The Principal's Handbook

Episode #29
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Principal's Handbook, your go to resource for principals looking to revamp their leadership approach and prioritize self care. I'm Barb Flowers, a certified life coach with eight years of experience as an elementary principal. Tune in each week as we delve into strategies for boosting mental resilience, managing time effectively, and nurturing overall wellness.
From tackling daily challenges to maintaining a healthy work life balance, I'm Barb Flowers. We'll navigate the complexities of school leadership together. Join me in fostering your sense of purpose as a principal and reigniting your passion for the job. Welcome to a podcast where your wellbeing is the top priority.
Welcome everyone to the Principal's Handbook. Today, I'm here with Danielle Newfer, and I'm going to let her go ahead and introduce herself. Hi, my name is Danielle, and I am the founder of a business called Teaching Well. I'm the author of The Path of a Mindful Teacher, and I work with school districts and teachers to try to promote, mental health and well [00:01:00] being with our teachers, because in my expertise.
And in my experience, the biggest predictor of a school's well being is their teacher's well being. I love that. And if you haven't read Daniel's book, it is really good. I recommend you getting it. It would also be a good book study for teachers. , we actually did a podcast episode for my other podcast, the teacher burnout podcast on it.
And It is a great book with lots of great tools and exercises that can help teachers be more mindful. So you could go back and listen to that episode of the Teacher Burnout Podcast, but I do recommend that book to help teachers just with their well being and, you know, overall wellness in teaching.
Today I'm excited because Danielle and I are going to talk about a report called the DASH Report. So Danielle, I'll let you go ahead and kind of get started with this report and any work you've done with it so far. Yeah, so this report , was put together by the Division of Adolescent [00:02:00] and School Health and the CDC and it came out in December of 2023 and I'm a podcast addict, and the way I heard about it isn't because I'm up on the latest research, but actually another podcaster, , Thea Davis, I believe her podcast might be Mindful Living, she did kind of a critique and overview of this, , report, and I was really excited to hear about it, and then I went and did a deep dive, and it's It's basically the CDC's guidelines for promoting mental health and well being in schools.
And , the subtitle is an action guide for school and district leaders. And what I thought was really wonderful about the entire report, is that I don't think a decade or five years ago we would have even had the CDC Doing this sort of deep dive. It wouldn't have been a conversation. So that's why I wanted to, , reach out and and see if we could have a conversation about it because I don't know that a lot of people have seen it yet, and I think it's a [00:03:00] great, , time of year to be thinking, Okay, how can we implement and integrate some of these practices so it's not like every school's reinventing the wheel as to what is going to help, , promote mental health and well being in our schools.
When Danielle reached out to me about this report, I was really excited because I hadn't heard about it before. And then I looked up the DASH report and I was surprised to see that it was actually put out by the CDC. And so, like you're saying, I thought, how cool is it that we actually have these guidelines that can help us with, school well being for students, for teachers, for everyone involved.
And what a huge step that is in education, just that we have this resource that helps guide that. If you have not read the DASH report, The cool thing about it is it has six strategies that you can use to help promote mental health and well being in schools.
So I'm going to share strategies and then we can just kind of dive into those different [00:04:00] strategies. The first strategy is to increase students mental health literacy, which I thought is such a neat concept , Because we talk about reading and literacy, we've talked about financial literacy in schools and now mental health literacy and teaching kids about mental health and understanding their own mental health and having peer modeling.
What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I agree. I think that the more we talk about emotions and any of those things, the more we, it's just part of not even necessarily a class, but just that they are subjected to understanding these terms and these, , concepts about themselves and about how their mind work is so important from a young age, you know, not just in like a psychology class or something like that.
Yeah, and I, I just think how cool and how far we have come in education that we [00:05:00] are talking about this from a system wide approach. The second strategy they talk about is promoting mindfulness, which I thought was really interesting because we've been doing this in my school a lot this year. We have mindful Mondays and thoughtful Thursdays and my own kids are in elementary school and
they will tell me about how their principal gets on the announcements and does breathing exercises and they can actually come home and do those breathing exercises, which I think is great. And now they're actually recommending this for schools to have mindfulness throughout. Yeah, I agree. , I could never have thought in because I've been doing this mindfulness work in schools for about 12 years.
So I never would have thought that would be something that would be so, , I knew it worked, right? Like, you know, these things work, you know that there's a benefit to them, but, you know, that it's coming from the CDC is, is I think a really, I don't [00:06:00] think it needed to come from that, but I think it's a really important step , I know for many years when I started this work was, you know, make sure this isn't like, Like, make sure you know that mindfulness isn't a religion and all that thing, and it's like, no, it's like breathing exercises, like, these are good things, these are skills that kids will need, that adults need, to use.
