Outliers in Education from CEE
Co-hosted by Erich Bolz and Eric Price, “Outliers in Education” from CEE, delves into the stories of school leaders who have found uncommon success in meeting the common challenges facing educators across America. Guest educators share how they’ve overcome everything from dwindling graduation rates, disenfranchised students and staff, angry school boards and underfunded mandates in their quest to deliver an equitable, top-quality education to the young people upon whom our shared future depends. Supported by cutting edge research from CEE, this podcast is a great listen for anyone interested in changing America’s educational systems for the better.Produced by Jamie Howell, Howell at the Moon Productions (www.howellatthemoon.com)
Outliers in Education from CEE
Turning To-do's into Ta-da's! with Jamie Johnson
Jamie Johnson is out to foment a "rebellion against overwhelm" that threatens education in this country.
Educator, author, and coach Jamie Johnson left her work as a teacher so that she might have an even greater impact on education in this country. Her first salvo, a new book entitled "Teach and Still Have Time to Pee" is a serious take on tackling teacher burnout couched in entertaining tales from the front lines of education. Well-researched and wide-ranging, Johnson's work sets forth everything from practical hacks for educator well-being to proposals for moving education policy forward.
In this episode, Johnson advocates for a world where educators don't just survive the school year, but thrive in a more balanced, fulfilling career that improves student outcomes along the way.
Find out more about Jamie Johnson and her book at:
Amazon
Kindle version
Facebook
Instagram
Or reach out to her directly at jamie@kickassteacher.com
"Outliers in Education" is a project of CEE, The Center for Educational Effectiveness. Find out more at effectiveness.org.
Produced by Jamie Howell at Howell at the Moon Productions.
Outliers in Education is brought to you by CEE, the Center for Educational Effectiveness. Better data, better decisions, better schools. To find out more, visit effectivenessorg.
Eric Price:Educators are on overload. Never ending task lists piled on top of daily emergencies, hostile boards, angry parents, troubled kids. Really it's just too much. But there are ways to lighten the load. Discover how to turn your to-do list into a ta-da list and have the energy to spare All of that on today's episode of Outliers in Education.
Ad VO:I think we really need to change how we look at what we do in schools. Everything that we do as educators, it just comes back to people.
Eric Price:I love it, even when it's hard, especially when it's hard.
Ad VO:Ultimately, this is about what's best for kids.
Eric Price:Welcome everyone and thank you for taking time to join us for another insight-filled, action-packed episode of Outliers in Education. I'm Eric Price, here as always, with my partner in podcasting, eric Bowles, from the Center for Educational Effectiveness. Time, energy, motivation Educators are finding these things in shorter and shorter supply these days and, not surprisingly, we're starting to lose them. We constantly hear from talented, devoted teachers and administrators who are being crushed by the demands of our job. Yet the only solution seems to be to do even more, and even to do it faster to implement new initiatives in the classroom, track more data, take more meetings, all on top of the teaching they all signed up to do in the first place. Bowles, it seems like it's a pressure cooker out there. What do you?
Erich Bolz:think. Well, I totally agree, and I've had the good fortune to sub as a substitute administrator at the building level once a week since last May and it's done a couple of things for me. One it's humbling, because the further away you get from your job, the better you are at it. So this keeps me just close enough to the field to know that I too struggle like everybody else. Also want to make it direct tie to what we do at the Center for Educational Effectiveness. We measure teacher satisfaction, teacher overload, teacher advocacy, which is a fancy way of saying how well do teachers work together, teacher's relationship with principals, how well principals work.
Erich Bolz:I was also struck by the notion that teachers work 54 hours a week. In the state of Washington their contract had worked 37 and a half hours a week. Just under half that time is actually devoted to working with students. So in addition to devoting copious hours a week essentially to volunteerism, a lot of that doesn't translate into directly working with the children that they serve. So there are a lot of conundrums that we're facing out there in public education at this time. Ep totally agree.
