In this session, licensed mental health professional Caroline Poland joined us to answer questions on supporting teachers. She gave tips for supporting teacher mental health and well-being, including understanding the neurological aspects of trauma, practicing active listening, and fostering a positive school culture.

Join the experts as they answer all your questions live on Tuesdays on YouTube at 10am PT / 12pm CT / 1pm ET.

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Michael Barber:
Hi, everybody. And welcome back to Tuesday Tips. I’m Michael Barber. We’ll welcome all our school leaders back as we talk about the biggest challenges facing school leaders. And today, we’ve got one of the biggest that we hear all the time and continues to be a challenge for school leaders, and that is mental health. Specifically, we’re welcoming back Caroline Poland, who joined us last week at our webinar on all things teacher mental health and wellbeing. And Caroline’s graciously come back to allow us to ask a few more questions on that webinar and have a chat of what’s coming up in the next few weeks as we tackle student mental health. So Caroline, welcome to Tuesday Tips. Thanks for joining us.
Caroline Poland:
Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Michael Barber:
Great to have you back again. So let’s hop right into the questions. By the way, if this is your first time here at Tuesday Tips, we’re here every Tuesday at 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern on our YouTube channel. We keep this chat to about 10 minutes, although I’m guessing today, based on not only just the expertise we have in the room, but some of the questions that we’ve got, we might go a little over. So maybe we’ll keep it to try and keep ourselves to 15 or so minutes, but we’ll do our best. So we’ll start with this first question. And this really gets, I think, at the heart of our conversation we had last week. But the question is this, how can understanding the neurological aspects of trauma inform a school leader’s approach to teacher wellbeing?
Caroline Poland:
That’s a great question. We’re going to talk a little bit more in detail about that next time, but I think understanding the neurobiology of trauma, what’s happening in our bodies and our nervous system when we experience a threat or a perception of any potential threat is really important because it allows us to make sense of behaviors that we’re seeing, or on the student end misbehaviors, disobedience, that we might on the surface label as one issue that underneath the surface is a very different story. So when we can understand the story as it’s being told by someone individually instead of what our perception is on the surface, then we’re better able to meet them with where they’re at and walk alongside them in their journeys. We don’t all need the same thing in a work environment. Our safety and threat perception is different. And so for school leaders, supervisors to be able to understand that each person that you supervise is different and be able to create something a little bit different for each person is really helpful in supporting their wellbeing and understanding, again, the story underneath the surface.
Michael Barber:
Yeah. You talked a lot about during our webinar the idea of listening, and that for a lot of us listening is an activity. How we define listening is not actually what listening should be, right?
Caroline Poland:
Right.
Michael Barber:
Can you unpack that a little bit? Because I think that’s important to the context of this question on the idea of actually listening versus just listening, if you will.
Caroline Poland:
Right, right. So I introduced that with a quote by Stephen Covey, not verbatim, but the biggest issue in communication is that we listen to reply and not listen to understand. And so listening can be a very passive process or it can be a very active process. And anytime we’re in a supervisory role or relationships in general, we want to be engaged in very active listening where we’re listening to understand the story underneath the story. And that comes not through our defensive replies or trying to just get our point across over and over, but really sitting back, taking on that stance of a really curious observer, you’re playing detective. So you’re flipping over every stone and saying, “I’m really going to listen to what you are saying so I can understand what this story actually is.” And then be able to better understand what we need to do moving forward to fix whatever the issue is or solve the problem. And so-
Michael Barber:
Yeah.
Caroline Poland:
… that’s the open-ended questions, reflections, affirmations, all of that.
Michael Barber:
Yeah, such good insights there. One of the things you also focused on during the webinar was the idea of culture and how it’s set from the top down. And we talked a lot about the impact of principals and school leaders and their impact on culture. I’m just wondering if you could reflect again on some of the steps that school leaders can take to actively shape that culture inside of their schools.
