Self-Led Classrooms with Tim Amaral

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In this powerful episode of Going Inside, trauma therapist John Clarke sits down with award-winning educator Tim Amaral to explore how trauma-informed practices can transform education. Tim shares his journey from martial arts instructor to adult educator, revealing the development of the Self-Led Classroom model and its deep integration of IFS (Internal Family Systems) principles. Together, they discuss how safety, connection, and a sense of belonging are essential for meaningful learning. If you've ever questioned traditional education or wondered how to reach students or clients who’ve been left behind, this episode will expand your perspective—and your heart.

🌿 Key takeaways:

• The true key to academic success and how traditional education often fails the very kids who need it most
• How love, belonging, and attachment show up (or don’t) in classrooms
• Is it possible for a trauma-informed classroom to flip the script on behavior “management”?
• Why learning doesn’t happen until attachment does—and how most systems get that backwards.

Stay in touch with our guest below: 

🗣️ Timothy Amaral 

Timothy Amaral is an award-winning adult educator and teacher trainer from Salinas, CA. He specializes in the teaching and application of trauma-informed practices, social-emotional skills and needs-based responsiveness for use in the classroom, in the workplace, and in the home. He is the creator of the SELf-Led Learning model.

🌐 selfledclassroom.com

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Transcript

0:00

You don't need an education to be of value. You need an education because you are of value. So you get value first, and you get treated like you have that value first, regardless of what history you bring to me, victim, perpetrator, combination of the both. It doesn't matter. You have value as a human being first. Going Inside is a podcast on a mission to help people heal from trauma and reconnect with their authentic self. Join me trauma therapist John Clarke for guest interviews, real life therapy sessions, and soothing guided meditations. I. Whether you're navigating your own trauma, helping others heal from trauma, or simply yearning for a deeper understanding of yourself, going inside is your companion on the path to healing and self-discovery. Download free guided meditations and apply to work with me one-on-one at John Clarke therapy.com. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in. Timothy Amaral is an award-winning adult educator and teacher trainer from Salinas, California. He specializes in the teaching and application of trauma-informed practices, social emotional skills, and needs-based responsiveness for use in the classroom, in the workplace, and in the home. He's the creator of the self-led learning model. You can find out more at self-led classroom.com. Tim, thanks for being here. I, to my memory you were referred by Mel from I-F-S-C-A Stepping Stone. She's been on the show twice now. And yeah. Anyway what else should people know about who you are and how you got here? Somebody actually asked me this the other day when I was training this. What is your background? It's a little bit of a mashup. On a professional level, i'm a credential teacher in the state of California. I just retired in February after doing 32 years in the classroom. I also, simultaneous to that ran a martial arts studio for 32 years. They're staggered. So my retirement in the martial arts world happened before my retirement in the classroom. And then last but not least, I also spent 10 years working for the Breakthrough Men's Community, which is a nonprofit down in Monterey County. And it's dedicated to healing, recovery and support. And it's in that space where I first learned the model that I started to embed in my classroom. And then my very good friend, Bob Falconer, whom I met there introduced me to IFS and the two models parallel each other really well, and I started to be a little bit more concrete in the application of the material from IFS in the classroom. Dick Schwartz found out about what I was doing and then put me in touch with a whole lot of other folks who are interested in getting IFS into schools and in 2018, I started to train other teachers, and in 2020 I launched the business and that's where I am today. Awesome. I have so many questions, and also we have quite a bit of overlap. Bob has been on the show three, almost four times now, so he is Yeah. A friend of the show and like a favorite of the show really. People always like when he comes on and I myself am a lifelong martial artist. I've also worked in schools, early in my career I worked I'm in the Bay Area and I've worked in San Francisco for years doing classroom stuff as a mental health clinician and behavioral therapy type stuff. Juvenile probation. Yeah you name it . what kind of martial arts, by the way? Kempo karate. So Ed Parker's, American karate. Oh, okay. I have a black belt in Kempo. Wow. 12 years. You may have to talk after the podcast. A small world. Yeah, it is really interesting. So you have this has been a culmination of a career in education and now bringing some of the core concepts from IFS into. Educational settings, it sounds like. That's exactly it.. So I work with or worked with an extremely traumatized population. I spent my career after I left special ed where I started, I spent the last 32 years in adult ed. And in adult ed, I was working with the high set GED, which high school equivalency program, getting folks their diploma. And what I realized is that all of the trauma that was occurring in our students' lives in the regular K 12 system. By