Leading Without Burning Out: A Conversation with Dr. Lisa Riegel

In this powerful episode of The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment, Dr. Lashawnte McCray-Sarvis sits down with educator, researcher, and author Dr. Lisa Riegel, whose groundbreaking work in NeuroWell brings neuroscience, mindfulness, and sustainable education into one transformative conversation.

As schools navigate increasing demands, high-pressure environments, and educator fatigue, Dr. Riegel offers a research-based perspective on what is actually happening in the brain during chronic stress and why understanding neuroscience is essential for modern school leadership. This episode goes beyond traditional wellness talk and dives into the science of emotional regulation, cognitive capacity, and brain-based strategies that help educators sustain their passion without burning out.

Together, they explore how mindfulness supports executive functioning, strengthens resilience, and enhances learning environments. Dr. Riegel challenges leaders to rethink sustainability, not as a personal luxury, but as a professional responsibility.

If you are an educator, administrator, or leader seeking to build schools where both students and staff can truly thrive, this conversation will shift how you think about leadership, wellness, and the future of education.

Links to Dr. Riegel's books: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lisa+riegel&crid=2ZRF25DBBRQZ6&sprefix=lisa+riegel%2Caps%2C178&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:02

Welcome back to The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment, the podcast where we set the stage for strategies that lead to thriving classrooms, empowered educators, and successful students. I am your host, Dr. Lashhanta, known as that classy sassy consultant. During this month, we have talked to several guests and we've had several topics. And so now we're exploring not just how to prepare students for workforce, but how to prepare educators and leaders for sustainability. Because here's the truth career readiness without emotional readiness is in complete preparation. Today's conversation takes us deeper into the brain. Joining me today is Dr. Lisa Regal, educator and author of NeuroWell and other works focused on brain-based wellness and sustainable education. Lisa's work bridges neuroscience, mindfulness, and leadership, helping educators understand what's actually happening in the brain under stress and how we design environments that support learning instead of depleting it. So let's begin this interesting conversation with Dr. Regal. Welcome to the show today. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 1:25

I am great. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Awesome, awesome. So we will just dive right on into this. I will say that Dr. Regal has been uh so great in talking with her before this episode. Uh, we have a lot of things in common. So I am thoroughly going to enjoy talking to her again for this episode. So you're in for a treat. So, for those who may not be familiar with your work, what is NeuroWell and why does it matter in today's educational landscape?

SPEAKER_00 1:59

So, NeuroWell is really a framework that schools can use to build a culture that's safe, supportive, and proactive that helps students be happier and then also healthier and more successful. And it really comes out of the, you know, we've gone through sort of the science of reading in education, and we finally started aligning how we teach reading to how the brain learns to read, which is great. But we also have a whole lot of information on how the brain interacts with behavior and how the brain, you know, impacts motivation and perseverance and grit and all of those things. And so it's really saying, let's expand the lens to really say the medium for educators is the brain. So the more we know about it, the more we can build effective classroom practices.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

So that sounds great. That sounds a lot like my psychology uh courses. Um, I majored in psychology when I went to Coastal Carolina University, and I love the brain. So this conversation is definitely something very insightful. So looking at the brain and um looking at classroom effectiveness, this is uh definitely two things that go together.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Yeah, well, and it's it's amazing to me that we don't have a deep psychology and neuroscience track within educator preparation and also within leader preparation. Because when I did my doctoral work at Ohio State, I was focused on leadership, but I was really interested in the human system as opposed to the policies. And what I found even when I was teaching there in their program, we really focus on the org theory and the the policy and you know how like how to frame change, but we don't talk about how to help implement change and support the people who do it.

SPEAKER_02 3:47

Correct. And speaking as a leader as well, you know, that is definitely a topic that was not in my educational leadership training. Even, you know, this is what year 20 in leadership, and this is you will hear bits and pieces about the brain and how it works, but usually those conversations are held whenever a student has done something wrong, but it's there's not a focus on the adults when it comes to that. So definitely you need it. So my next question for you we hear a lot about burnout, but from a neuroscience perspective, what is happening in the brain when educators and leaders experience chronic stress?

