052 - Rejuvenating Educators' Learning Capacity with Allison Rodman

Welcome to SEL in EDU.

Where we discuss all things social and emotional in education. I'm Krista and I'm Craig and we are your hosts on this journey. All right, all right, all right. Sel in EDU family. It is a new year at well. When we're recording it's a new year, but when you hear this, it's probably going to be frigid. You're going to be deeper. You feel this because it's like February or something like that. But it's okay, you know. Hopefully this warms you up like a good cup of cocoa. How you doing, krista? What's going on in your world?

I am good, I am good, you're right, you mentioned the frigid. I'm not looking forward to frigid. I'm already planning warm weather vacations coming up. But I am in a good spot, ready to tackle this 2024 year. How are you?

You know I'm I'm excited, I'm anxious. I carry a lot of things. I'm excited, I'm anxious. I carry a lot of different feelings right now, but it's all good Right now. It is a week from my birthday and this is your theme is Renaissance. I'm inspired by Beyonce. You might have heard about that on the Pride podcast, but we we're going to get all into it today and I'm excited about our guests. A great friend to both of us, an absolute superstar in the world moving and shaking, and I'm really excited to get on in.

So so, mike, we've been inviting her for months now and she's incredibly busy, but good, good, busy, and so we're like the stars aligned and we were able to get our schedules and her schedule to match up, and so I am so excited, as the L and E view family, to introduce you, to introduce you to Allison Rodman, our dear friend Ali. She is an ASCD emerging leader that Craig and I have known for going on 10 years now. She is the founder and chief learning officer of the learning loop and education consulting organization that provides professional learning, design, facilitation and leadership coaching services to district schools, nonprofit organizations and businesses internationally. Like I mentioned, ali is an ASCD emerging leader and an ASCD faculty member. She is the author of still learning strengthening professional and organizational capacity. It just dropped last year, just a couple months ago.

You can still get your copy hot off the presses and she also authored personalized professional learning, a job embedded pathway for elevating teacher voice, and that was from 2019. Her work focuses on adult learners and she has written for educational leadership, on professional learning, effective teams, educator wellness, and has also written for Education Weeks, classroom Q&A and Edutopia. Ali brings experience as a teacher, instructional coach, school leader, director of teaching and learning, director of professional learning and school board member. Hello, our dear friend Ali, how are you doing today?

Hey, Krista and Craig, it is so exciting to have an opportunity to join you. You are absolutely right this is long overdue and I am just feeling joyful today. I've got to be honest. It has been super exciting working with folks to put some of the new work from the book into play but also think about some of the generative opportunities that lie before us in education right now. New years always sort of have that promising feel to them, right, but it just seems like we're finally sort of turning the corner and people are having this energy and this joy about the profession that I hope continues to amplify, moving forward.

I am really processing the fact that at this time, it's like the third of January by the time this podcast comes out. Like I said, we're in winter, and so my first question, which I'm excited about, comes from chapter two, which focuses on alignment. So chapter two is still learning. So if you ain't got copy, you need to get it, and this is one of those like you keep revisiting it when I tell you just absolute gems across the board. But I'm going to dig right on in because I feel like this is this is very resonant for me in regards to alignment, and I'm thinking about my future self as I also think about my past self and past behaviors.

You are in this wonderful text.

You talk about discipline, of alignment calls us, calls on us to create congruence between our purpose and our practice, and at this time, I would imagine people are like myself got weight loss goals, we got finance goals, we got all these things and you're also thinking about, okay, I'm in my role or in my business and I'm trying to do these things, and alignment element is so critical to you having complete clarity of who you are and where you are in your work, as you also give yourself grace to evolve through this process of alignment.

Almost said a two minute, but alignment, because two minutes is another element. But I'm going to talk about alignment and so I'm really curious, from what you mentioned in in your comments a few moments ago about the state of education, and we have a number of folks who are really rethinking whether or not teaching is the profession for them, a number of school leaders who are also asking themselves is this, can I continue to live in purpose and passion and doing this work? And I'm really curious about your pulse on the work that you're seeing across. You know the communities you're working with the nation, the globe. I'm really curious about what. What are some of your observations around people working in alignment, especially the teaching profession today?

