The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 233
Jennifer Gonzalez, host
GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 233 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to help teachers by meeting their core human needs.
Teaching is intense, vulnerable work. Every single day, teachers are put in situations where their confidence is tested, where they make mistakes, where the people they serve — or their peers, or their mentors — can say and do things that wound them to their core. Every teacher shows up with their own histories and insecurities and flaws. It can be lonely. It can be overwhelming. On some days, it feels impossible. We can look at student data and try new instructional strategies all day long, but until we learn to navigate all of these complex feelings, the work of improving our teaching will always be limited at best. And anyone who wants to help teachers get better needs to know that.
One person who definitely knows that is Elena Aguilar, who has been coaching teachers for two decades and has written eight highly acclaimed books all centered on helping teachers grow. Her newest book, Arise: The Art of Transformational Coaching (Amazon | Bookshop.org), was written to replace 2013’s The Art of Coaching, which is being taken out of circulation now that the new book is published.
While the new book contains some elements of the original, this one takes a much more humanistic approach. Aguilar explains her motivation here: “There were certain things that I didn’t go into as deeply as I wanted,” she says. “In some ways it was just a different time … a time when we were compelled to focus more on the technical elements. Since then, I feel like the changes in the world, the changes in the education system, the crises in the world demand that we speak more holistically, that we really address every dimension of being an educator, including the emotional, the physical, perhaps even the spiritual.”
This is a big shift from traditional coaching, she says, “which is about data cycles and analyzing student work, learning targets and all of that. Teachers don’t need more of that. What they need is for someone to let them sit down, take a long deep breath, and actually talk about truly what’s on their mind and on their heart and have some space to sort through that.”
The strategies in Arise are all built on a framework of six core human needs: belonging, autonomy, competence, self-esteem, trust, and purpose. The approaches she teaches in the book are all meant to create the conditions where teachers can get these needs met. In our conversation, we looked at these needs one at a time and talked about what it looks like when those needs are not being met, how teachers can address those needs for themselves, and how those who support them can do the same.
While the book is written for instructional coaches working with teachers, Aguilar says “Anybody can use coaching strategies. A teacher can use them with their students. Principals can use them with their teachers. When you’re thinking about wanting to help someone develop, you need to keep their full humanity at the center.” So my hope is that these insights will be helpful not only to instructional coaches, but to everyone.
Before we get started, I’d like to thank EVERFI for sponsoring this episode. Hello to all the dedicated educators out there! Are you eager to equip your students for success in both their careers and personal lives, yet find yourself racing against the clock? EVERFI is your go-to solution! Their digital lessons, which align with state standards and boast the prestigious ISTE Seal, are crafted to empower your students to excel in our dynamic world. Engage and inspire with interactive, self-paced lessons, meticulously designed by content experts. These lessons cover essential real-world skills – from financial literacy and workforce readiness to character building, health and wellness – and are tailored for students across all grade levels. Best of all, thanks to EVERFI’s generous partners, these research-based resources come at no cost to all K-12 schools, districts and students. That’s right, absolutely free, and many districts are already single sign-on enabled thru Clever or ClassLink. As we rev up for the back-to-school season, there’s no better time to give your students a head start on their bright futures. Visit cultofpedagogy.com/everfi to get started today for free.
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If you’re listening to this close to the time we published this episode, you might also be interested in the in-person workshops Elena is giving this fall in six different cities called The Art of Transformational Coaching. She’s offering my listeners $200 off the registration. If you’re interested, head over to Cult of Pedagogy, select Podcast, and click on episode 233 to learn more about that. Now here’s my conversation with Elena Aguilar about meeting teachers’ core human needs.
GONZALEZ: This is your third time now on my podcast.
AGUILAR: Yeah. Thank you so much.
GONZALEZ: Well, I just really love the work you do and every time I read your stuff, I’m always just like, oh, this is the energy we need in the education space. And the topic that we’re going to talk about today is, it’s so you. You have a new book. You’ve got your 2013 book that you published called “The Art of Coaching.” And in the introduction to your new book, “Arise,” you explain that this is actually meant to replace “The Art of Coaching,” that you’re going to be taking that sort of out of circulation as this one comes in. Tell me a little bit about that decision. What prompted you to make what is sort of a revision of that? What’s different about this one?
AGUILAR: It was going to be a revision at first, and then as I started writing it, I realized it was a whole new book. And in some ways, I think it’s just a reflection of the fact that 12 years have passed since I wrote “The Art of Coaching,” and I’ve learned a tremendous amount about how to teach people how to coach. And so in “The Art of Coaching,” I was trying to cover a lot of ground and I felt like there were certain things that I didn’t go into as deeply as I wanted. In part, I feel like in some ways it was just a different time. It was a time when we were perhaps, as educators, feeling compelled to focus a little bit more on the technical elements, even though I don’t think the “The Art of Coaching” is heavy on technical elements of coaching. And since then, I feel like the changes in the world, the changes in the education system, the crises in the world demand that we speak more holistically, even more holistically than I did in “The Art of Coaching.” In that we really address the, every dimension of being an educator, including the emotional, the physical, perhaps even the spiritual. But we need to have a more holistic approach, and then we can layer on some of the technical elements. So that’s, that’s the main reason behind it. I felt like I had just learned so much and I was like, I just have a lot more to share now.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. You actually call it a more human-centered model in your introduction, that it’s just more focused on the person and less on the pedagogy, that that’s there but yeah. It’s more. And I agree with you 100 percent on that.