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yep, good question. So our brain has basically four states, our brain and our body. So the first is calm, and that's just your calm. The second is alert, and alert's actually good for us. It's the little bit of stress that we get when we're doing a job interview or we're going to play sporty match or something like that. And that's when our brain says, hey, we need to be on high alert, and it sends a message up to the CEO and juices us with some stress chemicals and says, we need to be super focused and ready. That's good. But then we get to the alarm phase. The alarm phase is where the brain has has sensed danger and it has hit the stress button on full tilt. And at that point, what happens is the limbic part of our brain kind of takes over and says, we need to protect ourselves from harm. We either need to fight, freeze, flee, fawn, whatever we need to do in order to stop this danger. And the important part is that when that happens, this part of our brain shuts down. And so we're actually operating, and I actually teach the brain. I talk about our brain, we think of it as like one organ, but the brain is actually like a giant company with lots of different departments. You've got a data management department, you have a security department, you have systems manager, you have all these different departments. And 80% of our brain thinking is happening below our nose, and below our nose is unconscious and it doesn't know time and it can't tell a story. So if we end up where we are in that alarm phase, then that limbic system of our brain is actually doing all the thinking for us. And the part of our brain that's logical and rational is not plugged in. And so then if we are in that alarm state for a long period of time, we end up in a state of fear where our body is dysregulated and our stress system basically hijacks our brain's thinking ability. And so when teachers are in this constant state of stress and don't release it and don't take care of their own mental health, they end up in that fear state. And so things that shouldn't bother them not only bother them, but but cause total shutdown. And so what we find in education, and I try to do a lot of school transformation work with leaders, and you know, the teacher is often the obstacle because they can't even hear the logic of the change you're asking because it's just all that I can't do one more thing. I'm already overloaded, this won't work. The other thing that happens is that when we are in that alarm phase and in that fear phase, we blame other people for the things that really we have a lot of control over. So you hear people a lot of times when they're getting into that burnout, they feel powerless. And so then they end up saying, This is something's wrong with my principal or something's wrong with my colleagues or with the students I teach or with their parents. And they aren't able to really reason. I have a lot of control in how I set up my classroom so I can change those factors and I can change the context.

SPEAKER_02 7:36

So listening to what you've just said, it's almost as if I should have switched you with my last guest because that last conversation was about mindfulness. And what you're saying right now is like at the beginning state of recognizing when you are at that burnout point and knowing this is where you are. So just uh just one of those things that I just thought about. I was like, that would have been great to flip-flop. But you know what? It's this is all great. This is great stuff.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

Well, and I think the brain, like, so what I try to teach, which is aligned with mindfulness, is really to be happy and healthy and successful, we need three things. We need self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-control. And you can't have self-control if you don't have the first two. So some of it is understanding how the brain makes perceptions. So, like our brain, we have these different departments. So we have a data department. I call my data manager Harold. And so Harold's job is to look in the environment and say what's going on right now. And again, limbic system. So can't tell time and doesn't know a story. So then Harold goes in. Well, the first of all, we have a systems manager, which is our vagal nerve, which is sending information to Harold all day long about how are we doing internally? Is our heart beating okay? Are our lungs working? Is our stomach emptying? All of those kinds of internal systems. And then he also looks for external. Where is our body in space? Are we in a safe space? And so that vagus nerve is sending information all day long to Harold. So now Harold gets all this information from the environment. And the first thing he does is goes into our sensory memory folder. And people think of memories like a library, but that's not how our brain works. Our brain actually fractures our memories and stores different kinds of memories in different kinds in different places. So, in order to make meaning out of a situation or a memory, we need the boss of our brain, the CEO, to order up some of the details from all these different parts of our brain and then hold them in the brain and make sense, piece it together and make it make meaning. The the data manager in our brain, Harold, doesn't have that capacity to do that. He's only looking at the sensory associations. And, you know, if every new experience we had was a novel experience, our brain would explode. So what Harold's looking for is what is this current situation? This is like what? So it goes into those sensory memories and it pulls up all these different filters. And I always kind of use the example of like spaghetti strainers or colanders. So you have like the data that comes into Harold's like a banana. That's reality. But once you shove that banana through all the folders and filters and colanders that Harold has pulled up, it doesn't look like a banana anymore. And so our past experiences and the way that our brain has associated different kinds of sensory input with either danger or safety or emotional reactions has a complete impact on how we see our environment in the moment. And so I think that it's important for self-awareness to understand what are the colanders in my brain, what are the filters my brain's using. And I can give you a really practical example. I get very anxious if I'm late. And so time is an issue for me. And so I'm always early. So when I was a little girl, my dad, my parents were divorced, my dad was always late. So I spent a good chunk of my life sitting on the stoop waiting for him. And so my little eight-year-old brain attached senses of worth and love and you know reliability to time. And it's kind of a faulty association because people are late for all kinds of reasons. It doesn't mean it's an expression, they don't respect me. But in my little brain, that's what I did. And so throughout most of my young life, like lateness was a real problem for me. And if my husband was running late, I would get so agitated and anxious about it that it like ruined my night because I was just angry about the whole situation. But once I understood that that association existed, now my CEO of my brain has some power. And so my CEO can send a message down to Harold to say, hey, this is not that. Decouple those two. This doesn't make sense. And so I still don't like to be late, but it doesn't cause me the type of anxiety that it once did because now I have self-control. And so that self-awareness is so important so that we have a sense of keep your CEO in the office. Because in your brain, you have Harold, and then you have your amygdala, which is kind of your security monitor. And I call him Bob. So you've got Harold sending a note to Bob about what's going on. Harold gets information from your nerve, your systems manager, and then from the environment. And if Bob looks at the note and says, okay, Harold says there might be some positive emotions associated right now, or there might be some negative, there might be some danger, there might be some safety, he's just gonna tap that panic button. And the immediate message that goes up here is, hey, CEO, we need you to weigh in. We need you to figure out what to do. And I'm gonna give you a little jolt of chemicals to help you focus. If that message comes and it's negative, and Harold says, Hey, dude, we're in danger, then Bob hits that button and the message that comes up says, We're in danger. So, hey, CEO, go get a cup of coffee somewhere, we'll call you. We're gonna take over. And so what happens when we get into that chronic stress is that that limbic system, Harold and Bob are really running the show, which is why, like, if you've ever been really angry about something and then you calm down, you're like, Why did I do that? Or why did I say that? That's not who I am. And it's not who you are, it's your prehistoric brain saying you're in danger and we're gonna do whatever we have to do to get you out of danger. And so, especially in a job like teaching, it is so critical that teachers are self-aware because certain kids will trigger them to get angry, and then now they don't have their character and morality and professionalism and purpose. They don't have access to it. So now you've got two limbic brains that are just fighting each other for survival and it destroys relationships and it makes it much harder to manage a classroom.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

