Talking with Skeptical Parents & Educators About Students Taking Action

Welcome back to Part Two of my S5E27 @schoolutionspodcast conversation. The dreaming is over, and it's time to move from empathy to action. Dr. Chris Hass and I get into the hard stuff: scripted curricula, skeptical parents, time constraints, and how to do this work even when the system feels like it's working against you.

Dr. Hass shares what research actually looks like from kindergarten through fifth grade, from K/1 students writing letters to restaurant managers about plastic straws, to fifth graders conducting year-long independent community inquiries. He makes the case that children are not waiting to be old enough, brave enough, or smart enough. They're ready right now.

Whether you're a classroom teacher with five minutes in a morning meeting or a school leader rethinking how literacy and social studies connect, this episode gives you concrete moves you can make tomorrow.

📚 Book mentioned: From Empathy to Action by Chris Hass, Katie Kelly & Lester Laminack, and Social Justice Talk by Chris Hass

🎧 Haven't listened to Part One yet? Start there first because this conversation builds directly on it.

Chapters:
0:00 — Welcome back: from dreaming to problem solving
1:30 — "My kids are too young" and answering the skeptics
3:30 — Scaffolding students toward independent action projects
5:00 — Scripted curricula: working within the constraints
7:00 — Finding the cracks: the 15% solution
9:00 — Advocating for your profession and your students
10:30 — What research looks like in K/1 classrooms
13:00 — Research structures in 2nd and 3rd grade
15:00 — Building toward independent 5th-grade inquiry
16:30 — AI, critical thinking, and why this work is future-proof
18:00 — Integrating literacy, social studies, and social justice
20:00 — Talking to skeptical parents and caregivers
22:00 — When kids need trusted adults to process hard news
24:00 — What schools doing this work can look forward to
25:30 — A closing passage from From Empathy to Action
27:00 — Next episode preview: Erin Patterson on student homelessness

Join our community of educators committed to cultivating student success, inspired teaching, and creating inclusive classrooms with a pro-kid mindset focused on the whole child.

🎧 New episodes every Monday & Friday with bite-sized Wednesday reel bonus content.
📧 Connect: schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com
🎵 Music: Benjamin Wahl

Don't forget to 🔔SUBSCRIBE for more teaching tips, and SHARE with fellow educators! 

Next Week: I am sitting down with Erin Patterson of Schoolhouse Connection, and she is about to pull back the curtain on a crisis that most of us walk right past every single day. There are 1.3 million homeless students hiding in plain sight in our schools, and Erin has spent her career fighting for them at the highest levels. From landmark congressional wins to the ongoing fight to change federal law, this conversation will forever reshape how you see homelessness, how you see your students, and what you believe is possible when one person refuses to look away. 

#SchoolutionsPodcast #ForeverGettingBetter #EmpathyToAction #StudentEngagement  

When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

Olivia: [00:00:00] Welcome back. Part two of my conversation with Dr. Chris Hass is where we stop dreaming and start problem-solving. How do you do this work when your curriculum is scripted? What do you say to the parent who thinks this is too heavy for a third grader, and what does research actually look like in kindergarten versus fifth grade?

Chris holds nothing back, and this conversation will leave you with concrete moves you can make right now, no matter the constraints you're working under. This is just a reminder, if you have not listened to part one of our conversation, pause this episode, go back and listen, and then return to this conversation.

This is Schoolutions podcast, the podcast that extends education beyond the classroom. A show that isn't just theory, but practical try-it-tomorrow approaches for educators and caregivers to ensure every student finds their spark and receives the [00:01:00] support they need to thrive.

Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Dr. Chris Hass, um, Chris in part one we talked a lot about the difference between just having empathy to using and harnessing, you know, how we're feeling into action and that this work is not easy work. But, um, you spoke to developing critical text sets of making sure that we are offering a perspective on how others live and, and exist in the world to help ourselves understand that better. 

