Self-Care 101: Resiliency and Health in the World's Most Noble Profession

Presenters: Ray McNulty, Windham Southeast Supervisory Union, Brattleboro, VT; Ellen Harris, Plymouth State College, NH

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

III. "We Are Where We're Supposed to Be"

RAY MCNULTY: The issue here is that the quality of life is never an accident. I know many believe that some people are lucky. Before I came to this session, a friend of mine, a retired scientist who has taught me a great deal over the past few years about synchronicity (you should read the book Synchronicity — it's a very powerful book), grabbed me by the arm and said, "You know, I wanted to go up to Stacy Allison and tell her than many years ago Louis Pasteur said that fortune favors the prepared." It's not luck. The quality of life is never an accident. It's a result of high intention, intelligent direction, skillful execution, and wise choices from many alternatives. That's where we need to begin as adults, as educators, getting that message to our students.

We're so caught up in the race to have them academically prepared. I have a bunch of data that I've been collecting for years, some it from the Search Institute. Are you all familiar with the Search Institute? So you've come here for the answers, right? So here are the answers:

Organize every part of your life, right? This is such a good idea — buy a day-timer, fill in the goals every day, write down the times you are going to do everything. Compartmentalize every part of your life: this is my home schedule, this is my work schedule, this is my travel schedule, this is my back home schedule. The stress will just be gone. I don't think so!

What we find and researchers find is that life doesn't come in parts like that. As a teacher, when you say, let's break this down in make it real simple, it doesn't always happen that way. Life is not in parts. It's for real. It's not a dress rehearsal. You can't cut into pieces your home life, your work life, your relaxing life, your personal quiet time. Living is simultaneous. Jeffrey Patnaude has written a book Living Simultaneously. His belief is that life is continuous; it's not predictable. The only thing that we do know is that the only predictable aspect of life is its unpredicatability. If you don't believe it, think about how our lives have changed. What happened on September 11 changed so much of how we live. It happened simultaneously. You can't compartmentalize. You can't say, well that's only going to affect my travel. It's going to affect a lot more than your travel.

As an educator, I know that I don't always control the environment in my classroom by simply what happens in my classroom. Something can have happened the night before. I recently got a call from our police chief at 11:30 at night. He called to tell me that there had been an incident of domestic abuse in town; they had to arrest the dad. And he knew that when the four children in the family arrived at school the next morning it was going to change the complexion of what was going on in those classrooms.

Even though we recognize the unpredictability of life, we still have an awful reaction to things that happen like that. We just need to know how to understand how to deal with that. By the way, I threw this slide in the other day because I was feeling that when we talk about organizing our lives and making plans, we sometimes give the message that once you make the plan, things will work. Planning is simple. Planning isn't a dynamic process. It's flat. You make the plan. Start here, go here. Implementation is dynamic. We never know where it's going to take us. That's one of the messages I was giving the legislature. And it's one of the things we need to share with our children in our classes and share with our staff, because if we made a plan, why are we changing the plan? Plans change. Even if you're planning a trip to Disney World, and you go day by day — you buy one of those books, and you make the plan — it changes. Yet we end up putting this stress in the system when the plans change, and we have to change our perception of that.

If we seek to understand our lives as straight lines, the universe will not cooperate. This again is not a difficult thing to understand, yet we allow it to affect us tremendously. Carl Sagan said, "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." This is a piece of Jeffrey Patnow's book. He said it's simultaneous. The world does not have to agree with our plan. And these kinds of skills, this kind of a conversation, is critical to have with children at times as we start to educate them for the kind of world they're going to live in. We as adults, setting an agenda with them, we need to do this.

While humans plan, organize, and compartmentalize, attempting some semblance of order and control, the universe continues its ongoing dance between chaos and stability, from one to the next and back again. We make plans; the universe changes it. We make plans; the universe changes it. We make plans and we might not actually be able to implement the plan. Our lives need to understand that we need to be able to go and move with the flow. If we build ways to resist change and to hold on to what is, our efforts are in vain since life changes with each breath.

One of the other things I like to do in my career is I like to read The Futurist magazine in my spare time. And then I say darned if life doesn't happen as naturally as it once did. It doesn't because of the kinds of lives we lead now. Change is so rampant, it's significant. Emails, voice mails — communication changes everything that we do. I remember the good old days when you could send a letter and hope that it would be there in three days. Now it's email and you want an immediate response. Balancing life is more difficult these days. It's a very difficult task. Today it's about flow, proceeding continuously and smoothly throughout life's experiences. Understanding that change is going to happen, and teaching children and having us, as adults, realize that it is going to be that way.

