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Elena Aguilar’s website – brightmorningteam.com
Episode Transcript
Are you gonna stay through the end of the year? And I said, yes, of course. And they said, well, so many of our teachers don’t. And I came to see that really quickly, the incredibly high turnover rates of teachers and the overwhelm and stress and burnout. I received some coaching in my first couple of years as a teacher.
It was very technical, very focused on instructional strategies and what I really needed support on was “the how do you manage all of this, the emotions, just the everything.” So, fast forward about 15 years or so, I became a coach first at the school that I had helped to found, and one of the things that we were really concerned with was the high turnover rate of teachers.
So the coaching methods that I developed were, um, in some ways built upon the strategies that I’d experienced as a coachee. So there was instructional coaching and focusing on students and engagement and all that. And I also sort of intuitively just began coaching people around what I now call their beliefs and ways.
Being because that was where we could get into in part the conversation around burnout and stress and overwhelm and just the emotions of it, many of which are beautiful and positive and encouraging. But, um, the transformational coaching model that I’ve developed is anchored in a sort of three domains, which are.
We coach around people’s behaviors, beliefs, and ways of being. I call that the three Bs behaviors, beliefs, and ways of being. So behaviors are the more familiar instructional coaching strategies that folks are probably, uh, have experienced or are trying. Beliefs around, beliefs around who you are, who your students are.
That’s where we get into conversations around equity and more, and then ways of being is where we explore emotions and identity. And who we are, who we wanna be. And so it’s really a holistic model that is, um, that was created from my own experiences as well as from what I observed that teachers, and really I would say human beings need, which is to be seen in our full humanity with the emotions, with all the conflict and the questions.
And also a model that does include, let’s talk about data. Let’s talk about students. Um, engagement and parent involvement and so on and so on. So that’s the model that I have created, cobbled together, that I write about, that I still practice as a coach and that I have seen tremendous impact from.
There’s no room for crying. There is no room for, um, having emotions around the students or even around your colleagues. Mm-hmm. So that you couldn’t even, even if you had a horrible day and you needed to break down just for a minute. Mm-hmm, you couldn’t even do that. Yeah. Because it was seen as unprofessional.
Mm-hmm. And so your model is so refreshing and I think is so meaningful for all of us because you do acknowledge that key component of emotion and how it does impact the other two areas. Our belief systems and our ways of being, because that’s who we are.
Mm-hmm, it’ll have an impact on students. And the other thing I think that I, I wanna shift the paradigm on or help people remember is that emotions aren’t good or bad. They’re just information. And some of that information is incredibly energizing and galvanizing can keep us teaching. So the things that we think about as the positive emotions, which again, they’re not really positive, they are just what they are, but that the emotions such as love and commitment and passion and all of that.
is what can keep so many of us in the classroom and in the work year after year. And so, you know, as can sadness and anger and fear and all of those, when we explore them and we understand the messages those emotions are trying to share with us. They’re giving us information. And yes, I got the same messages when I started teaching.
I was told by my first principal, Leave your emotions at the door. Do not bring them into the school building. In the school building, you have to be this, that, you know, don’t smile until after Thanksgiving and all that kind of thing. Like that was what that is asking us to do as human beings is disconnect from our humanity.
Mm-hmm. We’re not effective when we are shutting down parts of who we are, we just aren’t. And every action we take emerges from a belief, and every belief is connected to a way of being to our full humanity. And so as a transformational coach, we look for those threads, those through lines. Between behaviors, beliefs, and ways of being so that we can actually create transformational change and not just compliance based change or, you know, I used to coach a lot of teachers before I started using really a truly holistic model.
I would coach them around behaviors and then think, “okay, they did that, they made that change.” Three months later they were back doing the thing that I was like, “wait, I thought we worked on this. Why are the kids in rows again, why is the classroom silent? I thought we’d worked on that.” Um, and that was before I started really digging into beliefs.
And in that case of just specifically like what are the beliefs around. Silence in the classroom and students talking, what are the teacher’s beliefs and how does that affect the choices that they make? Mm-hmm, and then the effect on students.
I’m curious, because you’ve been at this for a really long time, um, in terms of, of looking at teacher burnout and why we have this, this teacher retention issue. Um, and I think it rose to the surface a lot during the pandemic because I think that’s an extreme right. Um, but this has been around since before the pandemic.
So do you see a change or a shift in what has been the cause of teacher retention issues versus what they are now?
This is it. It, I think the situation has been exasperated and the pressure for teachers has always been tremendous and has just grown. So it’s, it’s really just been an issue. Um, you know, of a, sort of an exponential impact on teachers and it’s, and I think the underlying causes are still the same, and that’s why in responding to the burnout and the retention, really burnout is depression.
Uh, I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that often, uh, and to name that burnout is really sort of emotional overwhelm. I would say, which often shows up as depression, which often could be really classified as depression. Um, burnout kind of obscures the more serious, um, you know, underlying issues.
But I think that the, the really deep underlying issues, uh, have to do with a whole lot of system issues with the way that, um, teachers are treated, are thought about, the amount of responsibility. And so I think there’s both. What’s needed is both an individual, um, response in terms of really an individual teacher’s response as well as a systemic response.
