The Assistant Principal Podcast

Frederick
There was once an old man, and he lived in a city in a lot that was adjacent to a corner lot. And that big corner lot stood empty for decades. And so because you had an empty corner lot, it naturally attracted all the neighborhood kids. And every day they would come out and they'd play baseball or they play football and whatever season it was, and these kids would come out and they'd yell and they'd laugh and they'd have fun. But the problem was the old man didn't like noise. He came more and more frustrated, and over the years it just built up. And one day he was listening to a podcast about motivation. And he got an ideal. An evil dastardly idea. And if you want to hear what that plan was and why it worked, stay tuned, because today we are talking about the complex issue of motivation. Hello colleagues, and welcome to the Assistant Principal podcast. I'm your host, doctor Frederick Busky. I've been growing leaders and future leaders for over 30 years. Through my own experiences and through working with hundreds of other leaders, I've learned that school leadership is a journey that occurs in three phases. Urgent leaders spend their time completing tasks, while intentional leaders invest their time building systems. But strategic leaders create time by growing people. In twenty eighteen i founded Strategic Leadership Consulting to help make this journey more enjoyable for leaders like you. Through my daily email monthly micro journal, online community, my upcoming book, and of course this podcast, I keep you company on this journey and provide you with actionable ideas and tools to live and lead better today and tomorrow. Today I'm joined by Mike Anderson, the founder of leading great learning and the author of tackling the Motivation Crisis and Mike's here with us today to explore what else's motivation and welcome to the show.
Mike
Like, thank you so much Frederick. And I just have to say off the bat, I really hope I'm not the old man with an evil plan.
Frederick
I don't think so.
Mike
Ok, we can keep going then yeah no, I think we're both in our fifth decade. So the definition of old is definitely pushing out. That's like 90, right?
Mike
All right. Sounds good to me.
Frederick
Can you tell us briefly how you got to where you are today?
Mike
Sure, absolutely. I was a an elementary school teacher for a long time. I taught 3rd, fourth and fifth grades in public schools in both Connecticut and New Hampshire. I worked for a nonprofit organization for a while that was all about helping teachers teach kids the skills that they needed to be great writers and great readers. And great mathematicians like how to make good choices and how to get along with other people and how to solve conflicts effectively. And then about eight years ago, I jumped out into my own independent consulting. And I've been writing books and consulting with schools ever since.
Frederick
Well, we're so great. We're so glad to have you on this show. We always like to start with this celebration. So what are you celebrating today?
Mike
Ohh. That's a lovely way to start. I am celebrating that my two kids are both coming home from college for the holiday break next week, and I'm really excited to have them both in the House for a little while. And then I'll also be really excited when they go back to college a few weeks later.
Frederick
Ok, so I'm going to, I'm going to use this as one of those life lessons for listeners that have young kids right now. You know, when they're, when they're under about five, it's just a physical, grueling grind because you don't sleep. And then you've got this period from about 5 to 12 where you're busy and you're on the go all the time. But there's just so much magic that happens like enjoy Christmas because it will never be the same again once they become teenagers. And then you have the teenage phase where you lose. But when your kids go off to college or they hit those twenties and all of a sudden you become a cool person again, isn't that a great place to be, Mike, with your kids?
Mike
It's really cool that my kids text me and FaceTime me just to chat every now and then. It's almost like I am in better touch with them when they're at school than when they're in the house. It's really lovely.
Frederick
Adult kids are amazing and and I'm taking the time to share this with listeners because I know, you know, I had four kids growing up and some of those teenage years were really tough and really hard told me there's light on the other side.
Mike
Yeah, and it's sad sometimes when they're gone. But I'll also say empty nesting is awesome. Really enjoying it. It's a good thing yeah every phase of life, listeners, what wherever you're at, appreciate and enjoy every phase because everyone is special. And then everyone has its challenges.
Mike
Yeah, right on.