Eric Price:Yeah, and I think that's frustrating. When you signed up to do this teaching and it ends up being that proportion. It's a heavy load, but our guest today has spent years in the teaching trenches and has emerged with a plan to lighten the load on educators and even helped to restore happiness to the job. She spent decades as an award-winning teacher herself. Today she's a speaker, she's a personal coach, she's the author of a new book and I love this title Teach and still have time to pee. Jamie, with a title like that, I don't actually think you need an introduction. But welcome to the show, jamie Johnson.
Jamie Johnson:Thank you, eric, I'm excited to be here.
Eric Price:We are happy to have you and let's just kind of start by digging into that awesome title. What inspired that title, or how did you come up with it and what's your intent to do with that book when you wrote it?
Jamie Johnson:Yeah, the title it gets everybody for sure. So obviously I wanted to make sure people noticed it. But the inspiration actually it's not a joke. It was in a doctor's office and she mentioned that teachers and RNs had among the highest rate of bladder infections and UTIs because they don't take time to pee, they don't go to the bathroom, and I also learned when I was speaking to some teachers in Australia that they actually call it teacher bladder in Australia. So I thought, okay, we don't have time for one of the most basic Moments of self-care, to the point that it's making us sick.
Erich Bolz:and that is going to be the title of my book so, jamie, I just want to say I thoroughly enjoyed your book. Read a cover to cover. So many things to cover, so let's just start at the top. What's it to do list and why is it better than a to-do list?
Jamie Johnson:To-do list and so you know when you say to know, you know like magic it's done. A to-do list we all usually have them, you know it's a list of all the things we want to get done today or this week, and it gets longer and Less is finished than you think every day. So to-do list I consider to be something that has been disempowering in my world as an educator, because the job itself is not humanly possible to do all of the things in what? Maybe six hours if you were lucky with students during a day. So a to-do list never gets done.
Jamie Johnson:A to-do list is a celebration of everything that does get done and it is very empowering to look back on your day. When you're feeling discouraged and Overwhelmed because maybe you've got nothing done and you have a whole pile of more to do. You look back instead and just start writing down everything you did get done and Just keeping it as simple as that. Giving that a try, people are amazed at how much they actually do and and accomplish in a day and how much better they feel looking at their day in that way, and that's a very simplified version. I mean we do have to. We need to have goals and targets for our day, but being really intentional and careful with those not to create something that's overwhelming and discouraging and instead be Encouraging to ourselves.
Eric Price:So, jamie, you, you were obviously a stellar teacher, your award-winning, for years. So what? What made you decide to kind of pop out of the the system and did you think that you were able to have more influence from outside the system than being the teacher?
Jamie Johnson:It was really hard to decide to step out because of my students. I loved my students. I worked with a very sensitive population of kiddos and To make that choice was difficult on that end. But, as you said, I had started winning some awards and there was a moment when I was standing up receiving an award when to get to that place? I my job had been threatened multiple times by dissatisfied administration and the choices I was making and trying to follow what research and Evidence was saying would impact my students. I was getting attacked the whole time. It was making me miserable, it was making me sick. And Then, on the other hand, there's a small group of people who are awarding me and I didn't.
Jamie Johnson:I got up to receive the word and didn't feel like I had the voice to say All of this at that time. I just didn't have the energy or the voice to say that. I got here by skipping over some harmful mandates and risking my job and I realized, as long as I keep doing things really well in this system, it's going to be twisted and turned to say, look, she can do it, she's doing great, and then we'll use that moral blackmail on other teachers saying that you should be doing these things when they don't feel like they have the space or License to be that creative, because they can't risk their jobs or they're not willing to to be able to serve their students. So I I knew in that moment, if I stay in the system, I'm going to make the system look good and it's going to perpetuate something that's really Harmful to my students at that time. So I need to find another way.
Eric Price:Yeah, and maybe even harmful to yourself, right?