AGUILAR: Yeah. I mean I really think about coaching as a set of communication strategies that we use to connect more deeply with other people. And we can use them regardless of our role, regardless of their position. I have a 20-year-old son, and I have used coaching strategies with him for his whole life, to help him reflect on what he’s doing and learn and grow and to connect with him, honestly. And so anybody can use coaching strategies. A teacher can use them with their students. Principals can use them with their teachers. When you’re thinking about wanting to help someone develop, and so you need to keep their full humanity at the center of those thoughts and those strategies. That’s really, so much of my work is based on a lot of research from neuroscience and evolutionary biology and sociology and psychology, and I don’t talk about that research a lot because I honestly don’t think it’s that important. I think what’s important is the “how do we do this.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: But it’s all there. And so centering someone’s full humanity and creating a space in which people can take risks requires that we create psychological safety. It requires that we attend to the other person’s nervous system and that we use language that allows them to relax and be reflective and take risks and say the things that sometimes we feel like, “Am I not supposed to say that as a teacher?” And so this is a big shift in some ways from very traditional instructional coaching, which is about, like, data cycles and analyzing student work and what are your goals? The learning targets and all of that. It’s like, we know a lot about that, and so do teachers. Teachers don’t need more of that. What they need is for someone to let them sit down, take a long deep breath, and actually talk about truly what’s on their mind and on their heart and have some space to sort through that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. In the book you describe teaching as a very intense profession, which I think is such a well-chosen word because there can be very high highs. So it’s not just that it’s stressful, but the lows can be really incredible. And it’s really very isolating a lot of times too even though we’re in a building full of people. A lot of times we do it alone and, you know, don’t necessarily always have people to talk to about it. So I’m glad that you mentioned too that the stuff that you talk about in this book can apply outside of the world of just instructional coaching because I feel like there are a lot of people who can be using these approaches that you teach about, and to limit it just to instructional coaches is a real missed opportunity. So we’ll be framing our conversation in terms of how someone who supports teachers can help them, but I would really love for everybody listening to be thinking about this as a parent, as the teacher of kids, as a leader in, you know, even in the workplace. How we all have opportunities to use these things.
AGUILAR: Mhmm. Yeah. Again, I just often say there’s strategies for connection.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: Self-awareness and connection.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. So the piece that we decided that we’re going to focus on here is a very, very small, but it informs a lot of the book, which is that, you know, in order to help teachers in this case, what we need to do is make sure that we address their core human needs. And you have outlined these six core human needs. I think I’ve got six, correct?
AGUILAR: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: So what we’re going to do is we’re going to sort of take these one at a time. I’ll have you list them to begin with, but then we’ll take them one at a time. And just sort of play out what would it look like if a teacher is experiencing a lack of this need or a need to have that, have that met. And then how would you as a coach sort of address that for them? And my hope is that people listening can hear the scenarios and think, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen this kind of thing in myself. I can, I can see how that’s what’s playing out when I’m experiencing this emotion.” And then also someone who is in a leadership position, how they can then address it. So what are these core human needs that we all have that show up so much in work?
AGUILAR: Yeah. This understanding has been an absolute game changer for me. So I think that a way that I can introduce these to you and to listeners is actually to invite folks to think about something in your life right now that doesn’t feel good, perhaps in professional life. You know, when you think about this situation, it brings up some tension or conflict or sadness or frustration, something uncomfortable. It could be something like in the middle of the summer you found out that your job assignment was shifted or that your principal was taking a different job or something that just brings up some discomfort. And so as I describe these core human needs, you can think about the degree to which that need is being met or is feeling unmet. And what I know is that by engaging this reflection, as I describe these, it’ll help listeners get a deeper sense of the core human needs and what it looks like for them. There’s some commonalities between all humans and then there’s some unique expressions of when these are met or unmet. So list the six core human needs. The first is the need for belonging and connectedness. Second is for autonomy. Third is for competence. Fourth is for genuine self-esteem. Fifth is for trust, and that’s specifically trust in yourself. And the last one is the need for purpose and meaning. So this is a framework that comes from the field of psychology, which basically says that humans have basic social and emotional needs, which I feel like is so obvious to all of us. Like, uh huh, yes. And yet for me it really helps to have this list. Somehow it just kind of validates. Like, oh yes, this is true. But what psychologists tell us is that so much of the suffering that people experience comes from unmet core human needs.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: So the definition of thriving, which is what I often talk about, is the aspiration that encompasses so many others is that we are thriving. The definition of thriving is that our core human needs are met. So one of the key concepts to introduce immediately is that we, we are thriving when we are able to meet our own core human needs. And so this is not about sort of sitting back and waiting for them to be met or asking others to meet them or getting mad at our principal or our partner saying, you’re not meeting my core human needs. There is this element of us taking action in order to get these met. But I would wager that in schools, if the core human needs of teachers were being met, we’d see far less turnover, far less burnout. We’d see more joy, more learning. And then of course we can apply all of this to thinking about what do kids need?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And so even just starting there with the first one, the need for belonging and connectedness. Educators know this. They know that students coming back to school need all those opportunities to connect with each other, the community-building and all of that.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
AGUILAR: You mentioned the loneliness of teaching and the isolation of it. I think that’s really something to unpack and explore. Another thing I’ve done a lot of research into that I incorporated into this book is research into trauma and what does it mean to do trauma-informed coaching. And there’s so much discussion about trauma in our students now and in schools. So one of the key definitions of trauma is that there was something that happened, it could actually be big or little or medium-sized. There’s something that happened, and one of the elements that results in it becoming sort of a traumatic experience is that you felt alone, and you felt lonely, and you didn’t have anyone to process it with or talk about it with. So that element of struggling with it alone is, is a correlate, it’s connected to this need for belonging and connectedness. And so if we had coaches who, as you described, could just sit down and talk to a teacher about what’s going on. I’m not saying that teachers are experiencing trauma by the loneliness, but they could be. I’m actually also not saying that they’re not, because they could be.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: But the, the impact of so much isolation and loneliness when someone, like a teacher, is dealing with so much every single day. And yes, as you said, there’s incredible joys and, and beauty in teaching, and there’s so much challenge. But sometimes it is also even just that joy that we want to share that we could share with a coach. So the first need, the need for belonging and connectedness, and in some ways that is connectedness with ourselves. And that is part of what happens in coaching is we have someone who slows things down enough so that we can process our own thoughts, and we connect with ourself by doing that. And then there’s connection to others, there’s connection to our, in this case, staff community, if we’re at a school, connection to our students. That sense of belonging and of having a community. That’s, that is, again, I’m sure as I say this that it’s sort of like yeah, of course. That’s obvious. Okay, the second core human need, should I go on or do you want me to stop?
