The Minimalist Educator Podcast
The Minimalist Educator Podcast
Episode 046: Thriving in Teaching: Resilience and Collaboration with Lindsay Prendergast and Piper Lee
Curious about the secrets behind teacher resilience in a rapidly changing educational landscape? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Lindsay Prendergast and Piper Lee, seasoned educators with over 40 years of combined experience, as they share their invaluable insights from their book, "Habits of Resilient Educators: Strategies for Thriving During Times of Anxiety, Doubt, and Constant Change." Discover the nine essential habits that can help educators navigate burnout and fatigue, and learn practical strategies to clarify and adapt your purpose throughout your teaching career. Lindsay and Piper's observations from hundreds of instructional rounds offer a fresh perspective on maintaining well-being and effectiveness in the classroom.
In another compelling segment, we explore the transformative power of collaboration and prioritization in education. By leveraging positive psychology and data, we discuss how educators can cultivate resilience and hope, despite the overwhelming demands of the profession. Christine and I delve into the shift from a deficit mindset to one of support, and share actionable strategies to minimize cognitive load and stress. Wrapping up, we reflect on the profound rewards of teaching and the essential role of community and collaboration in overcoming educational challenges. This episode is a heartfelt tribute to the joys and struggles of being an educator, complete with practical advice for thriving amidst constant change.
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Welcome to the Minimalist Educator Podcast, a podcast about paring down to refocus on the purpose and priorities in our roles with co-hosts and co-authors of the Minimalist Teacher Book, Tammy Musialski-Borneman and Christine Arnold.
Speaker 2:From schedules to curriculum to student behavior. Much of the work in schools can feel out of educators' control. Join us to examine nine specific habits enabling educators to regain control of their mindset and achieve utmost classroom impact. Engage in recentering purpose and navigating uncertainty to thrive in any environment.
Speaker 2:Today's guests, lindsay Prendergast and Piper Lee, have collectively been working in education for over four decades. Today, we're not immersed in coaching district and school educators around powerful practices to elevate student learning. They can be found spending evening hours, brainstorming and ideating ways to help teachers and leaders do their best work for students. Over the past three years, piper and Lindsay conducted hundreds of hours of instructional rounds with educators of all levels, and the book they will share today is not only the synthesis of these observations but a message of hope for those remaining in the classroom. As veteran educators themselves, who now have the privilege to support districts and schools around the country through their work with NWEA and the Danielson Group, piper and Lindsay are excited to share Habits of Resilient Educators, strategies for Thriving During Times of Anxiety, doubt and Constant Change with educators everywhere, and offer practical, proven, simple habits that may fuel educators' well-being and impact for many years to come.
Speaker 3:Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. Today, Christine and I are talking with two very special guests. We are talking to Lindsay Prendergast and Piper Nichols, who are the co-authors of the book Habits of Resilient Educators Strategies for Thriving During Times of Anxiety, Doubt and Constant Change, which is just like education all the time, I feel like. So welcome to the show. We're excited to have you, Piper and Lindsay. How are you today? So, we're excited to have you, Piper and Lindsay. How are you today?
Speaker 4:Thanks, so much for having us, you guys. It's great to be here. I love this podcast, so it's a treat to be on it. Thank you, so excited to join.
Speaker 5:Educators are just heroes right now and so excited to just talk about them today.
Speaker 3:How are you?
Speaker 2:Christine, I'm good. I'm very excited to talk to Lindsay and Piper and get into all of their great tips and strategies and research as well.