Um, but we also talked about the idea of taking action isn't always about success necessarily, that the success is found in each movement and each step forward. And so. I've thought a lot [00:02:00] about what I wanted to talk to you about with this conversation, and I thought a lot about skeptics. People that would say, you can't do this work in elementary school. You can't do this work now in the political climate and what's going on in the world. And I beg to differ. I think it's more important now to do this work and the work of empathy to action. So let's start off by talking about the skeptics. What would you say to someone that said, my kids are too young to do this work? 

Chris: Yeah, I feel like I spend half of my time addressing the skeptics, right? 'Cause, but for good reason. Because this is what I mean, there's just some things that they logically make sense to us in our heart, and our mind does not mean they're true whatsoever, by the way, but they logically make sense to us, so we don't do it.

Kids are too young. That's why I love when I have opportunities to go out and present to people. 'Cause I can show them photographs and I can show them videos of kids doing some pretty incredible things standing up in front of the school board and [00:03:00] saying, I'm really concerned about the lack of funding for our school libraries because the, the books don't reflect the kids who live there or the kids who are learning there. Right. Um, the kids are very capable. I, I don't, I, I, this one, I struggle with this one. 

Olivia: Yeah. 

Chris: Because it's, it's dumb logic. Because if you take the time to work alongside kids and to hear what they wanna talk about and hear what they're concerned about, and a lot of times it's school, it's the quality of school lunches, it's the quality of things in the playground. It's how short and teachers are gonna agree with this, by the way, how short their lunch period is. Because how can you possibly in 25 minutes when get to do all these other things also, 

Olivia: Right. 

Chris: When you start with the things that are most important to them, and you ask how it affects them and why it's problematic and what we might do differently. You find a place to start engaging them with this idea that when things aren't working the way that we feel like they should work, we have an opportunity, maybe we even have a responsibility to try and take action on it in some way. And for me, that's where the empathy part builds in. Because originally they really wanna be [00:04:00] focused on the things that affect them.

But we want them to understand that not everyone experiences the world that they do or experiences of the world in the way that they do. And we have a responsibility to address those sort things Also. I think the difference is we just had to think about how do we scaffold them into that work and what does that work look like.

For me, what I found success in working with young children to, to show that they can do this is it was a lot of doing things collaboratively. So we can go through that whole process together and see what it looks like to learn more about this topic and try to understand it in as many different ways that we can and think about who else needs to know about this and what might we do with it so that I could eventually get to the point where I could ask them, what issues are really important to you?

What would you like to do? So when I think about my classroom of looping from second, third grade, my goal was always by the end of third grade, they were gonna be able to independently do a project on something that was really important to them, and they're gonna take action in a way that was meaningful and they never failed to live into it. And not all of them looked exactly the same, and some of them were in a different trajectory, but that was okay because we were starting them down a path that we hope that they can take that. [00:05:00] 

Olivia: What would you say to someone, it's almost a combination question of like, I don't have time to do this work because I've gotta prep kids for a test or I mean, a lot of school districts right now, teachers, especially at elementary, are being required to use a scripted curricula that's not just for reading or just for writing. It's like their entire literacy day is structured every minute. So what would you say to those people? 

Chris: Yeah. That, first of all, they're absolutely right. The conditions that they're working under are so unprofessional and so offensive, um, that it creates a challenge. It creates a barrier, but it's not something that's not insurmountable either. We just have to be strategic in how we do it. I think there's a couple things to that. So I work with a group of six first and second year teachers who are former graduates of mine who wanted to continue exploring this type of work together.

And there's some of them at a school district where they had those same prescriptive programs, but they have a little bit of flexibility in how they use them. [00:06:00] And then I have one or two that are schools where they're not allowed to read a single book all year. They're not ever allowed to pick a book off a shelf and read it. They can't bring in a news article and read it. They can't do anything that's not verbatim in the prescriptive resources that they've been given. So we have this plan together in that they're gonna do four critical text sets across the year. They're gonna bring those conversations also into their morning meeting.

