Latest / The Thriving School Podcast with Jenni Awesome / Student Behavior Problems? Why Belonging May Be the Missing Piece
Transcript
- Jenni Awesome: Okay, I want to start this differently because this feels different. And if you've been listening to Reigniting Belonging, you're probably going to notice pretty quickly that something has shifted. Something has shifted in me. Not away from belonging. Actually, I think I finally realized just how big belonging really is, but I've been wrestling with some questions. And once I started asking it, I I haven't been able to stop. I have that natural curiosity. So here it is. What kind of world are we building? Like seriously. What kind of world are we building? Not someday. Not when somebody gets elected. Not when the economy changes, and not when education finally gets reformed, not when somebody else figures it out. I'm talking about right now, because we are building it. every single day with the things that we tolerate, with what we challenge, with what we teach, with what we fund, with the money that we have, with what we celebrate, with what we choose to ignore, with the way we treat people, with the things that we say about people we disagree with, those conversations we have with other people, with the way we raise our children, with the environments we create in our schools, with the environments we create in our workplaces. We are building tomorrow right now. And then I started asking a question that really got to me, is what we're building worthy of our children? That's a big one. And that's the question. And that's why you're listening to something new. Welcome to A Better Tomorrow is Possible. I'm Jenni Awesome, and this show is about people, possibility, and progress. It's about education because education is a huge part of my world. And I also believe that we're lifelong learners and that's why we're here, that natural curiosity that we're all born with. But we get to go bigger. We're going to talk about leadership, culture, children, families, community, failure, faith, purpose, innovation, systems, and yes. We're going to talk about politics and public policy, not because I'm interested in telling you what political decisions to make. I'm interested in something much bigger. What are we creating together? And what else could be possible? Spent more than two decades in education. That's on the adult side. I have been in school since I was three and told my mother to get a job so I could go to preschool. I've been a classroom teacher. I've worked in curriculum. I've worked with assessments. I've worked with graduation. I've been a school administrator. I've worked directly with student discipline, attendance, school culture, teachers, families. And kids who have essentially been told in a hundred different ways that they are the problem. And throughout all of that, I've kept coming back to belonging. Because I watch what happens when somebody doesn't believe they belong. I've struggled with it myself being made to believe that I didn't belong. I've watched what happens when that person finally realizes, hey, you actually. See me. That changes things. And that's why I created reigniting belonging. And I still believe deeply in that work. But lately I've realized belonging isn't the destination. It's the doorway. Because what happens when somebody knows they belong? What happens when a child feels safe enough to raise their hand? What happens when a teacher feels safe enough to try something different? Or go against a curriculum? What happens when a leader feels safe enough to say, I don't know? What happens when a community feels safe enough to have a difficult conversation? Possibility happens. And that word has been coming up for me a lot lately. Possibility. What could be possible? What if it didn't have to be this way? What if the system isn't invincible? What if the system isn't inevitable? What if the way we've always done something isn't the only way to do it? What if we stopped asking children to fit perfectly into systems and started asking whether our systems are worthy of our children? And that's where we're going. Before we go any further, can we do something? I genuinely want to know who is listening to this. Because I don't want this show to be me talking into a microphone in one of my children's bedrooms and hoping somebody somewhere hears it. I want to have a conversation. So find me on social media. I'm @msjenniferawesome MS. And just send me, hey, I'm here. That's it. Tell me where you're listening from. Tell me what you do. Tell me why this conversation matters to you. And if you want to get closer to this work, join my email community. You can do that at awesomeconsulting.org/subscribe That's where I'm going to share new episodes, ideas I'm wrestling with, opportunities to participate, and things that haven't necessarily made it onto social media yet. Don't think of it as subscribing to another you newsletter. Think of it as joining the conversation. Okay, let's get into that conversation. So here's something education taught me. Behavior is information. I've learned even more about that with some of the conversations we have coming up with this podcast. So knowing that behavior is information, that's changed how I've seen kids and adults. Basically all humans. Not so much dogs. Like dogs are pretty like. You know what they want when when they're barking, or you as you know you can kind of assume what they want. It's a little easier to tell what a dog wants than a human. it's incredibly easy to look at behavior and ask, how do I stop this? How do I stop the disruption? How do I stop the skipping? How do I stop the disrespect? How do I stop a student from walking out? How do I make them comply? And