way. And yet you've written this book to, if I understand correctly, you've written this book to the individual teacher focused on actions that they can take. Is that right?

[03:16] SPEAKER_00:

It is absolutely right. And yes, there are things that school leaders could and should be doing. But in my experience, most school leaders are even worse at taking care of themselves than teachers are. And administrators are often so burned out that if a teacher's only hope for getting any better is to wait for an exhausted administrator to come along and save the day, they're going to be waiting a long time. So I really wrote this book specifically for teachers to help them think about really practical things they can do to rekindle their fires.

[03:43] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And one concept that jumped out at me right away as I picked up the book was the idea of swagger. You know, we hear about self-care, we hear about, you know, take a Pilates class, take a nap, whatever, but help us understand where swagger comes from in your thinking about this topic.

[03:57] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I remember a long time ago, I was doing a research project. It was actually part of the Well-Balanced Teacher. And I was looking at all of these different factors that can lead to someone feeling healthy and vibrant at work, not just in education, but in any profession. And there was one quality that came up over and over and over again. And basically, if you don't have this thing, eventually you will burn out no matter how good all of the rest of your job is.

[04:20]

You could have a great salary. You could love where you work. You could enjoy the people you're in with. You can enjoy the physical space you're in. But if you don't feel competent, if you don't think you're good at what you do, eventually you will burn out. And that really resonated with me because I think we've got a whole lot of teachers out there who were actually way better than they give themselves credit for.

[04:46]

And so what's interesting about this, when it comes to burnout, it doesn't actually matter how good you are in some ways. I mean, if we want to be really sort of flip about it, it would be better to be a really bad teacher who thinks you're awesome than to be a really great teacher who thinks you're not good. It's perception that matters. And in my experience, we get a lot of teachers out there who are really, really good, who are constantly beating themselves up. So the sense of swagger is about the sense of being able to hold our heads high and say, yeah, I know what I'm doing. And it's not always working the way I'd like it to, but I've got some strategies and I've got some skills and I'm feeling good about the work that I do.

[05:23]

I think that's so important.

[05:25] SPEAKER_01:

Interesting. Wow. What an idea. Because, you know, certainly we can recognize both types, right? We can all think of people who maybe are new and they're like, you know, I've been on the job for 17 days and I'm ready to become a principal. I'm so good at this, you know, make me the instructional coach.

[05:39]

So we definitely see people with that swagger and kind of roll our eyes and think, okay, well, your skills will hopefully catch up to your self-concept at some point, but I'm glad you're having a good time. And we can certainly think of people who never feel like they're good enough, even though they're some of our best people. Just the confidence is not there, even though the skills are. And that's a very intriguing idea that regardless of where the skills are, burnout is prevented. You're saying burnout is prevented by believing in yourself, believing that you're doing a good job, regardless of whether that's true or not.

[06:10] SPEAKER_00:

yeah, well, I mean, I was being a little flip there. I mean, ideally we want somebody to both be good and to know it. And so competence isn't just about thinking that you're good. It's also having evidence, like it's collecting small little moments of success and holding onto those so that you can, so you've got some real evidence that you're doing well. And for that teacher, Yeah, I've known people who 17 days in think they're ready to be principal too. But I've also met people 17 days in who are almost ready to throw in the towel.

[06:39]

And we're saying, oh my gosh, I'm so overwhelmed. I don't think I can do it. Another element of competence is seeing yourself getting better. So if you're a first year teacher, and you know you're a first year teacher, and that means that there's going to be some challenge and struggle along the way, as long as you can see your skills developing and you get the sense that I'm gaining more competence, then you're gonna be somewhat shielded from burnout. So yeah, that's something I offer in the book is really practical strategies for how do you nurture your own sense of competence? Just as one really simple example, what if at the end of every single day, every teacher out there listening to this interview, were to write down three small successes that they had during that school day.