Frederick
So let's wrap up this story of the the old man. The kids come out to play and he comes out and he greets the kids with a big smile and he has this big tray and it's loaded down with. Peanut butter sandwiches. And he's got cans of soda on there. And he says, kids, I just love it when you come out here. I'm so thankful. I'm going to be here every day to greet you. And here's some sandwiches and some soda. And I tell you what, I enjoy hearing you so much that I'm going to give you 5$ every day you come out here and play. And so it gives every kid this crisp new 5$ bill. He does this for a week. And then the next week the kids come out and they come right up to the door and he comes out and he says, hey kids, I just, I don't really have any sandwiches today. I ran out of bed, I bread. I've got a couple crackers here for you. And and here's a picture of lemonade and and I'm a little bit short on cash, so I can only pay you 3$ today. Kids kind of look now, all right. You know, they take their stuff and they go play ball. That goes on for a couple of days and comes back on, on Thursday, the kids come out. And he says, you know, I'm. I'm out of money, I got nothing for you. I'm, I'm sorry. And the kids look, and they think, well, we're not getting paid, we're not going to play ball here. And they go away and they never come back. What an evil. Dastardly plan. So tell us what happened there, Mike wow i hope I can use that story when I'm out in schools, because that's so much fun and that's exactly what can happen. So there are a couple of things that happened there. One is by telling the kids that he wants them to come and play and offering to pay them to come and play and give them goodies. He's taking control of the situation. So up until that point, the kids are the ones who are in charge, and they're the ones who are feeling all the power and control. But once somebody starts paying you to do something, you're no longer in charge anymore. You're you're there at their behest. And so that's one thing that happened. Another thing that happened is something in psychology that's called signaling, which is that when when the when the man started to pay the kids to play in the lot, there was a there was a hidden signal there, which is that playing in that lot must somehow be something the kids wouldn't want to do. Because why would you pay somebody to do it if they wanted to, if they want to do it inherently anyway? So this is exactly what happens when we pay kids for reading with pizza in the summer, you know, with the local pizza place or the Pizza Hut says, you know, this is our summer reading promotion. The more books you read, the more pizza you get. There's a signal that we send there, which is reading must really stink if grown-ups are going to pay us pizza to do it. And so it actually turns the enjoyable task into something that is now. Not so enjoyable. And then once the once the pay is taken away. The kids have learned that the reason they go to that lot is to get peanut butter sandwiches and soda and 5$ bills. And so when it doesn't happen anymore, just like the kids said, well, if we're not going to get paid for it, why are we going to do it? So there are all kinds of interesting psychological phenomenon going on in that story.
Frederick
Yeah, and I think about what if he replaced the sandwiches with zucchini soup, which is still being paid, but it's not. Kids aren't going to work for that, so.
Mike
Or maybe grades?
Mike
Yeah maybe.
Frederick
Grades, let's just say. So I think you in your book, you describe kind of 6 intrinsic motivators. So do you want to start to unpack those? And then I think where we want to go with this conversation. Initially, of course, your work focused on how teachers can motivate kids. But in our discussions to coming to this, we thought how do assistant principals? Use that for teachers, and again, increase that intrinsic part of it, because the extrinsic rewards are not going to be keep people in the game right now. We need to, we need to dial up the internal.
Mike
Piece yeah, absolutely. And as we get into this, thinking about what exactly is intrinsic motivation and how do we leverage leverage that in schools? It's so important for assistant principals to recognize that we may do those incentive systems with the best of intentions. We may offer pizza for reading in the summer. We may offer good attendance awards and give assemblies. Student of the month and you know put up bulletin boards about how many books have you read. But when those systems are used in schools it actually turns kids off to learning for learning sake or behaving well for behaving wells sake. And so. So it's so important for school leaders to recognize the long term damage that's often done with those and we'll and and then we got to recognize So what do we do instead. And so leveraging intrinsic motivators is one of the ways that. They can go. But Frederick helped me remember that we should also talk about if we're not going to throw pizza parties for reading, why should we still have pizza parties? So let's make sure that we don't lose that thread, because we should come back to that. Ok, so you asked what intrinsic motivators are and what that's all about. In the book that I wrote about this, I outlined 6 didn't make them up. These come from self determination theory and Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There's all kinds of research behind these. So there are six. One is autonomy, which is people like to be in control. So these are intrinsic motivators. These are things we don't have to teach kids. Kids come to us already seeking these out. They're actually psychological needs, all humans, whether we're 5 or 15 or 51 Like one of us is we, we need these things. So autonomy is 1 feels really good to be in charge and have to have some power and control. A sense of competence is another. It's much easier to be motivated to do something if you think you're going to be successful at it, and if it feels like there's some appropriate challenge. It's really hard to be motivated to do something you think you're going to fail at. Belonging is a really important intrinsic motivator. We all have a psychological need to connect with other people. Purpose is another one I was just observing in some high school classrooms yesterday, and in several of the lessons that I saw, teachers launched right into the what and how. Here's what we're doing, here's how you're going to do it. And they forgot to connect with the why. They didn't say. Here's how this connects with our broader set of learning. Or we're going to be doing a lab tomorrow, and this formula you're learning today is going to help you with the lab tomorrow. Or we're doing this project, and here's how we're going to get ready for that. So purpose is so important, kids, adults, we all need to know why we're doing what we're doing, and the why has to connect with what we care about. So for adults, we've got to go beyond giving. Why's that sound like you'll need this someday? It's not that that's not a valid purpose. We know that's the purpose, but that's not a purpose that's going to motivate a kid who's struggling at the moment. You know that you might need this 9 or 12 months from now. All right, so purpose is an important one. Curiosity is another. Anytime we can tap into people's inherent interests and they get to learn deeper or learn through the things they're interested in, they can be fired up. And then the sixth one is fun. We human beings are like otters and golden retrievers and dolphins. We are programmed to seek out enjoyment and fun. And so the key to all of these six motivators autonomy, competence, belonging, purpose, curiosity, and fun, is that the learning itself should tap into these. It's not the something that we dangle as the carrot that if you finish your regular work then you can choose an activity to do. Or if you do what I want you to, then we'll have an ice cream party. It's the fun itself, the autonomy itself, the belonging itself needs to be woven into the fabric of the learning.
