This is the ten minute Teacher podcast with your host, Vicky Davis. Today’s sponsor is the modern classrooms project. If you’re ready to take a free course on how to center students in your classroom with modern pedagogy, join modern classrooms@coolcatteacher.com. Modern now I’ll tell you more at the end of the show about this fantastic opportunity to improve of your classroom. Today we’re talking to 24 year classroom teacher Jay Schroeder. He is author of Teach from your best self, a guide to thriving in the classroom, which is exciting for you. Jay, you received the High School Teacher of Excellence award from the National Council of Teachers of English, NCTE in 2022. Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate it. Vicky, thanks for having me on the show. So obviously you’ve got the credentials that you’re just an amazing classroom teacher, but you’re not really writing about teaching. You’re talking about thriving in the classroom. Help me understand. It’s a big lift, especially right now, isn’t it? One of the things that I’ve been observing over the years is that teachers are stacked with way too much to do and to the point to where our jobs become consuming and depleting for a lot of teachers all over the country. And so as I tried to find my way to successfully manage my own career as an educator, I had to learn a lot. And I learned some new ways of doing this. And some of these come from my martial arts training, and some of them come from a very wise mentor of mine. Some of them actually come from having been so sick, I had chronic fatigue syndrome. And so I had to really figure out a way to conserve my energy and to lower my stress levels or the job would just flatten me. One of the things that I talk to the teachers that I work with, as well as in this book, is this idea of ROI, return on investment. As educators, we have a limited amount, just like all human beings, of time, energy and attention. And we have to get a lot more strategic about how we use that because the net result, what we want, is maximum learning gains. What I’m about here is high impact, low effort teaching. The reason that’s so important is because I’m going to be able to bring my best self to my students. Not a self that’s stressed out, flustered, frustrated, overwhelmed, because it turns out that the best ROI, the thing that gets the biggest return on investment, is actually not what I do, but the self that I bring. That’s so hard. I’m sure you’ve had it happen all the extra duties, there’s things that we have to do that we didn’t sign up for. We were volunteered. Until we can kind of get the system to start paying attention, that teacher well being actually matters. And that only way we can finally get to students thriving is when their teachers are thriving. Until we get to that place, we kind of have to close our doors and do our own thing, figure out how we could prioritize the self that we bring, because ultimately that’s what’s going to allow us to thrive and have a long, fulfilling career. I’ve seen a lot of teachers put everything they’ve got, heart and soul, for two, three years, into their kids, and then they end up leaving the profession. You think about that. Is that really our modeled teacher? Or is it someone that’s able to thrive in the profession for 30 years and positively impact thousands and thousands of students? That’s really the direction we need to go, because right now, education isn’t sustainable. So the book, teach for your best self, offers a roadmap and an entryway into how we can start looking at education, both for ourselves as well as system wise, to make it a sustainable profession for people. So, Jay, let’s get practical. School year fall 2023. Getting ready to teach my classes. Looking at that load, what are some principles you can give me for how I should structure my week differently than in the past when I’ve kind of burned out? When we’re looking at ROI, I’m looking at how can I save my time, energy and attention, which is limited. One of the ways that teachers tend to use up a lot of time, energy and attention is on things they don’t actually have any control over. It’s kind of baked into the system that we’re supposed to control things that we don’t actually have any control over. We’ll hear people say things like, control your class. The truth is, I don’t have any control over the behavior of my students unless I’m literally willing to physically control them. What I have is influence. And I have to be clear what exists in my realm of control, which is mostly myself, pretty much, and what I do and what I say and the self that I bring, and then what exists in my realm of influence, because I’m going to use different tactics, different strategies for each. And if I’m trying to control things that I only have influence over or that I’m actually even worse, powerless in regard to, that’s going to exhaust me and it’s going to be super frustrating and deplete me now, influence is like it’s a different world in that I will use different strategies. So relationship, for instance, is an influence approach. Safety, availability, giving people positive messages, validating them, appreciating them, encouraging them, welcoming them, letting my students know that I’m 1000% behind them being safe. These are ways that I can exert influence, and in order to do it, I have to be in my best self because as soon as I start getting stressed and reactive, then that probably resort to some control techniques to try to control their behavior or make them stop doing whatever they’re doing. And it actually undermines the safety in my room. It undermines their ability to bring their best self to the relationship as well as me. And then a whole classroom environment derail from there. Jay? I always start off great and rested coming out of the summer, but usually