They're gonna make connections to their own lives. They're gonna think about what means to them, and then they're gonna write pen pal letters between students in different parts of the state so they can compare how they're each making sense of all these stories. For the, for the teachers who are in these schools that have no autonomy whatsoever and you can't read a single thing, that becomes a real challenge.

So what do they do? So what do they do is they say, well, if I have to read this unit, I'm gonna take these texts that you've given me, but I'm gonna create a different frame for viewing these texts. Because what we're really gonna talk about is multiple perspectives on a single event. Or what we're really gonna talk about is a sense of belonging.

So they still use the same text, they still use the same curriculum but [00:07:00] now they're folding in this whole other aspect of, but these texts can still help us think about something that's really important. That is one piece of it. I think the other piece of it is they've come to understand that they don't have to have a 100% solution right now. It's okay if they have a 15% solution. 

Olivia: Yeah. 

Chris: So we figure out where is it? Can we start, what's the one thing I feel like I can do in my classroom right now and maybe I can get five minutes to my morning meeting to something that's a little bit different 'cause they're scripting morning meeting for them now too. Um, I can start with this five minutes. I'll go from there and I'll just look for the cracks and I'll keep exploring the cracks until I grow it, grow it, grow it out to a place where I see comfortably, I'm moving forward, but I'm not allowing myself to be stopped by it because I'm continually moving forward.

And it may not always be the pace I'm moving forward that I want, but I'm moving forward at pace that allows me to discover new things and try new things with my kids, it can't be an excuse and I understand the pressures and, and, and I haven't been in the classroom for three and a half years, so I feel like I'm already too removed to speak with any certainty to anything at this point. 'cause so much has changed in the last three and a half [00:08:00] years. But I do know that if I was still in the classroom, ultimately I'm responsible to my kids in my community and I'm gonna make as many decisions as I can to make sure that I remember that. 

Olivia: Yeah. And I think for teachers that aren’t tenured, um, it's also just not a, a protective bubble, but it allows for a little bit more risk taking. Um, we are not telling anyone to put your job at risk, but it's also, I, I think often of the words of Katie Keier, I have integrity, uh, to my children and I've gotta teach with that integrity. Kids are all different. Children are diverse, and they bring this beautiful, uh, wealth of knowledge from their families, from their background. They have so many questions. And what these scripted curricula are doing is there's no room for questions. There's no for curiosity. And they're….

Chris: Engagement. 

Olivia: Engagement. They're killing joy [00:09:00] for our children. And so, um. It. That to me is, it's so important for us to be reflective and responsive and those of us that are not in the classroom anymore, we can certainly support teachers in taking these risks and be thought partners for them. Um, and…

Chris: I think another piece of it too, like when you think about taking action, 'cause that's another piece that I'm doing now and how do we help future professionals understand how do you advocate for your profession? 

Olivia: Yes. 

Chris: And for your community and your students. That's an important part of this too. You're in these situations and you're not continually having discussions with your administrative team and your literacy coach and all these other people about why this is problematic and what you really wanna be doing in your teaching, then you, you're surrendering. 

Olivia: Yeah. 

Chris: I, I feel like the schools that I've been in that have been especially restrictive, I wound up getting quite a bit of freedom, but it's because I was constantly demonstrating how passionate I was, how much I knew about it, what I wanna accomplish with the kids, and say, my door is wide open. Come and see what we're accomplishing. 

Olivia: Yeah. 

Chris: And surprisingly, there's a number of times where people say, well, go ahead and keep [00:10:00] doing that. That may not be the norm for everyone, but, but you have to advocate for yourself. You can't just accept it. 

Olivia: I agree. And I also wanna talk more about research, because this work does require children to be curious and then to follow that curiosity and to find answers that can help them take action. What does research look like at the K-1, 2-3, 4-5 grade levels with children? 

Chris: So one of my favorite examples from K-1, I was lucky enough to be at this full, our kids moved through as a cohort. So my kids came, they were together for two years with a teacher, Tiffany Palmetier, one of the most powerful teachers you could ever meet, and they came to me already ready in many ways for much of this work because she was invested in it too.