the time those students reached my world and landed in my class it, the room was super saturated with trauma. Quite a few years ago, I had done the ACEs survey and I did it. Probably with about 150 students over a couple of years, and we averaged 7.3 outta 10 ACEs in the classroom. So that tells you that I had many students who had all 10 ACEs. And then when we shifted the language a little bit. Away from that sort of Kaiser study, insurance based language. And made it more relevant to the lives of my students. What we saw was that it just pushed the needle all the way over into red, across the board. Yeah. And it made me think, okay, we really need to be doing something about this. And as I started to embed those things in the classroom. The big shift in my students' lives was they had always graduated from my class, but after they graduated, there was still this sort of recidivism thing.'cause I've worked with a lot of students who are in prison or coming out of prison or going into whatever it may be. They're part of the institutional world. And so I would still see them end up in the headlines two or three years after they left my class. And I thought, we're missing something. We're getting the academic stuff taken care of, but the other part we're missing. So as I started to be a little bit braver about embedding that material in there it really moved that dial completely. And I. I really felt like we were onto something in that room that made it terribly effective and sustainable over the long haul. Tell me more about what you all learned in terms of what students need in order to be successful in the classroom. Most of us educators walk into the classroom. Really well versed in our content area, right? We've been students our entire life and we become this sort of professional version of that when we walk into the classroom. That does not make us any good at dealing with the social dynamics that occur inside the room. It makes us great at following lesson plans, and I'm saying following very specifically. Because it doesn't make us great at designing lesson plans. So one of the things that I started to attend to is, as I started to understand, in the martial arts world, we pay attention to rhythm. We pay attention to breath, body posture. We're looking for cadence. We're looking for all sorts of nuance that's sit below the really obvious level of how to do the technique and the more centered you are. As you're moving into that space in the ring, the higher likelihood that you're gonna have a positive outcome at the end. So I started to mash this all up together and I started thinking about the being the self in the system, being centered when I walk into the classroom, and what is it that I bring. So as I started to visualize this, I thought I need to redesign my lesson plans. This is really problematic. I'm only focusing on content that makes me a technician as opposed to an artist, and I need to be an artist when I'm working with my students. So by bringing the self to the center of the experience, so we're grounded. We move through time and space solidly. We stay focused and engaged, and in particular, responsive to the. The love and belonging needs level on Maslow's Pyramid. That was really the critical thing, is that every time need popped up in that space, we were responsive to it in the classroom and it worked like the hinge around which everything else pivoted. Yeah, so it was, it kept the door open for my students as I became more censor, more centered, and more sensitive to need at the social level, and I could be responsive to it. It meant that my students could stay more connected to self until they learned how to bring self to the system. And they would be much less dysregulated, they'd be much less blended with parts in the class. Yeah. And if they were blended with parts, they were blended with self-like parts, which is in teacher land, that's gonna be perfectly fine. So as it turned out that. That sort of love and belonging level was the critical piece of the Maslow's pyramid because so much of education is about the esteem level, right? How we're gonna measure the thing we can do to get proficiency. But that real intense charge, particularly for my students who have experienced trauma, it's all around attachment. So if I stay centered and present, they can attach to me, they can attach to themselves, and then boom, we take off. I want to introduce you to our sponsor for today's episode, Jane, a clinic management software and EMR that helps you handle your clinic's daily admin tasks so that you can free up your evenings and weekends. The Jane team understands how precious your time is and recognizes that charting can often be the most time consuming part of your practice. That's why they're here to help. To save you from having to start your chart notes from scratch, you can check out Jane's template library, which gives you access to templates that have been generously created and shared by health and wellness practitioners in the community. Once you have a template you like, you can choose to customize it further with charting tools such as range scales, text fields. Check boxes and more to see how Jane can help you spend more time doing what you love. Head to the link in the show notes to book a personalized demo. Or if you're ready to get started, you can use the code, John, at the time of signup for a one month grace period applied to your account. First of all I'm really glad you're on the show. I'm really glad I'm meeting you right now because I have been thinking more and more about education as I get older. I think about my own educational past. I have a 5-year-old now who's moving through her education