Frederick
There's there's so much to unpack there. Let's stay on kids for just a minute. It's interesting. I was having a discussion. My wife teaches at Western Carolina University, does teacher education, and we're out with another friend who also does teacher education, and then a high school English teacher, and we're talking about differentiated instruction. And I, I was a phys Ed person and I actually was taught how to differentiate instruction without realizing it. And that, you know, if you have a kid doing you're trying to teach basketball layups, if you have a complete novice, all I'm teaching maybe is, is the motion of putting the arm up and letting the ball go off the backboard. I'm not dribbling, I'm not jumping. I'm not doing anything. I'm just going to start with that motion and then we'll add the jump in and then we'll add taking two steps and then we'll add dribbling. Taking steps and and then eventually down the road will increase the speed and the tempo and then we'll add a shadow defender and then we'll add a live defender and then we'll add three people and we'll we'll be running a fast break. That's all differentiated instruction and it's so simple to do in physical education and we were talking about well why can't we do that in in other classes in the academic classes and one of the things that came out is because in this edit all of that work we don't grade any of that work. It's all about learning the skill and developing the skill and playing the game. But as soon as you move into an academic classroom, if we're going to do all those different, that different work, well, how do we grade kids differently for doing different work? Because we've started to grade. The the efforts that people have to do to learn, we've just introduced it right in there.
Mike
Yeah, and as soon as we are grading, as soon as we are evaluating and judging, we are taking away some of the autonomy that kids have. They are now working for us. That's like handing out 5$ bills for kids to play on the playground and giving them peanut butter sandwiches. And what's important to recognize about these intrinsic motivators is that when we are experiencing these, we can be really motivated. But when they're taken away? Or when they're in deficit, we are demotivated. And so that's really important to recognize. So you you talk about the importance of differentiation. There's so much important there when when learning is differentiated. Kids can all feel a sense of competence even when they're we know they've got all kinds of different skills. You get 25 kids in a class, you've got 25 different little human beings in there who have all got different experiences and needs and sets of background knowledge. So we have to differentiate. So here's a really simple way that we can do that. The readers workshop approach to reading instruction is A is a beautiful. Example, instead of saying the kids, we're all going to read the same story and we're all going to think about the same themes and we're all going to learn the same vocabulary and you're going to take a test at the end of the book to show what you've learned. Instead we can say you're all going to pick a book that you'd like to read that's at your just right level. And we teach kids how to self level their books. We give them criteria. You got to read it fluently. It's got to be inherently interesting. You've got to be able to understand. It's got to sound smooth, need to know almost all the words so they're the ones. Who find the differentiated good, fit books. Then they all get to read their own books as we work on themes like recognizing character development or learning strategies for figuring out words that you don't know yet. So we can still do some whole class instruction, but kids can engage in that at their own reading level through books they're finding interesting and that they've chosen. They've got autonomy, they can feel a sense of competence. There's purpose because, you know, I've chosen the book and I want to read it. There's curiosity and fun. I'm interested in the characters, I'm interested in the content, and we're still all doing it together, so there's a sense of belonging. It's a it's a perfect example of how all those things can come together and and you talk about differentiation and that's so important and I wish we all in education could stop hyper focusing differentiation on differentiated instruction. And instead focus on differentiated learning. Because the instruction is one way we differentiate, but we can still teach a whole class lesson and offer three or four choices about how kids practice. The skill and the learning can be differentiated, but the differentiation itself doesn't have to require us to plan for different lessons.
Frederick
Mike, I love that that is golden. And I'm going to try to really embrace that language because language is important and that simple shift of differentiated instruction to differentiated learning is so powerful. It gets a mindset shift by the teacher and and and a transfer of ownership from the teacher to the student and and again increasing that autonomy.