I love all of the imagery that you use, just using names for those different parts, that makes everything more visible and more, and it breaks it down, it's more understandable when you use that imagery. So when you're teaching people about the brain and about how it affects them in the classroom, do you um you talk about Harold and Bob?

SPEAKER_00 15:06

And I do, I do, and I do it with adults and I tell them you name your own. You name you doesn't have to be Harold and Bob. So name your own and give it some qualities. Like, is Harold a very reasonable person? Does Harold look for the whole situation, or is Harold, you know, regularly pulling up faulty associations or not seeing certain aspects of reality because there's a confirmation bias in there? So there's a really great video that kind of illustrates this. You might have seen it. It's basically researchers had people count how many times somebody made a basket on a basketball court. And so they're focused and they're looking and they're counting the baskets. And then when the experiment's over, they say how many baskets they saw. And then the researcher says, Did you happen to see the giant gorilla that walked across? Yeah. So that's an example, example where Harold was given instructions to look for one particular kind of sensory information of watching the baskets. Completely missed the gorilla. And we have a lot of gorillas that we're missing. And I think in today's world, we live in such a negative context between the media we consume and the technology that we use that takes the you know executive functions, it offloads those and does them for us. So we're not developing those. That it's really important. I always say the solution to pollution is dilution, right? So if our folders in our brain are negative, negative, negative, the solution to that is positive. So, like another thing I do with people is I say, every day, jot down in a journal, or if you have kids, ask your kids or ask your students or ask your staff, what's one good thing that happened today? And if you do that over and over in a repeated way, then Harold starts to learn, hey, I gotta look for the gorilla. I gotta look for the things that that are kind of not my natural confirmation about the world.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

I love that. And I and when I saw that video, I saw the gorilla. I stopped, I had I stopped the video because it was on Facebook or it might have been on LinkedIn. I stopped the video and then I went, I was like, Well, how many baskets? Because my focus was on the gorilla. I'm like, what is happening right now with this gorilla? Right. Yeah, so that's interesting. You brought that up. And and that's that's good that you are able to teach students as well as adults how to, you know, recognize when they have gotten to that place where you've got to, you know, have that self-control, the self-regulation and the self-awareness. Awareness. There we go.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Well, and you know, to illustrate it just with a real example, like if you had a set of identical twins that have an identical day, and you asked the one twin, how was your day? And that twin has all these negative associations, he might say, It was horrible. I woke up late, I had to speed to get here, I got a horrible parking spot. I was running in, I fell down, I spilled my coffee, I ruined my shirt, I was late to a meeting. It was a horrible day. Then you ask the other twin, and the other twin says, Well, it started out rough because I woke up late and I had to rush to get here, and then I had to park far away, but I guess I got my steps in, and then I spilled my coffee. But this really nice person helped me clean myself up, and my friend lent me a sweatshirt, and my team was really very nice about me being late. So overall, it it turned around. So exact same event, completely different experience and totally different impact. And so we need to train teachers, we need to train leaders, we need to train humans and students and everybody that we get to choose how our brain works. And the only way that we get the opportunity to choose, because we need that self-control in order to do that, is by taking some time to be more aware. And then also learning our body is in a habit, right? We have a habit of a stress response. So learning how to regulate your body, learning how to calm that systems manager, learning how to use breathing and connect your body. And that's where the mindfulness becomes a tool to help regulate your system.