and starting to navigate these systems, so that's bringing up a lot of my own stuff and something I know and being a. A public school kid from rural Virginia is a lot of education or traditional education is built around to your point, curriculum, learning stuff, memorizing stuff, and then remembering that stuff on Thursday for the exam, which I was never good at, but my friend Kenny. Kenny was, and he could just. Look at it once and remember it. So he was deemed as smarter than me, right? In the classroom. He was a better student. He was smarter than me.'cause he could do that. And I couldn't, or at least I, it didn't come naturally to me to do that. Not to mention I had no motivation to do it. This, the material had no meaning to me or my life. And I had a hard time stuffing that into my brain for no reason. As a kid and a teenager. And then for teachers, a lot of it is around yeah, curriculum, standardized tests and classroom management, quote unquote, which is almost like a loaded term. It's like behavior management, which means like managing these little kids that are almost like they're against you. It's like teacher versus students in a way. And to be honest, that was the feeling that I had a lot of times in classrooms growing up and in reality it's I remember. The absolute worst teachers and the absolute best and not much in between. Yeah. But those that stand out, like they really stand out vividly today. Yeah. May I respond to please do, So what I'm hearing is these moments where the big people who were in charge of the experience Yeah. Dropped the ball in terms of attachment, right? Yeah. So every time we've got that. Shaming dynamic that's inherent in the difference between kids who would get it even without a teacher, and then kids who need the teacher to break the material down in a way that's more relatable to real life. The child who doesn't get the attachment moment mastered by the adult who's in the room gets abandoned in that process so I will have. People who are literally tattooed from fingertip to forehead, gang tattoos like you wouldn't believe. They're in my room and I reassure them. I say, I'm not gonna abandon you guys in this process. You don't have to have that fear. You have the right to make me earn my paycheck like so badly. I go home and complain about you to my wife. If my wife knows your name, you're gonna graduate and it's gonna be great. Trust me. So you have my permission to do that. And I won't abandon you in that process. So no matter how many times it takes me to figure out a way to express this idea to you, I get paid to do that. And you should feel comfortable demanding it of me until I can deliver. And so that's the social contract that we're gonna meet in class. I will not abandon you in this process and that. Statement, I won't abandon you in the learning. We'll make those guys weep. They will actually literally cry in the classroom saying, nobody's ever said that to me in my entire life. And so what you sense is the saying that we have is, it's not the math. It was never the math. It was just never the math. it was the fact that the teachers who were in charge of us as little kids left us behind. It reminds me of the whole No Child Left Behind era or what that was intended to be about, but maybe missed the mark. I don't know. Yeah. On paper, the, it sounded great, right? Yeah. It sounded really good. The PR on this, the truth is there's a whole lot of wounding that we have that's non-obvious, right? There are these moments where the child is reaching out and the parent is the parent. The proto parent. The para parent is nonresponsive to the child reaching out. Yeah. So what I train my teachers to do is to spot that moment of need. And then respond to it, particularly with what we call the five A's attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance and allowing from the work of David Rico. So , that's the toolkit that we have. For that social contract, the attachment moment. But prior to that, I let them know. I say, you don't want to just design your lessons relative to the content. You want to design your lessons relative to how the human brain experiences your content. So if you're working with students who've had something occur along that long trauma spectrum that we know is out there all the way from lack at one end. To capital T, trauma at the other end, then they, you have to expect that if you design lessons where powerlessness, hopelessness, shame, and fear and uncertainty, if those things are all present inside your design of a lesson plan, you're gonna guarantee. A trauma wound, or excuse me, an attachment wound for kids in their class. And you're gonna think that it's the content, but it's not the content, it's the design and your presence in the space. And yet the educator is then evaluated and their paycheck is contingent upon their ability to get that kid to sit still and learn stuff and do decent on the, the standardized tests for the state or whatever it is, right? So they give us a task to do and then remove all the tools.. From our toolkit. Telling us to go do that task. Pretty much.. It's one of the things that I have to address when I'm working with my teachers is the amount of grief that they actually carry, that it sits beneath the surface. And most of the time there are all these relief processes that they look for through the course of the day to get some relief around the distress that they feel at being. Forced into a system that denies the existence of the love and belonging element of Maslow's Pyramid.. It's so interesting. I mentioned my daughter and she, when we first found a preschool for her, we surveyed all the different types of preschool, Waldorf, Montessori, all