Craig, you are absolutely correct that people are tired educators across the system or burnt out. It doesn't matter what position you're in support staff member, a teacher, school leader, district leader board member. I think it's tiring and we continue to add more and more elements to it as we go. But I think what's becoming incredibly promising to me and sort of generates my initial response around joy is that the educators who are staying are staying from a place not just of self care but community care and really thinking through how do we continue to support one another in actionable and sustainable ways? And when we look at that discipline of alignment, so often we ask educators, why do you show up right, why do you do the work that you do? And nine out of 10 times they're going to respond for students, for kids. That's, that's why we do what we do.

Unlike other professions, we don't always do the best job of clarifying, as you noted, those goals personally and professionally. So, while we certainly get out of bed in the morning for students, unless we have clear goals that we're working toward that are going to help us feel that sense of fulfillment in our personal lives, going to get more tired and we're going to continue to feel more burnt out. So that practice, the day to day things that we do and that fill up our time and our task list, have to align to the core purpose that we set for ourselves. Whether it's a New Year's resolution, whether it's some type of growth objective that we've established, or we just want to have better relationships with family and friends, the day to day actions that we take have got to be aligned to those goals.

I think one of the things that when I read the book that I appreciated so much was that so often we talk about social, emotional learning and the five castle competencies and we talk about it, like you said, how are we supporting our students?

And you took it from a point of view of what are we doing to support our staff, to get them to the point that they can better serve students.

And so in your book you've taken adult learning theory, you've taken experiential activities around skill development and woven them with those couple castle competencies to get a, a toon mint and alignment. And one of the things you just mentioned in the alignment is the goal setting and I think that that in my perspective, knowing you for as long as I have, you are a master goal setter and really good at making it actionable, and that's something that, when I think about, is not one of my SEL strengths. So let's say and I'm telling all of the SEL and you do your family like if you were worried or like how do I make this happen? You need to get in contact with that Lee because she is your woman to get it done. So let's say we take that one off the table If you had to think about one of the other SEL competencies or skills that you feel is your superpower and that you really lean into. Which one would you say that is, and what did that look like for you when you were writing that part of the book?

So my other, if you will, sel superpower is the idea of collective efficacy. As you noted that discipline of alignment is really rooted in self efficacy. Right, how do you set the goals, how do you continue to improve and get better as an individual? But in my work I really tried to translate that beyond the individual level to the team and the system level. So, thinking about from a collective standpoint, what does this look like to help teams form really strong goals? How do we put in a cadence of accountability where that, you know, thought of being accountable isn't a dirty word but instead something that's truly supportive? And how do we help teams make the time and the space for commitments to each other but also their collective growth? So I really look at, you know, that superpower is being able to move beyond the self, from an alignment perspective to one of team and organization through collective efficacy.

And I know that other times that I've had the opportunity to hear you speak at conferences and on podcasts, you're talking a lot about reflection being part of that process. Could you speak a little bit more about that, because so much it seems like we need to go, go, go, produce, produce, produce, and you've been instrumental in helping educators especially realize that there's just as much value in the pause.

The title of the book, still learning, is actually a little bit of a play on words, right? So when we look to educators, we look to them to be these constant learners for our students, who continue to keep pushing forward, learning new things, trying new strategies. We're in a constant, perpetual state of movement as educators and that is to some degree part of our professional responsibility. We can't approach learning in the same way that we did 20 years ago. We know so much more about brain development and the way that individuals learn that that, quite honestly, would be irresponsible. So we do have that responsibility to continue learning and pushing our practice and in new directions, kind of, as Jennifer Abrams would refer to, stretching our learning edges, if you will.

But there's also value in stillness and calm. So the other dimension of that, as you noted, krista, is this component of reflection. We encourage our students to reflect on their work, to think about where they were successful or what their strengths and their growth opportunities are get all too often for our educators, we get stuck in this constant cycle of busyness and we don't promote stillness and calm with the same degree of importance that we give to it with our students. Right? So being able to recognize that reflection is as much or more a part of the professional learning process as that action tool or that pure reflection or that team meeting and really honoring that and giving it the space that it deserves within our learning communities.