GONZALEZ: Well, I want, well, I think I want to push back a little bit on the idea that it’s obvious because I just don’t, I think when somebody sees a teacher that is struggling, that’s not going to be the first thing they’re thinking as a means or a route to a solution. And, you know, the second episode of my podcast, 11 years ago, I interviewed a teacher who I, I knew her as a kid. She wanted to be a teacher. She went through. She taught for five years, and she left. And the thing that we unpacked in that interview was that. It wasn’t the kids. It wasn’t the salary. It was that she just didn’t ever feel that connected to her colleagues, and she was just kind of lonely. And I asked her, had your principal done more to build community between the faculty members, would that have changed things? She said absolutely.
AGUILAR: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And I don’t know that that’s something we really talk about enough when we think about all the different things that teachers struggle with, that that could be something that could really make a huge difference. I know that in these seven to eight years that I taught, the two years when I really felt like I had a fun peer group to go to work with every day, those were my best years because it just, it just helped —
AGUILAR: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: — to have people that I enjoyed working with to hang out with a little bit outside of my teaching time and blow off steam and talk about the kids. And the other years when I didn’t have that didn’t feel as good. So I think it’s one of those missed opportunities that, it’s an easy fix and we aren’t doing that, you know?
AGUILAR: And there is, this is another thing. Like, there’s so much research on organizational development and so on that’s like yes, in organizations and companies and schools, there’s research on schools, where people feel connected to each other, teachers stay.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And they learn more, and they take risks, and student experience and outcome improves. It’s just, it’s so, you know, one of the things that happens to us when we are connected to others and we can blow off steam or sit at lunch and talk about what’s going on is we can share our experiences, we hear others share theirs. Our feelings become normalized. Our perspective expands. We don’t feel like, oh, there’s something wrong with me. We often extend compassion to each other. We extend compassion to ourselves. And sometimes we laugh, and all of those are other key factors that allow people to thrive.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: The amount of, you know, play and fun and humor. And, so this is, yeah, so what can a principal do? What can a coach do? And what can teachers do? And so one of the things that I often coach teachers around the second core human need, which is the need for autonomy. It’s really the need to feel empowered, like you can make a change, like you have agency. And so when teachers are in situations where they feel really lonely and isolated, I will coach them towards, how can you create more connection, whether it’s outside of this school or in the district or even outside of education, if that’s, if it’s just not possible here for you right now. But that core human need is, it is, it’s the primary one. I mean, it’s at the top of the list because it’s primary, and it’s — you know, when you think about, I think about some of the phrases that the folks that I’ve coached have used with me, perhaps at the end of a session or later. They’ll say something like, “I just felt like you saw me,” or, “I felt like you just got me.” And what they’re saying is “I felt connected.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
AGUILAR: I felt like you accepted me. These are, this is, and really that’s, that’s what we want as humans. It’s really what we need. We’re a social species.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. I think it’s also, you know, I kind of want to just take a second to speak to all of the Type As out there too. Because I think for me as a teacher, I was very much sort of Type A, wanted to get things done. I’m an Enneagram 3. I want to check things off my list. And so I’m always the person at the meetings when people are chatting, I’m like, come on, we got — let’s move it along so that I can make more accomplishments and get more. And so I think there are people out there who need that connection and don’t even realize they need it because they’re so focused on their to-do list, and it’s a recipe for burnout because you’re not meeting that core need of belonging because you’re putting other things ahead of it, you’re putting productivity ahead of it. And I’ve seen young, new teachers really burn out because they’re very used to, you know, being productive and they don’t even recognize that need for belonging themselves. So I just wanted to kind of elevate that as a, as a need that — I think some people feel it acutely and some people don’t even realize that they’re starving for it.