these things. I remember one of the Montessori ideas was like, they, students are expected to do the work. They can do whatever work they wanna do, but they need to be productive little people. And the whole environment to me was almost too orderly. And then we found this forest school and the the teacher there has more of a child development philosophy, more of a philosophy that I would have as a therapist in terms of what do little kids need emotionally to learn? And thrive. And he looks at these lower level needs primarily, especially around belonging, safety, community, self-esteem. Helping them decide does that tree seem too big or not? Do you feel safe in your body right now or not when you're going up one more branch? And then naturally they were inclined to learn and come to him and say, I wanna learn to write my name in the dirt, or I wanna learn. Whatever, and he would help them. And so it also preserved their love of learning and their natural curiosity, which was something that was basically crushed for me as a kid, right? Because so early on from kindergarten on, it was just about sitting, still coloring in between the lines, compliance, right? Being compliant as being a good kid. And i, I was a severe A DHD kid from elementary school on, and so that was always the kind of sign on my back was like, this kid can't sit still, he can't apply himself. He can't focus . and I felt that and knew that. But all these lower level needs were just completely ignored, to be honest. And I think a lot about this. And again, in terms of even a child's connection with learning, what does it mean to be a learner? What does it mean to be an adult learner? Hey, if you're a therapist, I want to help you deepen your client work, help them get better results without burning yourself out. You can do all this by learning to harness the power of IFS. So I want to tell you, we've got a free IFS resource library that you can download. Now, this is full of resources like my Quickstart Guide to IFS, the full IFS protocol, a bunch of demos of me doing IFS. With real people and, extra self-care practices for therapists. You can get all this for free in the link in the description, and I hope you enjoy. Working with these guys in the prison system I've been working with an incarcerated person to develop a trauma-informed curriculum, basically that, it's called Taming Trauma is his nonprofit, and we're bringing. Some trauma-informed work into the prison system and he's delivering it and I'm helping him create the curriculum and stuff like that. But, asking people to. Sit down and learn, or do you want to learn? Or again, how do you create a container where people actually feel safe, it's a big task, but also that should be the primary focus because how are you gonna expect a kid or an adult to take anything into their brain if they don't have safety? Internal and external safety is not there. The funny thing is that so many teachers have the opinion that's a choice. Within the child. What they don't realize is that the biology eliminates choice when the brain's been triggered in that trauma space. Yeah. It there is no choice for the kid who's sitting in the chair Yeah. Or not sitting in the chair. And what the folks don't understand is that the system is asking the teacher to do something that is impossible. The teacher's asking the child to do something that's impossible. And all of those outcomes are that, that we complain about at the sort of national level in terms of how many people are passing the test and what are the scores. They're all based on that misalignment of expectation with what the child really needs. Yeah. And the children will try for years. So when I did the. Research on the ACEs, I also surveyed my students as to what years did they start having trouble in school and what year did their enjoyment start to bottom out in terms of the classroom. And you can see that there's a super strong correlation between the kids still having the hope that somebody in the classroom will respond to them. In spite of the amount of trauma that they have. They come in so hopeful, maybe this adult will be the person who's gonna be there for me. Yeah. And what they find out time and time again is that the system is stacked against them in that regard. so there's a huge drop off in performance, itself, it's because we don't have a holding space that, as you're saying, as you're describing, is safe enough. And what I try to. Tell my teachers when I'm training them, as I said, that safety's not merely the absence of threat, it's also the presence of connection. Those two things. A lack of threat and the presence of connection. Yeah. Generate a feeling of safety. Yeah. Otherwise, it's objective safety but our body doesn't get it. because we're not. so the upshot of all of this is that , we In my classroom, we destroyed it. We got such good scores. We hit, we blew past our benchmarks because my students could actually feel like instead of it all being about avoidance, motivation and running from discomfort and running from, pain, that's what the whole system was about. It's oh my gosh, I really enjoy this science stuff. Oh my gosh, I really enjoy this. Who knew math could be cool? And they then find the joy in education again. And that's with so many diagnoses in the room. My Monday, we would have folks who are struggling with severe mental health issues, living on the streets, living in the canals, in the ag fields down here, living under the bridges. I'd have folks who are, dealing with their addiction and folks who are not dealing with their addiction. We have every level of the socioeconomic ladder you can imagine people going through divorces. People