This makes me think about part of one element that you recommend, or one of the techniques and strategies that I think about is the tuning techniques. You speak about filtering with fences. I've been adopting this for a while, actually, I talked to my husband at times about creating boundaries and being very clear about how do you make sure you don't stack several meetings all at one time and not have buffer for self-care purposes or to pause, because you talk about pausing fairly often. What I think about with filtering with fences is something that I guess I've created like a little combo. You get a number one and I want a little extra sauce on it With filtering with fences.

For those who are like okay, craig, what are you talking about? Being able to really prioritize, this is what is important this week. This is part of my goal setting. This is some of the strategic work that I'm doing, whether or not I'm a classroom teacher or I'm a leader, and being very clear about that, but also then saying, well, how am I going to structure my time to ensure that people maximize and get the best of you when they can, when they're meeting with you or you're producing content, and that you're setting aside time to say, okay, I might have a 45-minute meeting and then I'm going to have 15 minutes, that's just my time, whether or not it's meditation or power walk or even a part that I'm just tapping on because, like I said, I love the combo deal of cultivating capacity. I'm saying, hey, I got 45 minutes to meet with someone to work on something. That's super important. But I also think about that 15 minutes could be used to innovate like a turtle.

I think Vicky Davis and even our good friend Kenny McKee talked about that in Compassionate Coaching is the book with him and Kathy right? I think Kathy is this co-author. I really appreciated that because we recognize that burnout is real. We want to work in passion, we want to work in purpose. We don't want to give up or give in to the exhaustion of just trying to run this race and do this incredible work. But I think it's very formidable for people to hear from you on, well, what does this really mean? To filter offenses or to cultivate your capacity? And how do you make sure that, with that self-efficacy that you talk about, that they do it in a way that's honorable to the work, but it's also just as honorable to who they are, where they are at this time in their lives. So how do you build that balance and still keep moving forward?

So, if I'm being transparent, that term fences actually came from August Wilson's work right, his great play fences and one of the things that he outlines is that fences serve two purposes One is to keep people out and also is to keep people in. So in coming up with that phrase filter with fences the intention was very much that dual, meaning that, as educators, to engage in this work in a sustainable and fulfilling way, we have a need and we need to make a commitment to keep the right people or things or influences out so that we can stay focused on our work. And that might mean unsubscribing from some email lists or recognizing that you don't need to act on every promo that comes in, or thinking about what tools are actually serving you well now versus ones that maybe served you well 10 years ago, but then also using those fences to keep people in. So a good friend of mine actually painted a watercolor that's on the wall of my office and it says if it's not a joyful yes, it's a no, and I consistently try and remind myself of that of you know, am I keeping the joyful things inside those fences and how am I helping educators to do the same?

So I've had an opportunity over the course of the past several months to facilitate a number of workshops on this discipline of alignment specifically, and following one of the engagements, a superintendent came up to me at lunch and he said thank you so much.

This was unbelievably powerful. And I said well, can you share with me, like, what was your big takeaway? And he said you were the first person in our profession who has ever given me permission to schedule reflection on my calendar, as if that was a meaningful and worthwhile use of my time. And he's like. I know it is at my core and in my educational philosophy but, for whatever reason, it's just not valued right. It's one of those things that gets filtered out instead of filtered in. So, being really thoughtful about you know, are we scheduling meetings with ourself, whether that's for a workout or a meditation or a mindfulness session or even just reading time, and are we giving it that place of significance in the same way that we might give a meeting with our supervisor or a teammate or someone that you know within our family that we care deeply about?

Yeah, I built that in the schedules that well, I have taken a pause in my full-time career as, like, a school leader and educator, and I am a full-time consultant.

For those who may not have known that, that transition happened during our season two. But what I found powerful was I had the shift from having several meetings back to back and I had to build in things that I knew at a joy. So I actually built in a 15-minute walk around my campus or outside just to breathe and oxygenate my body. I also built in time to say, craig, go and see kids, because if I'm spending all my time with adults, do that Built in time for mindfulness, meditation and all and gratitudes. I may not always be good with doing like a reflection journal, but I have a gratitude wall where I literally will write down these are the things I'm grateful for today and it helped to fuel just a little bit more energy and a little bit more focus into the work ahead. So I really appreciated those elements that helped to compliment and affirm some of the practices that I've been engaging in as a leader in the last few years.

Absolutely. We can't just always start doing new things right. At a certain point we've got to be comfortable stop doing and that's okay, to be able to take that step back and say is this the most intentional move for me to take at this point?

So that leads me to think. I actually have two questions and they're sort of related, but the first one is this so when we're talking about pause and reflection during COVID, I actually was sad to not okay. So I love my house, I am totally a homebody and I could live here for days and not leave. But after a while I realized that I did some of my best, thinking when I was in the car, like doing drives, that I would leave myself voice messages about new ideas. I also found that when I'm blowdrying my hair in the morning, my mind starts to wander. So my first question is Ali, where do you do your best reflection and how do you make that intentional during your day?

Very similar to you, krista.

I have a lot of ideas come to me in the car right and in some ways I wish I had more driving engagements, because I come up with some of my really good ideas and you know I either voice record or I keep a quick notebook so I can jot down a phrase or two at a stoplight.

But I also, like Craig, have been really trying to make time for those consistent walks and I'm not talking about, you know, like throw on my sneakers and all my workout gear and do like a full, like optimal heart rate situation. It's like no, just, you know, put on some things that are probably more slippers than shoes right and take like a walk around the backyard or a walk around the neighborhood just to clear my head. I feel like I get so much more inspiration from being outdoors and in the fresh air and engaging in some of that movement. And even if I'm not necessarily busy right so I'm moving but I'm not in that constant cycle of busyness that has been really healthy for me as a means to generate new ideas and just kind of step back and reflect on what the most thoughtful next step is.

And along those lines I kind of want to go back a little bit more macro and think about the book again and the five castle competencies and how we're working at priming educators so that we're building that organizational capacity. Are there not are there, because I know that there are, but in your experience, which of those pieces, of those five pieces, would you say that districts and organizations maybe struggle with the most, and what would you recommend for them to gain some ground in helping to build educator capacity?

One of the areas that I see them struggle with the most is that organizational learning.

We are still in very much a traditional state of schooling where it's a building with four walls and bell schedules and you know very you know strict blocks and pieces that we try and move around from from space to space.

And there are some schools and districts that are doing really innovative things around personalization and flexible scheduling and figuring out how are we meeting both students and educators where they are. But to a large degree we're just not there yet as a profession to be able to say how do we move beyond this traditional notion of schooling to create spaces that are truly learning ecosystems? I find it somewhat ironic that schools, from not only a student learning perspective but also an adult learning perspective, aren't looked at by other professions as a model of learning. Right, we don't have these businesses or these med schools or other places coming to our school systems to say show us how adults learn best. That's problematic for me. You know, I very much think that those we should be models of those spaces and we have a responsibility to look at those different dimensions of organizational learning to become deliberately developmental in a way that not only models learning for students but, quite honestly, models learning across the board and through professions.

I have to say to when you I love that term deliberately developmental, and I think often it might come back to having to have some hard conversations around what is the purpose of schooling and what is holding us back from creating those ecosystems that are more flexible. I'll just kind of leave that there, but I think that's a piece that that really needs to be unpacked.

And you know I've seen this at different levels, right, I've been a school leader, I've been an instructional coach, I've been a board member for you know almost three full terms at this point. So I very much have an understanding, through those different lenses, how our systems operate. But I just we can do it better collectively. We can do better on behalf of our educators and our students.

I am, I as a you and Chris, a word just discussing. I was thinking about, well, where, as a school leader, as a colleague, as a teacher, if I have a PLC, if I have a you know, like this is our early childhood team or we're a team of specialists who work in a particular how would we actually pause and create time where we could focus, refocus or center this work? And I'm like even take I really love collective efficacy. I think that there are some opportunities, even for individuals, to go on a retreat and actually just dig into this, do a pulse check for yourself and then create some really tangible action steps that can come from this. And so I'm curious for folks who are going to have the opportunity to hear our podcast and I know that they see you, they're going to see you and have seen you across, you know the social media ways, with all the great work that you're doing I'm just curious like it may feel tough at this point in a year when people hear this podcast and they're like look, I just don't have another moment because we're about to go into testing season or we're, you know, depending on you, know where where folks are, if you're up north in March and April generally like testing season, and you'll see schools in the South that are actually getting close to the end.

