Randy Weiner and James Bailey on The Daily SEL Leader

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host, Jessica, and today Rebecca Middles is talking with Randy Weiner and James Bailey about their new book, The Daily SEL Leader, a guided journal. Aside from being an author, Randy Weiner co-founded and served as the first chairman of the board

at Urban Montessori Charter School in Oakland, California, the nation’s first public Montessori, Arts Integration, and Design Thinking School. He is also co-founder and the CEO at Brainquake, a two-time U.S. Department of Education Small Business Innovation Award winner. James Bailey’s career has encompassed teacher, principal, school turnaround, principal consultant,

and superintendent roles spanning across Texas, Colorado, and Wyoming. As superintendent in Wyoming, his district was the first member in the state to join the League of Innovative Schools after reform efforts around personalized learning and social emotional development. Let’s listen in as they discuss the impetus for a daily SEL practice and the importance

of educators’ self-care and self-efficacy. Randy and James, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Congratulations on your book and the thoughtful intention behind that practice and that the book invites. How did you two meet?

James, you want to start? Yeah. So Randy and I met through probably happenstance more than anything else. We had been attending a lot of meetings through a lot of different organizations and just kept seeing this guy sitting in his brick kitchen as we see before us now and thought, man, he’s

a pretty interesting guy. Ask a lot of thoughtful questions, kind of challenges things. So maybe want to get to know him. So just kind of reached out and we started discussing some things and kind of came up with some ideas that we could work on together and had the ability and fortune to come up

with this idea for the book. And I guess you could say that the rest is history. Without knowing, I had it on my to-do list to reach out to James in the very week that he reached out to me and for very similar reasons. I was appreciating one, the different skill sets and areas of expertise that James brought

into the conversations that we were both part of and also just had a sense of here’s someone who seems like he really gets things done and is thinking big and also entrepreneurially and that that was intriguing and of interest. It’s that synchronicity thing, I think, that came to play eventually. Yes.

Why education? What was your draw to that as a profession? I was raised in a family of educators. My parents were both educators. My dad was a started off teaching high school, middle school.

I eventually moved into community college where he eventually retired as a president of a community college. My mom was a history teacher. She was one of those that would on vacations, would always be the one that would pull over to the interesting historical plaque to give us a little bit of a lesson.

So it was just sort of in bread into me, I guess, that knowledge and information and learning and things like that were very important. Started off as a middle school and high school English teacher myself and just really fell in love with it. Working with kids and then really trying to make things better for students in general.

So that’s kind of my entry into education. In my case, this was not part of a plan. I found myself in my senior year in college thinking about my privilege and looking for opportunities to try to make a contribution if anyone would have me. This was Teach for America’s fourth year.

And so I applied hoping that I would not be accepted. I was terrified. And I was accepted and I was placed here in Oakland and taught for three years before moving to teach in Madagascar for a couple of years. But at the end of that third year in TFA, Oakland had what I think is still its largest,

longest teacher strike in modern history. And it was a moment to all of a sudden reflect. And while I was crystal clear that I certainly did not have any answers, I felt like I was too deep into it to walk away just yet. And so even though I thought I was going to go in a very different direction, I ultimately

ended up being swayed by the profession and have been thrilled to have stuck with it. I am also. So interestingly enough, I grew up in an education family and because of that chose not to go in education. And then similar to you, Randy, wound up but couldn’t resist it.

It just kind of came to me. And so I appreciate both of those views. And thank you for both for sharing that. This book that we’re here to talk about. It focuses on daily SEL reflection and practice for leaders.

It also serves as a guide for how school leaders can lead their community in the SEL journey. What I appreciated is that you wrote this book with the ability to take different paths for the user. So in the sense, a very personalized approach. Would you mind walking us through these different options and telling us a little bit more about

this before we dive into some of the content? Randy, you better take that one, Randy. Okay. I’ll take that one. So one, thanks for the question because this is so central to, I think, just our overall

philosophy on the problem space. And we spent quite a bit of time prototyping the concept before even writing the book proposal because we wanted to make sure that we were as informed and clear on the constraints that face school leaders as we possibly could be before putting together a book that might otherwise just sit on the shelf due to inaccessibility.