sometimes, yeah, behavior needs an immediate response. Safety matters, boundary matters, and accountability matters. But if we stop at how do I make this stop, we may completely miss why is this happening in the first place? And I wonder if that's true beyond schools too. What if some of the things we're seeing in society are not isolated problems? What if there's signals? Teachers are burned out, students are disengaged, there's school avoidance across the board, chronic absenteeism, loneliness, political division, families feeling overwhelmed, leaders feeling exhausted, people feeling like institutions don't listen to them. What if instead of immediately asking, who do we blame, we got curious. Well, what is this telling us? Because curiosity changes a conversation. Imagine a student who keeps refusing to do their work. One interpretation could be that they're lazy, they're defiant, they don't care. Another interpretation could be that something is happening here that I don't understand yet. Notice the difference in the two ways of looking at this. The second doesn't excuse the behavior, it creates room to understand it. And I think we've become so fast at judgment that we're losing our ability to be curious, not just with children, but with each other. So let's establish something foundational for this show. I talked about this in one of my previous episodes. I believe that human dignity is non-negotiable. And I'm going to say something that might sound strange in conversations about leadership, education, policy, and changing the world. I want to talk about love. Not fluffy love. Not everybody be nice. I'm talking about love with a backbone. Love can say no. Love can establish a boundary. Love can hold somebody accountable. Love can challenge an idea. Love can tell the truth. Love can intervene when somebody is being harmed. But I don't believe love requires us to dehumanize someone in order to disagree with them. And wow, are we as a society struggling with that one? Think about how we talk about people who disagree with us. Not their ideas. Them. We reduce human beings to labels. And once we've decided somebody belongs to the wrong category, sometimes we stop listening altogether. I don't want this show to do that. There will be people on this show whose ideas I disagree with. There will probably be guests that you disagree with. And there will be things I say that you disagree with, which is a good thing. Let's figure out whether we can stay in conversation. Because if a better tomorrow requires 8 billion people to agree with one another, we are in serious trouble. So we need another way. I want this to be a place where we can say, I strongly disagree with your idea, and I still recognize your humanity. That's called alignment. And that's harder to do. And it's completely worth practicing. So now let's take a moment and talk about education. Because this is where I have a lot to say. I don't believe that education should simply create children who are really good at school. I can play the game of school really well. I want education to help create humans who are really good at life. And those are not necessarily the same thing. We get to have children who think, who question, who create, communicate. Build, collaborate, solve problems, navigate through uncertainty, recover from failure, recognize misinformation, change their minds when the evidence changes, stand up for something, listen, lead, and remain curious. But think about little kids. They arrive curious. Have you ever spent significant time with a four year old? Why? Why? Why? Why? Well why? I'm still very much like that four year old. And it drives my husband crazy. Think about it. They want to know everything. They touch everything. Unless it's gooey or whatever. They experiment. They build things that make absolutely no structural sense. And then they build them again. They fail constantly and they don't call it failure. You know what it's called? It's called playing. Do you want to come play with me? Let's go play dolls. Let's go build blocks. Let's play a game. Let's go swing. Let's go jump off this track. Like it's called playing. I can't tell you how many times I failed at riding my bike and still got on and rode the bike again. Somewhere along the way, learning becomes what's my grade? Is this going to be on the test? How many points is this worth? Did I get it right? And then people decide, I'm not good at learning. And that breaks my heart because humans are learners. We are the original learning device. So I want us to ask, what has happened to the curiosity? And how do we build schools where curiosity not only survives, but it thrives. Not just schools where kids behave, schools where kids come alive truly into their being about who they are born to be. So if you're an educator listening right now, I specifically want to hear from you, the teacher, the principal, the counselor, the paraeducator, the superintendent, the coach. Anyone working with young people tell me what's the thing in education we're not talking about enough? And I don't want the polished conference answer. The thing you talk about with your colleague after everybody else leaves, send it to me @msjenniferawesome because I want future episodes of this show to come from the conversations people are actually having. And if you do disagree with something I'm saying, that's even better. Tell me why. This is not meant to be an echo chamber. I am not surrounding myself with people who think exactly like me. I'm inviting the thinkers, the change makers, the builders to the table, and let's have that different and difficult conversation because those are the conversations that are going to enact the change that we are looking to build in this world. So, as this