Jamie Johnson:Oh, it was definitely harmful to me. Yes, yeah, but I wanted to find another way to do those good things and See if I could lure some people in.
Erich Bolz:So Jamie, one of the things that really impresses me about your book is it sort of artfully moves from pedagogy to neuroscience, to Self-care and then, ultimately, policy analysis. What would those changes in policy be that would Implicate a system that would enable us to have healthy, happy teachers every classroom.
Jamie Johnson:So, on top of having healthy, happy teachers having an impact on students, it has an impact on ourselves as well, the teachers as well.
Jamie Johnson:I think that the biggest policy changes that I could see being made is any policy that will create more time and autonomy over time for the educator, and that is based on research that I read it was actually research on research by Daniel Pink and then I started practicing that autonomy over time, handing that over to my students and myself as much as possible. I watched what that did for people and just that one shift. I mean there's, of course, a million shifts like smaller class sizes, which would give us more time building more schools, but if we just focus on that time piece, how can we get people to not be working? What did you say? 54 hour weeks and get back to that 37 hour week? How can we? What policies do we need to make that happen? That one thing according to the science of well-being, all that research out of Yale makes the biggest impact on happiness in a person Time affluence makes more of an impact than monetary affluence regarding happiness.
Erich Bolz:So, jamie, I have a quick follow up. So I completely in agreement with what you say and when you think about, in the world that we live in, that's, I think, outsized, influenced by corporate America. It's all about money and that trickles down into politics. It's all about efficiency. So we laud ourselves on giving these public institutions the least amount of resource they can have to do the most amount of job. So how does that change when the rubber meets the road? And we know it's all about money.
Jamie Johnson:So how does it change? I mean, that's it's a huge pet peeve of mine, actually, because we make so many decisions based on budget, not on students, and when we put the budget before the kids, something is seriously wrong and it's not going to work. It just won't work. It won't get the results we want. So, when the rubber meets the road, how do we change policy, knowing that that's the way it is? I, you know, I don't know if I have the answer to that I think it's just voices many voices are key here and the voices of the parents, the voices of the students pulling in, all of our advocates to really talk about how that's impacting us when we're choosing to put budget over students.
Eric Price:Jamie, I love that phrase time affluence. I think that's fantastic, just because I've never actually been monetarily affluent, so maybe I can be rich on the time side. But so you're talking to a couple of folks that have stepped outside of education as well and we continue to work within it, and you've done that same process. What advice would you have for those folks that are still within the system, they're still teaching, they're still leading? How can they best affect change within that system and still being in it?
Jamie Johnson:One of the things that I did for myself, once I had really dug into some of that research, is to recognize okay, so I need autonomy over my time. And in education, the three tiers of motivation are mastery, purpose and autonomy. And in autonomy there's four elements. One of them is time. In education, whether you're the teacher or the administrator or the student, autonomy is not commonly present. We're telling kids what to write, who to write with and how to do it, and say with teaching what to teach who your team's going to be, how to do it For me.
Jamie Johnson:On the time piece, I decided how am I going to get autonomy over time? I spoke to my administrator, my principal, and shared with her what I was trying and said I think if I could shift my day to have Thursdays and Fridays, I leave with the kids, I don't stay late, I don't stay even to the hour after contract hours, because I'm gonna bank that time earlier in the week and I'm gonna try out this thing where I go snowboarding in the afternoons or go do something fun for myself and see how that impacts my presence at school, my life, happiness and how I show up for my students. And she agreed and I also I said on our mornings, when we have, we had used to have late start mornings where you would have prep time, some of those mornings to plan and grade, and it wasn't happening well at school. Those that sacred yeah, that sacred time would be interrupted by other people needing this or that. So I requested that I take that time and do those things at home.
Jamie Johnson:And so she approved all of that and it felt so good to have an administrator believe in me, in what I was doing and give me that choice. And then it did impact my how I showed up at school, how my brain functioned, because I wasn't working past my efficiency level. So that was one thing that I pushed inside the system with. But the other thing is to not give myself extra work and not take my own time away by assigning extra assignments that I don't need to be assigning to really assess good student learning Right.
Eric Price:cause that workload is gonna be, you know, eternal right If you don't limit it.
Jamie Johnson:Yep, and we do add a lot more to our own plates as well, a lot of the time so.
Erich Bolz:So obviously you stepped out and, through your book and other activities, become an advocate for change inside of education. What advice would you have for other educators to become advocates for change?
Jamie Johnson:Not everybody is willing to risk their job to try something new, so I'm not. I wanna make sure people know I'm not suggesting that that's the way to do things. I think if you wanna make change in a low risk way where you're, you know you're not shaking the tree so much it just get a team together and have more than one voice. Really find who your advocates are. Who are the people waving your flag? Is it? Look outside the school as well. You know. Are their parents? Are their organizations? Are there other people who can help amplify your voice for change?
Jamie Johnson:And only pick one thing. It doesn't have to be something big, trying to change the whole system at once. You know again, we're adding more work to our plate and it's too much. So picking your team if you're an administrator in this work or a leader in education, give people more autonomy to choose their teams and choose who they're working with. Just because they're in a third grade band does not necessarily mean that's the band of people they need to be learning and studying and working with. They might have a passion for focusing on literacy or focusing in on something else and should be given some autonomy to find their passion, find their team and find their voice within that team to affect powerful change.
Eric Price:Well, if you need a quick break, maybe to pee, now's the time. We'll be back in 60 seconds with more from Jamie Johnson right here on Outliers in Education.
Ad VO:School districts across the country are turning their focus to social emotional learning like never before. But who has the time? Now you do, thanks to the whole educator series and online SEL training that you take at your own pace. Six modules packed with proven strategies that will make a difference right away. The training was awesome. The content was amazing.
Erich Bolz:This workshop is gonna make you a better educator.
Ad VO:Taught by SEL expert Dr Greg Benner. The whole educator series delivers strategies to ease the stress on you while bringing out the best in your students. These strategies they work. You'll be amazed at the results, not only with the youth you serve, but also in your own life.
Erich Bolz:Ease telling us strategies that we can implement tomorrow.
Ad VO:Absolutely a home run Professional development at the speed of life. Check out the whole educator series online SEL training Available now from CE at effectivenessorg slash workshops. That's effectivenessorg slash workshops.
Eric Price:Welcome back everyone. We're chatting with the kick ass teacher herself, Jamie Johnson, author of the new book Teach and Still have Time to Peek. Jamie, can you tell me, when you talk about this idea of strong boundaries right Like I think, I 100% agree with you what kinds of functional help would you give for teachers so that they can have those strong boundaries?
Jamie Johnson:Yeah, so I like to call them courageous boundaries, because when we're setting boundaries in a system, that where status quo is just so deeply entrenched, people don't like us to have some of the boundaries we need to set. So they are courageous Again. One of the biggest boundaries that's going to get you the most change in your motivation and alertness and kindness and patience at school is around time. So one of the ways to set a boundary around that with yourself, because a boundary is for you.
Jamie Johnson:You have to respect it and honor it. Whether other people do doesn't matter, because you're the one holding your boundaries. So setting an alarm was life changing for me, because I would not honor my own time boundary if I didn't have some way to be accountable to it, and just that little bell would help me go. Okay, I've done enough. This is plenty. I'm stopping where I said I would stop. It's time to go home or move on to the next thing. So alarms are huge. And then again I mentioned stop creating extra work. So boundaries around your workload can start with yourself.
Jamie Johnson:I worked with a teacher who she called. She reached out for some one-on-one coaching and her issue it was time and all the work, all the grading. It was just overwhelming her. So we went through and I looked at the state requirements for a grade. To give a grade, I believe at that time, you had to have eight pieces of evidence to give that grade and she had over 40. And I thought, well, why are you doing that, not only to yourself but to your students? So I'm like let's cut it down to eight, and not eight big, giant ones either, like eight awesome, meaningful pieces of evidence and let's see what happens there. So just really looking at what work you're creating for yourself. That doesn't need to be there, jamie so much in the book.