And so in particular, James and I, I think both feel very strongly that we wish more research were able to penetrate the school day. And we say that not with any sort of judgment about school leaders’ lives, but a recognition that there simply is not time or there is not enough time created for school leaders to be able to digest and access research in a way that I think we know most school leaders

wish they could. And so that came to be true during our prototyping. And we actually got it down to a place where school leaders effectively were telling us anything more than 400 words a day, you’re asking too much. And so while that flies in the face of our desire to bring a ton of research to bear,

we decided to embrace that as a creative constraint. And that, I think, more than anything, really informed the different paths because as James says, all the time, this work is so personal. And we wanted to make sure that we as authors weren’t coming across in a way that made it sound like we think we have your answer.

What we think we have is some insight into how to make this work accessible and approachable more or less no matter where you’re coming from. And so that immediately meant that something along the lines of choose your own SEL adventure kind of needed to come to bear. And we also couldn’t find anything that seemed to provide that kind of option to school leaders.

And so the paths come in a number of ways. One, we’ve put together six paths that from our perspective, we thought would resonate with leaders and they can turn right to and follow a subset of skills and just quickly dive into the work. But it’s also possible to design your own path. And whether that’s from front to back or based upon the diagnostic, we again didn’t want to make any

assumptions if we could help it around where you need to start. Right. And so the paths are meant to say, we understand that we don’t understand you necessarily and we want you to take ownership and agency of this journey so you don’t feel like it’s some external force that’s asking you to follow a particular prescription and that that’s ultimately more engaging and speaks.

I know I know we want to talk about agency eventually speaks to our own belief that this is a gentic work ideally. And that’s often not the experience that school leaders or teachers or children have in schools. That was what I was going to say around. I love the fact that this book opens with agency as options and readiness.

But I don’t know that I called this out also. You also encourage them to do it. Readers to do a preassessment. So it’s from the very beginning, those of us that know competency based and personalized learning, the book is practicing what we are trying to share with users by letting people go through and preassess where they’re at

and then inviting them to do different routes, which I think all of us as readers, probably if we were to be honest with those kinds of books do in our own way, but to be invited with really thoughtful intention and what that could look like. I really appreciated that opening. So just wanted to give some space for that for readers that they know that that’s available for the book.

So thank you for telling more about that. This led, of course, to daily practice. Why does social emotional learning need a daily practice and reflection? So principles, lives are very busy. I mean, let’s just go to the heart of it here.

It goes without saying that you start the day running, you end the day running. And you, in a sense, easily lose sight of it, even though probably about 99% of a school leader’s job is to deal with people. Again, whether that’s a student, a parent, a teacher, a cafeteria worker, a custodian, your whole life as a school leader is dealt with these interactions. It’s very easy to lose sight of what you’re trying to try and do accomplish.

And without intention, without deliberate practice, you’re not going to get better at these. Most of us enter the practice of school leadership with a lot of sort of advice to really focus on people, do a lot of relationship building, those types of things, which I think we all agree to. But A, there’s very little training for that in our principal prep programs. And B, once you get into the heart of it, you really don’t have time to do it.

So we talk a lot about the idea of reflecting upon those things. Because again, if you’re not reflecting upon that during your day to day work, you’re going to lose sense of it again. And without some sort of deliberate practice, you’re not going to get good at it. I mean, one of the clear things that we know across any endeavor, whether you’re teaching an eight-year-old mathematics or a 45-year-old, how to improve their golf swing, without deliberate practice, you’re not going to get better at the things that you choose to get better at.

And most of these skills we find are highly teachable or highly learnable. But again, they need practice. It’s very difficult just to read about these SEL skills and just say, OK, I have it. I’ve mastered it. Let’s move on to something else. They have to be practiced.