Caroline Poland:
Yeah. Yeah, research supports very strongly that idea that the top of organizations, principals really set the culture for everyone in the school, and that includes well-being. And so there’s several different ways that you can go about doing that. First, you want to really consider what those guiding values are of your organization. Those values and the vision that we have is the true north. And if we can focus on true north and everything that we’re doing is pointing to that, then we’re not going to lose our way. But when we take our eyes off of that vision or those values, we lose what our north is and then we can lose ourselves in the water, so to speak. And really it gets kind of confusing and takes us further away from where we want to be. So also, remember that we have to be in our regulated nervous system, our prefrontal cortex in order to hold to our values. So that’s another reason why neurobiology is so important.
But consider those guiding values. Really listen, that active listening to what our employees need. Prioritizing their mental health, and that can be done in a number of ways that we can unpack here. Embracing work-life harmony, people are of course allowed to be humans outside of work. But is that just a passive understanding or are you really encouraging that and supporting that explicitly? That’s really important. And then writing clear policies and procedures, whether that’s about workplace expectations, workplace mental health, gender harassment, discrimination, and racism, being very clear on what it is, what happens if you report it, how you’re going to be supported, and being explicit about that entire process creates a very firm foundation for mental health and wellbeing.
Michael Barber:
Yeah. So many good tips there that are both practical and I think strategic of how school leaders need to be thinking about teacher wellbeing and impacting their mental health. I’m wondering, how does school leaders and principals, how do you keep this sustained and a ongoing effort throughout the year? Because you think of the school year and there are so many highs and lows to the school year, and so many times where school leaders are under an immense amount of pressure, particularly as the context of the last few weeks. School leaders are just taking a breather and they’re dealing with immense challenges. I mean, we’ve heard from many of our school leaders, flu, COVID-19 making a huge return into schools and the impact on both their teachers and their students. Obviously making sure students are showing up for school, these stressful moments of the beginning of the year and throughout the year. Some thoughts on how school leaders and or principals can make sure that there’s a sustained and ongoing effort around teacher wellbeing and mental health?
Caroline Poland:
Right. And that’s such a challenge. We get caught in the tyranny of the urgent, and the tyranny of the urgent often takes us further away from health and wellbeing, whatever area of life we’re talking about. And I think that, again, is where it needs to be very explicit or it needs to be part of the true north guiding values that there are policies and procedures written into place so that there’s something built into the structure of that. But really practically, I think that involves building it into your schedule. Because if it’s a passive thing that fits in if there’s time, there’s probably not going to be time for it. Too many other things going on. Whereas if we can-
Michael Barber:
Yeah.
Caroline Poland:
… take intentional time, it’s built into supervisory meetings, it’s part of your natural questions that are being asked, maybe there’s a rhythm of anonymous surveys that go out to your staff where you can begin to adjust course. But I think it really has to be built into rhythms of days, weeks, months. Some days maybe only five minutes, maybe sometimes you can fit in an hour. But realistically, if we’re not intentional about it, it’s not going to happen.
Michael Barber:
Yeah. I think the more practical you can make it as a leader, whether you’re a school leader or not, putting it in your calendar, maybe it’s a reminder inside your to-do list app on your phone, making it a reoccurring thing so that you offload that mental stress of having to think about doing these every single time. There’s some very practical things that school leaders could be doing to make sure that they’re doing this on a regular basis, right?
Caroline Poland:
Right. And the great thing is we have a brain outside of our body now that exists in our calendars, our phones, our watches, that ping us reminders. And so this is more for wellbeing in general, although certainly applicable here. I often tell people, “You don’t have to remember to do something. Your phone can remind you to do that.” And so every hour a 10-minute passing period can a little notice come up on your watch to take a slow exhale. That’s a very simple way to just kind of get yourself grounded. Maybe it’s a reminder set as part of meeting notes to ask a specific question. But utilize your brain outside your brain because we have that. You might as well use it and take advantage of that.
Michael Barber:
For sure. Use the tools that you’ve got at your disposal, right?
Caroline Poland:
Yes.
Michael Barber:
One of the things that you mentioned just that I was really fascinated by and I think we got a lot of reactions to was some of the data you showed around retention and wellbeing issues, and just the direct connection that wellbeing and mental health has on retaining teachers. And in a context that we find in ourselves right now where we have more teachers leaving the profession than those joining or interested in joining the profession where we have significant gaps of teachers inside many states and inside many classrooms inside those states, can you unpack just some of the insights from that research about why this is so vitally important to the longevity and health of your school?
