[00:00:00] Teaching is such a noble career. Being a school administrator is such a noble career, a coach, working as a school site assistant, working with our children, we really have the opportunity every day to change lives. I really believe that. And to impact the world in a positive way and to make a difference. Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing in Education Podcast. The space where 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, and welcome back [00:01:00] and thank you for tuning in now to part two with the Classroom Narratives podcast conversation with Jeremy Brooks. In our conversations together, back in part one, we were talking about leadership and what it looks like in the most challenging times within our schools. And now here in part two, we're gonna be talking about what safety is and what it means for systems to be both accountable and proactive for both the emotional and physical wellbeing of our faculty, students, and their families. But before we go into part two, let me show you some highlights from part one that will come up again in the second half of our conversation. Leadership, to me, it really is about presence. For me it's interesting because I never really sought to gain additional titles or to really go up the ranks as an administrator. I really was looking to serve students in any capacity. And so when I became an administrator, I expected of myself in terms of integrity, if something needed to be addressed, you address it and you follow up and you do what you say you're gonna do. But at the [00:02:00] same time, when our educators, our students, need our support, it's important to make sure to be there to address those things. And so the check-ins, I like to be outside as much as possible. When you're an administrator, there's so many things that can keep you in the office and it is critical that you get outside as much as you can. Because when students see that you're present and they know you care, they tend to be more willing to reach out to you for help and support. But again, we're seeing a high rate of burnout and we're seeing people leave and it takes a lot to leave. It takes a lot to throw in the towel to say, I've reached my max. I can't do this anymore, and then to finally leave. And so this is a serious crisis that we need to try to find ways to address. I think as a early solution, is just the work-life balance. Finding ways to support our educators. And get involved where you can. That's what I did as an [00:03:00] early teacher. But, we all have certain constraints. Everybody has different experiences. There's a whole variety of circumstances. I was having a conversation with an organization that focuses on mental health and what they told me is that the pain points that they see within our youth is that they uphold amongst themselves and their families this culture of exhaustion where they're always having to do something and they always have to be competing and working, doing jobs, getting good grades, doing everything all at once. What this organization said that our youth need is the space and the permission to pause and do nothing. They need the space to do nothing and know that's okay. And with my own classes as well, we talk quite a bit about when we say that we're getting involved with our students and their emotional senses and how do we manage that? How do we keep that from depleting us? I ask my students , what's going to help you allow us to hold our [00:04:00] boundaries? And a lot of the students will say, they want us to use a rubric. There you have the highlights. Now let's go ahead and jump into part two and get the conversation started right from where we left off. So that leads me to my next question in terms of when we talk about post-secondary trauma and its interference with both teaching and leadership in our classrooms. You've mentioned in your own work as well that you have had to lead communities through really traumatic circumstances. For example, the loss of a student and I myself have been in similar communities where there is a leader that needs to bring the full community through grief, rather, it is as the principal to the full school and the full literal community, but even teachers to a classroom community when there's loss in that presence as well, whether it's a community loss or a personal loss. And I wanted to see if you'd be comfortable sharing [00:05:00] some of those personal experiences that you've seen with loss in your communities and just what advice you would have for this unfortunately growing network of educators who are navigating personal grief, community grief, and even public grief, like a mass tragedy or shooting. And what are some insights you can give about honoring the humanity of the situation, but also leading again as a teacher or a principal, leading in a way that is both ethical and grounding and respectful to what the classrooms need. Well, thank you for that question. And, first of all, I just wanna also mention something. You talked about, um, students being competitive and culture of exhaustion and things like that. And if you hadn't heard about it, and if your listeners haven't heard about this, I want to direct you to a resource, Anxious Generation. It's a book that came out by Dr. Jonathan Heit, I think is how you pronounce it, and it's regarding the rise in teen mental health since [00:06:00] 2000. And so that I think can be a great resource too. But to address that question regarding grief and sort of crisis that school communities or communities may experience, i've been an educator in various contexts, as a teacher, as a