Speaker 3:So habits are. You know what drive us to do everyday things, and the two of you have written an entire book on nine habits that educators need to have to be resilient. How did you come up with that list?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so I think the thing. First of all, let me just say Lindsay and I had an incredible opportunity to work alongside each other. We started in the great state of Texas and then our manager asked us to move to Clark County, which is the fifth largest school district in the country. Because of that, she and I have spent the last three years we figure over 3,000 instructional rounds combined together collectively. We have sat in on PLCs, professional learning communities and done rounds just observing teachers, having conversations with teachers. As Lindsay says, there are hundreds really of habits that you could talk about or think about for effective and resilient teachers. But as we continue to do rounds and collaborate with one another, we were able to distill some of those trends that we were noticing educators had down into 10, really it's nine the 10th being resiliency, and so it's really through kind of that observation of teachers and interacting with teachers on a national level that helped us to identify and then do some research on what are the habits of resiliency in education. Lindsay, you want to add anything to that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think, touching on that piece too, piper and I also, both we grew up in what we would probably consider a very special generation, very influenced by people like Harry Wong, bless his soul, who just recently passed away texts that really influence your development as a new teacher.
Speaker 4:In particular, this is a book that is certainly focused on maybe new or early career teachers, although we would argue it is relevant at any point in your career, because these are routines and practices that we know lead to effective instruction and positive student relationships. But that's a call out there to recognizing that these are not new practices necessarily. It's a manner of infusing them with current contemporary concerns, challenges that we know we've all undergone in the past few years, that are unique. And so, with a lens on that, for the teacher that's working in classrooms today that is either brand new or came in during the pandemic and that's all they really know, for instance, or survived the pandemic and is still in the classroom, and then calling back to things that we know have worked really well in education and kind of organizing those in a manner that is manageable, sensitive to the era that we're living in, but also recognizing things that we know have always worked.
Speaker 2:There's a section towards the beginning of the book where you talk about why teachers in particular are so primed for burnout and fatigue, and I love how clearly you articulate the ways in which teachers are really, really in the line of fire when it comes to these things. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 4:I certainly can. That's something that I think that we both saw so much of in our classroom observations, but we also have experienced it ourselves. We were both in the classroom at some point and have shifted into different paths ourselves. We were both in the classroom at some point and have shifted into different paths. But watching incredible educators go through this journey during the pandemic and thereafter, of just kind of grappling with the fact that this career that they chose wasn't giving back to them what they really hoped that it would. And so that piece, I think, that you're touching on is calling out the habit around clarifying why and zeroing in on your purpose and how your purpose really can evolve throughout the different stages in your career. And that's healthy and that's normal, and in fact it's important actually to revisit and continuously revisit your purpose so that we don't become at that stage where it's literally a source of friction and disappointment or challenge and frustration.
Speaker 4:So I literally had a conversation with a colleague we all know just the other day who said I have realized that I'm no longer going to view this as a career, it's just a job, and I said that's okay.
Speaker 4:It is okay to view your job as just a job, because we often position ourselves as educators in this field, where society expects us to literally sacrifice everything we have of ourselves to do everything that we do for kids. We expect that that's what's going to then return to us our own joy or satisfaction or well-being. Right now it's like swimming in the deep end with no floaties, like you're not going to get that reward necessarily, maybe over time. But so to feel good about your job, to feel good about your career, whichever it may feel like at that time, is a journey. But to continuously revisiting your purpose and kind of micro approaches, if you will, is how we touch on that in the chapter Reflection activities. Examining even down to the literally things that you're planning for instruction and how your decision-making processes informs what it is that you're really trying to impact and influence the classroom on a broader scale, tries to attend to that need for feeling satisfied in your work and satisfied as general overall well-being for yourself.
Speaker 3:And sometimes they're inextricably connected and sometimes they need to be separated to be healthy that's such a that was a very powerful part of the book and I'm like, oh, this is right at the beginning too, so I could just imagine what's coming up for the rest of the book. But, yeah, just that distinction that it is okay to like shift your purpose, but to know what your purpose is. And so if we keep that habit and you talked about eight other habits in the book but how do focusing on these habits create educators feel more confident, more calm and capable in their roles?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so I think when we wrote the book I'll just talk a little bit about how and the purpose of kind of our desire of how it would be used I don't think it's like you read the book and then all of a sudden, shazam, you have these 10 habits that you are fluent and doing great. It's more. It was written with the intent that you would look at the 10 habits and you would be able to self-select an area that you wanted to refine and focus on, a bit like goal setting right. So you would go in and you'd be able to select a goal that you wanted to work on. There is, there are scenarios, as you probably read and then followed by some research, of why that habit is important and going to help with resiliency. And then there are activities and reflective questions for you to do, both independently, but also with a colleague or a community of colleagues in the education world, so that none of us have arrived when we finished the chapter, but it's something that we continue to work on and can refine.