Mike
So, true and Frederick, I know you're going to give me a chance at the end of the podcast to say what? The website isn't all that, but we're talking about the tackling the motivation crisis book. But there are two other books I've written that dovetail with this, and one is all about how to use choice as a vehicle for self differentiated learning in the classroom. And another one is all about language and how do we use language that emphasizes autonomy and belonging and purpose and joy? And so all of these topics are so intertwined, interconnected and entwined and important. You know, we could give kids choices. But then say, OK, here's what you're going to do for me in today's lesson. I've given you 3 choices, and you're going to do one of these three choices for me. And as soon as we use that phrase for me, we have taken away kids autonomy, even as we're giving them choice. So the language we use is so important, and the way we offer choice is so important, it's. It's really interesting how these three topics all weave together.
Frederick
Yeah, yeah. So we at stay here all day. I want to shift this to specifically to teacher professional development because I think and and not, not just. The big Teacher Development Day, but just the routine way that we help support and develop teachers because that that's the emphasis here, right? The two important functions that school leaders have to keep everybody safe and grow your teachers. So when we talk about, when I talk about teacher professional development, I'm not just talking about the big formal things. Anything we do when we get down in those PLC's or when I stop by a teacher's room when we have any kind of a conversation, those are all opportunities to help support and grow our teachers. And I think one of the challenges is that a lot of us have this mindset. Of professional development is something we do to our teachers. And so the planning and and everything is coming from the top. And that's one of the things I'm trying to breakthrough and it seems hard. I think we need to really flip that on the head and we need to be serving our teachers and our teachers need to be pushing and saying here's what I need, here's where I need to grow. Can you kind of take us through some of that and and put that through the lens of of what we're talking about?
Mike
Absolutely and this is so important and I'm so glad to hear you say that because as a as somebody who supports professional development in schools, I I'm increasingly talking to school leaders about the importance of the slow drip. Of professional development instead of hanging all of our hopes on A1 big great Professional Development Day. And there's nothing wrong with a great professional development day. Those have a an important role to play in the in the overall body of work. But if we have a great keynote speaker come in and get everybody fired up on August twenty fifth and then they go away and they never come back, we should not expect real change to come from that because teachers are going to need to try stuff and ask questions, go out and experiment and then come back and talk about. Problems of practice and share successes. So I think one of the things that we can do is offer teachers choices about how they engage in professional development. These six intrinsic motivators are just as important for teachers as they are for kids. And so when we do PD, two teachers, and they don't have autonomy and they don't always connect with the purpose, we should expect them to be demotivated around the work. So I can give you a couple of examples of things I've tried in schools that have that have really helped.
Frederick
Yeah, let's talk through those. And again, assistant principals listen because you're the person that's there.
Mike
So here's one way to focus the slow drip. And by the slow drip, I mean little moments of professional development in an ongoing basis. 15 or 20 minutes or 30 or 60 minutes once every couple of weeks I think is going to be has the potential to be more impactful than one really big day at any point during the school year. But it but it needs to have a focus and it needs to come at least in part from the teachers themselves because of the slow drips that's just focused on what you want them to do and they haven't bought in. It's just going to be an ongoing. Annoyance and nuisance for people, so here's something to consider. Have spent some time helping the staff surface their shared positive beliefs. What are the things that they believe kids deserve to experience in school? And one structure I've used for this when working with schools is a professional development structure called Goyles GOILS It's an acronym stands for groups of increasingly larger size. So in round one you set everybody up and let them know they're going to be sharing some of what they believe is really important for kids to experience in school. What are some of their positive beliefs about kids? One of the one of the things they think schools should be for kids, and you might give a couple of your own examples to get them going, things like I believe all kids inherently want to learn and are curious and interested. Deep down, I believe all kids deserve to feel safe in school. Those kinds of things kind of get the ball rolling in the right direction and then give everyone a few moments to jot down some of those beliefs on a piece of paper. Next step is your partner people up and they now create a new list based on their original lists, but the only ideas that go on to the new list are ones they both share. They either showed up on each of their lists or one of them said this is a belief and the other one says, Oh yeah, me too. Or they come up with a new idea as they're talking and they both share it. That's what goes on to the list. Then partnerships go into groups of four and you repeat one new list, but all four people have to agree that that idea is important to them in order for it to go into the list. And then the fours go to eights. And at that point, that's probably about as far as you want to go with that step because 16 people it gets pretty unwieldy. But once you've got. Groups of eight who've shared positive beliefs about kids, positive beliefs about where we want our school to be and what it should look like. Then you can take those lists and do the next sort yourself. Look for the big themes. Look for the big ideas. Pull those together and share those with the staff and have them check to make sure that you got that right. See if you can get three to five goal statements or belief statements. We believe all kids are capable of learning and want to learn. We believe all kids need to feel safe and supported in school. We believe all that learning should be fun and creative and awesome. Once you've got those statements, that then becomes your focus for the small drip. Now you can start looking at practices across the school. I did this in one school and one of the things they said was that they believed all kids were motivated to learn. Well, a lot of them were using gem jars and clip charts and. You know, all these systems of extrinsic motivation. And so once they did that, I said to them, OK, everybody, here's something that we should recognize. If we believe kids are already motivated, then we don't need to use systems of extrinsic motivation, because why are we trying to motivate people who already motivated these? Clip charts and jam jars aren't quite in line with your beliefs, so this is something we should probably look at at some point. And really interesting, about three or four months later, almost everybody had given those systems up on their own. They recognized they didn't fit with what they were trying to create as a school.
