Transcript: Beyond Self-Care: Creating Supportive Conditions for Staff Well-Being

Laura Buckner:

Welcome. We’ll get started in just a moment. Feel free to grab some water, stretch, whatever you need to settle in.

All right. Welcome, welcome. Thank you everybody for being here with us today. We’re going to get started with our presentation momentarily, but I just wanted to take a moment to welcome you all to today’s webinar. Our session today will be on Creating Supportive Conditions for Staff Well-Being. My name is Laura Buckner and I’m part of the team here at WestEd that supports the Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center, which is a program of the California Department of Education. Please do feel free to share in the chat where you’re joining us from today and I’m going to start off with just a few virtual platform Zoom notes if we go to the next slide.

So for any audio help and captions, Alex Breyer is our Zoom host. I’ve seen Alex already posting in the chat and you can send a direct message to get support if you’re having trouble with your technology. If you need captions, you can find the closed captioning icon in the Zoom toolbar and you could also select View Full Transcript to open the transcript in a side panel. So those are some options in case you need them for accessibility purposes.

And then what can you expect today? Everyone for the main portion of our presentation will be muted with your videos off to minimize any distractions. We are recording this session today and it will be posted to the CDE’s Safe and Supportive Schools website. This session is scheduled for one hour and we’ll end at 2:00 o’clock Pacific. We have an additional 30 minutes saved for Q&A with our presenter. So if you’d like to stay on with us for some more discussion and to dive a little deeper, ask your questions. We invite you and encourage you to do so.

And on the point of any questions, we do welcome them throughout the presentation. We’ll be keeping track of them to address during that final 30 minutes and any remaining time that we may have at the end of the hour. So please do type any questions that are coming up for you. You can either share them in the chat or there’s a Q&A feature in Zoom. Either is fine. And as I said, we’ll get to as many as we possibly can during our discussion.

So as I mentioned, the webinar today is hosted by the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. It’s an initiative of the California Department of Education that’s led by us here at WestEd. We provide supports to schools and districts on topics related to safe, healthy, and supportive learning environments. On that note, you should see a Zoom poll pop up in which we would love to invite you to share with us topics that would be important or helpful for us to address in future webinars. So yeah, that poll is popping up. We’ll leave it up for just a few minutes and we would love for your responses on that. And then let’s move on to the next slide, please.

Okay. So our flow for today, we’re going to be talking about some foundational information related to what we know about the science behind staff well-being and what happens in times of stress and how we can mitigate those. We’re going to be hearing about strategies and practice, what that looks and feels like in a school building and for staff who are experiencing some really highly effective initiatives. We’re going to review some key takeaways and then we’ll have a closing and a quick Zoom poll survey, which we would love for you to complete. And then as I mentioned, we’ll end right at 2:00 PM and then we’ll have some discussion and questions and answers with our presenters.

We do have a resources Padlet that you can use the QR code for that you see here, or there’s a link being put into the chat that has a bunch of resources, including the slides for today, so you can find all of that on the Padlet.

And now I would like to introduce my colleague, Jenny Betz, who will be providing that foundational information to kick off the session. So, Jenny is a senior program associate here at WestEd who has worked with schools, districts, and county offices of education and state agencies across the country providing professional learning, coaching, and technical assistance. Jenny’s area of expertise are school connectedness, youth development, and school climate and culture. So now I’m going to pass it over to Jenny to help us dive into our topic for today. Thanks so much.

Jenny Betz:

Awesome. Thanks, Laura, and thanks everyone for being here. We’re excited to see you on what for most people is Friday-ish. A lot of us have tomorrow off, so Thursday, but heading into a long weekend. I hope you are as well.

Let’s start with a quick temperature check. Many of you are done with the school year or very close to being done with the school year and we’re curious, and let’s use the chat, if you look at these four images, which on best represents how you’re feeling about this past school year? So which of them? You can put in number one, two, three, or four in the chat and then three. We got a three, three and a four, and another three, and a one and a three. No twos yet, ones and threes, ones and threes. And if anyone would like to say why in the chat, that would be great. You don’t have to, but seen a lot of threes. There we go. We got some twos coming in.

All right. Well, as we go along, definitely share any of your thoughts around that. All of these you can look at and be like, “Uh-oh, you picked that one.” Or like, “Wow, that’s cool.” So really it’s just about connecting really to our humanity today and that’s what we’re talking about in terms of staff well-being as well. So thank you for sharing. So we all know that staff well-being matters and we hear that and often we also hear self-care, which is like sometimes we think it’s just about going and getting a massage or something like that, getting your nails done. But really, thinking about staff well-being from a school level or systems level is more than just those… A massage can be great, but that’s not changing overall well-being or the experience of students or staff at school or network.