And so what would be your advice for folks who may need to recenter pause, refocus, and they and you really do want to engage in some of these practices, take some of these tools and really dig into them in a meaningful way and do it in a community, do it in collaboration with folks. What would be your suggestions for teachers and leaders who are trying to figure out, well, how could I adopt and actually employ some of this really great work over the course of the summer, the spring and going into the new year?

I think it's a three step process, right. So first you need to step back, then you need to recenter and then you need to step forward, particularly at this point in the year. So that step back phase is really using that end of year opportunity to you know, not to say be cliche and keep repeating the same term over and over again, but really to reflect. And too often those end of year reflections for teachers as well as leaders have been rooted in the developmental frameworks that we have, right. So whether that's an observation framework, that's, you know, more widely known, or one of the ones that's been locally created, often it's grounded in domains and targets and and those different components. That's important. But I think in that stepping back there's also another layer of that reflection to understand how did you grow this year as a learner and what are your goals and areas of focus for future growth, moving forward, right. So that's that's kind of the other layer of that step back reflection. Then there's an opportunity, probably in the summer months, to do some recentering, whether that's with our leadership team that may or may not include teacher leaders to be able to say where in our team practices and team models can we continue to refine, because the reality is, educators work best when they use that appropriate nexus between structure and agency, where they feel that they have a voice and some command in the process and are being heard, but because they're so busy and they're so overwhelmed, they also have the structures and the tools to guide those processes. So that recentering time really is a self assessment and self evaluation of our organizations and our teams to say where can we provide more structure, whether that's through action planning tools or protocols or team agenda templates, to be able to support some of these practices that that we're looking to incorporate more firmly within our learning community. And then, finally, there's that idea of stepping forward, and I mentioned earlier the importance to stop doing at the same time that you start doing.

So that element of stepping forward is as much about stripping old practices as it is about layering in new ones.

We've all sat in those beginning of the year sessions where it becomes the new flavor of the week and we're like what's the new initiative, what's the big, like rah, rah moment that we're going to like have piled on for the next month or two and then no one's going to remember.

I would much rather rather have an administrator come in and say you know what these practices served this well five or 10 years ago. We're going to stop doing them and that's okay. And this is the area of focus that we're going to have collectively, because we know, based on data and team feedback and how we see our students and our educators grow, that this is what's going to serve us best in this moment. But that's a tough conversation to have as a leader, right to be vulnerable and say, hey, five years ago I told you this was the thing. But now I'm going to be honest and say we know more about learning and we know more about brain research now and it's okay to be able to say we're going to stop doing that because for our kids today and for our educators today, this is where we are and this is how we continue to move forward together.

I find that to be very encouraging because, again, like Craig said, it could be a really difficult time of year when people are listening in on this, but we are also seeing that it can be a.

There are things you can do or not do or reflect on in the next couple months, and this book offers these protocols, these activities that, even if it's not done in full faculty, but there are small communities that come together to learn about each other, to share about who they are and how they're showing up and how you can support each other.

And I'm also thinking, too, that this would be a prime time to be getting ahold of you, to start working on the summer work, so that they can think about what do we need to strip away, what is not serving us and what do we need to do so that we can create a plan of action that is not overwhelming, that seems doable, that honors people where they're at and their gifts that they're bringing, like their SEL superpowers. And so, as people are listening to this and they're like you know what I need to get ahold of this book. I also want to remind people that your first book was on personalized professional learning, so not everybody needs to be doing the same thing, and if you partner that with your second book, I think that you could be setting up organizations to just skyrocket. How can people get ahold of you and what is the best way to be able to do that? Because they're going to want to start working with you to set up a strong foundation moving forward.