Erich Bolz:We're only gonna get to a fraction of it, obviously, but could you share with us one story or vignette that is particularly poignant to you inside of the book? That might resonate with our audience.
Jamie Johnson:Just before COVID started. I hold several thousand teachers and got about 500 responses, and the question I asked was what is the most painful part of teaching? And I was expecting all kinds of things, but 90% came back saying that parents were the most painful part of teaching. So then I disaggregated that data further and kind of looked at well okay, what is it about parents? And only 11% of that 90% was helicopter parents. And then it was split 50-50 between parents that bully and parents that just disappear. You know that are totally uninvolved.
Jamie Johnson:So I convinced my colleagues to do home visits with me after school. And how in the world does that create time for me? And I did have to skip some math lessons and things to make time for that. But I knew, according to research, that their math scores would improve and they did if I created, built a relationship with them. So we did home visits and we agreed never to go alone. And so I had one child left and I was feeling so guilty because he was the last one and it was taking forever to get a time with my colleagues and the parent and bloody daddy, and so I decided well, I'm gonna just do this one alone. And so I went to the home visit by myself and what the my student was showing me around, showing me as Legos, he was all excited.
Jamie Johnson:And this particular parent did not like school, had not had a good experience in school, didn't like teachers and I had known that. And the dad says to me I'm getting ready to go out the door. He leans back in this like lazy boy lounge chair and looks at me in that like Lord of the Manor style and says would you like to taste my nuts? They're salty. And I didn't get it at first. It took me a second until I looked over at my student's face and saw his mortification. And then I was like, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening right now. And I was flooded with like so much sadness. I mean it just broke my heart because we'd had such a good home visit.
Jamie Johnson:I was so excited to be building a relationship with this parent who hated school, hated teachers, and I just I was kind and looked at him and said no thanks and I gotta go and then went in my car and cried and raged and then he I ended up coming to school a couple days later, like the next week, and I could see.
Jamie Johnson:He felt so guilty and embarrassed and apologized, and our relationship from that point on was totally different. He was supportive. He saw that I was there to partner in his child's success and I wasn't representative of what he had experienced in school. I wasn't there to hurt his child in any way. So it was an awful experience, but at the same time I have so many of those stories where parents who did not want to, even literally would not speak to me, turning into people that were on my team with their child and that saved me time because they would help their child progress at home in key ways that really make all the difference in student growth and learning. So it made my job easier in the end.
Eric Price:Jamie, if you were going to talk to a practicing teacher and you're going to say, hey, here are the top three teacher hacks that I'm going to give you that will really help you out the most, what three would you give them?
Jamie Johnson:I would, and we kind of talked a little bit about these. I think I'm going to reiterate set alarms If you have a task or a project. A good example my friend was setting up a bulletin board and she had an alarm set and when the tire went off she stopped and there was one little piece of border that hadn't been stapled on yet and she left it that way the entire quarter. That was her time for the task and I loved that. I thought it was such a good example for me. But set an alarm and what you get done is enough. And then so that's one.
Jamie Johnson:The second one I would say is stop creating extra work for yourself. So really look at the work you're doing and keep the core coolest, most awesome pieces and let everything else go. You don't need all of that to be an amazing educator. You are amazing. More is not going to make things better for you or your students. And then the third thing would be giving up some of that work, that homework or whatever extra work to build in relationships, because that is where the sense of purpose lies in what we do with your. You know, wherever you're at in the world of education, those relationships, if it's a relationship with your staff or a relationship with your students as educators. Again, relationships with the parents, because that is what I've understood to be the most painful part of teaching. Those are the three hacks that will make the biggest difference in your day and your quality of life at work.