[07:21]

It could be that they made good eye contact with a kid and had a little moment, you know, where they just sort of smiled with their eyes and the kid acknowledged back and they had a connection. It could be that kids did really well on an independent research project and the teacher's feeling good about that. Whatever it is, small little successes. That's not that much. It maybe takes five minutes to jot down three ideas, put it on a log on your computer or put it in an old fashioned journal. If you do that every single day for, 180 days, think about how those are going to pile up.

[07:53]

And if you did that every single year for a 30 year teaching career, think about how those are going to pile up. And that's the sort of really small, simple challenge that I offer to teachers in the book as one way of developing a greater sense of competence.

[08:08] SPEAKER_01:

I'm thinking about a huge number of teachers who are in their first year or perhaps new to the profession without any training. You know, increasingly people are entering through alternative pathways. So it seems to me that we're going to have a lot more people spending a lot more time total in the not quite good enough stage. And if I think back on myself as a first year teacher, I wasn't good enough. If I had been satisfied with my performance as a first year teacher, That would have taken some delusion to be satisfied with that. And yet what I had to do to get through it was just what you're saying.

[08:40]

Focus on the positive, focus on what I was doing well, keep getting better, but not quit. And that's a shift for us as a profession because for so long we focused on people being good enough, people getting results for students. And often we're not happy with those results, especially with new people during that learning curve period, which can be quite steep. For leaders, help us think a little bit about the developmental task there, because I'm starting to see leaders recognize that getting people to not quit actually might need to be the first order of business, and then improvement can happen if they don't quit. But you can't improve people if they quit. They're out the door and you're back to square one with somebody else.

[09:24]

So help us think about this from a leader's perspective.

[09:27] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. so important because just as we want teachers to take care of their students and help their teachers, help their students feel a sense of autonomy and competence and purpose, that should be one of the primary roles of a good leader is helping the teachers develop those same core needs. And so there are so many small things that a leader can do. I think one of the most important things they could do perhaps is be really clear about what it means to be successful. I think that's one of the things that often gets in teacher's way is we say, I wanna be the best teacher I can be, but we haven't actually defined what that means. What are our metrics?

[10:02]

If it's just about test scores, Good luck with that. There are so many variables that go into test scores that if a teacher's sole metric for whether or not they're a good teacher is whether or not their kids are performing at grade level or meeting state or national standards or benchmarks, oh my gosh. So one of the things leaders could do would be to help teachers develop really sensible and practical and inspiring goals about what success will look like during the year. And then teachers need really concrete, practical, small moments of feedback about this. I know as a classroom teacher, I had way too few visits from my principal. In my 15 years in the classroom, I was only officially observed three times.

[10:45]

Out of 15 years, it's supposed to be happening way more often than that. But I think that, you know, the principal knew I was a good teacher and knew I was doing well and parents weren't complaining and kids were happy. And so I was I wasn't the biggest fish they needed to fry. And I would often get an apologetic principal at the end of the year saying, you know, Mike, I'm so sorry. I really I wanted to get to you this year and I just couldn't. I promise I'll get to you next year.

[11:06] SPEAKER_01:

We both know you're doing fine. So sign here and we'll try again next year.

[11:09] SPEAKER_00:

That didn't do me a lot of good as a teacher. You know, I wanted to grow. I wanted to learn. I wanted my principal to come in and give me some coaching. And so I, as a teacher, I would have much preferred five, five minute observations from a principal where they just simply jot an email afterwards. Here are three positives in a push.

[11:29]

Three things that went well and here's something you might try next time. really small moments of feedback multiple times through the year would be so much more helpful and productive than one really formal, scary feeling observation and assessment that feels really judgmental. And yeah, that's something that comes to mind also is both principals helping teachers set realistic benchmarks for what success is and then giving them really concrete feedback on how they're doing as they move toward that.

[12:02] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And if anybody knows of any resources for helping school administrators get into classrooms, please let me know. I don't really have any ideas on that, but yeah, hit me up and maybe we'll try to put some things out there on that. Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about what you discussed in chapter two around recharging your battery. And certainly this is an area where we've heard lots of advice.