AGUILAR: Mhmm. So I would add that those Type A, I want to get something done, why are we spending so much time on community building? That those folks have a really strong need, this is the third core human need, for competence or mastery and perhaps also for purpose and meaning.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
AGUILAR: And so those are people who also may just need to understand the reasoning. And so with those kind of people, sometimes what I do is say, if in our leadership team meeting, we spend seven minutes in the beginning on connecting with each other, that’s actually going to prime our minds. Literally this is going to start producing the kind of neurochemicals that will allow us to get into the challenging parts of the agenda and be more productive when we get there. Because we’ll have some dopamine flowing through our veins. We’ll have a little bit of norepinephrine. We’ll like, we’ll feel better, which will allow us to get the work done. And so I, you know, everybody’s, again, that’s the perfect example of —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: You know, and then there was the people who say things like, “Why are we doing this again? Why don’t we have input into the agenda? Why aren’t we talking about classroom management?” Or something. So they’re expressing the need for autonomy and agency.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And so there are strategies then that leaders can use to say, to acknowledge that and say, “I hear you’ve got that, that need. That’s a normal human desire.” And there’s probably also in there the need for competence and purpose and meaning. There’s sort of a fear that if we don’t talk about these other important things, I’m not going to be a good teacher.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
AGUILAR: So one of the ways that I hear the need for competence expressed by teachers is I’ll hear them say things like, “I just, you know, if we focused on classroom management, if the school was calmer, then I could do my job. But right now I’m not able to do my job. The school’s out of control.” And that’s a desire, that is, “I came into this to teach biology” or third grade or whatever it is, and right now it feels like there are obstacles in the way.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And I can’t fulfill the purpose that I came here with.
GONZALEZ: It sounds like, tell me if this is correct, it sounds like whenever you are coaching people, that one of these six really bubbles up as the most pressing of the needs that’s not being met, and it almost kind of, you know, takes over until it’s met, and then the others can be met. But does that sound right? That you can kind of, like, when you’re talking with somebody, you see one that is really strong, in terms of that need not being met?
AGUILAR: Often, although I would also say several of them are really intertwined, and I think that they manifest prominently in hierarchical organizations. And so the need for agency is almost always teachers and so many people feel so disempowered, and they feel like they don’t have a say over what’s happening, and everything just happens and it’s so hard. The desire for competence shows up in a lot of ways. This like, “I just want to do a good job.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: “I just, I came here to teach. I came here to make a difference.” The need for purpose and meaning is also, you know, that, that comes up a lot. So it’s, I think there’s different ways that people express them, and they sort of manifest differently. And, but I am always listening for which of the needs are being expressed, which are unmet. And also for just what are the, what are the emotions that someone is experiencing that’s connected to this? Sometimes all we need to do is slow down, hit pause, have some space to acknowledge. We don’t actually necessarily have to meet those needs. We just have to say something like, as a coach I would say, “I’m really hearing your commitment to teaching and to your students, and I can really hear your frustration that we’re not addressing these other issues. And I want to just appreciate that.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: “And that’s powerful, thank you for sharing that.”
GONZALEZ: So just naming them can go a long way toward sort of starting to meet them is even just recognizing it and having a vocabulary for it?
AGUILAR: Yeah, and just validating someone’s desires, their needs, right?
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
AGUILAR: Just like, because so much of the struggle, sort of the, yeah, the struggle, the tension, the conflict in schools comes from people feeling like, essentially feeling like, “Nobody listens to me. Nobody will just listen to me.”
GONZALEZ: Yes, yes. I see that a lot.
AGUILAR: Yeah. And sometimes it’s just what they’re saying is you don’t have to necessarily have to agree. You don’t have to change things, but you have to just listen to what I’m saying.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. It sounds like —
AGUILAR: Start there.
GONZALEZ: — even if the school doesn’t have, you know, a team of instructional coaches or people to work with teachers, teachers can do this for each other even. Just having an understanding of these needs, we can do this validation for each other, even.
AGUILAR: Mhmm. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean I think one of the things that is helpful about a framework and, you know, the kind of research that I’m sharing is that again, it normalizes what we’re experiencing, so we feel like, okay, this is a thing.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: What I’m experiencing is an unmet core human need. This is a thing. There’s nothing actually wrong with me.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: You know, ’t’s like, we can kind of just be relieved to know that there is a way to talk about this. There is a framework. There is language that helps us understand all of it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. You talk in this chapter also about the shift away from a pathology-based way of looking at human needs that, you know, in the past it was, “Oh, this person’s experiencing a strong emotion. What’s wrong with them and how do we fix it?” And so now you’re shifting toward a more positive sort of Maslow-ish way of looking at human needs. Talk to me a little bit about that.
AGUILAR: Mhmm. So that reflects a massive shift that I think we’re going through as a society and that we need to go through, which is a shift from seeing emotions, and in this case, unmet core human needs and really our full humanity, from seeing it as a problem to fix to something that we can welcome and embrace and learn from. So a lot of the work that I do explores how we coach emotions. And I often talk about emotions as being incredibly wise friends that we can learn so much from, that we can welcome them, that anger can be one of our best friends. We can learn so much from anger. Anger has incredible messages for us. And so rather than — I don’t like the language that’s used in a lot of sort of emotional intelligence or SEL programs around managing emotions or regulating emotions. Because that sounds to me like the language of control. I think that we can develop good relationships with our emotions and that doesn’t mean that they get to drive the bus or take charge of things. And there’s a difference between having an emotion and expressing an emotion. But that is a shift from seeing, you know, anytime I hear someone expressing an unmet core human need, I see an opportunity. Like, oh, so you want to more deeply express your purpose as a teacher, or you want to become more competent. That’s great. Let’s explore that. I think there’s been such a, we’re hopefully we’re coming out of just a general mindset where basically humans are all seen as problems to control, regulate, manage so that we can be more productive and produce and churn out. I mean this is an industrial, colonial —
GONZALEZ: It’s very capitalist, yeah.