podcast expands, we're going talk about systems, we're going to talk about policy. And I want a framework for those conversations that isn't, well, which team proposed this? I want us to ask three questions. Who does this serve? Does it work? And who bears the cost when it doesn't? Think about how powerful those questions are. Let's take school discipline or our worldwide discipline system. Who does the system serve? Does it produce the outcomes we're hoping for? And who bears the cost when it doesn't? Well, that applies to testing, grading, attendance systems, school schedules, professional development, curriculum. Apply the same questions. And outside of education, we can use the same discipline when examining housing. Healthcare, technology, public safety, economy policy, or other public issues. Let's define the problem, examine who is affected, look at credible evidence about outcomes and trade-offs, and hear compelling perspectives. Not which side am I supposed to defend, but what problem are we actually trying to solve? And does the evidence tell us? What does the evidence tell us? And here's The uncomfortable one. What evidence would cause me to change my mind? And that's a question I want to practice asking. Because if the answer is nothing, well then I'm not investigating anymore. I'm defending an identity that I have stake in. So now let's take a moment and talk about failure. You've learned that failure is one of my favorite topics. And I at one point was calling myself the queen of failure. I am an expert at failure. I kind of like it. Because we're not going to build a better tomorrow without getting something spectacularly wrong. And I'm serious, we get to fail. Schools are going to try ideas that didn't work. Organizations are going to launch programs that block. Leaders are going to make decisions and realize later, that was the wrong call. I'm going to say things on this podcast that six months later I might understand differently. And that's learning. The question isn't will we fail? The question is actually what will we do when we fail? And that's where fail forward comes in. And here's a framework that I've developed. It's based off the word fail. So F A I L. Here's the framework. F, face what happened. Don't hide it. Don't pretend it. What actually happened? Really get into it. Get into the details. A. Analyze without blame. It's not whose fault is this. Instead, the question is actually what created this outcome? Because results are are directly related to the outcome. Results are directly related to what happened. I identify the learning. What do we know now that we didn't know before? And then L launch the next attempt. Try again. That's why the forward part matters. Reflection without action can become rumination. Fail forward says learn something, change something. Try again. I want to take a segue and tell you about a class I took in college where we learned about the inquiry model, the 5e model for using the scientific method of coming up with a hypothesis, testing it out, and moving from there. So I decided to do an experiment. I wanted to find out that if I put fish in colored water, would they absorb the color? coloring from the water and change color? Well, I bought a bunch of I think they were white goldfish. I had them in their own container and put them into single fish into separate containers with red, yellow, green, and blue food coloring. Probably not the most humane thing that I learned afterwards, but still it was an experiment. If if I could do that with plants, why couldn't I do that with a fish? So the experiment changed into, well, which color would they survive the longest in? Because I I bought like 30 fish, thinking that, you know, they're feeder fish. I didn't think I would have that many problems. But the fish that I never had to change out of the water was the one who was in the red food dye. And I I got more interested in in why is that why is that what happened. And it's it's quite possible that, you know, the red food dye was bad for a while, so they made it super safe. totally making it very simple. I really don't know. I really don't know why the experiment went from will they take on the color of the water that they're in to which one survives the longest. But that's failing. That's facing what happened, that is analyzing what's happening without blame, identifying the learning and launching the next attempt. No, I did not try this again. I have not put any other creatures in colored water. But think about that. Imagine if we were to take this model and if children learned this at a young age, if you as a as a child learned that you could get something wrong, and your immediate internal response is not, I'm stupid. But it turns into, huh, that's interesting. What did that teach me? Well that's powerful. Imagine the adults around you doing this. Imagine our leaders doing this. Imagine all the institutions doing this. Imagine political systems capable of saying the evidence suggests this isn't producing the intended results. So let's suggest that's not weakness, that's learning. And I want to share your fail forward stories. Seriously. I think we're gonna make this a part of the show. Tell me about something that went wrong. The business that failed, the lesson that bombed, the career move that didn't work, the leadership decision you'd make differently next time, the rejection, the idea everybody told you would work, and it absolutely did not. And here's the important part of that. What did it teach you? Send me your story @msjenniferawesome. Some of those stories may become conversations on this podcast. And if you want the deeper conversations, resources, and invitations that grow out of this work, join us here, awesomeconsulting.org/subscribe