A very profound Buddhist belief: "Where we are is where we're supposed to be." So many people believe that luck and all of what else creates where they're going to be. Where we are is where we're supposed to be. There's a book, The Power of Now. If you haven't read it, it's a wonderful book. Living in the now. And I'm going to suggest to you that this book really helps you to center and understand that what you can do is only deal with where you are. Making those decisions, the power of now, living in the now.

I have this on my wall, and I just wanted to share it with you. It says, "Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Laugh." I loved those pink flamingoes this morning on Mt. Everest. I don't know if you did, but I did. Practice wellness. Play with abandon, continue to learn, appreciate your friends, choose with no regret, do what you love, live as if this is all there is. Because in actuality that's what there is, what we have, it's the now. That's what we're all about. So much of understanding the stress of life is about being able to deal with the changes and what happens to you. I'm a Gary Larson fan. This is an early experiment in transportation. You want to talk about stress. It paints the picture that in our life we're going to experience lots of change and we're going to try many times to move from where we are to somewhere else. Doing that is going to create stress.

One of the things I believe in education — I believe as professionals that are trying to role model the things for our children — is that we need to be in control of ourselves. We need to model good behavior. I've seen this happen a million times. The class is sitting there, the teacher walks into the room after a morning faculty. "My God, you don't know what we have to do now. Class, I don't know how we're ever going to get there." And they create such tension in the lives of these cherubs. "They're making us do this."

We need to be the people that do a couple of things. As a commissioner, I was only a few weeks into my job when the new Leave No Child Behind Act was signed. Now, I'm not going to get into the politics of what that federal legislation will be doing for the schools and our country, but we do know a couple of things. Business has changed. And it wasn't but a couple of days later that our phones started ringing with schools saying, "What are we going to do? We do state testing now. Is there going to be different state testing? How many times are we going to do state testing?" Did you all experience something like that?

Let me tell you how I approached this. The phones all started ringing. In Vermont, we tested in 4th , in 8th, in 10th grade. We focused particularly on a lot of authentic student work. They're very expensive assessments. We pride ourselves on really launching many of these what I think are cutting-edge issues with our children, really taking each child one at a time and taking a close look. Now we're into this whole thing of identifying schools, ranking, sorting, all of those issues. The field was getting wild, and my response as commissioner — they were all looking at me like, okay, what are we going to do? And I could have said, "This is the worst thing that has ever happened to us." I could have.

And here's what I said: "We have been doing wonderful things with our kids. Our teachers are profoundly impacting the lives of our children with the work that we have been doing. We're now moving to another level. We will not lose what we have been doing because it was good work. We'll carry the successes of where that work has brought us into the next generation, wherever we go." If I were to have responded that this is the worst thing that ever happened to us, I know how the field would have reacted. Do you? It would have been an instant revolution in the field of education in Vermont. And, by the way, we were the only state that had its entire delegation in Washington vote in opposition to it, so I had even more of a reason to say, "This is not good for us." But that's not the way to approach it. That's not the model for our children.

In our classes that's not the model. When we launch new initiatives, we need to celebrate and praise the work that we have been doing, and it has an ability to cut across and reduce the level of tension. We'll do a good job. We'll do what we need to do. And we'll bring forward the important stuff that we've been doing. That's because that's how we have to approach it. We have to be good role models for our students and for everyone else. Ellen?

ELLEN HARRIS: I think Ray had a great lead-in — that we're all in a noble profession, and what we have to remember, most importantly, is that the children are the only future this human race has. And we have to take the risk. We're there for them. We have to learn how to maintain balance and control. We have to teach them through our own actions. How many have friends like Chicken Little? The sky is falling every time you see them. We have a friend — I wish I had caller I.D. at times. If anything could happen to this guy, it happens 10 times over. He's a wonderful man, but everything happens to him all the time. And it's just sort of like, "Smile, Paul. The sun's shining."

We tend to gravitate toward positive people. Think of your relationships with your friends. Are they positive? Don't you tend to move toward people who are positive? Who are smiling? Who are happy? Who are cheerful the majority of the time? Now think of the kids you're interacting with. And if you do have a teacher that comes in off of that staff meeting furious and depressed, those kids are going to pull away. They need that same positive feeling coming from you.

You're going through a lot of changes right now with the increased standards and all the pressures that that puts on you, plus all the other issues that you deal with every day in school. Your stress is going up. But we need to get you down to a balance of how to work at it. The key here is: Believe in the children. Have positive beliefs about the students. Remember, all individuals have the power to transform and change. Take the risk. What do you have to lose? You're there, and you can change. You can make those changes in the kids' lives.