So we know that it matters. And some of the things that are really important is that if staff are, and this is going to keep coming up this theme, so if staff are regulated, connected, and thinking and leading with their thinking brains, we have less burnout and turnover, better student outcomes and meaningful student-adult relationships able to really build on all of those things if we’re feeling good being at work as staff. And all of that is impacted by the stressors around us. So it can be things at school, it could be things out in the world. We’ve all had plenty of stressors in the last few years and all of that sort of impacts these things as well.

So if we think about it, we want our staff to be great teachers, leaders, coaches, and even learners themselves. But if we look at the brain science, there’s kind of a particular way to get there. So neuroscience research related to well-being teaches us that people need three things to effectively educate and lead or teach. So this is similar to what I just said, people need to get regulated. That is they need to be physically and emotionally calm and settled. They need to feel safe and secure. That’s the basic. Then once they’re regulated and feeling calm and settled, people need to feel socially and emotionally connected and that comes through safe and supportive relationships with the people around them, including colleagues and students and all of that and relationships that really are attuned to their needs and to people’s needs.

And then once we have that, we’re calm and settled, we’re connected in healthy and supportive ways, then as humans, we’re finally ready and able to engage in our thinking brain and engage in learning, teaching, and leading. So we can’t actually jump straight into that thinking brain, straight into even strategies. We have to make sure that the lower parts of the brain, so the regulated and related, are happening and that’s what allows the brain to make space and hold space for the higher level thinking.

So what gets in the way of that? At the end of the day, it comes down to stress. And this all may be stuff that’s super familiar to you and sometimes it’s just nice to get a refresher too, but at the end of the day, it is about stress. But not all stress is bad, remember, because we kind of need a bit of stress in order to stretch and grow, which is the purpose of schooling for students really is to develop and learn. And it’s the same for us as adults or staff at a school or district. So stress responses can be considered on a continuum from positive to toxic. And it’s important to note that each of us really experiences and responds to stress differently. There’s a whole bunch of variables. What’s tolerable for me may be toxic for you, so please don’t view these examples as finite answers. Really, everything varies by person.

But generally, positive stress responses activates a brief increase in heart rate and mild elevations in stress hormone levels. So in those moments it spikes, but it goes down pretty quickly. Our brains and bodies are able and really equipped for this type of stress like speaking in a webinar or taking a test, something like that. So we’re able to easily close the stress response cycle. So stress hormones go up and then everything’s okay and then they come back down to normal. And then we have tolerable stress. This is more serious, really hard things like death in a family, something like that, but it still has a temporary stress response, which can be buffered by supportive relationships. So it’s more serious and more prolonged, but there are things that we can do to buffer some of that and generally eventually our brains and bodies come back to normal. So we’ve all had these tolerable, painful maybe, but tolerable stress events.

And then last on the right there, we have toxic stress and this is much more prolonged activation of the stress response in the absence of protective factors. So some things can be when we’re talking about students or we’re talking about the communities we’re in or our own selves and our lives. Some examples can be chronic poverty, chronic domestic violence, social threats, systems of oppression, so sexism, racism, bias, those types of things. And really, we can to some degree say that the last few years we’ve all been in this prolonged and even toxic stress response and what comes with it I think after COVID we’re coming down, but there’s still a lot going on. So when it’s that really prolonged and chronic thing, it’s like the switch of the stress hormones and our heart rate and all of those things goes up, but it never comes back down to get close. So day in and day out, we’re constantly flooding our bodies with stress hormones consistently raising our heart rates and our minds and bodies really never get a break. So that’s why that is so problematic.

So another way to talk about it that we like to share, and it’s great when we’re thinking about our colleagues or ourselves or our students, is using the window of tolerance. So many of you may have heard of the window of tolerance. It’s another great tool to help us understand and really name normal brain and body reactions, especially following stressful situations. So we’re really thinking about the tolerable stress to toxic stress. So Dr. Dan Siegel, who’s amazing, says that we have this optimal arousal level when we’re within the window of tolerance. So it allows for the normal ups and downs of emotions that all humans experience, that positive stress and even the tolerable stress. Things like pain or anger or anxiety can bring us right to the edge of that, but we’re still regulated.

We’re able to apply strategies or over time helps us stay in that window or keeps us from becoming dysregulated. So in the middle of the regulated and normal life goes ups and downs. And then we can at one edge, we might be at the bottom hypo-arousal, dysregulated, but sad, down, fatigued, those types of things. And there is also hyper-arousal. So that is where we’re getting high energy, anxiety, anger, all of that. So that’s when sometimes we call it flipping our lid, all of those things, but it’s a way to think about it. So typically we’re able to be in that window of tolerance, but the more and more stressed we are, that window of tolerance also shrinks and there are other reasons as well that that window of tolerance can be narrow.

And then flipping our lid or getting dysregulated, getting out of the window of tolerance can come faster. But really, no, just like we said, the regulate and relate. So regulate and relate are in that window of tolerance if we’re doing those things because no meaningful teaching and learning happens if we’re in that either the top or the bottom dysregulated states.

So question is what can we do about it and what can school communities do or districts or other organizations and groups of people really? If we think back to the brain, which it all connects back to, and we think about regulate, relate, and reason, then we can adapt some strategies and systems to really follow that same structure because we know those things are all needed. So if we think about it, regulate the strategies around that are around safety and security. Do our staff and our colleagues feel emotionally calm and settled and safe? Then the relate piece is about connection and belonging. We all know how important connection and belonging are to our everyday functioning, and that’s also the relate piece. And then with those two happening, that’s then when we really get to do the reflecting and thinking and reasoning, making meaning of things, having agency and self-agency and really being able to grow. So setting those things, following the brain science to have folks, whether they’re adults or students really, best able to utilize their thinking brain and their human brain, neomammalian that is.

So as we head into the main component of today’s webinar, we really encourage you to be thinking about what real-world ideas might work in your context, not just, “Sure, I just said things about the brain,” but really what comes next is the important part. So what might work in your context and the tricky part given that we are in mid to late June is how are you going to remember any of it after summer break? So I want you to be thinking about that, whether that’s send yourself a note, put a sticky, have your email delay it, schedule it for September 1st or something like that, whatever it is so that it doesn’t just go away with all the other things that will slide away during break.

So it’s now my absolute pleasure to introduce our guest speaker for today, Jackie Campbell. Jackie’s been a principal for 17 years and is currently the principal of Kinoshita Elementary School in Capistrano Unified School District here in California. Jackie has supported learners with all sorts of different communities. So learners with over 90% poverty level, populations of over 70% English language learners, students who are living with gang presence in their environments and in their neighborhoods, all sorts of stress. And she’s also worked and led schools with students from affluence who begin school as high performers but also have plenty going on. So what’s more, she’s successfully in the last few years helped schools navigate the COVID pandemic and post-pandemic, really helping at her school students achieve higher levels of academic, social and emotional success.

Her insights really speak to the powerful approach to leadership, which is why we have Jackie here today, one that really rewards patience and consistency with an intentional focus on time and team to build ongoing growth and development. And all of this is detailed in her book, Time to Lead: Lead the Way, which we have a link to in the Padlet. And I think after saying that, you’ll see exactly what we mean by her intentional way for the rest of our webinar here. So with that, Jackie, take it away.

Jacqueline L. Campbell:

Thank you. Thank you so much for that great introduction. And again, thank you all for being here for a topic that is near and dear, I know, to all of our hearts. 18th year of being a principal, many different opportunities in my career to work strategically with underrepresented populations that were really living in the toxic stress response area. In my current school where I am in Kinoshita, it is very unique to Capistrano Unified School District where we do have 95% free and reduced lunch. We do have 75% McKinney-Vento Homeless category of our students living mainly in doubled-up situations.

We still have gang presence in our neighborhoods and we are also really struggling with, I’m sure many of you, with the ICE and the fear of ICE in our neighborhood in our communities. We are 97% Hispanic and when facing that, knowing that, and being a leader who knows that my role is to work together, build a team, take the time to be able to see these barriers, see these influences that are really creating barriers for our students, and then systematically with a team approach, overcome, overcome those barriers, build the bridges that we need to build. And one of the things throughout my entire career that I’ve always landed on is knowing that people do not care what you know until they know that you really care and that is where the change can actually take root.

So for our journey here at Kinoshita Elementary School, I was actually reached out to by Kathleen Satterley who was working for Orange County Department of Education, particularly with a focus on thriving schools. And because of our demographic and the toxic stress response that the majority of our students were experiencing school in, we were selected to actually be invited to participate in the Thriving Schools grant opportunity. When Kat initially reached out to me, it was in February and I know all of us as leaders doing something like a school-wide survey in February may not be the right time. Where you are right now and in this webinar and thinking about giving a survey is actually pretty good timing, even starting your year with a survey, we were given a lot of support through Orange County Department of Ed and they did provide us with that survey. However, you can create a survey yourself, you can use ChatGPT, you can look online for a staff survey for your culture.

The most important part is that you as the leader are willing to open yourself up and to say, “I really want to understand how people on my campus, how my staff are feeling so that we can systematically, intentionally bring collective care to our campus with our staff being willing to take a risk to say what they’re actually feeling, knowing that the point is to build collective care, not to target, not to say who said what, but to listen to what’s being said so that we can move together collectively and build a staff and a whole school climate on collective care.”

So you can see here she offered it in February and I said, “Can we wait?” And she said, “Absolutely.” And again, that is a caring response. She understood where I was coming from. We needed to start at the very end of the school year, use the data to begin the next year. So you can see in the next slide her response to me was, “Absolutely, 100%, just let me know what you need.” And so that opened my capability to do my own little checking around and checking in with staff before we gave the survey to make sure that the soil was ready for the teachers to take the survey and actually know that I really wanted to know. I really wanted to hear.

And then the next slide talks about Kat’s checking in, right? I have a few people, 24 responses, and then I respond back to her, I needed to get more responses. So I created a fun way. I did a little raffle prize for everybody that turned in their survey and then I pulled out three people that were able to get a Starbucks card. And it’s amazing what just a little Starbucks card can encourage people to participate, get in there, tell me what’s going on. So we got all of our results. That was my, I’m going to do a raffle. Then this is the overall journey. So I’m going to slow it back down and be able to share with you systematically how we created a timeline, but really focused on critical pillars of a thriving school.

So most important is you’re fostering as a leader collective care with intentional leadership. You’re using time-focused strategies that intentionally create a culture of collective care that allows the staff-wide approach for well-being and productivity to take root, going slow to go fast and that’s in anything as a leader. When we take the time and we really create those intentional opportunities for feedback, we can then move more quickly when we have our staff with us, really listening to colleagues, really listening to what they want so that we can co-create a path forward inclusive of the staff feedback and with the needs they are making us very well aware of. Then plotting a timeline for optimal success. And as leaders, we all know that timeline will waiver, but we need a timeline. So we created a timeline and then we really paid attention to the implementation and we modified it along the way.

So at the next slide we talk about the timeline. And so you can see May and June of 2024, two years ago, we were able to get the feedback from all of our staff. My school counselor and I were working together to look at that feedback and part of what the staff could see is that our school counselor and I are working together. This is something that I am also including my school counselor in so that when we are looking at the data, we are also collectively looking at how are we going to meet the emotional needs of our staff. So working with someone on your campus who is trusted, if you have a school counselor, great person to work with. But if you have another person, a lead teacher that you know is trusted, collaborate because that trust will transcend and more staff will be willing to work and tell you what they’re actually thinking.

So together my school counselor and I sat down with Kat Satterly, looked at our data, and then we were able to look at what we needed to do first. And the first thing we really needed to do is what Jenny has been doing for us today, educating our staff on stress. The bottom line with our staff, all of it boils down to stress, stress management, and next steps to understand that and then how do we then transform that with collective care so that understanding what causes stress, understanding how to regulate and manage that stress, how can we transform that into action on a daily basis on our school campus? So in August we launched a school-wide, staff-wide classified and certificated approach so that we were able to educate everyone on what stress really was causing within the body and the mind and then being able to identify knowing what was happening within our teachers who have been working with students who are in a toxic stress response.

And when we were able to identify, there was a big aha moment with many of my staff members going, “I understand. I have, I think it’s secondary trauma from what I know my students are going through, but the families are going through.” They were also absorbing a lot of that stress. Just being able to name it allowed for them to go, “Okay, well then what do I do? How do I address this?” That was a changing point for our school and on a macro level understanding that we needed to build a school-wide structure that would deeply allow our staff to know that it’s important to regulate, know that it’s important to have those regulatory on the campus during the day and also within their own life outside of school. So in school and outside of school.

So one of the most interesting things was sound bath. Our staff really wanted a sound bath. So you can kind of see the timeline. First, we looked at our data, then we did school-wide. We asked for them to give us their feedback.” What do we need to do to address your needs?” And then we systematically provided school-wide events that focused on regulation, sound bath, great way to release stress, to regulate yourself. We did more training in October of 2024 on stress management because it was clear that we needed to have a deeper understanding. And then we collectively, with staff input, created a Zen room on our campus and it was built by our staff. Even though we had a little bit of money from the grant, most of what we did was just time, commitment of time and resources from our own staff willing to say, “Hey, I can put something into the Zen room. I have a little massage insert. We can put that in there. I can bring a chair. I have a couch. I have lamps. I have a tapestry.”

And collectively, our staff transformed one of our classrooms into a Zen room with all of the components that our staff said they would really like to have access to during the day. We had walking pads in there, we had little weights in there, little dividers. So there were places for people to just go during their breaks and relax and do something for themselves. The Zen room was a change point and that actually happened very soon within implementation of the grant and using our data. By December of 2024, we had a grand opening of the Zen room and we were able to really see a transformation of people on our staff, our staff feeling like they mattered. Their well-being mattered. There was a space for them to go and to be able to fill their cup on a break every day. They could take advantage of that.

In February, we did a staff-wide celebration of all of our growth in not only collective care, but also academic accomplishments, which are tied together. And then the following year we recursively did it again, but with feedback, there was another survey at the end of the prior year and we were able to see what did we do? Was there a shift? Did our staff feel more connected? Did they feel a collective care feeling across our campus? And yes, we’ll look at the data shortly, significant improvement among our staff. 100% of our teachers felt like the focus on collective care positively impacted their ability to serve the students at a higher level. And about 86% said that they felt that it dramatically was able to transform the climate on the campus with just one year of implementation. So we launched the following year last year with another school-wide staff training and I linked the presentation for you in here because it is good to see something that has been created as a format to use even for your upcoming launch for your first year possibly focusing on this concept.

I’m sure we’re all in different places across California, across the nation, but class sizes went up dramatically this year. Our teachers experienced a shift in what they needed to do in their classrooms on a daily basis and it was a significant impact. They did not have as much time. I noticed right away they were not going to the Zen room. They had 32 kids in their class. They had had 22 students in their class the year prior, and the demand to meet the needs of the students was increased. So working with my counselor and working with our key people that were a part of our team for well-being, we had to shift what we did in order to make sure well-being was a centralized focus and that all of our staff felt included and that their well-being was important.

So we did something out of the box and we did a tiger, little tiny tigers search and rescue. We hid them all over the school when the students left and in the morning all the staff were invited to go on a tiger search and rescue. And it was like unlocking the inner child. The staff was everywhere. They were searching everywhere. They were laughing. They were delighted and it brought so much joy. So we realized, “Okay, we need to continue to do some things like this.” Joy, feeling joy at work is very important. So we shifted what we did. We also had a gratitude tree, very simple and really recursively, “What are you grateful for?” Mid-year celebration in the Zen room. I’m like, “I have to get them in the Zen room. They’re not going to the Zen room. I need to get them in the Zen room. They need to remember this Zen.” So we would do things in the Zen room to get them back in.

A staff-wide celebration of collective care and accomplishments again in February. And then again, I realized the staff really were struggling to take time during the day in order for themselves to regulate. So I released every staff member for an hour during the day to go into the Zen room or the garden for an hour just to have their time. Cannot tell you how many staff members told me that was the most encouraging, valuable opportunity that they had ever had that really showed that their well-being was important, such a small act but huge impact to promote our next steps because this is a journey and every year we’re going to get better. Every year we’re going to have a lot of things that we need to balance in order to focus on collective care. But if we don’t focus on collective care, nothing is going to really grow and take root.

So I did a Socratic seminar, and I’ve actually linked that activity later in the presentation, with my teachers to really go through and look at a document that really detailed staff well-being and student achievement correlation because we’re also seeing a lot of student achievement improvement at my site. And this has been correlated with a focus on staff well-being. So they read an article about that and we had a Socratic seminar and the outcome of that was, “What are we going to do next year? What are we going to do? Because every year we’re going to get better at this.” And I can share with you at the end of this what we did come up with, and it’s really more intentional. It’s intention, it’s regularity, predictability. Now that they know that we are focusing on staff well-being, they now want to have a more predictable view of these upcoming opportunities because that helps regulate them as well.

We had another sound bath and another great opportunity for regulation, and then staff breakfast and treats. So you can see how year to year we’re getting a little deeper, but we have to change how we are meeting the needs of our staff because the needs change based on what we are faced with. Increase in staff size immediately has an increase in behavior management. And then how do we adjust with that as well? So we’ll also look at some of the student regulation that we have done on our campus as well.

So there are four pillars of a thriving school culture and what I’ve given you is the story. But when you look and you can say, “Okay, well then how do I do that on my campus? What are the things I need to be aware of?” Psychological safety, regular check-ins, restorative spaces, celebration and recognition. So when we focus first on psychological safety, psychological safety is really the social-emotional climate survey starts that, a leader being open to hear the feedback and improve the climate based on that feedback. We need to be open. That opens the door. Staff-wide education on stress management. For us, connecting all of our personnel to the supports available of what emotional supports that are available through our district. And for us, it’s VEBA. We as leaders set and maintain the value and consistent focus on well-being. We set that tone and we make sure that it is valued. We lead with listening and we respond, not react.

The second pillar, the regular check-ins, can be embedded. This becomes a culture, the culture of checking in, leading a meeting with emotional check-ins, engaging in interactions with a check-in with your staff, staff-wide progress monitoring with staff well-being focus. So checking in. How are you doing? Making sure that we know how our staff are doing, not just here, but in their lives. It is connected. Student and staff well-being check-ins, and that’s something that we do. We do weekly check-ins with our students. And that’s another aspect of having a thriving school culture is also your students. It’s all connected. Regular staff-wide hunts. For us, the hunts are magical. They are just it. We’ve already bought all four different hunt opportunities for next year. We are prepared because this really inspires our staff. They love it. It is so cute.

And the regular gratitude tree space with a gratitude starter, we’re going to do that with regularity more and regularly scheduled sound baths, purposeful staff release time to go to the Zen room and the garden. That was phenomenal and that absolutely is something we need to do again. When you spotlight the importance of well-being to release teachers and staff for that time, it really shows how much you value that as a leader. Oh, and here we are, hunting for pumpkins and acorns. And there are so many pictures. I was just running around taking pictures. It was absolutely adorable. They were giddy. I love it.

And then the next pillar, restorative spaces. And I’ve talked to you about our Zen room. We co-created that. That restorative space was built with staff input and staff actually helped build it. Well-being team facilitated the creation and improvement of the restorative spaces. We have the Staff Zen Room, we have a Staff Patio Garden, we have a Staff Lounge. Our conference room is called the Staff Peace Room, and our Student Sensory Room. We have a Student Sensory Room as well. And the final, and there’s the Zen Room, that’s part of our zen. And you can see the massage chairs and then our garden. I know, there they are. I see the massage chairs. And then our garden, beautiful spaces where teachers can go and just relax, very, very important, and staff. And our Staff Lounge. And you can see that it’s a huge rectangular table. Our staff said, “We cannot have individual tables. We need to be connected. We need to see each other.” And so having that huge table where everybody can gather is another very important part of the work that we do.

And then of course, celebrations and recognition. And we all do this as leaders. We all do this, but it is essential. And we need to always remember that if we aren’t celebrating and recognizing, we are missing opportunities to really value our staff and to put that beautiful statement, flower, whatever it may be on the growth that we are all striving towards on our campus. So we do have purposeful staff recognition paired with a celebration often. And we have been going into the Zen Room for those celebrations because again, I’m like, “This is a beautiful place. Come back in here.” Staff-wide, shared, scheduled luncheons, celebrating staff birthdays with food, weekly celebration of student achievement and character development. It’s embedded into our culture. We’ve had quite a few retirements lately, but we always honor our retirees and teacher of the year with staff-wide celebrations, annual staff-wide recognitions, I do that, and I’ll go back to school, winter holiday, staff appreciation week, and we all do these things.

But something that I’ve done, and maybe you’ve done this too, but I realize donuts, donuts bring delight. So I just every month show up with donuts for the entire staff, but I pair it with a message that focuses on the determination and the difference that they make. And so just doing something, an act of kindness on the part of the leader focusing on that with regularity really does uplift the staff. And I think it’s the sugar too, but you know what? Everyone’s really happy on the donut days.

And then when we’re looking, there’s our team, so celebrating success, coming together. We were looking at data. We’ve seen a tremendous improvement with our students with academic achievement, English language development towards reclassification, celebrating this, really coming together and celebrating and it brings well-being, well-being.

So this is our snapshot of school success with also staff well-being. So if you look down the middle on the bottom, our school-wide well-being focus is students and we have a lot of focus on student well-being, but also staff. We do weekly check-ins with our students online so that we can really know what’s happening, especially with the toxic stress environments. We need to be ahead of these things. We need to see them as they’re coming. We realized we couldn’t just wait. Just trying to read our students and see if something was going on was not enough. And that also pairs with staff, checking with staff, making sure as an administrator, there may be things that are bothering staff that they’ve just never been given the forum to communicate that. So regular staff check-ins.

And you can see our data at the bottom for the thriving school data for staff, 100%. Like I said, if teachers felt like it dramatically, the focus on well-being dramatically did improve their teaching and learning in their classrooms, and then school-wide climate did change with the focus. You can see at Kinoshita, it is a whole school approach. We’re an AVID elementary school. We also have multi-tiered systems of support that we’ve built over the five years that I’ve been principal, vertically aligned instructional practices, very engaged parent community, community partnerships, AVID foundational highlights. Look at our data. When you look at our data, when I first started here five years ago, over 50% of my fourth and fifth-graders were not reading and that was post COVID. COVID dramatically, dramatically hurt our students learning. So we had a big mountain that we were going to climb.

But when you look at the transformation that we’re seeing with the academics on our campus from beginning of year with fourth-grade students, 42% at the beginning, ending at 61%, huge growth. And for third to fourth-grade math, 28% were proficient and now 46%. So we are seeing significant growth. Our English learner progress for our dashboard, we are in the green. There’s always room to grow, but healthy schools also create healthy progress and we are able to work more collectively and collaboratively as a team listening to each other to make those adjustments to transform the trajectory of learning on our campus.

And then next steps. So we’re cultivating staff-wide well-being next steps. So more regularity, more intentionality. We will have two sound baths and we know when, November and May, those are the times based on when they know they need one. Having monthly gratitude topics, having four Scavenger Hunts during the year, celebrating all the birthdays during the staff luncheons, then we’ll have four a year, but everybody will be recognized and have a staff activity invitation board. So if someone’s doing something and they’re just going to post it and invite people to come. And I know more will be revealed, but we have a very strong next step ready to go and the staff is excited about what we are going to be doing next year.

And professional articles and the Socratic Seminar staff well-being activity, powerful instructional practice, the Socratic Seminar. So the article that we use, it’s short enough for the Socratic Seminar, the educator well-being, it actually focuses on fall coming back to school. So it is very timely for you if you’re looking at doing this with your staff. And I also included the Socratic Seminar Speaker Copilot document so you can see what we did. It’s basically, you can just go verbatim and then make it your own, but you have an absolute script. And then there are more articles that really show how important it is.

Staff well-being is directly tied to student achievement. So when we’re looking at that from that perspective of collective care, collective care transforms the learning on your campus and the environment, the culture. It absolutely can be done without money. You do not need money. You can do this through time and dedicated intentional practice. And if a leader is making this the center point of every single opportunity we have with our staff, little by little by listening and showing up focused on well-being, you transform that culture on your campus and you are able to really form professional learning communities that work.

Laura Buckner:

Thank you so much, Jackie, for sharing about your journey with the elementary school staff and all of these incredible resources. We really, really appreciate it. I would love to pause here and just invite everybody who has been listening and watching along the way to just take a moment to write in the chat, don’t press Send yet, we’re going to do this waterfall style. So take 30 seconds or a minute to just write in something that resonated for you or something that is going to stick with you that you might be marinating on. As Jenny mentioned in the beginning, is there anything that you can do now as we’re thinking ahead to another school year and maybe thinking ahead to taking some time off and then getting back to our work in a few weeks or a few months, whatever that the case may be, what’s something that you’d like to either do or continue thinking about? So please be typing that into the chat. We’ll do maybe 20 more seconds to write something in.

And yeah, maybe Jackie, Jenny, in a moment once we read responses, I’d love to hear from you too if there’s something that, Jackie, for you, you’re thinking ahead to next year that’s a priority for you. Or, Jenny, that you heard that’s sticking with you. We’d love to hear. Okay. So, hopefully everyone has had a moment to type into the chat. I’m going to do a five, four, three, two, one countdown and we’ll all press Enter. So five, four, three, two, one, and I see a question as well. Okay. “The staff-wide hunt sounds so fun.” Yes. Jackie, I could tell you smile when you talk about them. So it just sounds like such a fun opportunity for staff to let go a little bit, access that inner child, the Socratic Seminars, start planning celebrations, restorative spaces, just taking the time to regulate ourselves, yes, prioritizing and dedicating real time for educators to have during their workday. Yeah, absolutely.