Speaker 5:And so, whether you're a new teacher and you maybe are in a lot of overwhelm because you don't even know that these habits are going to help you be resilient or you're a veteran teacher that you need to ground yourself, like Lindsay said back in that. Why so? It is a reflective practice. It is in that growth mindset space of we're continuing to get better at these habits and it's kind of like juggling you might be working on one and then another one starts to become less, and so it's a book that was intended that you would choose the habit you would work on, but that you would cycle through it. Hopefully you don't read through it and put it on the shelf and collect dust. It's really a resource. Like I think about Harry Wong's book, I was constantly every year pulling that out and like, oh yeah, what do I need to do at the beginning of the year, and so that's really our intent is that it would be something that is an ongoing tool that supports the habits that teachers are navigating.
Speaker 4:And Piper, I'll add a little bit to that too is just the piece of habits.
Speaker 4:Habits in and of themselves, we know, are things that, as Piper referred to, we put them into practice regularly, and routinely they take up less cognitive space in our brains, they take up less demand of our time and thought when we're implementing them.
Speaker 4:So the idea being again supporting that kind of ongoing journey towards developing them, so that then we free up that cognitive load for, for example, considering more collaboration opportunities around enhancing our instructional planning design whatever that may be, you know, designing a new unit of instruction or learning a new skill around inquiry-based teaching, for example. So this is all bringing back to things that we really figured out or identified, if you will, through research and observations, of what are going to be the most bang for your buck insofar as things that you can learn fairly easily and put into practice fairly easily, but that will ultimately lend themselves to saving you time and develop your sense of agency and kind of control over your environment. And that's what leads to. The calm is, when you have things mastered and developed. Then you feel confident, you feel that efficacy, you feel that control over your environment and you can feel good about the day-to-day demands of the job and be more equipped to tackle the obstacles or challenges that are not planned for, which we know happen a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I could definitely see this being a book that you know you want to pick up every year in like May when you're starting to get really exhausted and stressed out and just have another reread. But I was thinking for my own practice. You know your diagram where you've got the habits there in that visual. I was thinking how great would it be to have that somewhere near your computer, somewhere near your desk and when you're having those moments of feeling stressed and overwhelmed kind of go, what could actually help me here? Do I need some feedback? Do I need to collaborate? Do I need to like get away from that negative talk? What is it that would help me right now? Did you foresee it being used in that sort of way like in the moment, spot, here and there, wherever you need it, or were you thinking of it in a different way?
Speaker 4:Well, I love the idea you just described. So my wheels are turning, actually, and I think that's going to be the fun of it, right? Is we're going to get so many more ideas from educators out in the field using it themselves, but certainly being able to put them into a structure of an icon like that of an image is intended to highlight the interconnectivity of them all. Right, but that's a brilliant point actually, too, is that it's an easy reference to saying, oh, in this situation, I've been working on that skill and now I can put it into practice right here. It's a great, great call out, thanks. Can I touch on a little bit of the interconnectivity, then? That's just as a natural segue into that piece too. I was just thinking about that of the, the way that these might foster your resiliency, for instance.
Speaker 4:A lot of this is rooted in positive psychology, which is where we we don't even really introduce, actually until almost the last chapter, which is kind of a shame, because we could do a whole lot more.