who should be going to divorces but aren't. There's all sorts of stuff that's in the room and it's in that space that we build a sense of community and love and belonging to the degree that I would for years have opposing. Gangs represented in the classroom, sitting next to each other and taking care of each other. Not just being neutral, but literally taking care of each other to the degree that they would walk up to me afterwards and would say, everybody out there knows this is sanctuary. Now, stuff that happens in the outside world, that's another deal. But what happens inside the room is sanctuary. Multiple times we had that. So we really tapped into that. That love and belonging energy. And what we found was there was a reservoir of malnutrition or a malnourishment in that space. And by attending to it, two things occurred. Number one, people would walk out going, my gosh, class feels like therapy. And I would tell 'em we're not doing therapy, but because we're responding to your needs, it feels healing. so that'd be one thing. And then the other outcome is that the cortex would engage, right? The neocortex would engage and then we'd nail it on our tests. So we had really good practical success and people tapping into their. Yeah. Their own internal systems in a way that allowed them to see the worth and value that's inherently there. Yeah. And it shifted the dial for everybody. That's right. Yeah. It's something I think about a lot and I'm a teacher in some different avenues, whether it's helping with Mel's program stepping stones for IFS or the clinicians I teach and supervise at the practice. And I think about this kind of optimal level of arousal needed for learning or engaged learning. And it's like that Yorks Dodson, I think it's called the bell curve. And. Needing just enough stimulation to be engaged, right? Yeah. With the work or the environment or the container. But also not. Not too little where they're completely underwhelmed and not engaged at all, and also not too much to where they regress. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's the same thing with learning anything. It's the same thing for my five-year-old swim lessons, right? They actually had that on the wall at one point. It's if you push a student too far, like they regress, I. Yeah, for sure. Less, their skill swimming skills are like less than they were two weeks ago.'cause they got pushed too hard. Or they had this loss of connection. They didn't trust their teacher that day. Or whatever it was. Or the teacher was annoyed or distracted or frustrated with them or whatever. These moments are, they happen so often and they're so human, yeah. And again, I've been there, I've worked in the classrooms for years. But they have such tremendous impact on, on, on kids and adults alike. Absolutely. And the thing is, if we have a trauma history, our body is already set up with a threat detection radar. All it's on full blast.. And we walk into that space. So anything that even remotely resembles. Powerlessness . and shame . and uncertainty and hopelessness. Anytime we push those buttons, that body's already, it's already super saturated with those experiences. we can always predict the outcomes . fairly efficiently. and what's curious is that. When we're teachers, when we're trained, nobody ever tells you that the hard part of the lesson for students, in some cases will be an existential threat, and so quite often we just, I. We just blast through the moment where things are gonna be hard. We've pushed their system too far. The ask that we're giving or making of them is too much for what their carrying capacity is, what their sort of cognitive load is. And so they do fall back as you're saying, they do regress. Which makes sense, right? What was my level of development last time? I had this feeling right? Yeah. So I just go right back to that space. So in my classroom, we would talk about it regularly about whether we wanted the 8-year-old inside of us to have the car keys at this moment, right? And so when we felt that 8-year-old rise up, the one who was traumatized, where our understanding of math fell apart, I would, we would take a breath. We'd do all sorts of behaviors to reregulate ourselves. And then we would talk about the fact we would say the 8-year-old showed up. And did you see how the 8-year-old kind of grabbed the car keys? And would you trust an 8-year-old with car keys? And I don't want you to get into the habit of like shaming yourself and punishing yourself. Instead find out exactly the kind of hug that 8-year-old needed to reregulate. So they would know that they're still loved. And that way the system will stay, settled down and you'll be okay for moving forward. So we really normalized the experience of dysregulation in the classroom, but built in tools in that space for folks to address it because it is existential for folks, right? That whole idea of being abandoned by the adult in our lives when we face something that's challenging. When we're little, that's so painful. Through that, the message is love is conditional. That's it. And I know I, using that word love in the classroom might be weird, but that's really what it is, right? Love and connection is conditional upon your behavior, your performance, right? You getting or not getting this math formula, you remembering or not remembering this, world War II statistic or whatever it is. Yeah. When you do, I love you and I'm proud of you, and I'm engaged and going Good. I'm amazed you did so well. And all the other students are watching, right? Yeah. When you didn't do well it's the opposite, right? It's just, it's mortifying this, it's just so many trailheads for me, and it's