SPEAKER_02 19:13

I love it. I love it. I I want to give credit to one of my one of my close friends, dear friends. She's a sorority sister of mine. We work together. She is an author and she has a journal for girls, and she and the journals have prompts for them and helping them with you know different things, self-image. But one of the things that you just said reminded me of uh one of the statements that she has in that journal, command your day. So you choose whether or not you are going to have a good day or a bad day. You command your day, you make that decision, and you um you cover that beautifully just now. Yep. So let's talk a little bit about classroom management and school culture. How does understanding the brain change the way we think about classroom management and school culture?

SPEAKER_00 20:05

So, any behavior in the classroom, academic, social, and this is your behavior, my behavior, kids' behavior, is the intersection of our biology and our context. So when we understand that biology, we understand Bob and Harold and our CEO, and when we understand that, we reframe problems. Because if we understand the biology, we understand that the reaction right now has only to do with how our brain is processing the sensory data and aligning it to our past. It may not be accurate and it may not have anything to do with what's happening right now. So when we recognize that, then we can say, okay, let's reframe this problem. Something in this environment is causing this child to have stress. So what is the underlying fear that the body is responding to? And it might be a fear of feeling stupid or a fear of being limited or controlled, or it might be a fear of being left out, or, you know, any of those underlying fears that Harold is drawing upon. So once we understand the biology, we kind of change our perspective of the problem. And so our solution changes. So how we do behavior plans, how we correct behavior, how we talk to students who are dysregulated changes. The second piece of behavior is context. So it's biology and context. We have ultimate control of our context. So one of the things I talk about with teachers all the time is setting up opportunities throughout the day to practice positivity because our brain learns through repetition, experience, and emotion. And so if we do like a social emotional learning lesson and everybody does the lesson and then it's never talked about again, or there isn't ample time for practice, reflection, feedback, then we don't develop that neural pathway that makes that automatic. And so one of the things that I teach teachers, and it's super easy, this is the easiest, most impactful thing that you can do in a classroom, is break your classroom into learning sprints. So we have about 10 minutes of attention span. And I would imagine even as people listen to this, their mind's gonna wander at some point and they're gonna miss some of what we said, and then they're gonna have to come back and refocus. So if we know that and we break the class into 10-minute learning sprints or 12 minutes or eight minutes, or whatever you want, and you put a timer up and you tell the students, okay, we're gonna do an eight minute learning sprint. I'm gonna give you some instructions and then you're gonna work independently. So when we're doing this, the expectation is there's gonna be no talking because it's you're listening to me, and then you're working independently. You put the timer on, and the students do. That learning sprint, and then you give them a brain break. And that brain break then is like turn to your neighbor and tell them one thing you really like about them. What's one thing about you that other people don't know that you think is pretty neat? What's one good thing that happened today? You know, things that are not necessarily related to the content, but it fills the bucket, right? It puts those positive filters in there because when I'm talking about something I like about myself and I get positive feedback, I get that dopamine hit. And so we are combating dopamine hits online and in games and even in, you know, a lot of the even the learning technologies that kids are using. And so they have a very short attention span for not receiving that kind of positive chemical reaction. So building that into your routine. And then you say, okay, so the next learning routine or learning sprints 12 minutes, whatever. And then you go through the expectations. And this is also important because if we live in that state of alarm and fear, our CEO is out having a cup of coffee. So she's not learning how to be a CEO. It's like, you know, your first day on the job, you're hopefully much, much better today than you were the first day that you did your job because you practice. So doing the learning sprints teaches kids how long is 10 minutes. It teaches them when I actually focus, what can I accomplish in 10 minutes? So it gives them time and task responsibility management skills through repeated practice of the routine. And so the biggest mistake I see in schools is we try to like shoehorn lessons into our day, but then the rest of the day is business as usual. So I really encourage like, how do you build proactive routines that help to formulate self-awareness, self-soothing, and you know, positivity.

SPEAKER_02 24:31

And you know, and and that you've made a good point about that, the proactive, the positivity in implementing that into these classrooms, because when you have the stressors that teachers are facing, they they need that, not just for the students, but also for themselves. In uh my last uh conversation um with Mr. Todd Shoel, we when talking about mindfulness, he mentioned and we talked about tests and how you know testing, state testing, all of this is is a big stressor for teachers. And so when you have different things that you know you have to complete because this is what we have to do, it makes sense to infuse your classroom with positivity. And this is a great way to implement that in those uh in those spurts of 10 minutes and increasing that time frame. So I love that idea. Love it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Well, and it was interesting because I was at a school today and one of the teachers said, but if we're breaking everything in 10 minutes, how are we teaching kids to endure for a 90-minute test? And I said, Okay, well, think about assessments you've taken. Like you might do 10, 15 minutes of really hard focus, and then you lean back and you take a breath and you look up and you distract yourself and then you come back. So you're teaching them how to shift their focus back and forth and how to calm their body down when they start to get kind of stressed. Right. And so it it's one of the easiest things to implement because it's not changing your instruction, it's just chunking it, and it has a huge impact. And the teachers that I've worked with who have implemented it are like, we get through stuff so much faster. And I'm like, Well, of course you do, because you're spending in a 30-minute lesson, you're spending 15 minutes of that trying to get the kids centered. You know, you're like, stop talking or do this, or the kids are looking out the window and don't know what, and you're teaching them how to sustain a focus.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