She was having morning meeting discussions about what do we mean by justice and all these sorts of things. The kids were always, because also it was a school of inquiry. Kids were used to asking questions about things that didn't make sense to them or didn't feel right. And there was one time when they were reading an article about a beached whale or something.

The kids saw the picture and they were [00:11:00] just really curious, like, how would that happen? What would happen to a whale for it to wind up? And that was at the focus of the article itself. But that was the photo. And as much as they were, they were involved in this scientific study at the time, that an inquiry into whatever their standards were.

She noticed that here's an opportunity that I can bring in this other piece that's important to kids. They wanna better understand this. So they started learning about this, which led to the waste that gets into the ocean and how much waste that is, the effects that it has on aquatic life, where that comes from in our lives, how people are going about trying to change that in different ways. They learned about these blocks that some people make on a trash, where they shoved them into like a juice container. 

Olivia: Yeah. 

Chris: And then they built furniture out of it. So they started doing those sorts of things. I expected the kids were super passionate about it for a while, and then they're like, well, I don't wanna give up, play time for it. And they kind of veered away, which, that's part of the process sometimes when things are new also. Um, but then they learned about the use, like plastic straws. So in the end of it, the kids wound up going to their favorite restaurant or they had an invitation. 

Olivia: Mm-hmm. 

Chris: They had an invitation. They wrote letters so that when they went to their favorite restaurant with, um, family, they could deliver this letter to the [00:12:00] manager saying, would you please consider moving to paper straws? Because my class has been learning whatever it was. I think 22 families, eight of them wound up choosing to do that, but it was an open invitation, for anyone, who were comfortable doing that, I love it because they already had something they were supposed to learn in science, but Tiffany made room for this other piece that she knew that was important to them.

She knew, didn't make sense of them, and they, they, they felt more and more passionately. They discovered ways together that they could make a difference and they could change things. Because it was K-1, a lot of that was collaborative work. Right? That was shared writing, that was shared reading and all those sorts of things. She was preparing them for when they came to my class in second grade where I could continue them down that path. But my goal by the end of third grade was I want 'em to independently be doing this work. 

Olivia: Okay. 

Chris: So it's looking ahead of knowing where we're trying to get versus just teaching in this moment, having the long view of where trying to get, um, research in my second, third grade classroom looked quite a bit different except that we started with that same notion. Let's do share things together. Let's talk about what it looks like to go through a text to try to find information. What does it look [00:13:00] like to, um, summarize text, to organize it, all those sorts of things. 

But, and I think I, I feel like I drew a lot of this from like the world of writing instruction with the Katie Wood Rays and all these sorts of people, and the powerful use of metaphor and the powerful use of resources and structuring things in very particular ways so that we set our kids up for success. So if my kids were doing research. One of my favorite ones around research, it was the normalcy went up at, um, it came out of that one. 

Olivia: Yeah. 

Chris: We were looking together at a culture and we were looking at Chinese culture and they had these large folders and they had different, and they would put the information they found when they did the research on post-its, and they would stick it somewhere. So they would start with their questions and they would try to answer their questions, but there was another one, oh, I found out new information. Some said, oh, I was right. So if you thought something was true and you found out it was right, you could confirm it. But there was another section for, oops, that was a misconception.

Olivia: Yeah. 

Chris: What we found out in the research was a lot of the things that we thought were true weren't actually true at all. 

Olivia: It's fascinating. 

Chris: Because they had come from watching Kung Fu Panda [00:14:00] or something, and they generalized it to this larger thing. So through giving the structure of here's how we can collect information, but here's how we can start organizing it, we were also learning that not everything, that the preconceptions that we come in with, those aren't always true, and that's why we do research. Then we had someone from China come in, one of my classmates who had come from China just few years before, and she looked over everything and even she was like, okay, some of these are true and some of these things aren't true at. 