AGUILAR: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Yes, yeah, yeah.
AGUILAR: And that goes for our bodies, our minds, our emotions. And I think that there is, it’s just not working.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And there’s a major crisis.
GONZALEZ: So we’ve talked about belonging and connectedness. A little bit, I’d like to touch a little bit more on the autonomy piece because yes, there are a lot of teachers who are feeling a strong need for autonomy and are working within systems where they don’t have very much. So how do you typically handle that when you’re coaching a teacher who’s really feeling a strong need. I mean it sounds like the first step is that you at least get them to name it, and you validate that this is a legitimate thing. But then what?
AGUILAR: So one of the frameworks that I like to bring in, I love frameworks, is the concept of the spheres of influence and control.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
AGUILAR: And so that’s a very simple concept, I did not create it, which suggests there are things that are within our control, within our influence, and outside of our control. And so one of the first things we do is reflect on or evaluate whatever it is that you’re frustrated about, or you feel you don’t have the power to influence or control. Is it truly outside of your control? Or could you influence it? And so the one thing — I’ll come back to that — but what is within our control is really our emotions and our thoughts. And that’s it. And we can learn how to really feel, a lot of people feel like, “My emotions are not within my control.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: Or “My thoughts, they go all over the place, and they make me feel crazy.” But we can learn how to work with those. They are within our control. There’s a lot of that we can influence, so much more than we think, and that’s the key. A lot of people think, like, “Well, I can’t influence that.” Well, you might if you decided you wanted to put your energy there. Now, do you want to put your energy there? Or do you want to put it somewhere else? Because our energy is limited. And so this is one of the concepts that I bring in when we start talking about autonomy or agency or empowerment is you have a choice about where you put your energy. I find overwhelmingly that people have so much more power than they think they do, and they just don’t have the skills to act on it, and they’re afraid and they feel like this is a belief they’re telling themself. This is a thought, so this is a story that is within their control. I can’t do anything to influence that. I can’t control that. This just happens, and this just happens, and I say, “Well, do you want to — there are some skills that you could learn if you want to try to influence that.” But so often I hear teachers say things like, “Well, that just happened, and what am I going to do now?” I say, “Well, could you” — I mean I actually don’t usually get really directive right away but — “could you go to your principal and just get more information, so you have more of an understanding of why she made that decision? Could you share some additional insights or perspectives? Would you be open to hearing her insights and perspectives?” Could you think about proposing this? Could you propose that? There’s so many ways for us to productively act on our desire to have more influence or more autonomy, and I really do think that this is a skill set that, again, we’ve been conditioned to not act on.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: Because when we’re in hierarchical situations, beginning with our families of origin and our communities, we’re trained to be submissive, responsive, passive, and so we need to relearn the skills of, of taking action on what we want to have more influence on.
GONZALEZ: I mean just those two examples, just, you know, getting more information and sharing your thoughts, both of those, they sound great but you’re right. I think a lot of people don’t ever think of that as options because it’s like if I’m not the one who’s allowed to make the final call on something, I have no power at all. And it’s like, no, actually you might, especially if you just soften up, you know, sort of what you think the end product has to be and look at this as a relational thing and yeah. I just love those examples so much.
AGUILAR: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: So it’s sort of, it’s teaching the people that you work with, helping them to see the opportunities that are actually there instead of looking at everything so black and white?
AGUILAR: I think that’s part of it is, that’s the expansion of perspective, that’s reframing. That is making some assumptions, in this case, in those examples about your principal that are perhaps more positive assumptions.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
AGUILAR: And it does require sometimes a mutuality of skill, but I feel like so often, you know, so many educators, for many reasons, have become, you know, or become just really resigned and frustrated. And so just this idea of could you probe for understanding? Could you let your principal know the impact that this decision had on you? Maybe she’ll say, well, this is what we’re doing anyway, or maybe, who knows.
GONZALEZ: Right.
AGUILAR: But part of this is just sort of again, building this skill to take action and speak up.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. Love that. So belonging and connectedness, autonomy. The third one is competence, which we’ve also touched on a little bit more or already. Did you have more to say about that? You know, I’m identifying myself as somebody who does always want to feel competent. And so how do you get somebody who’s got such a drive for that to meet that need when it’s almost insatiable?
AGUILAR: Well, then I would say that there’s a, for those folks who can never feel like they’re competent, there’s a connection with the fourth core human need, which is the need for genuine self-esteem. So that is self-esteem that comes from within. It’s not a result of comparison. It’s not a result of any kind of achievement or accolade. It’s something really deep inside. And that, that, so what’s really interesting is in that example that you’re offering really of yourself, and you mentioned you’re an Enneagram 3 and that means something to me. So we’re kind of getting into the gray area. That gray area is the one in which we start talking about psychology and really the other side of that gray area, I would say, is therapy. And what, what professional mental health experts do with someone to help them understand their tendencies. And so on the other side of that continuum, in my mind there’s this continuum which is there’s coaches and then there’s the gray area, and then on the other side there’s therapists. And coaches are not therapists. We don’t probe. But when I work with people who are really driven and who are perfectionists and who never seem to be able to feel satisfied —
GONZALEZ: Yes.