Frederick
Yeah, well, that's a great point because when we when we take people's aspirations and. Beliefs, and then we provide them with the tools to be able to. Implement and make those beliefs happen. There don't need to be directives right and those, those then become the lens for everything. Hey, we're thinking about a new math curriculum and we're thinking about adopting a math program. Let's take a look at the programs through the lens of our positive beliefs. Like we believe learning should be awesome and creative and fun. Does this do that or are kids basically going to be working out of a workbook? No so it's, it's such a powerful tool. And then you can also couple that with differentiated professional learning opportunities for teachers. So I'm working in a middle school in Connecticut right now. This is the second year I've been with them, and last year we all engaged in a really similar structure to get people into each other's classrooms and learn how to observe each other and offer each other nonjudgmental feedback into in service of the teachers. Goals were being observed. This year, we offered a range of professional development opportunities for teachers to engage in. Some people are taking online courses, some people are engaged in book studies, some people are having me come in and give personal observations and. Feedback sessions. Some people are engaged in problems of practice discussions, little mini research projects like inquiry based projects, and it's so cool to see the professional learning happening in so many different ways. And the group of teachers are, you know, really pretty excited about what they're doing because they're getting to drive it. And it was they chose something that was going to work for them and that, and that scratched the itch that they had.
Frederick
So I I love this and and I appreciate that you're presenting it from. From a systems perspective, like as an organization, this is the way we can approach this work. I want to put a little bit of a different spin on it and think about those schools where.
Mike
Maybe the AP?
Frederick
Is on an island, or maybe they don't have the resources or the time to bring it to that systemic level. If if I'm an AP and I want to have. I incremental change I can make a difference for one or two teachers and I have 5 minutes. How can I do that? Can I can I in small conversations over time? Surface teachers, beliefs. And then can I come back to that and say, hey, you know, you were telling me the other day how much you value when you watch your kids interact with each other? Is that something you want to get better at and how can I support you in that? Is that is that possible?
Mike
Heck yeah. So actually that exercise I just shared about the goyles, the groups of increasingly larger size, we did that with that faculty in about a 45 to 60 minute time block. So it was the equivalent of a staff meeting. And and then I did some of the sorting on my own time and brought it back to them. So it actually wasn't a time intensive exercise, but absolutely having teachers share their own personal goals with you. And then having those on a clipboard or having them on a dock on your iPad so that when you walk through the building and you pop into a teacher's classroom, you can quickly glance down and say, ohh, right, this teacher, they've got a goal. They're trying to shorten their whole class instruction time so that they can increase student work time. I'll pop in and see how that's going and then I can offer them a little bit of feedback about how that's going. And here is an important part. The way we offer the feedback is so important if as the administrator. You go in and say I really loved how you were keeping your your direct teachings short. The energy is coming back to you without meaning to. Probably you are making this about your approval, which can actually feel like an extrinsic motivator. It takes a little bit of the power away from the teacher. So instead, you might say your goal was to keep your lesson short. I observed you kept your direct teaching to 7 minutes. That's totally in line with your goal congratulations. So to make sure the feedback we offered is centered on the teacher and their goals, not on how we feel about it. Is is a really important thing if we want teachers to maintain ownership of the learning that they're doing?
Frederick
There's so much to unpack right there, so I hope listeners just really sit with that for for a few seconds. Feedback is its own thing and and one of the things I actually advocate for is to. Trained teachers to not expect feedback every time you're in the classroom for a number of reasons. One of which if you know you don't have to write a sticky note or type something up, it's much easier for you to go in the classroom because you know you're not creating extra work for yourself. And another thing is we create.