Speaker 4:You could write a whole other book separately on that, as I'm sure you would agree but in that ability to understand, say, for instance, how data can disprove myths, and so we might develop stories in our heads about things that we feel are horrible and terrible and never going to get better and all of those things. So that's about mindset. But then let's think about that. We can actually look at some data to just prove a myth that we have, that that student is always late. Let's gather that source of data and that's a possible opportunity then to develop hope, which is an aspect of positive psychology. When you have hope and you work with that relationship with that student, your approach is different. You're no longer a negative or a deficit mindset about it. You're thinking about the things that you can do to support that relationship differently. So there's just some super micro examples there, but that they really are all very interconnected.
Speaker 3:Christine and I, obviously, you know, we're on the Minimalist Educator and we have written a book on minimalism and education and there's a lot of crossover in our books, which is, you know, like I just found, about minimalism. We talk a lot about adding value and decluttering, and so how do habits, support, teachers, kind of get down this road to minimizing and decluttering?
Speaker 4:So, pipe, I'm going to take this one to start with and I know you have things to share too, but just I could have I mean, you can mirror our books almost, I think, in a sense, right Like so you know, you know we read yours before we wrote ours and definitely infused some content in there, in particular in a chapter on prioritizing in a sea of initiatives.
Speaker 4:But all that is to say that what we feel is prioritization is a practice that can be really daunting, particularly at the amount of information that teachers are asked to intake, as you know right, and so contributing to the skill development, if you will, which is very much elaborated on in depth in your book and touched on in a chapter in ours, crosses over to that.
Speaker 4:We have to put it into practice on a regular basis, but then it becomes routine, it becomes just the way we do things, so it doesn't take up that cognitive load. And then those we know from, basically from research backing it, that those are things that enable us to free up time to think about more joyful things or more sophisticated skills and concepts that we need to grow and develop, and so we feel more in control in this area of prioritization. For example, we realize that although there may be an entire ocean of things in front of us, we don't have to swim through all of them at once, if you will. And so there's a lot of strategies kind of dissected in that from your book in and of itself. So, but that's the.
Speaker 5:Again, the intent is to help clear the weeds, if you will, for the reader of thinking through that as a more procedural process, if you will, for the reader of thinking through that as a more procedural process, when I think about prioritization and minimalizing our lives, because we just have so much always coming at us, and especially at educators, that really we truly are better together in that space. So if we are trying to prioritize in a sea of initiatives which is one of our habits you can do that alone, but it's really best to be done with your colleagues so that you are, you know, you're all collaborating and you're making sure that you are prioritizing. Let's say there's an ELA, maybe initiative, there's a new curriculum, so maybe doing that with somebody so that you can figure out what part of this curriculum do I need to implement and I don't have to do all of it. But it's that whole collaborating with others maybe an instructional coach, maybe a curriculum coach, maybe your principal, maybe veteran teachers to help really lift the load of trying to do everything on our own all the time and as educators.
Speaker 5:I think at the beginning of this podcast I called them heroes and that's a double-edged sword because we think, oh, I have to be a hero and I'm naming like man, you're doing a heavy lift and you're doing this on your own and you are being heroic. But I don't want educators to think. There's this myth that we have to do it all and be perfect at it, all Right, and so I think we have to be really, really careful when we're prioritizing, like what is really reasonable and what part of, let's say, an ELA curriculum do I need to hone in on? Or a math curriculum, whatever it is, but it's really best done together.
Speaker 4:Can I add one more example, speaking of better together, piper and I work together very well, as you can see here, but she uses a phrase that I've always kept in my head of thinking about helping our teachers who feel like they need to do it all to get good at one thing at a time. So let's get good at this first. And we often say to teachers we have a new curriculum, you need to have it all, go figure it out right. And we had that experience in a district and watched teachers. Just, they were paralyzed right. And piper said what if we just said let's just get good at this one piece of the curriculum? All of the units are structured this way let's look at this one piece of it and let's all get really good at that, and then we'll take the next one. And it's an example of prioritization. But you feel like you're developing your skills and then you're confident and you're like, oh, I can do this, it's it's a positive twist on that.