Caroline Poland:
Right. Yeah. Lots of great research out there. Again, if anyone’s interested, you can contact me. I’m happy to send information your way. But we can’t unmarry retention and wellbeing and leadership. They’re interconnected and one builds on top of the next. And so we want to be very aware of that. Again, every time we’re trying to address one, we need to be addressing address all of that. And I think when we talk about the pipeline from teacher education to those first years of teaching to sustaining over time, that pipeline has to be built with mental health and wellbeing in mind. If our job is or if our idea is that we can just use people up and push them along, then we’re never going to meet our goals of retention.
And if our goal is to help retain teachers in the long run, then we have to address health, we have to address wellbeing. And that means that we have to allow teachers to be humans and we have to value teachers as the humans that they are. And when we chop away too many parts of who people are and expect people to come to work in a very fragmented form of themselves, that takes a massive toll over time. So we really want to make sure that we’re valuing our educators as teachers or as humans, everything, everything that makes them humans, including their past histories and really building that pipeline with that in mind.
Michael Barber:
Yeah. I think we could spend a whole webinar session and a whole ‘nother 90 minutes, a whole 10 YouTube Lives on this conversation of the-
Caroline Poland:
Yes.
Michael Barber:
… connection of bringing oneself to work and the impact that it has on mental health and wellbeing, and in an era where we see teachers, laws being put in place that don’t allow teachers to bring their full selves to their work.
Caroline Poland:
Right.
Michael Barber:
We’ve got some challenges we’re going to face certainly in the future. We’ve talked a lot about school leader and teacher mental health. Maybe that’s a certain percentage of the equation. I was going to say half, but I think that’s probably wrong. But the other big part of the community at school is students. That’s why teachers are coming to work. As we think about how we impact student mental health and wellbeing, I know we’ve got a conversation coming up in a few weeks. Would love just some highlights of what we’re going to be talking about from you on, I believe it is October 5th, our October 5th webinar, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern on student wellbeing. So some initial thoughts and thought starters and things you’re going to be talking about when we chat in a few weeks.
Caroline Poland:
Yeah. I’m really excited about this conversation and working on my slide set. It’s energized me quite a bit in terms of giving you all very practical things that you can do. I know one of the things that I hear from educators is, “The need is so great. I don’t know what to do when I’m trying to balance that with all the learning objectives or teaching for the test that’s coming up or standardized testing. What can I do?” And so we’re going to really look at some very practical things that you can do that don’t take much time that will integrate really nicely into the structure and flow of your work days. And those things also you can use for yourself for your own mental health and wellbeing. But just as we talked about how principal health and wellbeing is critical for educator health and wellbeing, the same thing is true for our students.
And so one of the greatest gifts ever, I guess this is a little spoiler for what we’re talking about. One of the greatest gifts that we can ever give to our students is safety, connection, and emotional regulation. So we’re really going to talk about all of those areas, how you can build those things into the framework of your classroom. What you can give of yourselves in ways that are not draining, but energizing to you as well that will help to have students that will be more regulated, that will feel safe in the classroom because all of that supports healthy learning and a healthy flow of a classroom that just leads to great learning and energy in general instead of for a drain on people around.
Michael Barber:
[inaudible 00:15:23]. So we’ll look forward to having that conversation in a couple weeks. That’s on October 5th, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern. If you’re wondering how to register for that webinar, we’ll have it up on our website later today. You’ll just head over to charterschoolcapital.com and search student mental health, and it’ll show up there. You can also follow us on Instagram @CharterSchoolCapital, and you can find out the registration page there. Caroline, I want to say a big thanks for you for joining us today on our Tuesday Tips. We will be back next week with one of our team members, Ryan Eldridge, to discuss all things finding a forever home for your school. But for now, we’ll say goodbye and say thanks to Caroline. And we’ll see you next week. Thanks, everyone.
Caroline Poland:
Thank you.