[12:21]

We've heard lots of self-care tips and sometimes people get kind of sick of those. What actually works for helping teachers recharge their batteries?

[12:29] SPEAKER_00:

Really, really small shifts are so much better than really big shifts. A book that I read as I was writing this book was Atomic Habits by James Clear. And I know everybody and their brother has read that book and they should, it's a great book. I love the story he tells about the British cycling team And how for decades, the cycling team, I mean, they were a great cycling team. They were an international team, but they were a study in mediocrity. They just couldn't get out of their own way.

[12:59]

They couldn't win anything. And they had a coach come along and look for what he called 1% changes. He painted the insides of the vans that held the bicycles white so it was easier to see if dust was accumulating inside the vans and gunking up the gears. He had all the players try different pillows to see if they could find a pillow that would give them an extra 10 minutes of sleep each night. He made all these little tiny adjustments. And then after a few years, all of a sudden, the British cycling team was the dominant world-class cycling team in the world, quite a run.

[13:31]

And I think that's something that can really help us as educators think about making shifts to recharge our batteries, to engage in better self-care. It's not about going to the gym five days a week. It's not about signing up for a yoga class that we don't have time to take. It's about, oh my gosh, having a tall glass of water. First thing in the morning, when you first get up, before you have your cup of coffee, fill up your coffee mug with water and have a tall mug of water. Just a little bit of hydration first thing in the morning has so many health benefits.

[14:02]

Right now, one of my health goals, I'm a runner and I've been running for quite a while, but I got out of a good routine with any kind of strength work or upper body work and I'm really busy. And so all I'm doing is setting a goal of doing 10 pushups before I go for a run each day. Sometimes I do more than 10. Sometimes I just do 10. And if I just do 10, then great, I made my goal. So that's my biggest piece of advice for teachers is think about your daily routines.

[14:29]

What are some really small shifts that you could make that won't make a big deal right away, but when they accumulate and pile up over time can make a huge, huge difference. Just a few more examples. You could go from having two teaspoons of sugar in your coffee to one. Now that doesn't seem like a big deal, but I've actually got this written down here because it's such a great example. So if you shift from two teaspoons of sugar in your coffee to one, and you have two cups of coffee every morning, over a 30-year teaching career, that would reduce your sugar intake by 100 pounds. 25 pound bags of sugar is how much two teaspoons of sugar once a day is.

[15:13]

for 30 years is. So that's something I really encourage teachers to consider is finding little moments and making those little tiny shifts.

[15:21] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I like that idea of small changes because sometimes if we commit to something big and then we don't do it, we feel guilty, right? I think that's a cycle for a lot of people is, I'm going to change, I'm going to do things differently. And then for whatever reason, it's too big a commitment and we don't do it.

[15:39] SPEAKER_00:

Not only do we feel guilty, but we start to develop this narrative of ourselves that we're somebody who gives up on goals. You start to take on this sense of I'm a failure when it comes to self-care. I just can't do it, which makes it even harder then to set the next goal and try the next go around. Um, so it's way better to take on a small goal that you can be successful with than to take on a big goal that feels really inspirational. You know, I'm going to run a 5k or I'm going to run a 10k, but then you don't do it and you're worse off than before you started.

[16:11] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Yeah, I was seeing recently that Atomic Habits has been the best-selling book on Amazon for multiple years, especially around the beginning of the year, and would heartily endorse that book as well. But you have a chapter on how to build powerful new habits. Tell us a little bit of your advice from your experience and your research on building those habits. So you said, make them small, start small, don't overcommit, but something that you can do. What else?

[16:36] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, the other thing is to make a plan. Just simply having a goal and saying, I'm going to do 10 pushups before I run every day is fine. But how are you actually going to do that? For me, I do it as part of my warmup. I was already doing a little bit of light stretching before I went for a run. So I've just blended in those 10 pushups and I got to do it before I put on my sneakers.