funny, a lot of these trailheads actually came up during my level one training as a student being a student again. And wondering to what degree can I trust these people that are teaching me and, supervising or offering feedback or whatever. And it brought up a lot for me. Maybe in part, 'cause I haven't been a student in a long time, but also, yeah just trailhead after Trailhead. And I can tell you too, polarities of experiences in my. In high school alone was one teacher, my computer science teacher. I was not good at computer science. I'm not an engineer. Those are not, that's not where my gifts are. But I would be stuck trying to do this Microsoft Visual Basic coding stuff. And I would be stuck and not getting it. And I would be terrified to raise my hand and I would do it. And the teacher, he would come over and he would go, oh. Oh. And he was visibly frustrated before I'd even asked the question, and I was terrified. And I would just go, I don't know how to do it. And he'd go oh, and just make these sounds right. I had no connection with him. I didn't particularly like him. I could a hundred percent tell he didn't like me, especially compared to the kid beside me who was a whiz at it. And it was his favorite kid in the class. It's so obvious, right? So again, what does a kid take away from that? I'm stupid, right? I can't do this. He's not gonna help me. I have to somehow figure this out on my own. I don't belong here, right? Yeah. But the kid beside me belonged'cause he had this engineering brain. On the other end of the spectrum, there was this guy who, he was an old school kind of hippie. He had been like going on tour with Grateful Dead for years. He had owned a pizza shop in town and then found his new calling of being a history teacher, and his name was Mr. Treky and he was also a musician like me. And I was really bad at school, but really good at music. I've always been like a good drummer and he knew that. And one day after class, and I was getting D's in his class, he like. Would have me stay after, and he's Hey man, I made you a mix tape. He was like, I wanna introduce you to the Grateful Dead. And I was like, what? And he's I made you a mix tape. And he like sat I, it is emotional, just bringing it up. He would sit down with me and we would play it after class or after school and he would just spend time with me. And it was like the greatest gift I ever received, like from any teacher. And it wasn't contingent on anything. It wasn't like you sat still, so you get a mix tape or you did whatever, so you get a mix tape or you get love and connection. It was just like. He liked me. I'm sure he knew I was having a hard time. I'm sure he was also at my IEP meetings where 10 adults were talking about me and how problematic I was. And of course paradoxically, the more I had that connection, I started to do a bit better in history.'Cause I was safe and had this love from him and connection and it wasn't contingent, I might get a d and I would still get another mix tape or just get that time with him after. Class. Both being wounded and healing at the same time from Sure, sure. Two different teachers in two different classrooms, but there you go . it's so much about that principal, as teachers, we can't do therapy, right? We're not licensed and we shouldn't because we're not. And yet you're the first line of defense in most communities. It's funny that you say that because I actually tell. My teachers when I'm training them that this is, you're like a, the MASH unit? You are out on the front lines. Trying to get folks healthy enough so that they can move forward with things. But you're not the one who does any of the really heavy stuff that you, you have to know that there are other resources that are out there who are better positioned to do this than you are, but you are gonna be the person who's gonna see them in many cases, eight hours a day. And so you're gonna be able to normalize need in that space and give them hope because you are gonna be responsive to that need. And what we want it to be is universal so that all the kids who can do the work, who frankly didn't need your help in the first place, are your favorite students, and they get all the love and attention, which just tells me as a professional teacher that you're doing that because it makes you feel good about the fact that you suck, right? And you're not really going the extra mile to, to work with the students who really do need your support. So with that in mind, we have , this was the. Sort of the phrase hanging over the doorway in my classroom. You don't need an education to be of value. You need an education because you are of value. Wow. So you get value first, and you get treated like you have that value first, regardless of what history you bring to me. Victim perpetrator, combination of the both. Yeah. It doesn't matter. You have value as a human being first. And then we work out from there. And so you don't need to be performative in order to get those love and belonging needs met. In the room. You need to be human. That's what you need to be. You need to have been born and you get treated with love and belonging. And so because that's our baseline in the classroom, that's the very bottom level that we're working with. That normalization of need means that students. Who are high need students. That the system never could respond to beyond the level of the individual teacher who could like really color outside the lines right in. In that space, we've made it really systemic so everybody really feels oh gosh yeah, I'm okay here. Whether I can do it or whether I can't do it right. People are still gonna love me. Yeah, that's profound. Tim, I, on one hand I feel