AGUILAR: — what I’m hearing are some, you know, psychologists call, sometimes call them problematic core beliefs or some deeper stuff that deserves exploration. And sometimes if I’m working with someone because I don’t probe into that stuff, I know that’s not my business, sometimes I will say, “Hey, you know, I just want to let you know I’m hearing some stuff that I think you’d really benefit from exploring with a trained professional mental health person.”
GONZALEZ: Sorry I’m laughing. I’m just thinking of course. Like, eh, you might need professional help, Jenn.
AGUILAR: Yep.
GONZALEZ: Good to know, okay.
AGUILAR: But I’m also, I’m also really committed to normalizing. Like, I’ll often tell my clients, like, I have two therapists because one was not enough, and I found two because I like different modalities. So I’m really committing to destigmatizing, like, hey look, you know, we all, we all need and deserve to have someone to help us sort out our childhoods.
GONZALEZ: Right.
AGUILAR: We all have had childhoods. We all got stuff. We all got patterns. It’s expressed differently. And so, yes. And so sometimes if I, I ideally try to create a relationship with clients where we can laugh and we can joke and we can say, like, yep, there it is again.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: This is why I’m suggesting you get a therapist again.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
AGUILAR: Like, what’s it going to take? You know, and I’ll say to people, like, I’m not going to ask about what you had to do as a child to get approval from your parents because that’s none of my business. But this is how it shows up. And so, you know, that, it’s that need for self-esteem, that sort of people want to be, this is a, I hear teachers say, this is the indicator. I hear teachers say, “I’m just never appreciated.” Like, “No one appreciates me. I work so hard. My principal doesn’t appreciate me. My students don’t. Their parents don’t. Like, nobody appreciates how hard I work.” That is the core human need that is unmet is the need for genuine self-esteem. And that’s a really hard one to do in the context of coaching.
GONZALEZ: Okay, okay. But you do get somewhere at least by having the person understand that this is what is going on. It’s not necessarily the job.
AGUILAR: Right.
GONZALEZ: Or what I’m doing, you know, in my instructional decisions. It could be that this issue is just playing out in a lot of different contexts, yeah.
AGUILAR: Yeah. And there are things that as a coach I will help someone begin to identify their strengths and to identify when they’re acting on those strengths and to create more opportunities to maximize their strengths, to work on their, to demonstrate their assets as a teacher. And so that, that can begin to address that and for them to be — so, for example, if I do a classroom observation, this is the kind of teacher who I’ll walk in the room after the classroom observation, and they’ll say, “Okay, what did you think? I really want to know what you thought. Was that awful? Am I a terrible teacher?”
GONZALEZ: Right.
AGUILAR: And I’ll say something like, I’m willing to share, you know, I’m going to share some of my observations, but first I want to hear from you. I want to give you space to identify what went well.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: Because the impact of them identifying is exponentially more meaningful than me. It is, it is in the end, even though that’s not what they think, but it is.
GONZALEZ: Right. That’s interesting. So instead of feeding that need for the external feedback, getting them to build more of that ability to do it for themselves and see themselves more clearly. I like that.
AGUILAR: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: So the fifth one is trust, the need for trust. How do you see that show up when you’re working with teachers who are really feeling an unmet need for trust?
AGUILAR: Mhmm. So the trust is interesting because it’s the need for trust in yourself, that you have the capacity to deal with what’s going on. So this one is not, “I can trust others, I can trust my principal.”
GONZALEZ: Okay.
AGUILAR: That’s not what it is. It’s actually, “I can trust myself to find the resources I need to deal with this situation.”
GONZALEZ: Okay.
AGUILAR: And so this is, you know, this is the teacher who is, who says things like, “You know, I just can’t handle this. I can’t, I can’t handle this situation. I can’t take one more thing that lands on my plate today. This is just — this is my breaking point. I’m done.” So that’s a reflection of really a lack of trust in one’s own ability. And so to explore how to meet these needs, we often have to first give a little breathing space to the emotions that are coming up. And so in that case, there’s fear, there’s a lot of fear, which is really common. There’s so much fear in education, in educators, in humans. There’s just a lot of fear.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Gosh, we definitely don’t talk about that enough.
AGUILAR: No. We don’t talk about fear, and we don’t talk about grief. And that’s the other thing that I think that we need to talk about, the sort of — one of the most common questions I get about coaching is how do you deal with the resistant teacher? And resistance is an expression of distrust and fear and often grief. That teacher who’s been teaching for 25 years, and she is not seeing what she hoped she would see when she came in as a teacher.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And she’s actually just heartbroken.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And there’s never a chance for us to grieve or to mourn or to talk about the incredible sadness as well as the joys. But there’s also a lot of sadness.
GONZALEZ: I’m remembering, I’ve quoted you in a keynote, and it was this, it was the quote. It was that, and I can’t remember exactly what it was, but the negative teacher is usually somebody whose heart has been broken, and that came from one of your earlier books. And it was so resonate for me because as somebody who tried to be a motivated teacher and a positive teacher, I would get dragged down by that. And to shift the way that I saw that, it was revolutionary for me because having compassion for that and realizing that pretty much probably all of those teachers came into the profession with great hope and optimism and excitement, you know, fell down over and over again and just, yeah.
AGUILAR: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: I thought that was just a really beautiful, you know, insight to share.
AGUILAR: Yeah, yeah.
GONZALEZ: So how, when you recognized that, what’s your approach? I mean, apart from what we sort of keep repeating, which is to at least name it, is there a next step after that?