Right. I love it. Sounds like something that I need to start doing with our teachers as well. Just this is just a different take on it, and in some of the things that they're already doing. Being at a career center, it is a breath of fresh air. Love working with teachers in industry, and not that I don't miss the traditional setting. It's just a little extra, a little extra being at a career center and seeing the different, you know, the different industries and seeing students doing things that adults that are twice and three times their ages are doing already. So wonderful experience.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

That was where I was an administrator at a career center. So so I know exactly what you're talking about. And you know, you think about like the labs that students are in, you don't necessarily need to do learning sprints in a lab because they're hands-on, they're staying focused and doing stuff. But when you have the classroom, a lot of the students that come to the labs don't really like the sit-and-get classrooms, and that's why they're there for the hands-on learning. So breaking the academic pieces into the learning sprints can really amplify the impact of your teaching.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

Yes. I knew we have more and more in common here. All right. So let's let's talk a little bit about emotional regulation. How does emotional regulation directly impact student learning and teacher effectiveness? And I know you've touched on it a little bit, but can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

Yeah, I mean, I think that I've never been in a classroom with a dysregulated teacher that's working well. And so I think it's kind of like the airplane. You put your own mask on first. So that emotional regulation is critical for keeping the CEO in in her office. The other thing is, is it we feel sick when we have uh stress, especially chronic stress. And chronic stress is an inflammatory process. So, like, even I've had a couple back surgeries. When I get stressed, I notice my back aches. You know, it's like kicks up. So we end up, in fact, I did a huge project with a suburban school near Columbus, and and we grabbed all the data that we could get. Any data point you collected, we we took it. And our question was what impacts grade point average? And take a guess what the number one impact variable was.

SPEAKER_02 28:50

Number one for grade point average. The students the students outlook after high school?

SPEAKER_00 29:03

Nurse visits.

SPEAKER_02 29:05

So nurse visits.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Wow. We controlled for the kids who go for diabetes or you know, chronic, go down and get medications and stuff. If a student went to the nurse twice, it had zero impact. If they went a third time, it was the single most powerful predictor of a declining grade point average, and the effect size was almost twice what other variables were. The second most powerful predictor was a 504 plan. And you think about who do we put on 504 plans? Anxiety, ADHD, right? So we we put students who have regulation issues a lot of times, whether it's impulse control or emotional regulation or executive function problems, and we put them on the 504, but those don't include the person, they don't include support. And so it was interesting. We had some really good conversations about, you know, you think of your MTSS models and you think we spend a lot of time on the academic side, but when you start to think, how do we move students through tiers proactively? And so one of the things that we talked about in that school was we're gonna pay attention to the nurse visits. And if students, you know, and we're also gonna pay attention if a student has a 504, we bump them up to a tier two where they would get a little bit of additional support within the classroom. And and that helps with grade point average and success.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Wow, that is interesting.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Well, and you think the nurses, you know, the nurse is often a friendly face. The nurse is often a place where most of the time. Yeah, most of the time, you hope. Um, and then it's usually a place where you can lie down, where it's quiet, yeah, and you can calm down. And and a lot of times it's the first barrier to go home.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

You know, you go to the nurse's office and then they call parents and then you get to go home. So it's an escape hatch. Yeah. And so thinking of how do we reframe the nurse's office, even to have the nurse do some regulating activities with the students rather than just go lay down. Hey, let's sit together and breathe. Let's calm down that body. Because the other thing with stress is it hurts. I mean, it impacts your heart, it impacts your blood pressure, it impacts, you know, if you have chronic stress, there's connections between stress and lupus and other autoimmune diseases, arthritis, all kinds of things that can make us sick.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

Correct. That that is a good, that was a great study that you all did. And finding out that information, I and I can definitely see in the being from being in the traditional schools most of my career, I saw so many, especially at the middle school level. So I'm I'm sure that's definitely a study there. At middle schools, more middle schoolers, I think, go to the nurse than than high school, of course. Elementary probably has middle school B, just depending on the area, the demographics, and so forth. But that would be interesting to look at in looking at um the GPAs of students once they got to high school, just having some a longitudinal study on that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:03