January, I’m really rested. I start off, I’m working out those days, so many days a week, and I’m feeling great. And then it’s like I wake up mid March and I’m like, oh, what happened to the rested Vicki? Because I’m kind of exhausted. So can you give me some things that’ll work? It’s a mindset of prioritizing the self that you bring means that I might have to let some of those things that I would normally do go because I’m prioritizing the self that I bring as the most important thing. And then I’m looking at what else gets a high RoI. So all of the things in teach from your best self, high Roi. So one of the things I talk about is radical acceptance in the book, and that’s where the capacity to accept students where they are is actually where I have the most influence. If I resist it because I think they should be different, if I think they should be doing something else, if I think they should be more engaged in my class, that, again, is going to cost me more energy. There’s all of these ways that teachers use energy that we don’t actually have to use that might be better deployed in a different way. And so it’s more of a thematic approach. Vicki, in terms of one technique, you’re going to feel better in March. I don’t know quite what I would offer, but I’ll give you this. The teacher and best self model. Think of it as a triangle, and at the top of the triangle is the teacher bringing the best self they possibly can to their students. Bottom left, students. I’m interacting with students in ways that will bring out their best self. Bottom right, I’m creating a classroom environment that helps support me being my best self and helps support students being their best self. Now automatically I’m in my best self. Students are going to tend to bring their best self to me because of mirror neurons. If I’m relating to students in a way that brings out their best, my job is suddenly much easier because they’re not bringing me that same kind of resistance or that same kind of defiance or disruption that they would if they were coming from a lesser version of themselves. And likewise, if I’m working on creating this learning environment that brings out the best in all of us, that saves all of us energy, because it’s like working smarter, not harder, right? Because I don’t have to fight them. We could just have fun and learn together. And it’s not like always roses, but what teaching your best self asserts is that we can maximize whatever available learning is possible on any particular day if we bring our best and minimize the amount of energy I’m spending. Let me ask you this with radical acceptance. So I’m accepting them as they are, but does that mean that I allow them to behave in a way that’s less than they could be or maybe should be? Really? Good question. No, because I can accept something as it is, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to take a stand that it’s going to need to change. Where I discovered this spiky is I was teaching the class early, brand new teacher. True. And I had in my imagination everything that I thought my students should be. They should be engaged, they should be stimulated by these discussion questions I’m provoking. They should do their homework. And I had this idea in my head that we’re like that, and I was judging. Being the students I actually had because they weren’t matching up my ideas. Now in my mind I just said I’m holding high standards. But no, what I was really doing was judging my students for being how they were. I didn’t have leverage to help them grow from there. All I had was kind of a cudgel that they resisted that would actually wreck the relationship or diminish the relationship we could have otherwise had. Learning alliances between teachers and students come from a bedrock of acceptance. I need to accept them how they are now. If a student disrupts my class, I’m not going to just accept the behavior. I’m accepting that the behavior is happening. And that helps me be less reactive because if I resist that it’s happening, I’m going to actually slip into fight, flee, or freeze. I’m going to lose my frontal cortex. I’m going to start becoming reactive with a student and then we’re going to get into a power struggle. So I need to avoid power struggles to stay in my best self and so I can just stay in that place and handle the situation. Acceptance, really, in a lot of ways it’s great for the students, but it’s also for me because it helps me stay in my best self and respond to the situation rather than reacting to it in a way that isn’t really good for anybody. Well, and saying, okay, this is how things are now. Let’s see if we can improve, but not comparing it to some sort of movie. Awesome. So, Jay Schroeder, teach from your best self, a guide to thriving in the classroom. Thanks, Jay. Modern classroom’s project will help you bring engaging, exciting teaching to your classroom with their free online course and community. Go to forward slash Modern right now to sign up for the modern classroom’s essential course for free, where you will learn about the strategies, research, and resources that can drive student centered, self directed learning in your classroom. They can show you how to use technology to unlock deeper student relationships with your students. So many people ask me how to respond to artificial intelligence, and my response is always that we need to shift our pedagogical practices into the classroom to the time tested, research based best practices. That is what you get with modern classroom. So go to coolcatteacher.com modern today and sign up. You’ll be glad you did. You’ve been listening to the ten minute Teacher podcast. If you want more content from Vicky Davis, you can find her on Facebook, x.com, TikTok Threads, Instagram, Blue sky, and YouTube at Coolcat Teacher. Thank you for listening.