AGUILAR: So that is also a teacher who feels incredibly disempowered who doesn’t feel like they have that autonomy, who often doesn’t feel a sense of belonging anymore. This is the teacher who we all have known or know these teachers, you know —
GONZALEZ: Yep, yep.
AGUILAR: — who are cranky, and they close their door, and they come late to meetings. And they have pushed others away, isolated themselves. They’re just going through the motions, you know.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: They clock out at 3:05. So as a coach, what I do is first I have to build a relationship with them.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: I have to, inside of me, remember that there is something good and whole and beautiful about them. I have to try to remember that they were not like this when they came in. So I have to build a relationship with them. I have to kind of be with them where they’re at, and what they fear most is that I’m going to try to change them.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And so as soon as they sense that, like, oh, here’s another person sent in to fix me, to try to change me.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: As soon as they sense that, the walls get even thicker. And so I have to be with them and truly feel like it’s such a, it’s such a sort of catch-22 or a paradox because I do want to change them, but I can’t really feel like I want to change them because they’ll sense that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
AGUILAR: So I have to just be with them in their sadness and their grief. But what’s amazing is how quickly they want to change because they’re miserable.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And when they sense, and when they become aware that I don’t want to change them, I’m not going to force them to do this curriculum, or I’m not going to make them, they kind of relax. And I’ve had so many of those kinds of educators. Essentially, I mean often it really is burst into tears within 15 minutes and just say, “I’m heartbroken. I didn’t come in,” you know. They’ll say things like, “Do you know how many of my students I’ve buried? I’ve been to their funerals. Do you know how many?” You know, and that’s an extreme example, but there’s so much grief, and there’s so much disappointment in themselves. “This isn’t who I thought I was going to be. You know, it’s just been so hard.” And as long as I don’t push back or try to make them change, they start shifting. It’s like they’re stepping out of a horribly uncomfortable uniform that they’ve been wearing for so long, and they start stepping out of it and saying, like, “This isn’t me. I don’t want to be this.” But this is, you know, life is hard. It’s really hard to be a human.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
AGUILAR: And we just accumulate these unexpressed experiences and the isolation and then again, you layer on, like, people’s childhoods. I mean the mental health experts, psychologists, are saying that two-thirds of people have experienced trauma and lived with the aftermath of trauma and chronic stress and chronic PTSD. And it’s like, that’s the more I learn in that field, the more I’m like, “Wow. It’s kind of amazing that we’re actually as whole and good as we are.” Like, humans are kind of incredible. But yeah. So I can’t be, so I have to be really accepting about who someone is when they show up in that way.
GONZALEZ: When you start up, start off a coaching relationship with somebody that you recognize is sort of that far down the road of just, is it then, is your approach then, because you talked about just being with them, but what are you actually saying? Are you just asking them lots of questions about what their current experience is and how is it going? And just a lot of, like, open-ended questions to get them talking?
AGUILAR: Yeah, that’s a great question. So one of the things I will do explicitly in the beginning, which is probably not something you would guess, is that I will name and address what starts feeling like the elephant in the room, which is what am I doing there? And so I’ll open it up by saying, hey, let’s — I really want to get clear on, what is your understanding of coaching and my role? How are you feeling about it? What else? Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate that insight. Can I share with you how I see coaching? If at any point anything comes up and you want to give me feedback on, I want to hear it because I’m here to support you so you can support your kids.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And then building a relationship, to create a psychologically safe space we have to sort of, you know, we need to moderate or sort of titrate what we ask. So we can ask some questions. Like, tell me about who you were when you got into teaching. Tell me about what’s difficult right now. Tell me about something you’re looking forward to this year, if anything. If there’s nothing, that’s okay too. A lot of normalizing. A lot of really deep listening. A lot of ensuring that I am really paying attention to what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, that I’m attuned to them, to their emotions.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And then I’ll, you know, I might, in that first conversation say something like, hey, I noticed when I asked you that question you kind of leaned back and it looked like your brow was furrowed. Did that hit a nerve? I really want to know so that I can know you better, so that I can understand.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And so I’m addressing the relationship between us.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And that builds relationship.
GONZALEZ: Interesting.
AGUILAR: It’s not just, because they know. If I’m only asking them questions about, like, you know, what brought you to teaching, and all of that, they know that, like, this is, you know, these are the lists of questions that she’s got.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. Oh, that’s interesting.
AGUILAR: But if I start saying, like, you know, if I say something like, hey, you know what? If it was me in your shoes, I might feel really annoyed that this teacher —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And especially in the times when there’s been a huge age gap between me and that teacher.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: You know, I’ll say, like, here’s this, you know, if I was you, I’d be thinking, who is this young coach thinking she’s coming in, she knows all this stuff and she hasn’t even taught.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
AGUILAR: And I’d say, like, maybe I’m crankier than most people, but that might be how I feel.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, no. I think that, I mean anybody who says, hey, we’re bringing in a coach for you. Right away, that’s, you know, probably not good news for most people. So I think that’s a really, the smart approach to just, let’s talk about this right out of the gate and get it out on the table. I think there’s one more here that maybe we haven’t gone in depth about, which is the last one, purpose and meaning . What does it look like when you see a teacher who is feeling some lack in that area?