like, gosh, your work is so needed. On the other hand, there's parts of me that are disheartened because it must feel like swimming upstream at times.'cause it's like education, especially like public school education, which is my experience is you're working in the system and you're trying to change the system from the inside out. My sister-in-law, who's a high school teacher she said a student got a poor grade on their writing assignment. And she and I said yeah, what happened? She said I just sat down with them and I worked with them, and I said, do you want a chance to correct this? Do you want a chance to try again? And I was like, what, that's an option. That was a never an option for me growing up, but what a gift that would've been. And she teaches at a private school, where they can do whatever the hell they want. Yeah. Yeah. But it's more this like liberal arts college kind of moment of we're just trying to help you learn to think critically. It's not about the carrot, which is like the A, the B, the C, the D. But anyway I'm so glad you're doing the work you're doing and also. Man, God bless you for doing it.'cause you're, the systems are hard to change, but someone's gotta do it. It's funny I use the metaphor that for years I showed up and I felt like I was warming my hands on cannibal fires. They're going, what's for dinner tonight, guys? Yeah. Because when you're the fir person who colors outside of the lines, the system really works against you. It's like you're, this Tim guy's coming in and creating more work for me. Yes. I gotta go to this workshop or do something different. Or it triggers the teacher's parts around and their shame parts around. You're telling me I'm a bad teacher doing bad, or if I can't again get this kid to succeed, I'm doing bad. The funny thing is, we all think we're the good driver, right? Sure. And yet, when you look out on the road, you see all kinds of stuff happening. And the outcomes are quite often really messed up. Traffic moves, but it moves in a way that is very painful for most people who are in it. And so I think the classroom is the same way. It's very painful for almost everybody who's in it, but teacher and student and most of the adults who are managing it think they are the best driver on the road, and yet those outcomes show that something is wrong. We have a failure to complete rate in the United States of 18% on average. Eight 18%. And that to me is like a crime against humanity. I think it produces all sorts of political, economic, social outcomes that are really Yeah. Burdens. Yeah. Yeah. It's really problematic. And I, I know that the teachers are well intentioned. Of course. They're very well intentioned. Of course. But they're operating in a system and with an internal system that's misaligned to need. That's right. Somehow we're out of time, which. It's my fault because I screwed up on the tech this morning. It just means we're gonna have to do a Bob Falcon or part two, three, and four. Alright. I would love to have you back genuinely,'cause it education has come up a few times on the show, with other guests. Just we've stumbled our way into it or trauma dumped my, childhood, my, my school trauma. And the guest is oh wow. Okay. Sure John. So anyway I would genuinely love to have you back to just keep building this conversation 'cause there's just so much more to talk about here. And it's so foundational to how do adults become the adults they become. Yep. And how do they pick up the burdens they picked up? Yep. Got, how did I pick up these worthlessness, burdens from my computer science teacher, right? So it's a just so formative, the most formative, experiences of our lives and relationships of our lives for better or worse. So I'd love to have you back some time. In the meantime, how can people learn more about you and your work and how you help? The easiest way if they wanna reach out to me is just find my website self-led classroom.com. One of the things that I will be doing in June with Mel up in IFS Canada is we're going to be putting together a three hour workshop for folks who have curiosity around this. And what will be really nice is that Mel's gonna be co-leading with me on that. So awesome. If anything comes up that's really very specifically about therapy land, I have a fabulous professional at my side who can take it to that level because though I know lots of stuff, I often don't go where I don't belong. Yeah. So I teach what I know and what I'm licensed to teach. That's June 27th. And if they go to my website, self-led classroom.com, they can find it on upcoming events and click the link to register. I also will be presenting really all over the United States in a variety of venues and if somebody would like me to present for their schools for the community.'cause I do this for communities as well, so parents. Particularly homeschool parents. We'll have some information that will be helpful for them. They're just welcome to reach out to me on the website and the answer is always gonna be yes. Awesome. You're a man on a mission, that's for sure. I love it. Love it. Right, Thanks again. We'll pull links to that and the description and then I can't wait to have you back. So thank you again for your time. I look forward to it. And thank you for having me, John. I, it's very much appreciated. You got it. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to another episode of Going Inside. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching, and share your favorite episode with a friend. You can follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at John Clarkee therapy and apply to work with me one-on-one at John Clarkee therapy.com. See you next time.