Mike
Those praise junkies because I was in your classroom. Oh, what nice sticky note am I going to get today? And there there's a place for that. But you don't want that to be the expectation because then you've done exactly what this whole podcast is about. You have shifted the teachers focus to what's the approval I'm going to get? What's that extrinsic motivation as opposed to doing something? I'm a big advocate of five minute coaching where you just invest. 5 minutes with the teacher and say hey, what went well? Were there any surprises? Is there anything you would do differently? That is all teacher focused and and how motivating is that that I get to reflect on my own practice. That's that's huge, it's powerful, it's much better than a sticky note, and it's going to have a much bigger influence on teachers. You got it, you got it. Because the energy, the autonomy is staying with the adult, with the teacher and it's not shifting over to the administrator. And the more we can keep the power and control with the person who's doing the learning, the more the the deeper and more powerful the learning can be and the less scary it is. Because another danger of using the praise of the I really liked this and here the three awesome things and here's the sticky note is that then? A lack of that feels like criticism. Like if I really liked these three things you did, what does that mean about the thing that I that I giving as a push or something to consider? I listen to this really interesting podcast once about a master surgeon who trains apprentice surgeons, you know, people in residency and training, and he doesn't want relationship to get in the way of feedback. So as they're practicing a surgery on like the pig carcass or whatever. He has a clicker, and whenever they're doing what they should, he just gives a simple click. And the click means you're on the right track. You're doing it the right way because he worries that if he's saying, good job, Yep, I like it, Yep, you're doing great, awesome that they're going to worry that if they mess up, they're going to lose his approval and he doesn't want relationship getting in the way of learning and so. Now, what's important about this is relationships are critical for learning. We need to build relationships outside of feedback, but not give feedback in terms of relationship. That's an important, important point.
Frederick
So one of my big new points of emphasis is that it's people before purpose and I used to be a purpose driven, you know why? Type person. But it's people before purpose and and that's exactly what you just said. I have to invest in you as a person and when I build that relationship because I care about you and I value you. In that process, you're going to tell me what you need, you're going to tell me what you want, and then I can serve you. And 90 percent, 95 % of teachers in schools are passionate about kids and they want to do a good job and they want to enjoy their profession, and we need to trust that. And build those relationships and listen to that and then help them be able to do that. In a way that's rewarding and better for them.
Mike
You got it. So just like we want kids to not be motivated by teachers, we want the kids to be self motivated. We need to assume that our staff are self motivated and we are here to support their work. That's based in their own self motivation. But as school leaders, if you think it's your job to motivate the staff, energy is going to be coming from the wrong place.
Frederick
I love that. So when let's let's talk about goals too, and then we may start to wrap this up. But I think every teacher should have a goal that they want something that they want to improve on, a place that they want to get better. But I also think that starts with leadership and that every school leader should have a goal, and that goal should be public. And so my goal might be, I want to be better about knowing what's happening in your classrooms. So my goal is to get into classrooms, to get into every classroom five times this month or whatever it is. But I want to make that public. I have a goal. I need to improve my leadership. As a teacher with something you want to improve, what is going to bring you more joy or help you have less frustration in your classroom? What is it that you want to to chase? And and then it's my job to support you there absolutely i think about the first principle that I ever had Cherry Jones in East Lyme connecticut the nameplate on her office door did not say Cherry Jones principal. It said Cherry Jones chief Lerner. Since she viewed herself as the lead learner of the building and that made such an impression on me as a young teacher. And she did try lots of things. She was always experimenting and learning and growing and making mistakes and and it was open and sometimes raw and public and it was awesome and it was such a great example of somebody who was truly a lead learner. And I I love that notion that the teachers are lead learners in the classroom and. Administrators are lead learners of their adult learning group yeah so I like to use this clip of a high school classroom and it's, it's a staged clip, but the teacher is kind of that classic. I'm going to lecture you on social studies, very dry and disengaged. So I show this two-minute clip to assistant principals and then we think about what are the, what are the areas that this teacher. They really develop at and then we think, OK, what would be your priority focus if you were going to drive the agenda? If I have 15 assistant principals in the room, there are five different areas that they think are the priority area. And what that tells me is that what we identify as a priority area is really irrelevant. It doesn't matter. The important thing is what would the teacher. Because I can go in and say, I want you to get better at this. Now I own it. But if I say, hey, how's your teaching going? And and mister. Preston says I'm just so frustrated that kids are never focused. It's like they don't listen to me. Ok well, let's break that down. What do you think we can do about that? Where, what do you think? You might be able to do to get them in. And then let them drive it. And and if they say I need a better opening routine, OK, we'll do opening routine. If I need to ask better questions, it doesn't matter any anyone they engage in and you help them successfully reach that goal, the classroom is going to be better.