[16:57]

So having some really practical concrete strategies for how you're going to make the change can really help. So let's say that one of your goals is to get in more steps each day. A couple of things you could do would be to park on the far end of the parking lot to force yourself to walk from your car into the school just a little bit longer. And if there's an elevator in your school to force yourself to take the steps, to take the stairs. Those would just be a couple of little small practical things you could do. I mean, in the book, I've got all of these other practical strategies that are kind of dependent on the goal that you're taking on.

[17:32]

But I'll give you one that I use all the time. I often have a goal of working on writing. I'm working on another book right now. And so I'm forcing myself to do a little bit of writing each day. And one of the things that I do, and this can apply outside of writing, but it's an easy example in writing, is if you know you want to come back to something, you're working on something now, but you want to return to it later on, leave something unfinished to return to. So in writing, that means leave a sentence unfinished.

[18:00]

Because if you finish the sentence and put a period at the end, it's really hard to come back later on and pick up the train of thought. But if you have a sentence to finish, you can finish the sentence that gets you right back into the flow of your writing. So it's that kind of really practical strategy that can help us then follow through on our goals. I can tell you a surefire way to be unsuccessful with following through on your goals. It's to count on willpower. It just doesn't work.

[18:27]

We don't have a lot of it. And as the day wears on, we have less of it. And that's often what we say we're going to do is I'm just going to force myself this year to fill in the blank. But forcing yourself, it doesn't work. So you've got to come up with these really practical strategies for getting yourself to get into the new habit and pattern. The good news is once you're in a new habit or pattern, I mean, that's another key idea about good goal setting is it's about habits and patterns, not about outcomes.

[18:53]

So the goal shouldn't be to run a 10K. The goal should be to run four days a week. And if you could say, that's my goal is to be in that habit or that pattern, then once you run the 10K, you don't get out of the pattern. I mean, that's the classic, you know, we think, okay, I'm going to lose 20 pounds. And so you cut out all your favorite foods and you exercise like crazy and you drink a lot of water and you lose the 20 pounds and you say, oh, phew, thank heaven I've done that. You check off the goal and then you go back to your habit.

[19:19]

That's over, right? So it's about finding little practical strategies that will help you get into those new habits and patterns. And then eventually you don't have to work at it so hard because patterns run or habits run on autopilot. So if you start drinking a tall glass of water with your coffee every morning, it could be a little hard to get into the habit at first, but after a couple of weeks, it just happens automatically. It'll have to work so hard anymore.

[19:41] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. It doesn't take willpower. It doesn't take thinking. It's just, yeah, it's just automatic. Love it. It's just what you do.

[19:47]

Talk to us a little bit about refreshing your spirit. That's another topic that, you know, that might be a little bit surprising to people, might be a little bit hard to pin down. What do you mean by refreshing your spirit in chapter five?

[19:59] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that chapter is all about our needs for belonging and fun. We all have a need for positive human connection. Actually, that's not true. We all have a need for connection. It doesn't necessarily have to be positive for it to meet our needs for belonging. This is why complaining to others can actually scratch that itch and it can feel really good is when we complain to a colleague about a bad day and they say, oh, I know that's so hard when that happens and they complain back, you feel a sense of connection.

[20:27]

I think it's better if we get positive belonging. That's what the chapter is all about. So it's about meeting our needs for positive belonging and also fun and joy. You know, not many of us got into this profession because we were trying to become rich and famous. If so, bad call. Most of us got into this work because we love working with children and we love the content we teach and we find it fascinating and interesting and we enjoy being in school.

[20:52]

And so we need to find ways of nurturing those feelings in school. How are we setting up habits and patterns where we're connecting with positive colleagues and engaging in fun with our students and having fun with the curriculum we teach, not just with these sort of extra outside events, but the daily teaching and learning should be fun. When we're meeting our needs for belonging and fun during the school day, oh my gosh, we can walk into school with a light, fresh spirit and enjoy the day.