All personal changes, as we heard Stacy Allison say, can affect all those around us. As she said, she learned that she was not a team player. She was out for herself. You have to learn to be a team player. You have to learn what's important, no matter what the risk. Transform and change. When you think back or I think back to teachers in my children's lives and what teachers had the most profound effect on both their lives and my life, I don't think of the teacher where he scored an "A" in algebra or an "A" in geometry. I reflect back on the 2nd grade teacher, where my son went to school — and actually he fell asleep in class, he was exhausted from something we did the night before. She let him sleep. I came in to pick him up, and she said, "Ellen, he's just exhausted." She said, "I needed to let him just rest." I valued that because she valued him as an individual. She didn't wake him up and force him to sit through the lesson plan. She knew he wouldn't respond. I valued the teachers that came to kids'games, that cheered them on, that gave them positive influence. That's the value of our professional lives.

Teachers in schools have the power to transform the lives. They can tip the scales from risk to resiliency. Think of disparate issues that have occurred in your schools where you've lashed out, and all of sudden you've escalated the issues. Bathroom control, how do we handle bathrooms? Those kids in the bathrooms! You know how our school handles it? They lock up the bathrooms. Poor kids can't go to the bathroom. Makes it harder on the kids, makes it harder on the staff. Take those issues and turn them around, make them a positive instead of a negative. Incorporate everyone's opinion. You want to have your opinion validated. So do the students. Tie everyone, empower them into it.

Remember, it's important to build self-esteem. And this is an important piece where you can build the self-esteem. Once again, believe in your students. Three factors: caring relationships, positive and high expectations, opportunities to participate and contribute. As Ray said, some of this is very common sense, but sometimes we get caught up in going forward, doing this and doing that, and we forget the simple pieces. Not only do we need to build caring relationships within the classroom, the school environment, and that we know is very important. But we also need to build caring relationships among each other, among your staff.

How many sometimes feel disjointed? I know that's a complaint that we have among a lot of teachers. You're in your own cubicle, you're doing your own thing, and you don't know what the left hand's doing over here, the right's doing over here. And you get on your own little train. You need to build caring relationships among the staff and the administration. We talk about high expectations and test standards and scores and things of that sort, and we push that on our kids — high expectations. We need to also have high expectations for ourselves. We can look at ourselves and build high expectations and not let that diminish. It's important that we keep that up there, so that we can keep everybody all together and keep the standards going. Contribute.

We need to listen. How many feel you're effective listeners? We don't listen to each other, we don't listen to the undercurrent. So we need to listen to each other. Where are they coming from? What are they saying? What are we saying? And have them participate. Now, this isn't just students, this is among the staff, this is among the administration, this is among the community.

Some of the strategies for building resilience. Teacher support. School-level approaches. Just as teachers can create a nurturing classroom climate, administrators can create a school environment that supports teacher resiliency. It's imperative that as you work together as teachers, trying to build that unity, that climate of support with each other, that your administrators are right there supporting you, that they have to give you the time you need, the support you need, the positives you need. When was the last time an administrator came and said, "What a great job you're doing." Sat in your class, moved around. When was the last they got you all together just for coffee and tea? It's important that a climate is created within the school and within the teachers.

School-level approach is staff development. Teachers should reflect personally on beliefs about resiliency, and as a staff, exchange experiences and research. How many of you get together to discuss academics? Have staff development time? How many of you get together just to discuss how your day is going, as a group, incorporated into the school day, and share notes? Very few. You may do it over lunch if you go off with a colleague, on the weekend. You need time to get away from the academics and say, "How are you handling classes? How are you coping with everything?" There's a school in Vermont that designates an hour and a half each week just for the staff to get together to talk, to work together. You need that time in order to see how people's resiliency factors are playing into the classroom environment.

Assessing school resiliency-building — evaluating your school's resiliency-building elements. We've given you a worksheet that you can use as an instrument to assess your school's resiliency. Let me take you just through the first question. Pro-social bonding: "Staff sees themselves as nurturers and work to build positive relationships with students." Second one: " Lots of before, after, and in-school activities are available to students." Third: "The work day is structured to promote meaningful interactions among staff." Next one: "Staff has been involved in creating meaningful vision and mission statement." "The school creates positive bonds with families, and the physical environment of the school is warm, positive, and inviting."

Now, the rubrics we've given you are: (1) We have this all together; (2) We've done a lot in this area; (3) We are getting started; and (4) Nothing's been done. Take a second and just fill that one in. If you have [a score of] six, my hat goes off to you. Use this tool as an instrument to take back to your school. You can complete the rest of it at your leisure. It's also a wonderful tool to have all teachers in the school complete. It's a tool you could give out to parents. It's a tool you could give out to community member to see what they're perceptions are of the school. And then take those results and possibly form an action plan as to how to address those issues to create a better environment for both yourselves and for the students.