Mike
And if they don't know? If they say I'm really frustrated but I don't know what's going on and I don't even know what to do, then we can say here are a few things you might consider. Would any one of these seem like an idea you'd like to try? So sometimes we do need to supply the possibilities, but then we keep the ownership on the teacher by saying which of these do you think might be a good fit for you, or which one might you like to experiment with?
Frederick
Yeah, I love that. And and then the next piece of that where we won't go right now, but the next piece of that then is how what does that support? Look like which again using those techniques that put more ownership into the hands of the teacher. But I just love this whole discussion Mike and and it just helps reinforce that idea that school administrators are there to support the teachers and that when we when we approach that as support and we trust our teachers. We are actually increasing that extrinsic, that intrinsic motivation.
Mike
You got it. Just the other day a teacher came up to me. This happens quite frequently and said, so how did you get into the role you're in now? I think that's something I might want to do one day. And one of the things I talked with her about was as a classroom teacher. Like, I loved being a classroom teacher. I had so much fun teaching 3rd, fourth and fifth grade because I loved watching kids learn. I loved it when the light bulbs came on and when they got so excited about. Something, and I said to her, part of what you got to do if you're going to help lead adult learning is you have to feel the same joy in working with adults that you did in working with kids and recognize that everybody's going to be in different places and some days are going to be hard. But, but you need to see the people you're working with as learners and you're there to support their learning and get this sort of joy and satisfaction from watching them grow and learn, OK?
Frederick
One more thing and then we'll wrap this up. So one of my favorite things is M - V. Divided by E. Motivation equals value divided by effort. And and what I love about this is it says there is no such thing as a motivation problem. A motivation problem is simply a kind of economical unbalance between value or perceived value and effort or perceived effort. And and if somebody's not motivated. Then it's our job to figure out how do we increase value? How do we decrease effort? Or maybe we're wrong and it isn't that valuable and we need to back off and change our minds. That's that's my big thing because I can't remember 6 things, but I can remember value and effort. So you can kind of critique that yeah well, that's really interesting. And so I don't know if I'm going to critique the math formula. I really want to think about that a little bit more, especially if the division part of it. But what? And what I'm thinking about, what it triggers for me is the. Is the effort part. And I think oftentimes when we see either a kid or an adult. Who looks unmotivated? It's so easy to have this knee jerk reaction that they don't care and that they don't want to work hard. And I just don't believe that's true. What's really interesting is very often so when I'm when I'm doing a demonstration lesson in a classroom. So I'm going to go in and I'm going to do a choice lesson with a whole bunch of teachers observing. And I give kids choices. The teachers will often ask, well, what if the kids just pick the easy thing? And I say, well, there might be reasons they do that. You know, if this isn't a graded assignment, then it would make sense to pick something that, you know, you can do well. Grades get in the way of motivation all the time. That's a whole other podcast. We shouldn't go there now. But what's really interesting is that rarely do kids pick something that's way too easy. Because that's boring. Like, why would you pick something that's so easy to do? It requires no effort unless The thing is so inherently distasteful that you're just trying to. Like, you don't want to do it. But almost always, if the if The thing is worth doing, and we let kids pick which way they want to do it, they will pick the way. Almost always. That's engaging. They'll put themselves in what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development. Because learning is most interesting. A task is most interesting when it's between. What you can do without effort and what you can't do even with support and scaffolding. It's that zone of proximal development where we're learning is inherently engaging and enjoyable. It's why I do wordle Cordle and Oct Turtle every single morning. Because I find those word puzzles. Hard enough that they push me and they're engaging, but that most of the time I can do them successfully. And so that's a really fun place to be. And I think the same is true for adults, that when we offer adults choices about professional learning and we give them options for how they might engage in a topic. All of a sudden you'll see teachers who will put more energy into their work because it's in that just right learning zone. It's something they care about. So I am not going to critique that math formula you got there, but I think it's a really interesting idea about thinking about value and effort in tandem like that.
Frederick
Well, and and when people have choice, they're going to choose the things that are valuable to them. And then when we serve them. And support them. We're decreasing that effort and creating a little bit more safety so that they can push the envelope and take risks because they know we have their back yep, Yep, you got it wow mike, this has been such a great, great discussion. I have three more questions for you as we wrap up. First, what part of your own leadership are you still trying to get better at?
Mike
So it's funny you say that. I was just opening my email this morning and saw an email about jim knight, who was an instructional coach guru who is going to be coming to New Hampshire in late January. And I'm thinking, man, I could learn a lot from him. Like I love to go in and coach teachers, and I love to help teachers learn how to support each other. But I know there's there's room for growth there. And so even though I've got a packed week that week and I'm in schools every other day, I am seriously considering signing up for it because I would love to go and hear somebody else who does coaching work in schools share some ideas and strategies about that. That's something I'm really, really curious about because I think that the the coaching model is such a great. Part of professional learning that. I'd love to get better at that.