I think with young children, it's a lot of those things. It's those shared experiences. It's setting up structures that allow them to be successful. 'cause we're asking 'em to do little pieces at a time while giving them heavily have heavy amounts of scaffolding. But it's also understanding the power of having someone to our classroom who truly is an expert on something because we truly are not an expert on something, who can help guide us along the way. 

By the time at my school, the kids reached the end of fifth grade, they all engaged in their own independent yearlong inquiries into an issue within their community that they wanted to take action on. And by then, throughout all of those years, they had opportunities to learn what it means to conduct an interview with someone.

Olivia: Amazing. [00:15:00] 

Chris: What it means to collect information. It's amazing what it means to organize information, what it means to communicate that to other people so that by the time they got there, they could draw on all those years worth of tiny pieces and put it all together and go into middle school. Very much capable, very much capable of taking action in their communities.

Olivia: Chris, oh my gosh! So, what gets me out of bed every morning, and I think a lot of my colleagues is we hope to help nurture better humans. And this is the work of, uh, future proofing and future readying, as Brene Brown says, uh, I, we don't have to worry necessarily about AI taking away anything from children that are empowered with this work because this is the higher-level thinking work that we want our kids doing and adults doing.

We want people looking for patterns. We want people really examining their knowledge base. [00:16:00] What I'm experiencing now, especially in middle and high school, are teachers at the high school level saying kids are not doing enough research. And so if we start foundationally K through 5, our children leaving and entering middle school with the volumes of experience that you're describing, my gosh, by middle and high school, the possibilities are endless.

Chris: So I had that experience recently when I was helping our exchange student with a Model U in project she was doing, looking at overdependence on oil production for some countries and how they needed to diversify, um, which is a very heady topic. So I was learning a lot alongside her. But as I was trying to help her do research and craft this proposal, we both realized like she hasn't had much instruction, how to organize data, how to organize research.

So it just becomes all this stuff. I feel like, and I hate this but when I show examples of my kids writing from second and third grade, people assume I was working with like kids who were more [00:17:00] capable than other kids. But it was just they were scaffolded more carefully into the work because you know what? Their writing was pretty sophisticated. But also when it came time to research, we would have different files for all these different pieces of the research. 

They would put post-its in there, then they would sort their post-its and whatever made sense. And I said, oh, now we know what paragraphs are gonna be. Right? You just saw what paragraphs might look like. Because the structure was in place for them and how we might do it, the end product looked like something that a third grader wouldn't produce, but they absolutely can produce if, if we just think about how to scaffold them into it more carefully. 

Olivia: Yeah, and and your book, you also say that writing is a catalyst for change, and so it's teaching those steps along the way because the writing process is very messy, but I also, there's a call to action to do this work and to scaffold it vertically and horizontally. And so you've so beautifully captured the possibilities of if we know where we're going, then we can backwards scaffold down to say, all right, here's where we're beginning, and then I'm gonna stand on the shoulders of that work and [00:18:00] that and the children - what a gift that a fifth grade teacher could say. This is where you began with research as kindergartners. Here's the newness that we're adding this year and each year the teacher could say that. That's powerful. It's the known to new, Chris., 

Chris: and we're speaking again to what's problem with all these prescriptive programs that say that every kid learns exactly the same. This is what you say and this is what you do, versus. We're kid watchers. We're supposed to constantly be watching kids and observing what they're being successful with, what they're struggling with, how the things they know and say, what can I do tomorrow to help them be more successful? And there's no room for that.

Olivia: There's not, 

Chris: But it's so important. 

Olivia: It is. And so I, I want, I wanna wrap part two with the vision for the future and something that you're making me think about a lot right now. Most elementary schools (hopefully) have time carved for social studies science instruction outside of this scripted curricula time.

I am thinking right now if I'm a teacher and every moment is [00:19:00] planned for me when it comes to literacy and I don't actually believe literacy is just reading and writing. I think becoming a literate being involves social sciences. But I'm wondering if we could think about future work at the elementary grades. This work could be done also during social studies and science time in the day. I don't know what you think about that. 