Because failure stories shouldn't be hidden. Sometimes they're exactly the stories somebody needs to hear. So I've spent a lot of time thinking lately, and one of the topics that keeps coming to mind is purpose, and about what that means to live according to what you believe you're here to contribute. Words that mean a lot to me right now are love, light, possibility, and purpose. They really mean something to me. But I've also realized something. These words have have to become verbs. So if I say I believe in love, what does love make me do? If I believe in human dignity, what decisions does that change? If I believe that children matter, that the next generation matters, how does that affect the systems that I help create? If I believe a better tomorrow is possible, what am I building? And who am I becoming? Because possibility without action is imagination. And imagination is incredibly important. And eventually we build. So maybe light looks like telling the truth when silence would be easier. Maybe love looks like holding a boundary. Maybe possibility looks like questioning a system. Everyone else is accepted. Maybe purpose looks like showing up when I'm scared. When I don't want to. When the only thing I want to do is roll back over to bed and knock it up. Maybe leadership looks like saying, I don't know. Let's find out. And maybe changing the world isn't always some gigantic heroic act. Maybe it's the teacher who decided not to give up on one child. Maybe it's the principle. Maybe changing the world isn't always some gigantic heroic act. Maybe it's a teacher deciding not to give up on one kiddo. A principal changing one policy. A parent having one conversation. A teenager starting one project. A community deciding we're going to get to do this differently. And those things compound. And this is where I need you. I'm looking for people. I call them the builders. People who look for something and think there has to be another way. Teachers, students, parents, principals, researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, tradespeople, community leaders, faith leaders, people working inside government, people working outside of our traditional systems, people who are experimenting, people who have failed, people who have learned, and yes. People who challenge the way that I think. I don't care whether you have ten followers or ten million. I'm interested in your ideas. What are you seeing? What are you building? What have you learned? Who are you becoming? And what do you believe could be possible? If somebody popped into your head while I was saying that, send them this episode. Or message me, Jenni, you get to talk to this person and tell me why. Because I don't want this podcast to simply collect listeners. I want to create connections. What happens when the right people find each other? That's where things get interesting. So we're back at where we started. What kind of world are we building? I don't know exactly what the better tomorrow looks like, and I think that's important to admit. I have ideas. I have convictions. I have expertise in areas where I've spent years doing the work. And I have areas where I need to listen to people. And I have areas where I get to listen to people who know far more than I do. And that's how this should work. I don't want to become somebody who believes authority means certainty. I think authority can mean something else. I've done the work, I'm willing to keep learning, and I'm willing to tell you what I believe, I'm willing to show you why, and I'm willing to reconsider it when better evidence arrives. That's the kind of conversation I want here. Because our children are watching. They're watching how we disagree. They're watching what we prioritize. They're watching how we treat people. They're watching what happens when we fail. They're watching whether adults actually live the values we preach and one day they're going to inherit whatever we leave behind. So I don't want to simply prepare children to survive in our world. I want to invite them to help us imagine the next one. So before you go, I want to ask you three things. First, ask yourself, what kind of world do I get to help build? Don't make it complicated. Write down whatever comes to mind. Second, think of one person you need to have that conversation with. Send them this episode. Don't just say, hey, listen to this podcast. Let's actually have a conversation and say, hey, Listen to this because I want to talk about it with you afterwards. And then have the conversation. Actually have the conversation. And then third, come find me. I'm @msjenniferawesome. Tell me what came up. Tell me what you're questioning. Tell me what you're building. Tell me where you disagree. And tell me what gets to be said. And please come join us. Come be a part of the community we're building around this. You can join our email community at awesomeconsulting.org backslash subscribe. And this isn't about me, Jenni Awesome, having all the answers. I don't. It's about gathering people willing to ask better questions, people willing to listen, people willing to imagine, people willing to try, people willing to fail forward, and people willing to build. Because here's what I believe. I believe that a better tomorrow isn't something we wait for. It's something we participate in creating. And that means my final question isn't what do you wish you could change? It's this. What do you believe strongly enough that you're willing to help build it? Hmm. I'm Jenni Awesome. This is a Better Tomorrow Is Possible, part of the work of Awesome Consulting and Educational Services. People, possibility, progress. And we're just getting started. A better tomorrow is possible, so let's build it together.