Frederick
I try not to interject when people are going through this, but I want to point out to everybody listening, this is already your, one of your areas of strength. You know a lot about teacher development and in multiple ways and you're saying I still need to get better at this thing. And and I think a lot of times we think that we have to grow at the things that we're weak at, but. There's growth opportunity everywhere if you think about professional athletes. They're phenomenal things, but they're just, they're continually trying to shave and trying to push the edge.
Mike
Yeah, and I think we need to lean into our strengths. You know, if there's something that as a consultant I'm really not good at. That's just something I'm not going to include in my repertoire. Let's let's lean into the things we're good at and work on getting better at those things. This again, going back to kids, we know that kids are demotivated to do things they can't do well. And unfortunately the paradigm in school often is we figure out exactly what kids weaknesses are and then we have them spend a lot of time on those things and we wonder why kids especially who are getting remedial services and special education services. Disconnect from learning. Well, they're being pulled away from their peers so they don't feel a sense of belonging. They're being made to work on stuff they don't want to work on. So there goes curiosity and fun. They think they're bad at it, so now they're experiencing a low self sense of competence. And oftentimes we don't give those kids enough choice so they don't have autonomy and so we shouldn't be surprised that kids who struggle with learning in that model. Often get even progressively more demotivated, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Frederick
We have covered a lot of ground today, and this is another one of those podcasts that I, I wish people would almost listen to again because there's there's so much that you've offered for people if listeners could take away just one thing from today. What do you want them to take away?
Mike
I think the idea that people are already motivated, and if you've got either a kid or adult who looks unmotivated, there's something getting in their way. They're probably feeling incompetent or isolated, or they feel like they've got a lack of power. And so in in really good, healthy learning environments. All people are going to be naturally motivated to grow and learn. We're wired that way. And so to just keep that in mind, and then when we see somebody who's acting outside of that, instead of saying it's a person problem, you know, somehow a character defect, they're not motivated instead to think boy. That's odd. I wonder what's getting in their way. And if we can figure out how to remove some of those barriers, we've got a great chance of helping them out.
Frederick
That's golden again. It just flips the way we look at things. So there's a lot, and you have a lot more to offer people. And I'd like you to maybe share a little bit more about your books about how people can connect with you. Maybe invite you into their schools or follow some of the other work that you're doing and continue to learn from you because you have so much to offer and provide to people.
Mike
Thank you, Frederick. My website is probably a great starting point. It's leading great learning.com I write influence infrequently on a blog. An idea hits me. I'll write it up real quick and put it in as a blog post. There are links there to books that I've written. I've written a bunch, many that focus on this topic of motivation. There's tackling the motivation crisis. The one about choice is called learning to choose, choosing to learn. And then the one about language is called what we say and how we say it matter. And all of those that have real connections to this podcast episode so that my website is a good place to go. Check those out. Of course, they're available through a CD and. And Amazon also something people might be interested in if certainly I'd love to talk with people about coming to your school and supporting your leadership or teachers learning or kids learning in your school. But something I worked on in the height of the pandemic, when I was stuck in my office for like 9 straight months and couldn't leave it, was. I created a whole series of asynchronous courses for teachers. One about motivation, one about choice, one about language, one about how to teach social skills and emotional skills through not instead of academics, as well as a whole series of short courses about teacher health and balance. And there are a lot of schools that are using those courses as one professional development. Mechanism for teachers, they're offering it as choices, you know, do you want to read a book? Do you want to take a course? Some schools are using them as guided professional development for their whole school. And so that's perhaps a cost effective way of getting some of the work that I'm doing into the hands of teachers. And then of course, you know, I'd love to chat with people about coming and doing work in their schools. That's that's what I love to do excellent and you're on LinkedIn so people can find you there, and we'll include all the links to all of those things in the show notes great sounds good. Thank you.
Frederick
Mike, I'm so glad that we got to have this conversation today.
Mike
Yeah, me too. This has been so much fun.
Mike
Good, good. All right. Well, if you, dear listener, enjoyed today's show, please subscribe and rate this podcast. This has just been a fantastic conversation with Mike. So much to learn and unpack. And it would be great if you shared that information and forwarded this podcast and and rated it, because that's going to help other people be able to find conversations like today's. I'm always trying to improve the show, so if you have feedback for me, please email at frederick buskey dot com. And if you'd like more content tailored towards the needs of assistant principals, you can head over to my website at frederickbuskey.com That wraps up today's show. I am Frederick Busky, and I hope you'll join me next time for the Assistant Principal podcast cheers.