Chris: Yeah, I, and so one of the courses, or the course I'm teaching right now is, uh, interdisciplinary literacy class, which is talking about that very thing. How does social studies come over here and how does literacy come back over here, which gives us the opportunity to do this work. So for my current students who are seniors in in education programs. It's how do we take this literacy standard? How do we take this piece of social studies? And then how do we take some social justice goals that we have, like we want our kids to learn to live together in a more democratic way or have a greater understanding or appreciation for diversity.

How can we bring these things together but also have this larger picture of what we're trying to accomplish for our community and make it all work [00:20:00] together? And the answer is, those things already work so beautifully together. 

Olivia: They do. 

Chris: We've just been taught to compartmentalize everything in schooling context. Which shouldn't be compartmentalized at all because you're right, you can't work as a reader and not be a social scientist at the same time. 

Olivia: No, no. 

Chris: You're not gonna read any good book without bringing in social sciences to help you understand characters and plot and all those sorts of things. And just the opposite, the other way over. I think that's the answer to a lot of our challenges with time is we just have to look for ways that we can integrate things as much as possible, um, within the context that we have. 'Cause you're right, we don't want anyone getting themselves fired. But I also want people to recognize that sometimes the perceived threat isn't the actual threat that's laying in front of us either. And it's a matter of differentiating or understanding that.

Olivia: Yeah. 

Chris: Um, there's a lot of times we pull short 'cause we're fearful something's gonna happen. Like parents, you, you didn't ask about parents, but people, that's the question I get more often than not. Mm-hmm. But what about parents? Um, and that's another example of living in fear of something that's never quite as bad as we, we presume it's going to be.

Olivia: Yeah. And so thinking about. [00:21:00] The response to parents thinking about systems and structures that need changing. What is your response then to a caregiver that says, this topic's too heavy. This is too big for a third, fourth grader to be thinking and and studying? 

Chris: Yeah. I think what helps me is I've accumulated a lot of career stories of kids who came in and they needed to talk about things that we presume that they didn't already know about. So I'll give you one example. Um, when I was still teaching second, third grade, I wrote a book called Social Justice Talk, and one of my favorite components of that book is there's a lot of videos of my second graders having discussions about these topics. And in one of them, this little girl Maya, comes into the morning meeting and she wants to talk about a shooting that's just occurred at a synagogue where two people were shot and killed.

Ashley brings it up. I pause and say, you know, Maya, I thought about sharing that story yesterday and I didn't because anytime there's a story that involves violence and especially death, I'm just afraid for you all because I don't want you to feel unsafe in a world that really is safe because there's so many people who care about you.[00:22:00] But I realize now I should have brought that story to you all yesterday because you already heard about it. 

And if you didn't have a trusted adult in a classroom to help you process it and think about what it means and, and where we are in this world and what our role in. Then it just stays here with you and it stays here with you in your heart and in your head. And that's not, that's more dangerous than, than bringing up topics that might feel sensitive to us because a lot of our kids are already hearing about these things, and it's important if we want them to have strong mental health to give them outlets for talking about them. Um, but I think a piece of this is we need to know our kids. 

We need to know who they are, we need to know what they're comfortable with, all those sorts of things. I'll give you one more quick example. At the end of one year, I interviewed my kids in small groups just to see how did this year go? How are we feeling about it was my dissertation. So I was looking at the discussions we had, and one of the group of girls said, well, some of the discussions around gender inequality made us uncomfortable because we didn't know these things happened, and we [00:23:00] realized the school, this world was more unfair or a little scarier than we realized it is.

And like, yeah, I can imagine you feeling that way. So now I guess I'm kind of wondering, do you think those are appropriate conversations for us to have? 'cause I don't want you to live life in fear. And their response was, no, it was hard. But if people don't know about it, how would it ever change? Which is a very healthy outlook on it. So we think, how do we have those discussions so we know all the ways that they are valued, all the ways that they are celebrated. 'cause that's a piece of it too. But there's this other piece we can't ignore because we want the world to change as much for them. I wanted the boys in the classroom to hear about those things so they could reconsider some of the things that they say at recess and some of the things that they say when they're sitting around a table just talking, because some of them are pretty offensive and they need to understand that those types of statements are rooted in a whole belief system we don't want any part of. 