[21:19] SPEAKER_01:

How do we do that for ourselves? Because I think we've all been on the receiving end of forced fun, you know, like, okay, everybody, welcome back. We're going to have some mandatory fun for the first three hours of our day. Hope everybody likes this. I hope you appreciate it. You better appreciate it.

[21:30]

You better be having fun. Like we know forced fun doesn't work, but you're talking about, you know, for ourselves, figuring out how to make, you know, this an enjoyable job to have to make the day fun. How do we do that for ourselves?

[21:45] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, again, it's about these little habits and patterns. You know, are there colleagues who give you good energy? How are you finding ways to spend a little bit more time with them? In one school that I was teaching in, I did not have a lot of good, fun colleagues I was working with. I was on a couple of grade level teams. I sort of switched back and forth between the two that were kind of full of people who were not enjoying teaching and didn't really enjoy kids and were grumpy and complaining a lot.

[22:11]

So there was a teacher in a different grade level who I was good friends with, and we made a habit of going out to breakfast at a local diner every Wednesday morning. And so no matter how bad my week was, I knew I was going to get to have an omelet with Cindy on Wednesday morning, and that was something I could look forward to. You know, who do you sit next to in staff meetings? Are they people who bring you joy? Or are they people who suck out your soul? Like, avoid those people and go sit with the people who bring you joy.

[22:39]

That's a little thing you could do. Another thing you could do is to think about how to have more fun with your students with daily learning. What if one day a week you commit to playing academic games as a way to refresh and consolidate and even teach some new skills or practice skills or have a little academic joke board? where the goal is every week to put up one new joke that has something to do with content. Like I remember my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Sweetser, was sort of famous for dad jokes and bad puns.

[23:12]

Max Planck was bored with his name. I mean, it's a bad joke, but I still remember it all these years later. So finding these little habits and routines to bring a little more playfulness and joy into our teaching is something else to consider.

[23:28] SPEAKER_01:

I saw a post on social media recently from a teacher who told her class the, you know, why is six afraid of seven? Because seven, eight, nine joke, which of course, you know, every adult has heard and it's not funny to us anymore. But this group of kids like understood conceptually what they needed to get the joke and they had never heard it before. And it knocked their socks off. Like they were rolling on the floor laughing. And I think it's easy to forget, you know, just how much joy there can be in little things like that that are not necessarily new to us, but might be just what our students need.

[23:58]

Love it.

[23:59] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I was talking with a high school teacher recently and he told me about a good one. It wasn't an academic joke, but still fun. He's teaching a social studies class. And he said to a girl in the room whose name was Paige, he said, Paige, what is that over on that wall over there? And she turned around and looked and he looked at the rest of the class and said, I just turned the page.

[24:19]

I mean, if you're a kid in that class, you're going to get some groans, but yeah. Yeah. And aren't you just listening a little bit more carefully as a kid because you're waiting for the next little goofy line? And as a teacher, when we smile, we feel more joyful. You know, when we crack a joke and we laugh at our own dumb joke and we smile, it feels better. That's actually a really funny thing in cognitive science.

[24:41]

I don't know if you've heard about this, but fake smiling actually elicits the same chemical response in our bodies as real smiling. So some days when I'm going into work in a school and I'm just feeling a little bit down, I'm having a hard time getting good positive energy to go work with the school, I'll put on a Jim Gaffigan Pandora station and listen to stand-up comedy on my way in. And the laughing at the stand-up comedy, even though they're jokes I've heard many times because I've listened to this Pandora station a lot, it actually makes me happier. It makes me smile and it boosts my mood. So yeah, it seems like a small thing, but it's no small thing to smile and laugh a lot with our students.