Because again, the context in which school leaders work matter a lot. The way that you communicate with students is different than the way you might communicate with a parent versus the way you communicate with the staff member. And so understanding how each of those changes is really something that school leaders need to take into consideration. Rebecca, if I can just add to that, I think one of the central observations we had in writing the book was there seems to us to be a disconnect in the idea of thinking that adults who are not supported to develop these skills are somehow going to be able to develop them well in children.

And again, that’s not meant as criticism of the adults. That’s meant to say the system at scale at least isn’t designed to be supporting leaders and teachers in developing these skills. Yet we do expect them to teach these skills. That feels wrong. And so might we be able to make some small contribution to helping leaders do that work better?

And we were just presenting a session related to this work last Friday to Philadelphia charter schools. And there was a principal who attended and we had asked the group to reflect on how accurate their self perception is. And what sort of evidence they have for that both within themselves and outside of themselves and where their strengths are and where their weaknesses might be. And the principal was wonderfully vulnerable and transparent and said, to be honest, I’m really uncomfortable spending time thinking about my weaknesses.

That’s not something that I really want to do. And we were so appreciative of that honesty because it’s a reflection of what we’re trying to lay out and make more accessible is we totally get it. You’re not set up to be OK with that. And we want to just make sure you understand how high the cost of that hesitancy and discomfort is not just to yourself, but to all those you serve and that there’s a way to help you through this that can be private and productive and at your own pace and in your own way.

I think that also speaks to how society views leadership. I think that’s changing and you’re part of this change. But certainly what brought people to a role leadership is sometimes the very traits that make it hard to be vulnerable because they were brought up in a time where that was valued. So I know that you guys agree with what you’re saying because you have designed a book to be interactive. I mean, that’s the piece about what the readers will get to see as they get in there is there is actually intentional interaction baked into this book so that I know you believe in this practice.

So I appreciate you calling out why. And James, you also talked about how this looks different for different stakeholders. And so I want to give a little space for that, too. In module one, you talk about self-efficacy and this is related. How does this look different for adults and learners in that scope?

Because you talked about the different stakeholders and how that changes things. Could you speak a little bit more about that as well as self-efficacy? Yeah, I mean, I think self-efficacy is a way to think about the beliefs that were capable of something. Again, whether you’re eight or 45 or 60 or 70, it really doesn’t matter. I think the big difference is adults get much better at covering up their weaknesses.

We have much better defense mechanisms than children do. And so the ability to actually develop efficacy as a school leader, not only in yourself, but in your teachers, I think is a huge thing. I mean, tons and tons of research have showed. Matter of fact, I’ve been doing some other research lately that talks about the connection

between efficacy and job satisfaction. And there is a huge correlation, not only in the United States, but internationally, that if a teacher believes that he or she can be good as a teacher, they usually have much more job satisfaction. And so part of the trick, I believe, again, is that leaders A need to understand what that means for themselves.

But then again, what are the techniques and the tricks that they have to use in order to help their teachers develop that efficacy? Because again, it’s one of those things. It’s like one of the highest one or two things. I mean, we look at trust, we look at efficacy, some of those real sort of stable,

emotional affective states that the teachers have and want from schools. If leaders can actually develop those, you’re going to have a much different way to look at this. There is a lot of research and I was raised in the way of thinking that all good principles are instructional leaders, which I believe in still. But I think there are other ways.

You look at other researchers like Kenneth Leithwood and people like that who talk about the impact of the emotional path. And what we’ve really done is we’ve reduced that emotional path probably over the last 20 years. And we’ve seen a ton of unintended consequences from that. You look at 40% of teachers leaving the profession within the first five years.

You look at an eight billion dollar yearly attrition. You look at surveys that have come recently about teachers wanting to leave the profession after COVID. I mean, it is starkingly scary to me about what’s going to happen to our public education system because I think we may have missed the boat. I mean, I really do think we’ve missed the boat by putting so much pressure and accountability on our schools and teachers.

And in a sense, what we have to really think about is how do you make the workplace conditions so inviting to people that that’s what they want to do with the rest of their life? And a lot of that, again, stems from what leaders can do and do well. How do you make it feel trusted? How do you make it feel efficacious when they do have a bad day?

How do you help them recover from that so they can actually build resilience around that? Because again, it’s a hard profession. We all know that. And teachers are prone to bad days. But again, without that sort of level of support, they’re going to walk away and do something different.

Just a quick note. I mean, there’s so much in what James just said. Self-efficacy, I find, to be not terribly well understood and also a potentially really good beachhead for leaders to latch onto to try to get past the notion that SEL is something extra or separate from academics, right? Where I think James and I would say we can’t conceive of learning taking place where both are not attended to.

Right? And so if we think about self-efficacy as one’s belief in one’s capacity to achieve a goal, goal setting is a very specific SEL skill, but we might just call it a learning skill. That is also maybe among the easiest to teach, right? That can be personal, but is I think a little bit more cut and dried in terms of this is what a good goal looks like. These are simple practices to monitor whether or not you’re achieving that goal.

These are simple practices to revise your goal based upon whether you achieved it or not, as opposed to something like self-awareness or self-perception. That’s I think that’s a lot messier, relatively speaking. So we just always want to take advantage of any opportunity to try to introduce this notion that if folks are thinking about SEL as something extra, as something that’s divorced from the core of what it means to learn and develop as a human being, there’s there’s some room to explore that in our opinion. Yeah, I mean, a long time ago, four or five hundred years ago in the Reformation, someone said, let’s divorce the intellect from the emotion.

Right? Those two things should never go hand in hand. And what we’re really finding out from a lot of again, research, study, neuroscience, a lot of neuroimaging is that they are two sides of the same coin, basically, is that you cannot learn without social emotional understanding. So again, a student who gets frustrated because they don’t understand their math is exhibiting an emotional aspect to self-efficacy. And only when they learn how to switch strategies to do their math in a different way, does that emotion begin to change toward toward a better feeling for themselves.

So people who say those two things are very separate are are again, I just think very misguided and they have to go hand in hand. Isn’t it interesting that we know this to be true for strong learning to happen in the classroom? We know this to be true for the learners that we serve. It’s also true for the adults that we serve as leaders. So I appreciate that you call that out.

If we want those our teachers to be the instructional leaders, if we ourselves want to be instructional leaders, we need that healthy environment. I appreciate that you call out the different types of leadership and quote some of this research in the beginning when you talk about the different types of leaders. And I think that that would be really interesting read for readers to catch as well. I’d love to move into module three, which only because it’s probably my favorite, but all of them are great. But the module three piece where you actually talk about empathy work and you cover all of the castle areas and you give mindful attention to trust your relationship building through the work of empathy.

But I love the time that you take to talk about truly appreciating diversity and not just the buzz terms and really talking about that intention of appreciating. Would you mind sharing some more about that? Yeah, I think I think our experiences this unfortunately does often only take place at the surface level, right? And again, is another example of if you really want to make inroads here, it’s necessary to do this on a daily basis. Because you will you will almost certainly uncover and I think this is this is this is especially true for white leaders.

Some areas of your practice that you may be uncomfortable trying to improve, right? Or acknowledging that they need to be improved. And to that end, I think what we’re trying to support is your current state, regardless, good, bad and different is much less important. Then your willingness to engage in being that much better tomorrow than you are today, where it’s it’s not about the judgment, it’s about the action. And so it’s inconceivable to think of a school leader who does not lead across some amount of diversity, right?

Might be less might be more, but it’s almost certainly not zero. And so to that end, examining who is representing diversity, how is diversity defined in in your community? How are you reflecting your appreciation for diversity in ways that may not be that that are not only meaningful to you, but are actually meaningful to the people whose diversity you are trying to appreciate in the first place. And are there disconnects there? And if so, how can you begin to engage in trying to address that and make that a regular part of a community?

Because I think I think where this ultimately goes is this one’s really about your use of power, right? And how conscious you are of the impact of how you choose to wield your power, even when you might think you’re not wielding it. Others probably perceive it otherwise. And so again, if we can make a small contribution to helping leaders not beat themselves up, but just get into a groove, regardless of where they’re coming to this work of looking at this aspect of their practice on a regular basis, I think that’s what we’re seeking to achieve. I think this is a really good example of the way that these skills and competencies sort of overlap real well together.

Because again, I think that that you can go in with the intent to appreciate diversity to work on this. Again, though, without self-awareness about what is happening and how you’re coming off as a leader. Because again, in a lot of cases, we are trained as leaders to basically always be in charge, always have the, you know, set the agenda, do these sort of things. And in a lot of cases that feels like for diverse populations like we’re just being told what to do again. And so having those two sort of things work in tandem is really a necessary way to think about these skills.

So many things come up with this conversation and in terms of how we really invite vulnerability by also role modeling it. And what I also hear you guys saying is essentially love, how do you learn to love ourselves, love the work that we’re doing and give space for for for students to show up and show up as themselves and to feel loved and accepted. So, thank you for highlighting that what did you to learn in writing this book together. And you can take that where you like but what did you learn from Ryan’s book together. So, this was like our first first experiment of working together so I think we learned a lot about each other.

I think we learned a lot about what the social emotional skills look like in in in a partnership. I think, but I think ultimately, what I think we learned is, is, you know, I certainly brought the, I think a more research focused and initially to the book, and Randy brought a much more intentional personalized interactive mode to the book. And so I think what we probably learn what I’ve learned more than anything else is how do you make research approachable how do you make it actionable for leaders who are extremely busy in their day to day lives. Yeah, I was I was thinking something similar and I had never written a book before. And, and I think maybe because of that my my design thinking my designer designer re background. I just suggested that you prototype before you do something like a book proposal or create a create a book and, as I mentioned at the top you know James James has that same sensibility and so fortunately we didn’t we didn’t end up butting heads over that notion and I think it was, I think it was just so helpful and

really compelling and I think we both feel really confident that if nothing else we can explain why we made the choices we did in the book and that we really weren’t making them for ourselves, right that they’re they’re meant to serve the audience that we’re trying to serve. I think it was really good. And I think we would, we would replicate this this approach for for the next book in order to ensure that we’re blending the depth of research to the degree that we can with with usability in the real world otherwise it kind of doesn’t matter how how deep you can go. All right, a little hint about the next book already being dropped here. I believe that I believe that agency is the promise of education that we make to each and every learner as they enter our doors. I want to thank you for providing a resource to make that a promise we can keep as educational leaders, and by honoring that practice by giving space and time for all of us to experience that growth and then therefore help lead it.

So why don’t our listeners find out more about you and this book and maybe even the next book to come. So numerous places are our book website is just daily scl.com. You can you can go there take a look at it. Our business website is just brass tax innovations.com. You can certainly go there we are in the midst of putting together a network and some courses based on the content of the book so people want a little more involved experience with that and some some coaching involved we have that coming, which will be coming probably within the next couple of weeks. What else by miss Randy. I think we just point out you know that that of course you can find brass tax on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the daily scl website provides some additional information around the network and the courses that that James is referencing and and we’re really excited about that because it extends in new ways it’s not a repeat or rehash of the book at all the book is a point of departure but we are really trying to help leaders go go deeper in some specific areas in order to fully realize the promise of developing these skills for themselves and and for those whom they serve.

Thanks so much to Randy and James for joining us on this week’s episode. We’d also like to send a special thank you to Corwin the publishers of leading schools in disruptive times for sponsoring this episode. Be sure to check out one of our other recent episodes with Corwin authors Debbie Silver or Mark White and Dwight Carter. All right listeners, that’s it for today for the getting smart podcast. This is Jessica signing off.