AGUILAR: Yeah. That’s another one I hear expressed a lot, and that really can sound like things like this is what I came into this profession to do. Or this year, I just feel like I failed. So this is, I hear this from the teachers who have really high expectations for themselves. You know, this year was my worst year ever. I just failed. I don’t know why I’m even teaching. I probably should come back. So there’s, they don’t feel like they met their need for purpose. And this is, purpose and meaning are often connected to the sense we have of a desire for transcendence, really. It’s the, it’s the desire for something bigger, you know. It’s the desire for, it’s beyond self-actualization. It’s the sort of, like, you know, perhaps more metaphysical or a spiritual, like, I just want my life to mean something in the big picture.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: I want to be remembered. Yeah. So those are some of the ways that I hear it expressed.
GONZALEZ: And how do you address that?
AGUILAR: So, you know, this is interesting because the first thing that comes to my mind is what I know from neuroscience, which is that our minds have a negativity bias. So we remember, this is sort of a survival mechanism for humans. We remember danger. We pay attention to danger. We log in our minds. So like, the example I always give is if you do a professional development session for 100 people, you get 100 surveys back. Ninety-nine of them had positive feedback and one of them said something slightly critical. Ten years later, you remember that slightly critical thing. Right? Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Absolutely, yep.
AGUILAR: Yeah. And you’ll remember the same with your students. I remember, you know, students 30 years ago who made some little comment. So that is our brain’s negativity bias. So what we need to do is create new neural pathways or strengthen neural pathways that help us focus on what is working. So one of the things that I’ll do is help or guide teachers into starting to catalog what is going well. Where do you see indicators that you are having impact? Maybe all 150 of your students did not score proficient on the exam. So let’s break this down a little bit. Let’s see what did happen. Let’s look at the data. We’re looking for bright spots. We’re looking for your strengths. We’re looking for student strengths. And that really is what we need to start doing systematically and intentionally to reprogram our brains, which are not designed to, in some ways, to help us thrive. This is left over from, you know, when our, when we were, well we weren’t reptiles but our, our ancient ancestors.
GONZALEZ: Right.
AGUILAR: In other words, like, this is a really old evolutionary leftover that we need to correct.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. So this is, this is just a small slice of your book, and you know, obviously people should be, you know, going to read the whole, the rest of it because it’s all just, it’s full of all kinds of really good techniques and compassionate insights. But I guess my final question for you is just, I keep hearing this over and over and over again from people that teaching is harder than it has ever been before. And so, you know, what do you think about that? Do you think it’s true? You’ve been, you’ve been working with teachers since well before the pandemic. You know, do you think that, are you seeing that also? Or is this just the state of teaching as it always is? And what should we be doing? If I’m a person who’s supporting teachers, what is the, what should I be doing to best support them? If there’s like an overall thing that they need.
AGUILAR: Yeah. I, okay, two things that are going to sound contradictory which is yes, I think that these are really, really, really difficult times, really uncertain. So much crisis. I mean there’s so much talk and, and concern about the mental health for young people right now as well. I think it, we’re in absolute crisis, and I also think humans have been through many, many crises in our human history. I remember talking to my grandma who was born in 1914 and how she was talking about when she was a kid that they thought the world was going to end, you know.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: That it was, at that point it was World War I and II, and then there was the Cold War and it’s, there’s been so many things that we have dealt with. I’ve just discovered a new writer who I’m obsessed with. His name is Bayo Akomolafe, and he is Nigerian born. And I read this blog that he wrote, and he says he heard a saying from Africa, and the saying is that times are urgent, let us slow down. And I feel like that just encapsulates everything, like, oh my God, we just need to slow down.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
AGUILAR: We need to slow down. We need to slow down. The times are urgent, yes, let us slow down, and let us sit with each other and listen and be with each other, tell stories, and I know that so many of us feel this intense urgency to do things, to change, to meet the needs of students. And what we’re doing and what we’ve been doing so long isn’t creating the results we want to see.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: We’ve never had such high turnover in schools or higher rates of teachers leaving the profession. So let’s try something different.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: Let’s try talking about our emotions. Let’s try attending to our core human needs. Let’s slow down and take some deep breaths, and I literally mean like let’s bring in some mindfulness meditation practices, and let’s have conversations about what it feels like to talk about our emotions together. Let’s redefine what success means. Let’s stop externalizing all of the metrics. Let’s figure out how we can have more influence and more control over the things that we can influence and control. We have to, in order to do any of that, we have to slow down.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: And so specifically, like, what does this look like? When you’re starting a meeting and when you’re starting a coaching conversation or even a class with students, this is where, you know, I hear teachers say, “But I don’t know if I can do that.” I’m saying, like, “Is your principal in there every day telling you, you cannot take three minutes at the start of class? Is your principal really in there?”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: Like, prove it to me that you can’t do that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: There’s a lot of like, oh, I can’t do that. We’re not allowed to do that. I’m like, really? Show me.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGUILAR: Try it. Okay, how about one minute?
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
AGUILAR: How about as students are coming in the, you know, so there’s a lot of ways that we can slow down and that we can assert more, that we can make more decisions about what we can do.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Where is the best place for people to connect with you online?
AGUILAR: My website is a good place to start. That’s brightmorningteam.com, and then there are links there to my podcast, to my newsletter, social media. But brightmorningteam.com is the best place to start to get all those links.
GONZALEZ: Thank you so much for this hour, and I just want to encourage people to go and buy your book. So, have a good rest of the day.
AGUILAR: Thank you so much. Take care.
For a full transcript of this episode and links to Elena’s book, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 233. To get a bimonthly email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.