Well, and I think there's also, you know, the the stress reaction, either your parasympathetic or your sympathetic nervous system takes over. So the sympathetic nervous system is like if if Bob thinks that you can get out of the danger you're in, then he pushes the button for that. So if you're driving on the road and somebody cuts you off, you get the insta sweat, super focused, you can swerve. That's Bob saying you can get out of this mess. But if you're sitting at a stoplight and somebody's barreling down and they're going to re-rend you and there's nowhere to go, then the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, and that's the one that slows your body down. You dissociate, you disengage, your body puts me, you know, we we make our own opioids and analgesics so that it numbs pain. And and so when you think about students, if they're in the fight or flight, or if they're in the freeze. So if they're in the freeze, then they disengage in class and daydream. If they're in the flight, they're the kids who, you know, they go to the bathroom for 45 minutes or they go to the nurse, or if they're in the the fight, they get combative. They and so I think again, when you understand the biology of behavior, you start to look at some of those behaviors as hey, this is a stress reaction. So what can I do? What's in the context right now that is triggering this stress reaction for this kid? And so it changes the way you interact with that child at the moment to help calm them down.

SPEAKER_02 33:24

Nice, awesome. I love that. Love this topic all together. Love everything about this topic. All right, so let's go on to the next question. And talking about school leaders. If a school leader wanted to become more brain aware tomorrow, what would be the first shift that person should make?

SPEAKER_00 33:44

I think the first thing is to understand that our behaviors, our reactions, our emotional and you know, action actions is that biology and context. And I think for leaders, just as with teachers, their first job is to become self-aware. So doing a little introspection about what is it as a leader that stresses me out and why, and starting to figure out who they are because when they understand that and they understand it in themselves, then they have more empathy for their staff. And they become so I I wrote a book called Aspirations to Operations, and it's a leader's guide to making transformation stick. And it talks about like first, you have to know yourself. And then once you know yourself, you you can apply that knowledge to understand the human system that's responsible for change, and you can start to be more strategic about how you communicate change, how you coach, how you collaborate, how you set up the plan for change, because our we don't like unknown things. We like to be in control. So when you give people really fuzzy instructions on what you're asking of them, or if you're not making it coherent with what they already do, it raises the stress level. And then you get a lot of resistance from your staff.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

Right, right. And that and that goes back to we can rem we can both remember from our leadership training and taking all of the different tests to see what type of leadership style we have. But there's also different inventories out there that you can take to tell what type of leader if you are compassionate, if you have SEL um competencies that will help you to be a better leader as well. So looking at those different types of assessments for those who are in the leadership role, it will definitely would help them to understand how you lead as well as if you are that sympathetic, empathetic leader, and you know how to help people understand change that is happening in their organization.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

Right. And I think one of the things too, I remember when I was teaching leadership courses, and they want you to write your leadership platform. And I was always like, that to me seems like a really silly exercise. It should be one sentence. I am the leader people follow. And so I think some of those, like, you know, inventories and things like that can kind of help you understand that current state. But what I always challenge leaders to do is to say, but is that the style of leadership the people you're leading needs?

SPEAKER_01 36:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

And so we should be able to understand, we have kind of our comfort of what we like to do. And and if we set up change in a right way, we can live that way. We can turn into the leader that we want to be. But but I I see a lot of times some some people take those instruments and then they're just like, well, this is who I am. Correct. Well, that's great for you, but that means you know, you need to find an organization then that needs that type of leader. If you want to lead in the organization you're currently in, you need to figure out what leader style your staff needs.

SPEAKER_02 36:53

Right. And usually those are the individuals that may or may not have gotten into the leadership role because they had that calling on their life to do it. Because since you know, I've taken that first type of um leadership inventory, my style has changed. And I've learned to change based on change itself and help and going from different organizations, having different staffs, different teachers. It is important that you, as a leader, you have to also be willing to change, to accommodate, and not be so rigid. So the things that we learn in in this in leadership. Yep. All right. So we're coming to the end of our discussion. But this has been great. I'm gonna go ahead and say this. I would love to have you back on for a part two. Um again, I love the brain, love, you know, love psychology, and and now in learning more about neurowell and and understanding the brain in the classroom, I I think that this is another, there's another discussion that we can have. So would love to have you back. But just in in talking about the learning environments, how can principals and district leaders create environments where both students and educators feel psychologically safe?

SPEAKER_00 38:17

So I think one of the so there's been some social science research, and it was actually interesting, it grew out of the diversity movement. You know, we've spent 25 years talking about diversity, and and what these researchers said is we've kind of failed because people of different types, whether it's socioeconomic or racial or religious or whatever, they're not finding deep ties with people who are different than they are. We seem to still see people kind of hunker down with like people. And so they they said, Why is that? So they went to the the armed services and they said, So here's a context where soldiers form really deep ties with other soldiers, regardless of where they're from or their backgrounds. And they said, What is this going on? And what they came up with is that there's a collective identity. So when I am in that context, because remember, behavior is biology and context, it's context specific. So they said, when I'm with my fellow soldiers, I am a soldier first, and then I'm all these other differences. And so when we think about that collective identity, we want to think how do we build that in a school so that students feel a sense of belonging and staff feels a sense of belonging. And it really gets down to culture and culture is not words. And I see districts spend thousands of dollars to come up with their taglines and their words, but then you look at their practices, they're not at all aligned. Correct. So the first step is really to define what is our collective identity? What does it mean to be a, you know, buccaneer or whatever you are?

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Right.

SPEAKER_00 39:55

And then to start saying, okay, do we have the practices in place that are actually living that and creating some of those things? Because students come in. The other thing is a lot of students in today's world and and adults as well, you know, we spend a lot of time on social media. And when you think about the persona that you project on social media, it is always a little better than who you really are. Like you're not, but right. You get on there, and everybody's kids are clean and beautiful and doing all these great things, and my kids are a hot mess and you know, can't put their dishes away. So we get this fake person persona online. Well, then when we enter into a brick and mortar building, that causes dissonance for us because now I'm walking in less than the way I've projected myself. So we already have that level of stress walking into a school building or not being in the online space. And and then if we can get rid of that, if we can say, when you're here, you belong. You are part of us. And and that engagement, what's cool is that engagement and belonging is bi-directional, which means that if you're engaged, you tend to feel you belong. And if you feel you belong, you engage. And so it really is like the foundation for starting to build a neurowell culture.

SPEAKER_02 41:11

Yes, and I love that. And I think one example of having that um helping to build an identity is social contracts. When um teachers give students that opportunity to help to come up with, you know, one or a few of the rules in the classroom and how we are I like to use the word expectation versus rules. They come up with the expectations for that classroom. How are we gonna treat each other? How are we going to treat, you know, the teacher? How are we gonna, you know, treat this in this environment, and actually putting into language and having the students be a part of that stakeholders. So I think that's one example of having them to feel as if they are in a safe place. And many of the social contracts that I've seen within my building since I've been there, the focus uh there's always something about feeling safe, that this is a safe space. And and then what happens when it's not a safe space? How do we as a class handle that?

SPEAKER_00 42:14

So and I teach like to to start out with the idea of we are a learning community. So, what's the purpose of our community? The purpose of our community is to learn. So then having kids to say, you know, what is a good learner? What is a good community member? To your point about what are the actual actions. And I think doing doing it through the lens of learning community adds a little bit of a shift because I think like I see a lot of like PBIS, the positive behavior intervention, I see the PBIS stuff that it's just class rules put into a grid. And so the when you read them, you're like, okay, so this is about compliance and control within this classroom. Where if you define it as a learning community, it's about being part of something and that we all have a responsibility. And like I'll tell kids sometimes, you're not the main character in this chapter, like you're a supporting character, and they just kind of look at you with their mind blown because I'm like, you're not always the main character.

SPEAKER_02 43:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

So we need to work together as a community to support each other. It's not about what you need, it's about what we need.

SPEAKER_02 43:18

Right. Yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it. Very beautiful. So, next question: what role, and I think we've touched on it just a little bit more, but this is uh an important point that I I want to make sure that we reiterate. What role does self-awareness play in preventing burnout?

SPEAKER_00 43:41

So I think it I think it is the key to preventing burnout because if we're self-aware, then we first of all we can control the context to reduce the things that upset us, that dysregulate us. Second of all, we can tell Harold, decouple this association. It doesn't make sense. And I think when we're self-aware, we we practice that sense of asking ourselves why. And so we're able to then apply that skill to the students that we're we're working with. So we can ask them why. So instead of saying this is about me, it's more about like what's going on underneath all of this behavior or disengagement or whatever it is you're looking at.

SPEAKER_02 44:22

And what do you find where there are when you're working with teachers and you're working with leaders, do you find that there is one uh gender that seems to embrace this embrace this science of the brain more than others?

SPEAKER_00 44:39

I haven't seen it divided by gender. What I have seen that is a big divide, and and I think this. Happened in education over the past 15 years or so with high-stakes testing is that we shifted away from the idea that I teach kids in a content area to I teach content to kids. And you can feel that difference in a classroom. When you're in a classroom that's kid centered, where the teacher's focused on teaching kids, then the little hiccups along the way are challenges to be dealt with. But when you're in a classroom where the teacher's teaching content and that's their focus, then it's about them. And it's about, I've got to get through this curriculum. I don't have time to do these things that I know are good for kids because it's going to bite into my curriculum and my teaching time. And so that's the divide that I see is that teachers who are seeing the kids as humans and that their function is to develop that child, and they happen to be teaching them content to do that. It's they they embrace this stuff really fast.