And so when I talk about an individual’s response, that’s really what I write about in my book Onward, which is about cultivating emotional resilience. There are things that we can do, there are things that are within our sphere of influence or even our sphere of control that we can do to build our resilience to feel better to, to navigate the burnout, the depression, the overwhelm, the responsibility, and to be able to make some clear decisions. There are things we can do and there are teachers I know who have thrived in, in the pandemic, and that’s been, um, incredible to see. And they’re, they’re definitely outliers and that is not to overshadow the difficulty and the stress that so many teachers have faced.
And that’s why, again, I say there’s two things that need to happen. One is a, a total system overhaul of the really, the education experience, the teaching profession. And there are things that individually we need to do, and that includes setting boundaries and saying, and knowing when to walk away and knowing.
um, having a real clarity on our sphere of influence and our sphere of control and being able to say like, yes, this I have to let go of, but this I can do something about if I learn the skills to advocate for myself or my students or to speak up or to engage in the kind of healthy conflict that we need to be seeing in our school.
So there’s a tremendous amount that educators can do to improve their experience and to navigate, um, the challenge. and I always, and the system needs to change. Yeah. Yeah. But we can’t, we can’t affect the change of the system if we’re completely exhausted and burnt out and just sort of scrambling to stay alive.
So we need to shore up our own resilience so that we can have the energy to change the system.
It is either within our sphere of control or it is closest, and that is the thoughts that we have. The thoughts that we have, create the emotions that we have. Mm-hmm. So let’s say a student. Let’s say you give your students a direction, you ask ’em to do something, and you see a student sitting in the front.
She rolls her eyes, she puts her head down on the desk. She might even mumble something about you, and you might think, what did you just say about me? What happens next is where you can have a tremendous impact on your emotions and your resilience. The meaning that you make of that student’s behaviors.
Things will happen. They will always happen. People will do things. Students will roll their eyes. What we tell ourselves with the meaning that we make can lead us in all kinds of different directions. So if we say to ourselves, she doesn’t respect me, teachers are the most disrespected people in our professional sphere.
I don’t know how I can keep doing this. How can I do this when I’m treated like this? By students, by parents, by admin, by everybody. Now that set of thoughts is going to, is going to, um, lead to physiological changes in your body, right? It’s going to lead to your stress hormones, um, flowing, increasing, moving through your body that contributes to the emotions.
So it, it’s, it’s helpful to understand what emotions are. They are in part a result of sort of our biochemical shifts in our body, and those are affected by our thoughts. And so that can generate the anger, the grief, the frustration. We could have other thoughts in that moment. We could think. I wonder what’s going on with her, or she’s tired, or clearly she’s frustrated and maybe she’s frustrated with what’s going on in the classroom.
Maybe there’s other things. I wonder if there’s anything I can do. I wonder if I could connect with her. I wonder, you know, what’s going on with her, but so I’m saying there’s a, there’s a, like, don’t take it personally message here. Um, when we take it personally, that generally can undermine our resilience.
So there’s a whole lot more to say about the thoughts we have, the impact they have on our resilience, but that is a place for us to really dig into understanding. We create to a great extent, we create our own reality, and that’s really hard to accept. That took me a long time to accept, like my thoughts create my reality.
No, I wanna blame everybody else. I wanna say it’s admin, it’s the system. And again, it’s uh, it’s not black and white and the system does affect our wellbeing and health, but there are things that we can influence and control in terms of our day-to-day experience, our emotions, our thoughts. So, um, that’s Onward.
My book is organized around 12 habits educators can take to cultivate their own resilience. And that includes understanding emotions and, um, understanding how to work with emotions includes understanding ourselves, building community, taking care of ourselves. It includes, um, the habit of play and create and appreciate and celebrate.
And so it’s not everything and this is not, um, a panacea, but there is a lot we can.
And so you identify what thoughts you’re having and what feelings then result from those thoughts. And then what actions result from your feelings, and then what the results are from your actions. And that you can, if you can get to a point where you’re aware, to pause yourself in the middle of the cycle.
That is where the power lies. And I, I hear that from you, from this framework that you’ve been working on with teachers. And I think that’s the key, right? If we can stop ourselves in the moment, um, and identify and acknowledge that it’s in our heads. What are the thoughts that we’re having? What are the stories that we’re telling ourselves that Brene Brown says often?
Um, I think that’s super powerful. Um, and it, it does, it empowers teachers to be able to have control of their own destiny, which oftentimes we feel so out of control that that’s helpful.
But it is really hard and it does take. Practice and cultivating that habit. And that’s what one of the chapters in Onward is called, be here now. And it’s the one in which I plug meditation as a strategy. Meditation is really just the daily practice of what’s going on in my mind and how can I cultivate awareness of that.
Um, but I do, I just, I wanted to say like, yeah, it is really hard. It’s hard. Um, our, the, the potential for our impact on children when we learn how to meet students’ needs. When we learn how to do that better, we’ll see the results that we all came into this profession to see. We’ll see the student achievement, the student experience that we all long to see.
I know that’s why educators got into this and, um, and we can do through the learning. We can do that. We need to do, that we can do about our own, in our own skill set.
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Ep 23 Elena Aguilar Transcript
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The Art Works for Teachers Podcast helps teachers crack the code of creativity and use it as a hidden advantage in the classroom. Each week, we’ll use “creative clues” from authors, artists, and teachers to unlock the power of the arts and where it can take us in education today.