school administrator, when, we've experienced some kind of crisis, either it be in our community, or maybe it was in a neighboring school. And so it's really important, I think, as educators, as leaders as well, to look at communicating with our stakeholders and being very transparent, right? One of the things that helps to ease anxiety during those times is sharing what we know. You have to share as much as you can. I talked to someone recently in our show about crisis communication. And you have to be careful not to rush and give information that could be [00:07:00] false because you could lose trust very quickly and it's hard to gain that trust back. But you wanna share what you can share what you do know, and you've gotta tell people when you're gonna be available in the future to share more facts about what's going on on the ground and what are you doing to resolve the situation, how is it gonna be addressed? Those are important in addressing crises. And then also making sure that you have the resources, the interventions to be able to address it. And because what could happen is you may have some communities where something could happen and there's a lack of transparency and there's a lack of acknowledgement of this did happen in our community or on our campus, and we're gonna try to go the sort of the public relations safest route. And to not try to be associated with this crisis or this tragedy, or to maybe minimize it, there's sometimes that response that can occur. And so [00:08:00] we definitely need to a number one address it. B communicate. But the other thing is making sure that we have the resources to be able to support our students, whether it be counseling available, maybe you need to bring in more counselors to your site. Maybe you need a stronger administrative presence during those crises. And then, going back to looking at how are we gonna make sure that something like this does not happen again? What are the prevention strategies? And oftentimes we see that we tend to be a little bit more reactive versus proactive. So what's great is trying to have a comprehensive school safety plan to try to come up with, the different scenarios of things that could occur and work with different stakeholders. As a site leader, I was on the school safety planning committee. I led our school safety planning committee. I was fortunate to work very closely with our law enforcement [00:09:00] partners we had a city council member who was a parent. We also had, classified staff. We had our certificated staff and of course our administrative team that was on the comprehensive school safety plan. We met multiple times throughout the year. And we addressed everything that we could address regarding, you name it, whether it was a bee swarm that could happen to a chemical spill nearby on the freeway to, the need to go on a lockdown or shelter in place. And so having those discussions to be able to prevent them instead of being reactive and then also practicing. I think it's very important to practice, those drills and to, allow students to be able to know this is what we do and this type of a situation and for our staff to, because we have to practice. And that could also, by the way, we do have to be careful because that could be a source of trauma too, if we aren't doing it the right way. And that's, again, that goes back to that [00:10:00] communication piece. Do we need to do a shelter in place or a lockdown drill and not tell our parents and students that's coming? There's some that maybe think, well, we have to see how they respond. But there's ways that you can condition gently and. Maybe we're announcing the first set of drills, this is what we're gonna do to practice, right? So that we know what to do. And then, you gradually, as you're exposing students to, these practices, so we can respond in a way that's appropriate and safe, then we maybe are going in a direction where it, we're not announcing it as much, right? But we have to practice, you have to communicate, you have to address, and then try to be proactive. But, yeah, I hope that an answers your questions. I could go on and on about this because this is our number one job as school leaders is safety. That's 100% the number one job. Parents, communities, they send us their children. And, our job is to make sure they're safe. And it's really [00:11:00] critical. They're our future. And we need to make sure that we're educating them, but we're making sure, again, that when they're in our care, that we're doing everything in our power to make sure that they have a safe, healthy, productive opportunity to learn throughout the day. Again, thank you for that question, Dr. Weisler. No, thank you so much for that. I have emphasized since my doctoral work about being proactive versus reactive, and a lot of the work that I emphasized that, especially as I call us frontline workers, the frontline workers in the classroom, especially as the writing teachers that are in spaces where we can be more privy to student emotion through our content. Again, we love our STEM teachers, love them, love them, but I doubt the chemistry teacher's going to get that story about, the trauma at home by teaching about moles. Right? Or math, same thing about teaching the quadratic formula. It can happen, probably just a little bit more challenging to get there for them. And I'm saying that knowing that one of my, I call her my academic mother was the chemistry teacher back in high school. But as the writing [00:12:00] teacher, we are in the circumstances where student writing is an easy gateway, very easy gateway for us to get into the emotions of what our students are going through in real time through their compositions. So when we talk about being proactive, a lot of the work that I work to do is trying to explore how can we see the student in real time based upon what their compositions look like and how we can, maybe even, not to sound dramatic, but prevent the next crisis by looking at that. How do you do that while still respecting the circumstances of those who were impacted by those tragedies? Yeah. Such great points right there. And one of the things that I think there's so many things we can do, and I love what you mentioned regarding the chemistry teacher and, we love our math and chemistry teachers. But regardless of discipline, regardless of subject matter, we can in fact have practices that [00:13:00] try to help support students in those regards. We can certainly use what we call social emotional learning or SEL and we can do these practices and embed them and we can still meet our standards and still, prepare students for the benchmark assessments. And these are little simple things that all educators can build practical strategies that we could actually implement in the classroom. And it can be daily check-ins. One of the things that a lot of teachers will use, which I love, is standing at the door and checking with students whether there's a thumbs up, thumbs down as students enter the classroom, to indicate whether they're off to a good day, or maybe there's something they would like to talk about, or maybe they don't even have to talk about it, but they're just indicating that they're having a rough day and maybe they need a space to be able to reflect and adjust to the day. So those daily check-ins, there's emoji scales, there's one [00:14:00] word mood. There's so many amazing things. You also have, first of all, working on name, pronunciation and preferred names. There's positive phone calls and emails home, those can work wonders with helping to connect with families. And there are ways that some of our most incredible educators, they reach out to parents through apps like Remind, and there's lots of other tech tools to simplify and streamline those check-ins. But besides the door greetings, you can use breathing resets, brain breaks. There's mood meters. There's just so many things, um, that can be used. A lot of what we see too is calm corners. I dunno if you have educators in your show that talk about that, or reset spaces not used for punishment, but to be used. If a student is feeling or a child's feeling deregulated, these are still things that could be used at the secondary level. There's a high school that I know that [00:15:00] has a calm room and the lighting is really nice and there's a small office space. I know that facility space can be tough to find sometimes, . But, there's ways to work around. Work some magic to be able to create those kinds of opportunities for students. And they use it. And so these are things that not only could be used at the primary level, but also at the secondary level too. And they certainly can help us to see what students might be experiencing, what kind of emotions they might be experiencing, what they may be going through. Because there's a lot of things. And I just wanna mention if I can real fast Dr. Weisler is for those students, when we do find that we have students that are, having difficulty, right? We use a model that I love. It's, it tiered interventions, and, it's the MTSS model. And what happens with that is there's the tier one, tier two and tier three interventions. And for some of our students that we're seeing [00:16:00] who maybe are coming to school and they're having a lot of challenges, a lot of difficulty, and it might be because there's trauma, or maybe they need additional support. We utilize, in my district, when I was an administrator, we utilized what's called a coordination of services team. And so we had on our team, our support staff, we had teachers, we had school administrators, and everybody has a unique lens in which they maybe see or interact with students. And so it's really important, our counseling teams, school psychologists, to have these people on the team. And what we would do is we would meet minimum of once a week to say, here are students that need tier three interventions and supports. Whether it's because of experiencing a trauma or maybe, they're in some sort of crisis, or maybe there's chronic absenteeism or maybe they have experienced bullying. Or maybe there's some behavioral concerns. And [00:17:00] so what are the interventions and supports that we could put in place as a team so that we could make sure that we are addressing these things that our students are experiencing because they deserve our support. And then the last thing I'll share too, you go beyond that. So, if you do find that there are students that are experiencing a lot of difficulty, there can be wraparound services. So it doesn't just have to stop at the school day. Sometimes there's some amazing outside agencies, social service agencies that can support students at home. And they will meet with students at home and families to do check-ins. And I've worked with some agencies that have even done things like setting up nutrition plans for children, working with parents to do those kinds of things because there's all sorts of different types of help that we could provide our students. So it does not have to stop at the school day, and we should be providing those wraparound services, especially for students that are in crisis and that have additional needs. And [00:18:00] there are systems that we could put in place, such as the coordination of services teams, and again, also the SEL strategies to be able to help support our students. You reminded me of when I used to have what I call the Zen Zone, a classroom as well, where I had two beanbag chairs, some lights, and the middle of it. I had a little fake tree. And that was my one rule. I should have had more rules in my class, but the one rule that I had in my entire class was, no matter what you do, do not touch my zen zone tree. That was the one standard rule. And the funny thing is that during the state testing, the librarian came in to help me out and she moved my tree out of the way, and the whole class was like, and they all looked at each other and they looked at me, and then she looks back, they're like, what? Did I try something sacred or something? We're like, yes, yes, you did. Oh, but I also think about these wraparound services as well, so one of the things that I also offer on my unsolicited advice here on this show with teachers is to tell them to form communities. [00:19:00] And one time when I had a student in crisis, you talk about triggering through, lockdown drills, whatnot, and active shooter drills. I had a student who after, within the first 18 months of the shooting in Parkland, having happened after she lost a good friend in that tragedy, we had an unannounced active shooter drill in the morning during my class period, I was second period and in our school we had a block schedule where it was 1 3 5 one day and 2 4 6 the next. So I'm the first block of the day for 2, 4, 6. In a second period, we had this active shooter drill and this student just, she was not coming back. She was not resurfacing from that. She was sitting there practically at her desk in the fetal position. And I approached her and I said, please go into my zen zone. I didn't even invite her. I kind of mandated her to go over there to say, please use my zen zone and if you do not feel safe later in the day, please come back to my room to know that you have a safe human on campus to communicate with [00:20:00] and to keep eyes on that student. I then sent a quick message to fourth period and to sixth period, two close colleagues of mine just to say, Hey, here's the situation. You don't have to bring it up, but just know that this happened during my class. Just keep an eye on her during the day to make sure that she has a village following her, at least during this school day, to keep her feeling safe until she goes home today. And I think about when students do leave and they do have those wraparound services, I know that sometimes there is teachers that say, I wanna help. I wish the best for my students, but I don't wanna jeopardize myself from getting involved. For teachers that do feel that way, what are some ways that they can still get in touch with these services for their communities, or rather for their students and the way that still protects themselves, their boundaries, and ultimately their career? Yeah, that's such a good question. And I wanna mention that sometimes these services, again, they're [00:21:00] a lot, oftentimes they're nonprofits, but they can be expensive. Sometimes they will build districts, right? Or districts will work with them. And they do have to, there are some costs associated with those services. And so sometimes, if you know that there's a student that's in crisis and that needs additional support, one of my core beliefs is that we need to be our biggest advocates for our students, right? We need to help to make sure that they have what they need. And i've certainly, even as an administrator, I've ran into situations where I've said, Hey, I know this student needs a additional support. And I've gotten sometimes a little bit of pushback that this student may not fit the qualifications. And then I make sure to have a whole list of here's the reasons why and here's the documented evidence. And then I might follow up with a phone call and I'll really advocate and push and push and push. And so I've experienced that and I've had those encounters where no, we're not gonna be able to do [00:22:00] that. But then again, after additional advocacy, we were able to get the, those students, the support that they needed. So sometimes you may hear no, and what I'd say is, don't let that discourage you. Right. I'd say, what evidence do you have to back up, that this student needs additional support, and be specific with dates and times and things like that, and experiences. And it's very important to document, document, document, I reached out and I tried to get support for this on such and such date. And, again, like I said, don't be discouraged. Continue to advocate for those services and those needs. I wanted to also mention too, my apologies for that experience, for that student that is terrible, that, that student experienced that. And there's ways that we can also support doing drills in a way that they're unannounced, while also making sure that we're being cautious to, those kinds of situations that could happen. For example, [00:23:00] maybe we don't have to say the specific period or when, because it can be useful to try to collect data on how are our students and staff gonna respond to a drill in case of a crisis or emergency so that we can be proactive and we can see, do our students and staff know what needs to be done, the emergency action responses to make sure we're safe so we can do those things while also taking into account and balancing being cautious not to have our drills cause trauma themselves. Right? Because they can, especially in our communities that have suffered tragedies, right? And I believe you're in Parkland. Yes. Florida, right? And so those are important considerations to take in mind. One of the things that, again, you could do as an administrative team, as a school site safety team, is you could say, okay, staff, we are gonna do a drill. Please review your procedures with students. Let your students [00:24:00] know sometime between Monday and Wednesday, there will be a drill. Again, you're not saying the specific time. You could still assess a specific grade level or a specific block, but now everybody is a little bit more prepared. They know teachers can reinforce those strategies that need to be used during those drills. And then it's not as alarming as it might be if it were just completely unannounced, right? So, it's very important to know your community, know the history and if your community has experienced any serious tragedies or things like that, to be extra cautious and to also make sure that you have supports available for those students if those situations occur Where a student might experience some sort of anxiety or things like that. You have counseling staff to support those students. Absolutely. Thank you for that. And to wrap up our conversation [00:25:00] as well, and I'm thinking about some of the proactive work that we're doing. Again, you have been very involved in PBIS in California, and PBIS again stands for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. And to me, when I think about PBIS, that is one of the key ways to create proactively safe environments. So tell us about some of the work that you've done with that and how you have been able to contribute to the molding of climates that are safer and more positive for everybody involved. So I absolutely love, Positive Behavior and Interventions and Supports, or P-B-I-S, I really think it is a model that can be used with fidelity to really make a difference on our campuses to support students in a variety of ways. The great thing about PBIS is it is also part of that multi-tiered systems of supports model. The MTSS model, it fits hand in hand with that. And so at the tier one level, you have universal supports for all students. And this could be in the form of, behavior [00:26:00] matrices or matrix that goes out, regarding these are the expectations for behavior in our classroom, in our library, in our cafeteria out on the playground. And so students knew, and we talked earlier about rubrics. There's a rubric and they knew what the expectations were. And by the way, when I've had students in my office for discipline, sometimes they don't recall what the expectations were. And that's how I would start off, do you know what our matrix is for the bathroom setting or for the library? And students are great because sometimes they'll genuinely not know, and they'll be honest and say, actually, I don't recall what it was. And then I'd pull it up and, you know, okay, well let's go through it real quick. So it says right here, this is the expectations for this part of the campus. And a lot of times, again, it's a learning opportunity for students. And so being very explicit and intentional about those tier one expectations is important, but it's [00:27:00] also important to model and practice those. One of the things that we would do is we would do these role playing videos where our video production class on leadership students might get together and they would, model, this is how we behave in this part of the campus or that at the high school level, secondary, and I was at K -8 level with about a thousand students. We were a big, K -8 school. I know there are bigger ones out there, but those large for our area. But one of the things too, these can be used even at the high school level. I've seen high schools do videos on this is how we behave in the parking lot. We're not speeding through the parking lot, so you could certainly connect this to your age group. But, also there's the tier two level where there's targeted interventions and prevention. For some students, these could be check-ins, like, check-in checkout. We would use check-in checkout quite a bit. And students could select a mentor that they would like to check in with. [00:28:00] And, you have a matrix there, or there's a small group social instruction, there's behavior contracts, there's daily point sheets, and then you also have tier three PBIS, which is where students are receiving more intensive interventions. And that could be, where you do a functionalized behavior assessment or maybe a behavior intervention plan. Wraparound services, as we discussed. And we're providing counseling, mental health support, social services in the home, one-on-one mentoring crisis plans for students. So there's a different variety of practices I wanna share with you too. One of the things that we did, which I think helped our program to be so successful when I was an administrator and I got to help lead this program, I'm so thankful for our partnerships and, what we were able to achieve. When I was an administrator, the top program in the district, we earned California PBS Gold status. So we're one of the top in the county and one of the top in the state. And I know there's those [00:29:00] platinum schools out there too, which are amazing, but one of the things that we certainly did was we had regular meetings and we worked on the Fidelity. What are we doing? There's a tiered Fidelity inventory and it tells you what you're supposed to do at each level to be able to roll out your program. And so we were very intentional about taking our tiered fidelity inventory, going through it and implementing the recommendations. And that's really the secret was the tiered fidelity inventory, but also then following up. And so I would send out our calendar invites for the year for our PBS committee. I'd make sure that these were dates that everybody could attend. Everyone had a role. I would look at who might be the best person for these different roles. And so our librarian, she was very good with data and she was very smart, and she was just so incredible. And so she became our data analysis and I drop off the data, she'd analyze it, she'd come with a report to the meetings, and she'd do such a phenomenal job. And, we had [00:30:00] definitely somebody on every grade level. Let me tell you something that is so critical. But we would do grade spans so we would have maybe a kindergarten teacher to second grade. It was so important to have those grade spans represented because as you roll things out, maybe there's a certain grade level that's a little bit more resistant, to rolling out a system. And if you have those grade level representatives on your team, guess who gets to help with speaking and advocating for the implementation of the system? Well, it's those grade level teams. And so, it's not the top down approach. It's coming from peers who say, can we please give this a try? And so that makes a difference in terms of fidelity too. Some of the pushback we had is our ticketing system, we wanted to give out a certain number of tickets 'cause again, that prevention piece is really important and critical. We give out behavior tickets for students and one of our site expectations was you turn these in on Thursday and we recognize students on Friday, so please give out a certain [00:31:00] number of tickets to recognize students throughout the week. And we were hoping tickets are a good thing. In a sense. They're a good thing. Exactly. They're got it because you're, again, it's positive behavior, interventions and rewards, right? Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, PBS well, the, the, the rewards aspect of it's important is what I'm saying, and right. So we were giving out, these recognitions for behavior and again, once a week we would do that, but how are we gonna make sure that we collect those? Well, we got students on the committee and we asked them any ideas, and you wanna know what students did? They came up with a solution. They said, let's go ahead and we'll go and we'll collect these tickets. We'll make it easier. We'll go to the classrooms if you give us time during our leadership period, and we'll get those. And so it was incredible. But as school leaders, we can't do everything. We have blind spots. And so it is so important to be mindful that we don't want to use the hero leader approach. We want to [00:32:00] be servant leaders and we gotta find ways to connect our stakeholders, our students, our staff, our parents. We had parents on our PBS committee. And with all of those voices, we were able to create a much better program for students and for staff. And of course it made our campus much more respectful, much more safer, and it helped to improve the climate and the culture of our school. Yeah. And I love when you say that servant leader approach versus the hero leader approach, because you are not there to become a hero or a savior if you're a school, rather than you are to appeal to the people who are also there for the school to make it function alongside you as well. That's an excellent point. And if I could, yeah, if I could just add this too, Dr. Weisler, sorry to interrupt. , It's also, it gets back to this idea, there was a TED talk about this, and I'm drawing a blank on the name of who mentioned this, but what we really need, if we're gonna do the big challenges [00:33:00] that we face, whether it's solving, chronic absenteeism, whether it's helping our students to meet academic expectations and raising achievement, whatever it might be, we need radical interdependence. We're not gonna be able to do it alone. Then this, I think, goes to whether you're a CEO of a company or whether you're a leader of a school or it doesn't matter the organization. We need to work together. We need multiple voices, multiple stakeholders. We have to build those bridges as leaders. That's where we come in. We facilitate those opportunities by building bridges, by bringing people to the table and by giving them a voice. And we listen. Listening is critical, and we hear the input because again, we certainly do not have all the answers. No one person does. And so we have to hear that there's the saying that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution. And that is certainly true. So we listen to our stakeholders and that's how we can [00:34:00] solve and achieve the great things that we have. Again, radical interdependence, love that. And my advice to other leaders who are listening include the newest members on your team to be part of those decisions as well. When I was back in the first year of teaching, I left the school in December, but in November there was a discipline committee that formed because they realized that in that K -8 school, 6, 7, and 8 were having extreme issues, especially 7th. That was like their sweet spot for doom. And they were all saying to me, Joey, you teach eighth. If you don't get outta here now, you're gonna wanna leave by the time you get those seventh graders next year. So they formed a discipline committee and I myself was actually told that I had the toughest students in the school in my fourth period class alone as a first year teacher. They did that on purpose, but they told me that I had some really challenging students in that one class. But I said, okay, well since I'm in the problem and I think I have solutions coming from Parkland, lemme sit in and see what it can happen. [00:35:00] And I was side eyed by coming to sit in and eventually told not to sit in at all because he didn't value what I had to say. And as a new member, I was the closest thing that they had to an outside perspective. Because I was so new, I did not know the school for that long. So definitely value your newest members because they will have things that your veteran teachers either are not seeing anymore because they're just so maybe used to it or they just adjusted too much that maybe they don't have the same input like they should. Yeah. Such good points right there. Yeah, I mean, again, all stakeholders and it's important that, again, we try to build space as leadership teams to meet with our new teachers to provide ongoing support. Because a lot of times, we have teachers that might come to us who, maybe their primary background, it's not, in education. Maybe they're coming to you doing a, this is their second job, their second career. And so they're new. And so we have to certainly find ways [00:36:00] to, have space for our new teachers to be able to meet and to get support. Try to pair 'em up with a mentor and listen to our new teachers too. And maybe don't put our most challenging students in the new teachers class. Well, we're classroom building. Take those things into consideration as we're classroom building. Exactly. And real quick, when you talk about PBIS, you mentioned different tiers. Real quick, could you just tell us what those different tiers indicate on a universal scale? Like tier one, tier two? Yeah. So tier one is again, our supports that go to all students. Okay. And these are interventions that, you start with, school-wide expectations. And I'll give you a quick example. One of the things that we had as part of our tier one systems is every single classroom had a bulletin board that had our PBS expectations. It had our matrix, it had our [00:37:00] posters with our values. 'cause that's part of it. You want your school values to be on there. It also had, other things as well, their information. So those were across the campus, every classroom had 'em. And then every single year on the first day or the first couple days within that first week, part of the introduction, to the school and the lessons was, going over a syllabus that had, those expectations on it. And then also modeling. And so taking students around and we would see, depending on the grade level, this was excellent. Our teachers would do this. This is how we behave in the cafeteria or the library, and this is what the library looks like. You know what that does too, by the way? Talk about lowering that effective filter, showing students, these are the spaces in campus and, that helps to lower that anxiety so students can be ready to learn. So that's a good technique too. But, that's that tier one, this is something that all students are gonna get. [00:38:00] And, as leadership teams, it's important to make sure that we're following up and ensuring that those students are getting those opportunities, so that they can learn the expectations. Tier two, though, again, that's for, some of our students, right? This is a smaller number of students, and these are supports where, again, at the tier two level, it might be check in, checkout, it could be other things, but it's a lot more, it could be group SEL learning, maybe you look at your data and you see you have more behavior referrals for seventh grade, and it could be a certain period of the day. Maybe it's referrals for what's going on in the cafeteria. Well, guess what? Maybe you bring 'em into the conference room and during an intervention period and administration, or maybe you have an intervention person, a tosa, and they go over, these are the expectations and you can do, there's lots of by the way, incredible curriculum out there to teach expectations too beyond that social emotional learning expectations and [00:39:00] curriculum, that could be utilized. And you meet with students for maybe 20, 30 minutes once a week or a couple times a week, and you go over those expectations and watch what's gonna happen to your data. By the way, when you do those things. Hopefully you should see it go down. It may, but it may not. But I'm gonna make you a bet that I'm sure it will go down because it did for us. And again, maybe it's in the cafeteria and you're teaching, this is how we behave in the cafeteria. And you're going over those things and you're giving students room to talk and share their ideas in a small group. That will certainly help. And then for your students that need much more intensive support, these are students that you know are in crises. These are students that maybe they have experienced trauma. Maybe they're in foster youth. Maybe again, they're going through some challenging or difficult times. Those students get much more intensive, one-on-one individualized [00:40:00] support, and you're definitely checking up on those students to make sure they're getting the support as leaders. That was really important. I know our counselors can get sometimes overwhelmed, we've got a ton of referrals that come in all the time, but going back and making sure that they are receiving those interventions, following up with parents or guardians to check in to see what's going on, and to see that, not just be reactive, but proactive doing those phone calls, and providing all those different kinds of supports that tier one, two, and three supports, those make a huge difference. And as we start to conclude our conversation, by the way, what a dialogue this has been. Thank you so much from start to finish and as we start to wrap up, I wanted to ask just real quick, are there any questions that I haven't asked you yet that you still wanted to share some insight on for today? And at the same time where can our audiences, even though all of your information will be in the show notes, can you just give a short narration as to where our audiences can learn about you and what to expect when they click on your links? Thank you [00:41:00] so much, and again, thank you for letting me be on the show today. It's such an honor and I can't wait to get you on my shows as well. So we're definitely gonna follow up and do that. But one of the resources that I highly recommend is "More Than Just Principals", uh, real principles, real advice, real Results by Robert Hinchcliffe. This is a book that can be purchased on Amazon. And, you can find me in that book. Uh, Robert Hinchcliffe does an incredible job. He's got a ton of other resources that I highly encourage you to check out, but you can find more in that book. I wrote an article that was in the November, December edition of Leadership Magazine that you can also read regarding chronic absenteeism and truancy and those kinds of supports if you need help there. And that capacity with your school site. It's called The Seven Effective Steps to Improve Your School's Attendance by Jeremy Brooks. And then also, of course, we have our podcast, uh, we have our show called The Education Talk Show with Jeremy Brooks, and we are wherever you [00:42:00] can find podcasts as well. And we also have a weekly show called The Weekly Recess, and that is a panel discussion that I have with an incredible panel. And we do that again once a week. But, yeah, reach out anytime. You can also find me on social media. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm active on other social media networks as well. And I want to thank our educators for doing what they do every day. Teaching is such a noble career. Being a school administrator is such a noble career, a coach, working as a school site assistant, working with our children, we really have the opportunity every day to change lives. I really believe that. And to impact the world in a positive way and to make a difference. And wow, the fact that we get to do that, what a special thing. And so thank you for what you're doing and if you find that you are one of those educators, especially a new educator, we need you, we want you to continue what you're doing. And, if you find [00:43:00] that you're experiencing challenges, please, find a mentor. Try to check in with an association. There's, especially for new administrators, there's associations like the California Association of California School Administrators. You've got the NEA, the National Educators Association for our teachers. There's lots of organizations that have lots of resources out there that are incredible, that provide conferences for new teachers that provide networking for administrators. And of course, there's wonderful podcasts like the one that we're on today. There's also other resources, so please, find a mentor. Maybe it might be somebody in your grade level or in your department or somewhere else, maybe might be a mentor at home. I know for me as a newer teacher, one of my mentors, I had several, but one of 'em was my wife and she was a teacher, and so she was a resource. And so find who that mentor might be because we shouldn't be going it alone. We shouldn't be [00:44:00] working on an island , we need that connection and that support. And it can be amazing to have a sounding board, to have somebody who provides advice and who listens. And what I've noticed, based on the research that I've done so far, is that some of our people that do stay in education have had a strong mentor and they have somebody that they can go to. And that makes a huge difference. And thank you for all that you do. And again, thank you Dr. Weisler, for letting me be on the show with you. This is just such an honor. The feeling is quite mutual, Jeremy. So that was Jeremy Brooks showing us that the way that you model leadership is human, ethical, and rooted in public service. And what stands out to me most is just the reminder that leadership, again, does not require permission. It does not require perfection, but it requires the intention and the integrity, and even the courage to show up for communities when it matters most. And for our listeners, I encourage you to sit with our conversation and value this aspect of an invitation [00:45:00] to being a leader, being one who services the public, not tries to save them. Jeremy, thank you again for being on the show today from the classroom narratives. Thank you, Dr. Weisler. And one, if I could just mention one last thing. Take care of yourselves. Take care of yourselves. If we're not able to take care of ourselves and get that work-life balance, then we won't be able to show up for our students and our staff. So please take care of yourselves. Thank you everybody. I appreciate it. What an honor. Dr. Weisler amazing show. I can't wait to share this with everybody. Thank you for joining us on the Classroom Narratives Healing in Education podcast. If today's episode inspired you or made you think differently, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts and stay connected with us on the at Classroom Narratives podcast over Instagram and Facebook. Remember, together we can transform our scars into stars and education, one conversation at a time.