RAY MCNULTY: To just insert a piece there, I do know that, as a superintendent, we had more action plans focused on our students' scores, but we very rarely … and we had just begun while I was leaving, we started to have action plans designed on social bonding, clear and consistent rules in our schools, getting a sense from the faculty whether we had those. Now, six is a perfect score. Anything above six requires some movement down toward six. And it's really an important test. I've spoken to many principals. They may have a belief that we have pro-social bonding. They may have a belief that we have clear and consistent boundaries. But when we've assessed it we've found that they didn't. And when we saw the school as dropping, and there's good data to support it when you start to see the school as dropping, the faculty start to behave in different ways. We start to measure it. So it's an important aspect of our action planning that I believe has been left aside for many years.

ELLEN HARRIS: So don't just do the test once. Keep repeating it through the month. Another area that you're all very aware of , school-level approaches, is the school-to-community collaborations. You remember the school is part of the larger community with widespread family resources. Use them well. As Joycelyn Elders said in that opening general session, for those of you who heard her, "We can't say you support the child if you don't support the family." We have to be very aware of reaching out to everybody in the community, parents and community members, and bringing them into the school and the school into the community. Build intergenerational programs into your classroom. Don't put all the burden on your own shoulders. There's many people out there that would be more than willing to help. Take some of the stresses off of your shoulders.

Some of the classroom approaches you can take: Teach to students' strengths. Teach students that they have innate resilience. Provide growth opportunities for students and self-assess, using the resiliency approach as an experiment. Search Institute found that if you build upon a student's strengths you build upon their resiliency factors. You've got to have a starting point. A student can't feel successful unless they've experienced it. So they have to experience it first. So find that key in each individual student, and then build upon it. We're all individuals; the students are all individuals. The better they feel about themselves, the better they can handle any adversities that they have coming their way, just as you handle them.

There's an example that Ray and I discussed of what not to do. We always tell you things that you should do. Well, this is something that you shouldn't do. On Picture Day in school, comes once a year, all the kids come into school looking like what? Like a million dollars. And what are the comments that flow through the day? What comments do you hear during the day to the kids? Positive — "You look nice," "Pretty outfit." That's great. Wonderful for the kids' self-esteem. But why is it only done on one day of the year? Why don't we do that every day of the year? They look just as nice in jeans and a t-shirt. They're comfortable. They're happy. They look just as nice. But do we make those comments all the time? No. We have to remember to always complement and be positive, to reach out to them.

One key element here is, don't be afraid to fail. We often look at failure as a bad thing. Failure's not bad. We've all failed. Look back on your own lives. You've failed many times, although you may not remember. You fell down the first time you tried to walk. You almost drowned the first time you tried to swim, didn't you? Did you hit the ball the first time at bat? Heavy hitters, the ones who hit the most home runs, also strike out a lot. R.H. Macy failed seven times before a store in New York caught on. And English novelist, John Kesey, got 753 rejection slips before he published 564 books. Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times, but he also hit 714 home runs. Don't worry about failure. Worry about the chance you miss when you don't even try. Give the kid a chance to try. Encourage them. Try new and different ideas. Take the risks. Be optimistic. Motivate them.

RAY MCNULTY: We've reached the end of our time, and I just wanted to share with you one last piece as you walk out. Hopefully, something that we said at least begins to resonate with you about resiliency, about building strength within you, building strength within our students.

If a dog were your teacher, you would learn things like: When loved ones come home, always run to greet them. Mr. Reagan, my 8th grade English teacher used to meet us all the time. He was like the puppy dog. He greeted us at that door. We knew we were welcome. Even if it was a bad day in his life, he made sure we had a good day.

Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joy ride. Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy. You know it's sad what we're doing with our children today with respect to play, and not engaging them enough in good, quality play. It's sad. We need play, too. We need those joy rides.

When it's your best interest, patience and obedience. Let others know when they've invaded your territory. You need that time for yourself. Take naps and stretch before rising. That's a wonderful one. Run, romp, and play daily. Thrive on attention and let people touch you. Avoid biting when a simple growl will do. On warm days, stop to lie on your back in the grass. On hot days, drink lots of water and lie under a shady tree. When you're happy dance around and wag your entire body. No matter how often you're scolded, don't buy into the guilt thing and pout; run back and make friends. Delight in the simple joy of a long walk. Eat with gusto and enthusiasm and stop when you've had enough. Be loyal. Never pretend to be something you're not. If something you want lies buried, dig until you find it. And finally, when someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by, and nuzzle them gently.

Hopefully, in this hour, at a very superficial level, you've gotten a sense of some of the things I think we still need to really focus our attention and time on. We've included two sheets in there about strength and resiliency. The message really is that in this run for standards, in this run for sorting and ranking, we don't forget the most important thing, which is that we're all people, we loved to be loved, we love to be connected, and one of the most important things, we love to share. So I'd like to make sure that you as educators are out there sharing the good things of life and providing that balance that's necessary.

Thanks for being with us for this hour and I hope you have a safe and wonderful day.

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