Yeah. And, and I love they talk about, you know, offering it in small groups and whole groups and different settings. And I think, again, how far we've come that we're now introducing this in integrating it into different aspects of the school. That's really great. And then their third strategy is to promote social, emotional, and behavioral learning, which I thought was interesting because we talk a lot about social, emotional learning, but the aspect of the behavioral piece in that integrated and.
that what we do with social skills and emotional development really does help behaviors and it helps students learn to manage their behavior. So I [00:07:00] think that that is such an important topic that they're including in this guide. Yeah. And I think it just pairs really well with mindfulness. So I was really happy to see that, you know, the mindfulness piece is there for the focus and the being in the moment.
And then that That is such an enhancement into the social emotional learning piece. And the fourth strategy they're talking about is enhancing connectedness among students, staff and families. So really providing relationship building programs throughout the school in a systematic way. That's deeper than just parents coming into the school, but more engagement and parents being part of this mental health and student wellness initiative. Yeah, and I think that again ties along with the promoting the social emotional behavior that is one of the things is to know how to build relationships.
And now we're just taking that, that [00:08:00] piece and then we're showing like, this is how it works in our community with the parents and with the families and that sort of, sort of modeling, , what we're trying to teach them in these lessons or in these, , learning opportunities. Yeah. And I think bringing parents in is huge because as a parent,, I get the opportunity to learn about this stuff from podcasting and working in the schools.
I learn about mental health and wellbeing, but I do think it's a topic that a lot of parents still don't understand how it affects kids differently than it did maybe when they were growing up or, you know, , I hear a lot still from parents about kids are so sensitive today or they're fine if they're making threats to, want to harm themselves.
That's just them wanting attention and not always taking this seriously because it is so different than when we grew up or maybe when they were growing up, if they're even older. So I think having these [00:09:00] conversations and supporting parents in schools is really a crucial part of all of this to really making the mental health.
work for kids. Definitely. The fifth strategy they talk about is providing psychosocial skills training and cognitive behavioral interventions. And as a life coach this really excited me because this is something I just learned a year or two ago when I got into life coaching and learning that My thoughts create my emotions and feelings, which create my actions.
And when I learned that, it was life changing, and I realized that I could decide the type of life I wanted to have, and I could create the thoughts that I wanted to have. And the idea that we start teaching kids about this, I thought how life changing for them to learn this at an early age, and even for the families involved, if they can learn it as well.
Yeah, and I think it's such a, a benefit to be, like you said, to be learning these [00:10:00] things when you're younger. And I love that we're making the connection between something like that and mental health. You know, like, it's not just about, , you know, understanding what different mental health disorders are.
Like, that's obviously important. But this is about, you know, really creating a better life for yourself. You know, it's not just about, , understanding mental illness, but like really cultivating mental health, I guess is what I want to say. And I think that's really important. , and they talk about that aspect of well being with it as well, which goes into the sixth strategy, which I'm very passionate about, which is supporting school staff well being.
And again, the fact that we're bringing that up in these documents and in guidance for schools to really be focusing on Staff well being I think is huge because I know in Ohio there's been a big push for the whole child, but I do think there needs to be this push for the whole educator and focusing on [00:11:00] how the educator develops as a person and their well being and then how they can support the child with that.
And so the fact that, , the CDC is really promoting that and having, giving schools that guidance that we need to be providing tips and well being for staff members as well. Yeah, I think that what I took away from this is that piece right there, to me, if we start there, there is so much of this that gets covered, I'll say, because the educator understands mental health literacy, mindfulness, social emotional learning, building relationships, cognitive behavior, , when we focus on their well being, they are able to to just bring those skills to their classroom without it having to be something else they need to teach.
Because I feel like that can be the pushback, right? Like, how am I going to do this? What curriculum are [00:12:00] you using? Like, all of those things where we get really anxious as educators. Like, what do you mean I have to, , teach them mindfulness and mental health literacy and all those things? But if we start with the staff well being piece, Or at least prioritize that along with some of these other things.
I think, , those other components start to teach themselves just by virtue of the teacher, you know, encompassing that. And I think that's such a good point. As I was reading over this report, I kept thinking to myself, you know. Some of these things like parent engagement, it's something that we have learned in education early on in our programs, but I think that we forget as we get into the busyness of school, even though we know it's important,, it comes behind curriculum and instruction and all the other things.
And we let it go and we don't focus on it anymore. So I think shifting that focus and not necessarily like you're saying, have new initiatives, but how can you focus on the well being of staff within everything that you're [00:13:00] already doing in the building? How can you focus on mindfulness in simple ways throughout the school and doing it where you're integrating it throughout?
