WHOLE

What Teachers Need to Help Students Thrive

Rex Miller, Bill Latham, Kevin Baird, Michelle Kinder

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119651031
• eBook ISBN: 9781119651116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

A shocking statistic in education reveals that 70% of K-12 teachers work under chronic stress. This revolutionary new book explains how removing stress from the classroom holds the key to improving education. The book also explains what administrators, teachers, parents, and communities can do to help accomplish a stress-free classroom.

For years, the expert voices said "disengagement" was the crucial issue behind poor educational environments and results. Naturally, only massive reform could fix it. But what if the enormous restructuring and expenditures attacked the wrong problem?

MindShift, an organization that reframes tired and clogged conversations, pushed the old conclusions off the table and started fresh. They gathered diverse leaders in education, leadership, neuroscience, architecture, and wellness in working forums around the nation. These pivotal meetings produced WHOLE, a game-changing approach to education. This book captures the story and details of how the system can be remade for real and lasting benefits to everyone.

With the authors' expertise, the book exposes the exhausted and antiquated thinking that led to the present crisis. But, WHOLE also proposes a new era of disruptive change that can produce happier, healthier, and more successful education for the 21 st century. The book introduces the outliers, tells the stories, and presents the roadmaps to:

• Why teachers should be seen as high-performance athletes, requiring time for recovery and preparation
• How schools can become "field hospitals, " combining learning with healing
• Why space matters, how redesigning and refurnishing schools can eliminate stress and produce learning environments that are more open and inviting
• Ways to properly integrate schools within communities, building honest relationships, increasing social capital, and achieving transparency that increases success

Packed with real-life examples, new research, and solutions that you can introduce to your own schools, students, and communities, WHOLE shows us how to move schools from the age of stress and insecurity to an age of true educational flourishing.

CHAPTER 1
Dying to Teach

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

—Henry David Thoreau

Education is a habitat for heroes.

And, what else would we expect? Teaching tackles and fulfills one of the most foundational and primordial purposes of civilization. Teachers prepare children for adulthood and careers. More than that, they preserve the social order. That very milieu attracts those of heroic spirit.

That heroic dimension is why teaching provides an exceptional and recurrent focus for books and movies. Each generation of teachers can point to a printed or filmed story of heroes—Up the Down Staircase, Stand and Deliver, Mr. Holland's Opus, Dead Poets Society, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, etc. Each spoke to the hero's heart in millions of boys or girls, sitting in movie theaters or curled up in Dad's reading chair.

Our MindShift team also knows those heroes. They cared enough about the story of teachers to join our team. Lynn Frickey, Dan Bereens, Michelle Kinder, David Vroonland, Rachel Hucul, John Gasko, Denise Benavides, and other teachers (active or retired) knew the movies and books, and they knew the twenty-first-century educational machine that chewed teachers carefully and slowly before swallowing them up alive.

Another of those teachers, Dr. Marilyn Denison, was a long-time educator and administrator who specialized in launching new schools. She left education after two decades because of the stress. Six months into her new job with DLR Group she saw her doctor for her regular checkup. Her doctor had long been concerned about Marilyn's blood pressure. Soon after the checkup, her doctor called.

“Marilyn, what are you doing differently?”

Assuming a problem, Marilyn started to list several recent minor health issues when the doctor said, “No, that's not what I'm calling about. It's your blood work. You have NO stress markers at all. What changed?”

Marilyn told her the only thing that had changed was that she quit teaching and accepted a job she loved and a place where she was appreciated. Through subsequent conversations with her doctor, Marilyn clearly saw she had been dying to teach.

Who Cares?

The course of our work all over the country very naturally brought us into continuous interaction with the teachers on our team. As our work moved into stories of teacher and student trauma, as we talked to courageous and selfless educators, and walked through broken neighborhoods, we often saw our teachers suddenly look away, shake their heads, and wipe their eyes.

Sometimes it was like walking through old battlefields with the retired servicemen and women who once had fought there. In time, we all began to realize how much those old soldiers and sailors still care about those who remain in battle mode. Despite their own PTSD, some part of them wished they could return to the front.

Yet, even as we were surrounded with those genuinely intrepid teachers, we began encountering Gallup's reports that 70% of teachers have checked out and 20% are so indifferent that they poison the atmosphere. In fact, “teacher disengagement” sits at the center of the debate over school performance. So, there we were, working with teachers of generational, geographic, ethnic, and political diversity. But, they all cared. Every one of them. Deeply. And Gallup says 70% of teachers have disengaged?

What was going on?

The Next Jump

In January 2018, I attended a three-day leadership academy in New York City sponsored by Next Jump, the e-commerce company. As part of their passion for supporting educators, Next Jump's academy offers their unconventional philosophy, tools, and practices to teachers.

Next Jump's unorthodox approach grows out of their own unique history. After early success, they plunged to near bankruptcy during the dot-com crash. After surviving, Next Jump shifted its business platform from marketing to technology. That launched a period of rapid growth, an evolution that stripped away the culture which the founders built and cherished. As Charlie Kim, the driving founder, explained to our class, “We found ourselves with a small army of brilliant jerks.” So, one Friday afternoon, Charlie and Meghan Messenger (another founder) fired 50% of their programmers. They started over, establishing the right culture and character, and then rebuilt the business on that new platform.

Next Jump now employs around 250 people, and those people generate $2.5 billion in annual revenue. That is $10 million of revenue per employee! To put this in perspective, Google makes about $1.63 million and Walmart about $230,000 per employee. Next Jump is clearly a cult, in the best sense of the word (“cult,” as the root for culture).

The three-day academy felt like a group of little league baseball players showing up at Yankee Stadium for a day of training and workouts. It was a day of 90-mile-an-hour fastballs, magical curveballs, a lot of grins, and shaking our heads in awe of what we saw and did. The Next Jumpers were confident, transparent, genuine, and generous.

We watched young employees, just a few years out of college, quietly manifesting the poise and presence of seasoned executive leaders. That is part of their mystique and magic. Their transparency and willingness to go off script showed up the morning of our last day. Of course, that very genuine integrity and flexibility were a jolt to the group. But the whole Next Jump experience was an earthquake to my paradigm regarding employee and teacher engagement.

“I Just Got a View of Everything I Can't Do”

Charlie Kim kicked off the academy's final day by telling us, “The safest thing we can do is to follow our agenda. You'll have a great day, and at the end, we'll shower you with books and gifts, food, and a great send-off.

“But we think we might have screwed up the whole thing. We may have lost sight of the primary reason we held this academy. It is for educators, not for the VIP guests observing. You are very good people doing good work, but you are resource-starved, time-starved.

“I feel like we showcased our healthy food, exercise, and things you cannot imagine. We plopped you into how we run. That's why our team stepped back last night and asked, ‘Are we actually helping them?’

“Is today going to end where you educators walk away, saying, ‘Okay, that's cool, but I just got a view of everything I can't do.’ That's why I reached out to Peter Chiarchiaro, our Director of Wellness, to provide a summary of the vitals we took from you yesterday. We take the same vitals with every academy. We've seen it for the CIA, the military, Fortune 500 companies, every group.

“Let me read Peter's summary:

This group's energy efficiency is bad, very bad. It sucks, to be blunt. Of the twenty people, sixteen are in a survival state, four are in varying states of alarm, and none are...

Table of contents

• COVER
• FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• Part 1 Dying to Teach
• Part 2 Changing the Story of Education
• Part 3 Putting Into Practice
• APPENDIX A: CONTRIBUTORS
• APPENDIX B: SLEEP HYGIENE TIPS
• WORKS CITED AND FURTHER READING
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT