Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education Podcast. The space for Education Meets Resilience. I'm Dr. Joey Weisler, and in each episode we dive deep into the personal stories of educators, students, leaders, and frontline advocates who are navigating the complexities within modern education.

Whether you're just starting your teaching journey or are a seasoned professional looking for inspiration, we'll explore how to foster meaningful change, prevent burnout, and build trauma-informed communities within our schools. Now, let's take a seat at the front of the classroom as we get started.

Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Classroom Narratives podcast. Big thanks to those tuning in tonight. Some of you have may have known me from my prior segments. I'm Dr. Joey Weisler. But for those of you joining us for the first time, welcome to the podcast and thank you again for taking the time and offering the space to get to know me and hopefully also get to know yourselves through our episode here today. I [00:01:00] wanna start today's conversation by saying if we haven't heard yet, that teaching was my first choice for my career. I wanted to become an educator since I was five years old.

And I have a picture that I would love to share with you, of me sitting in the lap of my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Lynch. Ms. Lynch, I hope you listen to our segments, and if not, this one is dedicated entirely to you. Thank you for believing in me for almost 25 years. A quarter of the century, but we don't need to add a numeric value on it like that.

So 25 years ago, I knew I wanted to become an educator because of the love that my kindergarten teacher had offered. Now I had to tell you why kindergarten was so special for me. In the year 2000 in this kindergarten class, this was a time where we would come in and journal about ourselves, journal about our feelings.

Writing had an incredible force on how we went about the everyday in that class. Our [00:02:00] afternoons were spent doing kinesthetics with songs, dancing, playing with stuffed animals to learn the alphabet, and we had the best time. And I also gained a love for the Backstreet Boys as well.

But that's a whole nother conversation. But what my kindergarten teacher did, Ms. Lynch, is that she formed her whole classroom to be premised on what we may coin here in 2025 as social and emotional learning. She was an educator who was well ahead of her time, way back in that day, and her methods and her pedagogy are things that I've carried into my own classroom today.

My own late grandmother and I'm actually recording tonight's podcast sitting in my grandparents' former apartment, was also a New York City based educator with an incredible legacy that she left on the education in the Bronx.

She began as an elementary school teacher. She evolved into later on a principal. She trained teachers in retirement and she left a true [00:03:00] legacy as a New York City public school educator during her tenure in the field.

So my roots have teaching within themselves and knowing that what I was not prepared for was having myself feel disillusioned entirely before I had even stepped into my first classroom. My high school was no other than Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and in 2018 when their mass tragedy happened, killing 17 people and wounding 17 others.

On Valentine's Day, I was right next door. Substituting the children of the friends, of the siblings of, and the community members of folks who were in the building on that fateful day at their high school.

I returned to that same middle school, that same calendar year, six months later in August to begin what was my very first year of teaching. Now, no educator deserves a tragedy. That's my premise, but I'll add onto that by saying no educator [00:04:00] deserves a tragedy before they even begin the classroom. So I was already disillusioned before I had even started my very first year.

Sometimes I'd think of myself as a toxic teacher in that year. I used to think in front of my students, what is wrong with you? Maybe a detention will fix this and. I feel like I neglected to take on the approach of, Hey, I see you're struggling. How can I help you? Now, I'll say that my students remember differently according to what they shared with me at that time,

they said that I was the person that almost did too much. They said that I came in as their superhero, but I was not a superhero. I was just a caring person, and I often confuse the boundaries of what it meant to protect my students without becoming their therapist and working to keep them safe for now, because we all know that we are not therapists, but we are caring humans who need to draw the boundary because sometimes trying too hard to save a [00:05:00] student and rescue them emotionally can actually perpetrate more.

Maybe that's where I went wrong in my opening ear. When I'm dealing with students that had behaviors that dealt with depression. Some students were suicidal, others were struggling with their sexuality. Others were in my eighth grade class reading on a first grade reading level. Others were in terms of acting out, I wouldn't say they were talking over me.

I'd say they were singing over me. I'm talking like American idling behind me as I'm trying to teach a lesson. And of course the defiance with those cell phones in 2019 was enough to make me want to smash my head into the wall, I'm not saying hit my head into the wall, I'm saying literally smash it into my wall every single day.

Oh, I wanted to do that so bad. Never tried it. Hopefully I won't ever have to, but that was my opening year. And honestly, my classroom looked like chaos quite often. I had students arm wrestling while trying to show them Schindler's List. While teaching Elie Wiesel, I was [00:06:00] mandated to play. Steven Spielberg's film and students are in the back doing anything but watching the content, and I did not have the skills to redirect the conversation and instead of saying to me, here's how you can support your students, admin would come to me too and say, how come you don't have a grip on these kids?

Maybe that's why my mindset defaulted to thinking about what was wrong versus what can we correct and make right. I went to my administration six years ago this week. And I was towards the end of my first calendar year of teaching.

My first full year was from January to December, 2019. I went to my leadership and I said to them, I'm disillusioned by the teacher I am, and here's what I feel. I snooze my alarm six times before I wake up, and those snoozes are 10 minutes apart. I had to set my alarm for an hour just to get up on time to get to work.

'cause I just had a feeling of existential dread every single [00:07:00] time that alarm went off. When I walked around my campus, I know that I looked scared to death. I just looked petrified. And when my students would leave most days, I just remember some days I would lock my door.

I would spike my lanyard and onto the ground and just sit in the corner and sob, and I would think, wow, as I leave today, which I wouldn't leave until 9:00 PM by the way, as I leave today, I know I'm going to be as happy as my most miserable child, the most miserable one I've seen today. And believe you, me, as you see, I worked with some really, really disheartened students and children in the months following that mass tragedy.

I was gutted. I didn't know where to go, where to turn, and I felt like I had no options. I even went to my parents and said I wanted to do this since I was five years old. This is the only thing I think I know how to do. I have no backup plan. What am I supposed to do now with my life? Is there a purpose [00:08:00] to what I want to do with my own ambitions?

I felt so stuck. So during that time. Believe it or not, my kindergarten teacher was visiting from Rhode Island and I had wonderful opportunity to have some coffee with her, and I said to her, Ms. Lynch, you taught me to love this system. And quite frankly, I'm upset. I'm POed because you made it look easy.

You made it look fun, and I don't feel what you felt when you were up there for us. Unless you have faked it really, really well. I'm not feeling it. What am I doing wrong? And she said to me, I'm gonna give you my secret. She said to me, I came in every single day knowing that I was not going to teach your brain, I was not going to feed you logic, but rather I was going to feed you emotion and teach to your heart.

I'm just gonna teach you to the heart. And that was the mindset that I took on from that day that going forward I would teach [00:09:00] to the heart and the heart mindset. It is a mindset is what I'm here to talk to you about today. So here we are in November, 2025, and let me show you how my life has looked six years later.

How did I do it? How do I move on from this teacher who cried every single day to the one who was hosting the Classroom Narratives Podcast as we see it? First I went away and I got a PhD. I would not advise doing a PhD in hopes that it will resolve your trauma. I actually have many people that would say that is, uh, quite a counter narrative nonetheless.

But what it did for me is that by doing a dissertation, focusing on trauma, is that I was able to almost have my day in court. Every single time that I was working to write my dissertation and what I was working to do is just change my mindsets in the way that allowed me to be more present, hold boundaries, and find peace in my day-to-day as a teacher.

My classrooms now look like students being extremely [00:10:00] productive. They come in, they know that they have options in how they want the class to run. They engage authentically. Instead of having students karaoking behind me, I now have students that show up willing to have conversation. ,

And of course I say this knowing that I do teach at the university level, but trust me, there is definitely still resistance going on in our classrooms at the university level. So. The mindset that I have used in following through with Ms. Lynch, my kindergarten teacher, is teaching to the heart. You can find a link to our acronym here in our show notes.

What does heart stand for? The H in heart stands for habits, understanding our habits. When it comes to understanding our classroom habits, for example , I teach my classrooms based upon flexibility and choice. The students will come in and they'll first seat themselves in a circle.

That's the mandatory part. But once they're in a circle, [00:11:00] I tell them, you can run your class today with me, based upon flexibility and choice, meaning I'll have an agenda. We're gonna follow that syllabus. But we're gonna be flexible in how we wanna guide the discussion.

And in doing so, this enables the class to be a lot more about them than it is about me. And then the students feel like their voices matter and that they have a chance to be seen because of that. This allows students to then become engaged more authentically. One of my first days of a graduate seminar about three years ago when I was taking classes for my PhD.

, We walk in and I had a professor say to us and address the class by saying, this classroom is going to be your safe space this semester. And my thought was, oh boy. Wow. Okay, so then how vulnerable do I have to be this semester in order to do well? Am I going to be graded on vulnerability?

Now, I'll admit I was just [00:12:00] as guilty for using that same type of language before I had taken that class when introducing myself to my own students as well. And it wasn't until then that I thought, , maybe it's not about announcing a classroom is safe.

Maybe it's about showing how it's safe by inviting safe moments. Safe conversations and using invitational language to allow students to be a part of the community on their own terms. Meaning when students come into my class, they will all be in a circle, but from there it'll be up to them how they choose to engage, whether they want to talk out their ideas for the day, whether they want to go away and submit it through writing.

And here's my play on words. I don't give homework. Aha. But I do have students complete what is called a written alternative assignment if they don't wanna talk about it in class. If they can talk about what's going on in class through our everyday conversations, they'll go home and they'll see in, in the great book that afternoon that they got a 10 outta 10.[00:13:00] 

If they choose to write about it, that's their choice. And I will pend their submission for their homework that afternoon based upon their responses that would normally go in writing instead of being spoken out. And that's engagement. I co-regulate with my students. To have them feel invited to engage on their own terms.

, And once they do engage, that allows 'em to think through what's really going on in our world. So I wanna pause and talk about the a. The A stands for awareness, and when it comes to awareness, I would love to share my term paper that I present every semester in my composition class called Your Voice, Your Change.

Your Voice your Change is a premise that asks students to go away and think about a community in the world where their voice can be heard. And in doing that, I had students just this semester alone, focused on animal testing and cosmetics. I have a student focused on the mental health of athletes and thinking about the athletic community.[00:14:00] 

I have a student working on substance abuse and usage and doing A PSA on that. I have another student doing a gluten-free diet awareness menu and clean eating . And I have another student focused on issues around male suicide and male communication.

So when students are asked to use content to connect to their own lives, they become more aware about emotions such as, for example, empathy. And in my writing class, I'll commonly ask, how is empathy a theme that we see in fictional stories? And the communities that we see ourselves becoming a part of, and it really leads students to think about the question, why does any of this matter?

I'm sure a lot of us as teachers hear the, the why am I, why am I going to use this when I grow up? Well, when you think about the awareness piece to help students bridge that connection, I have a lot of students that may not care about A, B, or C, but when I bring up their community, when I say to the student, Hey.

You might not like the Giver by Lewis [00:15:00] Lowry. I understand that. But let's talk about gluten-free awareness. Ooh. When Jonas tried to speak out against this community, how do you see yourself doing that with gluten-free awareness and building that menu? , And when I bring the stories back to the way that the students are thinking and they can bridge connections, they start to see themselves in the characters.

And that's the power of stories. It's letting students see themselves in the characters that they read. So then as students continue to work through this project, Your Voice, Your Change, that leads me to the R components where the work that we do in class can become practical in terms of students saying.

Yes, there are problems out there, and we have to own those problems. And once we own the problems that we see now we can go out there and fix it, and then we tell our stories about it. We tell our truths, and we record that to set the record straight. I can tell you that, like I said, I can remember myself as a toxic teacher [00:16:00] back from my first year of teaching, but if I were to open a notebook

seated right beside me as I record tonight and pull out letters that students have written me since 2018. Some even wrote to me a couple months ago from that first year of class six years ago. I can tell you that the record says that the students remembered something different than I did, and in their favor, I was somebody who was there to help them, not perpetrate them during that time.

Some days I still did ask the wrong questions. Some days the detention was easier than pulling student off to the side . but for the students that are still in touch, they offer memories that show that there was definitely help for them. And if you're listening to tonight's podcast, you're here and you're tuning in because you too have helped students.

And for that, all of us in academia are truly, truly grateful for you. Thank you for being here. So. We tell our stories to get our records straight and even through trauma, i'm gonna refer back to Charlene Weisler Schwarzkopf, who was one of our founding members of the [00:17:00] podcast, who alongside Rich Schwarzkopf, witnessed nine 11.

They said, when you see something so traumatic, write it down, document it, and then put it away. You don't ever have to read it again, but just know that the truth is there for you.

So that's my HEART method. It's understanding our habits, it's focusing on our engagement. It's knowing what makes us become more aware within our classrooms. It's focusing on our resilience and being able to tell our whole truth and tell our full stories. And my eureka moment from all this was that I realized that I did not have to standardize myself as a teacher in order to meet my course standards.

I also know that whenever I'm handed a pacing guide, I feel so depleted in thinking that, ugh, anybody can teach this. Why me? And the pacing guide is what always makes my imposter syndrome act up. But when we think with the HEART mindset, when we teach with our heart, [00:18:00] that is when we can truly allow ourselves to meet the standards without being standardized.

If you're tuning into that as a STEM educator, you might be thinking, okay, doc, well, stories, trauma, great. I teach science and math. Where is that gonna lead me? Here's the truth for you when it comes to understanding the HEART mindset and cross-curricular subjects. Students may not remember every formula that you teach them.

They may not remember every molecule, every quadratic formula. Those things may not stick with students in five years from now. The everyday content might eventually go away. What the students will remember is your grace, your presence, the fact that you showed up, the fact that you cared, and the fact that you were willing to address them and have real human conversations bridging that human connection.

So tonight's conversation is to help you understand how you are whole and enough as you are as a teacher. When you show up [00:19:00] with care and authenticity, you're making a true difference . The weight that we carry as educators isn't gonna be going away overnight, but the way that we do carry it and who we become while we carry it, can truly make a difference in how we think and lead and act. Trauma is a tricky thing because we don't really see how it happens and impacts people on individual levels..

It's usually observed at a very high level, but. I truly believe that perseverance after hardship is always a possibility. So next time you go into your classroom, think with your whole heart and know that I'm here to guide you along the way as we turn our scars into stars and find purpose through pain.

Thank you so much for joining me for tonight's mini segment.