I have some amazing elementary teachers who are great at starting a lesson with breathing. You know, they just naturally will start that lesson with, let's get our bodies ready and, and help kids take breaths to get started. And I think it's simple things like that, that if we can help educators
learn those skills to incorporate that throughout the day, it's going to feel more manageable and not like a whole nother initiative to do, but just things to integrate throughout. Yeah, my philosophy also is that the last thing I want to do is say, let's increase your mental health, but here's all the other things you have to do to increase the mental health, you know, like that's not going to Be conducive to increasing mental health among staff members if you're asking them to do More things and things that they're not comfortable with right and we all know What happens if you [00:14:00] ask a group of teachers to do something that they don't believe in there's no buy in And then it's just wasted time money resources and everything else So you have to really bring the educators to the table and say how can we do this?
Like, here's the information we have. How can we do this in a manageable way? What are you already doing? Because there's so much that teachers, like you said, are already doing. , not everybody has to do the same things. And, you know, if we have some intentionality and maybe we know the skill sets of different people, then maybe, all of our students are impacted , through the gifts of all the teachers that are in that school.
Yeah, and I think another important aspect that I didn't cover that the DASH report, , does include in it is equity throughout the whole document. And I also love that because it's a great opportunity to have these conversations with teachers and bring up how are we having equitable practices for all students [00:15:00] throughout.
As I was reading this, I was also thinking about the evaluation system. And a lot of this goes. With what we're already doing with the teacher evaluation system, being culturally responsive, engaging with parents, focusing on kids well being, that's already things that we should be doing.
So I think this is just a great resource to kind of help bring it all together. So I know that you've talked to, , a couple of principals about this, Danielle. What are your recommendations to get started with it? The website has lots of, of great resources that go along with each of these, , pillars. So I think that just looking at that, maybe doing a little, , Reflecting on, okay, what are the things that we are doing? What are we not doing? , and then bringing some voices in and again, talking about equity, bringing some voices in of students, teachers, parents, community members, like , where are, Maybe some of our gaps.
, where are we doing? Well, you know, that sort of thing [00:16:00] with all of the people that are stakeholders in the school. And again, I'll just plug again. I really feel like supporting staff well being and starting with that piece. And again, you might think you already are, but sometimes I think there can be a disconnect between what school leaders might know that they're doing and the perception that teachers have of what's actually going on.
And sometimes they need a reminder, like, oh, these things, we're doing these things, you know, we're doing some of these things, and maybe,, they don't realize that there are, Initiatives available to them or resources to support them or things there, but, you know, I would say starting this conversation as soon as you can, because, you know, a little planning and a little intentionality can go a long way to increasing this .
piece of the puzzle. And I love that you said to start out with what you're already doing well in these areas. I think [00:17:00] too often we get in this deficit mindset of, Oh no, what are we not doing? What do we need to start incorporating and integrating into the school? But looking at the things that you're already doing well and letting teachers see that is a great way to build in not only that positivity into the building of recognizing things that are going well, But acknowledging, look, this is really important.
This is what the CDC is saying is important. And we're already doing these things. So looking for those, I think, is a great way to get started. And I will link Daniel's information in the show notes as well. So if anybody wants to reach out or has any questions about the DASH report as well. Anything else, Daniel, you want to share before we go?
No, I would just I'd welcome a conversation. I am always looking to see how to creatively bring teacher well being into school districts and to prioritize that because, you know, I don't think that we can get there without teachers being fully [00:18:00] supported and their well being being a priority. And I think, too, bringing in outside people is always helpful because I know as a principal, I always feel like I have a good handle on the building of what's happening and, , what the teachers are doing, but then sometimes I'll hear from someone that that might not actually be what's happening because they don't want me as the leader to know, as much as I'm in classrooms, I still don't get that confidential conversation that I'd really like to have with teachers because I.
Even if we have that trust at the end of the day, I'm their principal, I'm their evaluator. And so having outside sources that can really talk to teachers about these things, I think in getting coaches and consultants in is a great way to get started with these conversations. Yeah, absolutely. All right.
Well, thank you, Danielle, for being here. I appreciate it. And again, I will link the DASH report into the show notes. So if you're interested in accessing that, it is a great tool for you to use. Thank you so much.
And if you're a principal [00:19:00] who's seeking to elevate your leadership and well being, I'm here to help. My one on one coaching offers clarity. It'll help you build resilience and enhance your effectiveness in your role. You'll receive personalized support, insights into your strengths and areas for growth, and practical tools to improve both your leadership and your school's performance.
Having experienced the power of life coaching myself, I am so excited to share this journey with you. So if you're interested in a complimentary session, To just explore what your current challenges are and think about what future aspirations you have. Reach out to me on Instagram at barbflowerscoaching or visit me at barbflowerscoaching.
com. Also, if you love the show, if you're listening on Apple, scroll down in your app and leave a review. Keep in mind, you have the power to shape your life according to the mindset you choose.
I hope you have a great week and I'll see you back here next time.
Mhm.