Olivia: No, we don't. And so Chris, then thinking forward, you know, if we have schools, if we have districts doing this work, what would [00:24:00] you say we can look forward to for the future of our children?

Chris: I think we would have kids who are stronger critical thinkers, who are more engaged learners and who are more tied to the wellbeing of their communities because they see the connection between what they're doing in school and what's happening outside of school. And I don't think a lot of kids see that connection right now. 

Olivia: Yeah.  

Chris: I didn’t. I was very much a struggling, apathetic, not strong student, but I also think it gives me a better understanding of those types of students when I work with them ‘cause I remember when that fall. And I remember exactly why I felt so disengaged. Um, anytime I've had people come into my classroom, one of the things that they usually wanted to talk about was how sophisticated the talk sounded. And I'm like, yeah, it's that way, because they talk a lot. Right? It just give kids opportunities to talk and to think critically about things in the question them and try to construct meaning together versus classrooms where I'm gonna show you, and this happens way too often, and I see it quite often, classrooms where I'm gonna show you a bunch of slides and then you're going out to a computer and you're gonna complete a task.[00:25:00] What's the end game there? 

Olivia: Yeah. Um, I actually post-ited it a spot in the book that I revisit often. And with your permission, I'd love to end on this note. Um, I love the sections in your book that say, uh, What does this mean for our teaching? Because it helps me pause. And, um, you say, “Our task is to help our students better understand what options are available to them as advocates for change. We must explicitly teach students about the various forms of advocacy can take and then provide them opportunities to put these into action in their own lives.”

That to me, is such a statement as to why we have to do this work. We have to take action and I don't think there's an age limit on it, and you prove it time and time again along with Katie and Lester in this beautiful book. So thank you, Chris, for the work you're [00:26:00] doing. I appreciate you. 

Chris: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. 

Olivia: Yeah, take care. 

Olivia: I hope all of us are leaving this conversation with what Chris reminded us of, that children are not waiting to be old enough, brave enough, or smart enough - they're all ready right now. And so are you. Thank you, Chris, for this gift of a conversation and for the decades of work you have done to show us what education can actually be.

If this conversation lits something up in you, like it did with me, do three things. First, get their book From Empathy to Action by Chris Hass, Katie Kelly, and Lester Laminack. It belongs in your hands. Second, share this episode with one colleague who needs permission to do this work. And third, find the time in your day where this work can begin. It doesn't have to be an hour. It can be [00:27:00] five minutes in the morning meeting. Start there. Chris said it best. You can't fail if you act. So, act. 

And next week, I am so honored to host Erin Patterson of Schoolhouse Connection again on the podcast. She is about to pull back the curtain on a crisis that most of us walk right past every single day, there are 1.3 million homeless students hiding in plain sight in our schools, and Erin has spent her career fighting for them at the highest levels. From landmark Congressional wins, to the ongoing fight to change federal law, this conversation will forever reshape how you see homelessness, how you see your students, and what you believe is possible when one person refuses to look away. I will see you for that conversation next week. 

Schoolutions podcast is created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl. Thank you to my [00:28:00] older son Benjamin, who created the music playing in the background. You can follow and listen to Scions wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to never miss an episode and watch on YouTube.

Thank you to my guest, Dr. Chris Hass for enlightening how we can all use our sense of empathy as a catalyst to take action. Don't forget to send me an email at schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com to let me know what your next step is after listening. 

And tune in every Monday and Friday for part one and part two of my guest conversations with the best evidence-based, classroom ready strategies you can apply right away to better the lives of the children in your care. Your 6o-second bite-sized piece of learning from our conversation will be ready for you on Wednesdays. You can share that with a colleague. Take care, and thank you for forever getting better with me. See you next [00:29:00] week.