Speaker 3:I think that highlights the, the capability too for people right, like I remember moving in when I moved to New York City and I started teaching you know, totally different curriculum and all these things and I was just handed all this stuff and I was a newer teacher, like three years in something like that, and I'm, like you know, deer in the headlights Cause I'm like where do I even start?
Speaker 3:And even with a coach in the building I was like I don't even know what I'm prioritizing, cause I just have to do all these things. So how often does someone say to you just focus on the one thing, and that just would bring so much relief to so many people when you can just prioritize that thing to get good at, because then everything else, you know, you end up doing the same thing. But it's just a relief when someone gives you that permission. I think it's the permission that we seek sometimes and you know, sadly, as professionals, we, you know we're operating under administrators and principals and and other people, so we want to make sure we're doing the right thing.
Speaker 5:But yeah, that permission is a big piece, I think this is where our habits there's like an intersection, where they kind of weave in and out, and so I'm thinking of the habit of don't isolate. We need to collaborate. Collaborate, don't isolate is the name of the habit. And then you think about prioritizing. It's much easier to prioritize when you're collaborating with somebody, right? And so this is where there's like intersections within our habits that they're very different, but there's a call out that they are infused and there's some, some gray lines there, which is why actually distilling down to 10 habits was challenging, right, because there's a lot of different habits that kind of intersect with one another. But really that collaboration and we name it Better, together is so essential when thinking about prioritizing.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, One of the things that I'll often bring up, too, in workshops and as part of our book too, is advocating for that work together. Right, because we can't we really can't do things on our own, and no one should expect that we should or will or can you know. We just seek a lot of comfort in being able to collaborate with each other and bringing someone along on the ride, right, like, we're going to do this together. We're going to, I'm going to open this cupboard and I'm going to tackle this, but will you come with me and then just make it your habit, right? So it's just it's. I love seeing the crossovers in our books, that's for sure, so I really enjoyed your book.
Speaker 5:I think about the researcher John Hattie, and he names all of this collective teacher efficacy. Right, we distill it down into the habit of you know, don't isolate, make sure you're collaborating, and the sea of initiatives. But really his research was around collective teacher efficacy. We all have uh superpowers and when we come together, uh collectively, we can learn from one another and the lift isn't as hard, right?
Speaker 2:So I think, um, it's, we maybe put it into less, uh, academic language, but John Hattie's work is really calling out these two habits language, but John Hattie's work is really calling out these two habits Absolutely, and if there's something that we can generalize about teachers, it's probably that they're going to be willing to help each other, so it's good to utilize that as much as possible. I think, unfortunately, it's just about time for us to wrap up today, but we do always ask for a pare down pointer from our guests. So do you have, besides all the wonderful things you've already shared with us, do you have a pare down pointer that you would like to share with us today?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I would say the pare down is really that we are better together and that this book was intended to be read with a partner, not in isolation. To be read with a partner, not in isolation. And so and we would welcome our listeners to find a thinking partner, a book buddy, and we also have a book study that's for free on the Cortland website that we wrote so that people can do this collectively, and so really, the message is we see you and we value the educators that are working so hard and we are here for you.
Speaker 3:Thank you, ladies, so much for being with us today. It was wonderful just talking about the things that we love about education, even though it's hard, but there are definitely ways that we can work through it together. So thank you for being with us today. Such a treat.
Speaker 5:Thank you, it's been a treat. Thank you, it's been a joy. Thank you, guys, so much for your time.
Speaker 2:Today's episode was brought to you by Plan Z Professional Learning Services forward-thinking educator support. Find out more at planzplservicescom.
Speaker 1:Be sure to join Tammy and Christine and guests for more episodes of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. They would love to hear about your journey with minimalism. Connect with them at PlanZPLS on Twitter or Instagram. The music for the podcast has been written and performed by Gaia Moretti.