“Intentional about community spaces, taking time to care for myself.” Okay, somebody else said that they do the Scavenger Hunts as well, celebrations. Yeah. And what’s striking me is a lot of these things, they can be done relatively simply. They also prioritize fun and don’t necessarily have to have something directly to do with solving the hard work that we all do of solving challenges and even looking at data and driving towards student success and all of that. It’s actually just taking a little bit of time to be humans for a little bit can have a big impact. So, Jenny, Jackie, anything coming up for you?

Jenny Betz:

Well, I’m curious, Jackie, actually one of the things that I think is so unique about what you’ve been doing is this idea of giving staff time and release time to be able to use the Zen Room or the whatever. And I’m curious if you could just tell us a little bit, how does that really work logistically? Because we hear all the time, “There’s no time, there’s no time,” and that makes sense. So how do you make it work?

Jacqueline L. Campbell:

I know as leaders, we’re pretty creative. Usually, we do have money allocated or some days for staff release for training purposes or for planning. So what I utilized some of our gift funds, because we do have some gift funds, I used money in there to pay for sub-release. And then what I did was I had a signup sheet for all the staff in the staff lounge, especially, I don’t know, many of you, maybe your classified staff, our classified staff don’t necessarily have access to email. So I realized a lot of what we need to do was posters in the lounge, at the boxes, making sure everybody felt included. And we just posted them and had everybody sign up for a time that worked for them. And then once we had everybody sign up and we had the dates, we had them spread out over about a week and a half, three different dates. We were able to have everybody pick not only when but where. So they could either go to the Zen Room or the garden and then they had a full hour to just relax.

And again, investment. It is a powerful investment on the uplift and that value added when you spend the time that way because self-care, it feeds into collective care. So it was something that we prioritized and I did see about the sound bath. Sometimes you can work with agencies and they will donate that time because they can also advertise their services. We did have some of that money from the staff well-being grant and we did use it for the first sound bath, and then the second sound bath we were able to get donated. So it’s amazing. Even massages, you can get free massages on your campus if you find the right people because they also are letting people know about their service and then they’re generating business.

So when you work with, it can’t just be the principal because we don’t necessarily have the time to find all that, but when we make it important and we find a person or a team on the campus who will champion that because it is something that this is a big part of their job, like my counselor, we’re able to do so much more because we’re united and then I’m making the priority as a leader that this is something we are going to do with intentionality. At first they were like, “You’re kidding me. We’re going to have staff meeting and it’s going to be a sound bath?” “Yes, this is what we’re going to do.” And it was like, “Wow,” but such a powerful hour of a sound bath and connectivity that we can then transform into action when we are looking at our mission and our vision and our collective commitments. We are achieving at higher levels because we are also taking the time to value the regulation and unity of our staff.

Laura Buckner:

I love that. Thank you so much. I’m noticing that we’re just about to the top of the hour. So we are going to do a quick transition from closing out this webinar. We’ll stop the recording here for anybody who wants to re-watch it. So we’ll close out our webinar and then we would love for folks to stay for an additional 30-minute discussion with Jenny and Jackie. We can come off of mute and answer questions, have some discussion. But before we move to that, we have a quick Zoom feedback poll that should be popping up very shortly. We’d love for you to just, everybody who’s here, take a few moments to complete that poll before we go today. There we go. So yeah, it’s just quick three questions and we’d love to hear, because we do use this information to continuously improve our virtual offerings.

And then we can go to the next slide. Invite everyone to stay engaged with us at the Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. We’re sort of taking a break, as many of you hopefully are, during the summer and we will be back. Our next session is September 9th. We’re going to be having a wellness mini session, which kind of builds on this idea of like, “It’s important for all of us to take a moment for ourselves sometimes.” And these wellness mini sessions are an opportunity to learn about and experience a quick strategy that you can do yourself and then share with others to experience a moment of wellness or a moment of stress release. So I believe our September one will be on mindful sort of doodling and we’ll have some fun art activities. So you can learn about that and also learn some strategies that you can take and use in your own context.

I’ll also highlight, and you can find information about this on the Padlet, in the fall, we’ll be launching an Attendance and Connections Peer Network, that’s for school districts in California, to connect with each other. It’s a five-part shared learning journey where you can look at your attendance and school climate data and start moving towards some continuous improvement ideas to help improve attendance and connections at your school. So please do learn more at Stronger Connections. We’ve got a newsletter you can sign up for. It’s got all of that wonderful information. And I just want to take a moment and say thank you so much, Jackie. Thank you so much, Jenny, for sharing this wonderful information. We are going to conclude the webinar portion and now I invite folks to take a moment and if you’re going to stay with us, please type into the chat any questions that you may have for our presenters.