1. When researching WHOLE, what surprised you about your findings?
We were looking for examples of schools “outperforming their zip code”. Places where the community was viewed by outsiders as rife with poverty, or violence, or other societal challenges and yet the schools were thriving. We were aware of research on stress and well-being from the last Mindshift book on The Healthy Workplace Nudge.
The findings, once we stepped back to make sense of them, were stark. Schools which addressed the social and emotional needs of teachers first, enabled more effective student intervention. And prioritizing student emotional wellbeing first, resulted in ongoing acceleration of learning. End of story.
2. How do the findings help us understand the impact of the current situation, with remote and hybrid learning?
We have known for years that “self-efficacy” — teacher self-confidence and student self-confidence — are the two most important elements for teaching and learning. COVID has injected a mixture of chaos, fear, anxiety, and for many a significant level of trauma. Equity begins with social emotional stability.
Students who have a self-confident, socially and emotionally well teacher will have better outcomes. Students who experience learning that supports their social and emotional well-being, which supports their feelings of confidence and self-efficacy, will have better outcomes.
For obvious reasons, many educators have been focused on “how do I learn new tools like Zoom or Google Classroom”? Many districts have been focused on feeding students, distributing laptops and working to close the online connectivity gap.
The next step is not delivering content. The next step is attending to the social and emotional well-being of our teachers and our students. “Do teachers and students feel successful? Are they set up for success?” should be our next urgent set of questions.
3. What did you discover about how teachers’ overall well-being impacts student learning?
Teachers are the fourth most stressed occupation in the United States. That is a fact. A well known and documented statistic. Teacher stress is rising. That is also a fact. A well known and documented statistic.
I wish our discovery was revolutionary, but honestly – when you step back from the problem and observe it from a distance – the findings are common sense.
Students have to be emotionally ready to learn. The primitive part of the brain – the amygdala, which regulates our ‘fight or flight’ response—hijacks our ability to think deeply, critically, to concentrate. The person who most impacts student readiness to learn – who calms them, supports them, focuses them, attends to their immediate emotional needs – is their teacher.
No human – teacher or otherwise – has unlimited emotional resources to do that work. It’s like lifting weights at the gym. Eventually the muscles get tired. If I walk into my workout having lifted weights for eight hours already, I won’t have any strength left. If teacher walks into the classroom concerned about how to pay their own bills, concerned about their administrator harshly evaluating them, concerned about anger from parents, or violence from students, or how to use new technology that was just dropped into their lap.. the teacher’s self-confidence and emotional reserves are already used up.
4. How can schools and districts do a better job of supporting teachers to promote the best outcomes for students?
Commit to teacher and student success by enabling it instead of demanding it—because the reality is you cannot adopt, mandate, legislate, evaluate, or assess into existence effective teaching and learning.
We have to understand that teaching and learning is a team effort between teacher and student, and we need our team members to take the field in the best shape possible. An interesting by-product of focusing on teams which support each other is the integration of skills which are critical in today’s economy. Win-win.
A few specifics:
- Stop forcing students to “sit in front of” content that is beyond their zone of proximal development. Adopt a competency-based model which allows students to engage with content at a level of difficulty within their success zone and allow them to master each level before moving on. The research behind competency-based approaches to learning is vast and definitive. Students build agency and self-confidence, accelerating their own “learning fly-wheel”. Teachers increase self-confidence and combined self-efficacy, improving the effectiveness of their practice.
This is the primary design principal behind precision differentiation experiences like Achieve3000 – guaranteed student skill acquisition, success, and self-confidence.
2. Prioritize culture of learning over curriculum content. Look at every high performing school – the small schools, the private schools, the schools like those we found in Whole and in our prior book Humanizing the Education Machine. The culture of the school, which begins with the culture of the classroom, is one which prioritizes how every student feels and how every teacher feels. Evluate programs through a lens of caring and confidence building, not scope and standards.
3. If you measure something, measure social emotional wellbeing – multiple times a day – for teachers and students. This is not difficult, there are inexpensive tools which can be used to do it. I personally like Rhithm. Constantly and continuously check in on the health of the learning team – the teacher / student team.
4. Reframe the conversation from “us vs. them” to “one boat, one team”. That begins with the boat. Standardize tools that are broad, flexible, and allow teachers and students to have a wide variety of experiences. I like Actively Learn as a broad digital learning environment (www.ActivelyLearn.com). Once you decide on the boat, enable the classrooms to focus on what is important for teaching and learning – the student/teacher teams.
5. Your co-author, Rex Miller, is a futurist and The Mindshift Collaborative is about solving “audacious problems”. What can schools become in the future?
I have a new favorite phrase: “COVID Chrysalis”. The events of 2020 will no doubt change us. The question is – what do we want to become?
We are at the beginning of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Schools are just now starting to look up and realize that the horizon has changed. “College & Career Readiness” has shifted dramatically. The SAT and ACT are declining, more students are opting into new post-secondary learning and training experiences. The workplace is changing at a pace we can barely comprehend. From remote work to the gig economy, the impact of automation and AI – the world we are teaching our students to succeed within after high school is shifting more rapidly than ever. Schools can catch up—but it means aligning to the future of work, not the standards and practices of the past.
The surprising news – what we found in Whole: What Teachers Need to Help Students Thrive – is that the alignments and priorities required for effective teaching and learning are the same as those needed for success in the modern and emerging workplace. Humanizing our approach in schools is the key. By putting teacher and student well-being in the center of the circle and surrounding them with a focus on opportunities for success, creativity, individual exploration, and self-discovery –we lift up all boats.
We ensure “no child is left behind” and “every student succeeds” by starting with the teacher. Every teacher a well person, a cared for team member, a confident and emotionally supported adult ready and excited to meet the emotional needs of students so they are ready to learn. And then we let these incredibly committed, talented, caring professionals do their thing –wrapping each student in experiences where they succeed, they find confidence, and they unlock their passion and purpose.
The learning will come. Young people are eager to grow, to experience new things, to explore. Give them tools to do that safely and successfully and watch them thrive.