All of my contact information and samples of my work is available on my website, and that's wwwTheLearningLoopcom. I also have a pretty active social media presence at the Learning Loop across a multitude of platforms, and I send out a weekly newsletter. So if some of the things that we're talking about today really resonate with you or you want to learn more and get some free resources, you can sign up for that newsletter right on my website, wwwTheLearningLoopcom a front slash newsletter and it'll come right to your inbox.

Thank you. I also know that you often offer free webinars to give people a sense of what you offer for free already and then how far it can go. So I know that I just want to remind people to keep an eye on that website and on your social media for that.

Yep, absolutely. We're doing webinars once a month at this point. We just finished up one today that was focused on a lot of these concepts for teams, right? So how do you move beyond the individual to the team level so that replay is available on my website and definitely beyond the lookout? Not only will I be hosting these individually, but I'm bringing some really awesome guests on in the months to come. Thank you.

Craig, am I missing anything? Any last questions we've got? Well, we've got Ali in our space for a bit.

I mean there are tons of questions. I'm just like, where's the retreat on the wonderful island that we're gonna, you know, like chapter one, chapter one? I'm like, could I, where can we find a nice little island like tropical environment, just to do a tumor work, Like I could sit and experience such joy in actually taking a pulse on where I'm at and moving forward. So I'm just like, where's that at? Where's the part for that?

Craig, I think it's really important to remind folks too. You know, when I was working on this book with ASCD, I knew that the learning was gonna continue to evolve right, so it was important to me that it not just be a static printed text, but with every chapter there is a whole resource page on my website of downloadable and editable tools that, as I continue to work with schools and districts and organizations, I've been adding to, so that, even beyond the book itself, there are the tools and the action steps necessary to put it into action. It's not just concept, but instead something that you can really move forward within your school community.

I'm excited. So I'm just saying y'all, stop playing. Don't just get one for you, get one for your friend, like this is where you gotta buy two. You can't buy one. You gotta, like you know that self care for two of y'all or a whole group have some wine, go through it. It's all good in my opinion. It's just me.

The king of nallies and you know what. Who better to say than like hey? We've known Allie for 10 years. This isn't just like a hey, we just met last week. Absolutely Gotta listen to us, trust us people.

Well, sel and EDU family it has been. It is a continued honor that we are in the presence of Allie Robyn Alison Robyn for those who you know. Yeah, I ain't got there yet. You know, I don't know. I'm just saying you'll get there in a second. This, like so many things, and I'm just like I've been personally blessed many times by her and I think you. I wish I could just say this in a way like look, you gotta get a. I'm holding a book in my hand, like I got pages ready, you just gotta grab a book. Anyway, let me focus because Chris is looking at me like Craig, you know.

No, no, actually I just got an idea, Don't worry. Chris, let it get. Everybody who responds to this podcast and says I need a copy, we do a raffle and we'll buy an extra book. Allie, could I send it to you and get you to sign it? And you know, we'll randomly like, we'll give it two weeks after the podcast drops and anybody who ties this all, including Allie, on social media we'll put your name into a hat and then you will get a copy. Then you only need to buy one more for somebody else.

Well, and I'll buy the other hey.

There we go, there you go.

So it's not just one. You get two, two, we might pick two people and it might be four, I don't know. We'll see what happens.

And you know what? We'll throw in some still learning swag to go along with it. So we'll put in some stickers and all kinds of fun stuff so that you can get that daily reminder of hey, I got a pause, that's okay.

This is fabulous. I like this idea. We're a good team, yes.

Perfect. Sounds good, sounds like an Oprah moment. Okay, all right, that's all.

You're gonna fuck and you're gonna fuck and you're gonna fuck. You're gonna get the swag.

This is amazing. So SELA EDU family we could keep going on and on, but it has been an incredible pleasure having Alison Robman here, author of Still Learning and more. We are excited You'll get all of this information in the notes and all of that we're gonna tag all across social media and the learning loop is where you need to be. That's one of the great parties that you can enjoy for yourself and more. But until then, until we come back again and we're gonna have another incredible guest who will share their insights, we will ask you to hold yourself dear and hold yourself tight and make sure you stand in the SELA light. We love you Y'all. Take care. N almonds hard core.