Eric Price:Awesome. Thank you, Jamie. Well, now is the time that we get to tap into that awesome intelligence of Bullsy here in his summarization. Bullsy, love to see you put a stitch in this one. What do you got for a wrap? It was so wide ranging.
Erich Bolz:I got a full page of notes. I'm going to try to summarize here, so I want to start at the top. I fell in love with the book. It's pithy and fun writing style. It was incredibly well researched.
Erich Bolz:Seldom and Hunter Pages have I seen something that toggles so effortlessly and yet discreetly inside of the research with you know shout outs to neuroscience, shout outs to self-care so many things we didn't really cover today that are inside of the book. We didn't talk a whole lot about self-care, but what Pete Paul has to say about self-care and one of our earlier episodes is definitely worth a revisitation Great privilege, pedagogy, hacks to improve pedagogy and policy advocacy, just to say a few. So I was absolutely bowled over by the content and the style of the books of home run should be read by, I think, every teacher and principal, maybe even more importantly, policymakers. So all that to say, working conditions for teachers are just really tough. Can you imagine a law office where lawyers were intentionally not ingesting fluids so that they could get through their workday? I mean it really makes no sense in a professional context. We've got to get away from that scarcity mentality. I love the tada. It's something I should adopt myself. Track and celebrate your accomplishments as opposed to burdening yourself with tasks that maybe you're just assigning yourself was a big takeaway. Kudos to sticking up for what works and not bending to institutional pressure in the context of your career. You know we need more talented Maverick folks in the United States across every profession. Budgets before students that'll never work. I'm hoping that our earlier podcast guest, reed Sarris, a candidate for OSPI superintendent, happens to listen to that and he strikes me as somebody who's going to beat that policy drum as well.
Erich Bolz:Find your advocacy tribe. Pick the one thing that you can work on and change. You can't fix everything. I think that's really great advice. We share that same advice at CEE when we're working with staffs to unpack our data sets. You know one of the one to three things in here that you could do that really already in the context of your work. That would make the greatest difference. So we use a lot of the same advice Any relationships over homework.
Erich Bolz:We know at CEE that relationships are job one. We believe that mantra to its core, so hearing that over again was super helpful, and Jamie's story about salty nuts may be hard for some people to hear as far as just the course language and the discourse, but what it really stood out to me was it's a strong reminder that we should never give up on the possibility of a strong relationship. So inside of that salacious title is a moral lesson that we could all benefit from or should be reinforced Push outside of your comfort zone. That's really critical. Getting to the three hacks Set boundaries.
Erich Bolz:Boy advice I don't follow very well myself. I love the bulletin board border example. I mean having that visual of it's okay not to have that finished. Super helpful that you are enough without assigning those extra tasks. I think we're. I think we dipped our toe a little bit into Brené Brown territory there. And above all and we would say the same thing at CEE build relationships. It's job one. And I would conclude by saying maybe the Beatles were right. I think what Jamie and the Beatles are telling us is that love is all you need.
Eric Price:You're bringing tears to my eyes bowls. Where can we find your book, jamie?
Jamie Johnson:You can get it on Kindle or Amazon at teachandstillhowtime2pcom.
Eric Price:Okay, awesome, and also Facebook under this title. I love kick ass teacher. Jamie thanks for being on the show. You can find her book on Amazon and you can find her on Facebook under kick ass teacher. So, jamie, thanks again for being on the show. It was awesome to have you.
Jamie Johnson:Oh, I had a blast. You guys are so much fun. Thanks, you guys.
Erich Bolz:And thanks to all of you for listening today. You can find this episode and more anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts or visit us online at effectivenessorg. Until next time, this has been Outliers in Education.
Ad VO:If you'd like to find out how to gather the data you need to help drive positive change in your school or district, take a moment to visit CEE, the Center for Educational Effectiveness, at effectivenessorg. Better data, better decisions, better schools. No-transcript.