[25:20] SPEAKER_01:

When we were teaching in Seattle we used to listen to the the 520 funny Which they played during the evening commute and that was always a nice way to end the day I want to follow up on the topic of negative colleagues because it seems to me that if negativity burns people out A disproportionate number of new teachers are going to be hired into roles where their colleagues are negative precisely because that's where the vacancies occur, right? Challenging positions, negative positions, stressful positions, that's where the vacancies are going to be. And if you have people who are doing great, having a great time, there's not going to be that turnover. So disproportionately, people are going to find themselves in that situation where their colleagues are negative. And maybe long term, they might seek to work somewhere where they can find more positive colleagues. But let's say in the short term, or if someone's very committed to their school, you mentioned earlier, just choosing who you sit by.

[26:10]

What else are some of your thoughts on just kind of how we can seek out the positive and avoid bringing other people's negativity into our day?

[26:16] SPEAKER_00:

So important for us to recognize because emotions are contagious. I actually do a little writing in that chapter about emotion contagion, where our emotions rub off on each other. So one little thing that you yourself can do is try to bring more positive, playful energy to your colleagues, because just as their negative energy can rub off on you, your positive energy can actually rub off on them a little bit, too. And I wouldn't make it your quest or goal to make a grumpy person happy. That's not what you should do. But you can at least to some extent control how you respond to other people's negativity.

[26:47]

and how much you internalize it. And I think just being aware of it, to in the moment say, oh my gosh, that person's grumpy right now, I don't want to get grumpy, can help protect you a little bit from some of that emotion contagion. I think as a school leader, there's also something to pay attention to that I think is so interesting. Have you heard of the crabs in the bucket phenomenon?

[27:07] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. They're like pulling others down.

[27:09] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So apparently this comes from a real thing. Crab fishermen can leave a five gallon bucket of crabs out on the dock without a cover on the bucket. And they don't have to worry about the crabs getting out. Because if a crab on the top of the heap starts to climb out of the bucket, his buddies down below say, ooh, something to grab onto. And they try to pull themselves out of the bucket with their buddy's leg and they yank their buddy back in.

[27:29]

And this happens in school where often a new energetic teacher says, oh, I'm so excited about trying a new strategy. I'm going to try this with my students. And someone nearby says, oh, yeah, we did that back in the 90s. We used to call it such and such. Good luck with that. Or someone says, oh, it's just the pendulum swinging back around.

[27:45]

You'll see it'll swing back this way, you know. So as school leaders, we can also be sensitive to. that phenomenon. And in staff meetings, think about intentionally grouping people. Like don't just let everybody sit where they're going to sit, but sometimes have people sit in grade level teams because of something you're doing. And other times have assigned seats where you're making sure that those new colleagues who you want to stay vibrant and fresh are not being worn down by people who are tired and upset and grumpy all the time.

[28:18]

I think those are at least a couple of ideas. It's hard though. I worked in a school like that for a long time and it's really hard. It does wear you down over time.

[28:26] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. And it is contagious in both directions. And I can think of, you know, one particularly negative person I worked with who I think ultimately was driven out by the peer pressure. You know, like if you are the one negative person and you can tell your attempts to make other people negative are not succeeding, you know, people want to succeed, as we said earlier. And, you know, I think people kind of self-select out in both directions in that sense. So I think great advice for individual teachers and great advice for leaders as well.

[28:55] SPEAKER_00:

And if a leader's got somebody on their staff who is toxic, start getting them in the process for moving them out of your school one way or the other. Give them coaching, give them support, give them all the love you can. But if in the end, they're just not going to make that shift, it's better for your school culture, it's better for students, it's better for faculty to not have really negative people on staff.

[29:18] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Rekindle Your Professional Fire, Powerful Habits for Becoming a More Well-Balanced Teacher. Mike, if people want to learn more about you, see your other books, get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go online?

[29:30] SPEAKER_00:

Probably the easiest landing spot is my website, which is leadinggreatlearning.com. People there can see books I've written and online courses I've created and a blog that I write and see all kinds of other information about me. So that's a good spot, leadinggreatlearning.com.

[29:47] SPEAKER_01:

Mike Anderson, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. Let's do this again sometime in less than nine years.

[29:53] SPEAKER_00:

Please. This has been great. Thank you, Justin.

[29:56] Announcer:

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