SPEAKER_02 45:39

And I and I can see that. I definitely can see that that divide being more about how you see children and how you see what you're teaching. Because this is one of the battles in making sure that you have the right people hired in schools who are actually there and care about children, and they're not so fixated on the fact I've got 90 days to cover this curriculum. We've got to speed through, we've got to go through it. You've got to have a human component to education. And some days, you know, I I come across individuals and I'm just like, what in the world? Do you just not like people? You know, that's what I'm thinking in my head. I don't say it with my mouth, not as a later, but you know, thinking it in my head, do you really just don't like children? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:29

I've oftentimes laughed that I want t-shirts printed that say, Stop being mean to kids.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

You know, that there's some money in that.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

How do you, you know, how do you solve the education problem? Stop being mean to kids. But but the other thing I will say is that part of the reason that we're in the situation we are is because of the leadership in education. Because if all we focus on is test scores, you know, you measure what matters and what you measure matters. And so if you want your teachers to be kid focused, then you need to start thinking about like saying, hey, we're gonna all do learning sprints because we know it's good for the brain and we're gonna have positivity in our classroom, you need to monitor and measure that and and you know, celebrate it and make it visible for the teachers because we give a lot of lip service at the administrative level, and then every meeting we have is a data debrief on academic outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 47:19

Correct. That is right. The leadership, you know, there has to be some change for testing. And and that was, again, that conversation in my with my last guest speaker, that you know, that has been, I feel like the thorn in the side of education for those of us that have different viewpoints as to what really matters when it comes to our students and making sure that they're um prepared for the future. You know, there's a different way to assess. And so we know that assessments and testing is not only a stressor for our students, but it's a stressor for the um for our classroom teachers. And hopefully we will see a change. You know, we may be retired by the time that change happens, but I'm a believer that anything can happen when you have the right people in place. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:06

Well, and I think that we are in a really unique time in education because I think that we have a real purpose problem. You know, you think education initially was to teach people a little bit about a lot of things so that they could be educated, but then the internet and AI and all that, like we don't need to give them content anymore, but yet our assessment system is still measuring that purpose. Correct. Then we switched to career readiness, career pathways, and and now we're in a little bit of a pickle because we don't know what those are going to look like with the infusion of AI into the workforce. Right. So, what I would argue is that right now, really the purpose of school needs to shift to teaching this, making that CEO of the brain the smartest CEO they can be. And it was interesting. I'm working with a school that put that into kind of a priority framework. So I said, okay, well, let's we have to define it so we can measure it, right? So that we know how we're doing. So, what is critical thinking? And this high school team had two hours and could not come up with a shared definition. And then we wanted like a definition and then start, you know, start putting together like what's it look like when they're approaching expectations or meeting expectations? Because we say we want to teach critical thinking and we we talk about this stuff all the time, but we don't even have a shared vision of what that looks like, and so we're never gonna get there.

SPEAKER_02 49:26

This is true. This is true. So many different voices, and you need one, you needed one voice that represented the collective as to what you know critical thinking is. So yeah, very good discussion. Again, I I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, our talk, and I'm so glad that you're willing to come back for another segment. And next month is women's month, and we also have music education, uh, appreciation. We have a lot of different things going on in Mark. So hopefully uh we can have a conversation next month, but we will talk offline about that later on. But I have thoroughly enjoyed having you before going to the closing. Can you is there anything that you want to share with the audience related to your work, your books, anything that you would like to share at this time?

SPEAKER_00 50:18

Sure, sure. So the two books that I think really get at this NeuroWell is kind of the what. This is the the culture we want. And then Aspirations to operations is for the leaders, like how do we actually get there? And that book at the end of each chapter has like stopping things to to really get you to build some self-awareness. So I highly encourage leaders to get that and to really work the steps and think through it because at the end, they're going to be a much stronger leader. And then, you know, if people out there are interested, I do keynote addresses, I do workshops. You know, in this world today with Zoom, it's super easy. I can do book studies with groups of administrators to really help build the conditions that we need in order for transformation. And that real change starts in the brain. So we have to know the brain.

SPEAKER_02 51:06

Exactly. I love it. And I will make sure that your information is in the tagline of uh the if of the promo as well as in the episode upload for my platform. And then that way, any listeners that would like to reach out, they can reach out to you. Or if they want to send me an email, I can send that to send that information out to them. My email address is lashante6 at gmail l-a-s-h a w n-t-e, the number six at gmail.com. So this conversation reminds us that the effective education is not just about curriculum, it is about capacity, and capacity begins in the brain. As we have celebrated this month, we've talked to uh several uh several individuals on the broadcast. We will continue to explore leadership and sustainability, and today's episode challenges us to rethink what readiness truly means because we cannot build a future workforce if we are burning out the people preparing it. So, to our listeners, remember this skilled hands are important, but strong minds are essential. Thank you for joining the Road to an Effective Classroom Environment. If this conversation spoke to you, share it with a leader, an educator, or someone who needs permission to protect their well being. Until next time, lead boldly, serve intentionally, and build environments where everyone can thrive. Thank you.