The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Manager, Voice of the Customer, Hayley Browning.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Empowering Yourself as an Educator: Teacher Self-Advocacy with Zach Pfrimmer
This week, we engage in a thought-provoking conversation with Extraordinary Educator, Zach Pfrimmer, shedding light on an often overlooked yet crucial aspect of teaching - self-advocacy. Zach opens up about his experiences, offering insights on the necessity of asking for help, constructing supportive networks, and nurturing reciprocal relationships with colleagues.
Ever wondered how to efficiently use time amidst the busy school day for these essential conversations? Zach shares practical strategies, ranging from leveraging quick chats during breaks to efficiently using emails during transition times. He underlines the significant role of administrative staff, not just as superiors but as enablers who can help you become a better educator. Listen in as Zach ties everything back to what truly matters - the students and their learning. This enlightening conversation is sure to equip you with the tools to navigate the complexities of teaching effectively and gracefully.
Read Zach's Blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog/advocate-for-you
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Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Curriculum Associates presents the Extraordinary Educators Podcast with host Danielle Solvon and Sarah LaBeurus your tips, best practices and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We're here for you.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone, Welcome to the Extraordinary Educator Podcast. My name is Danielle.
Speaker 1:And I'm Sarah, and this week we are joined by Extraordinary Educator Zach in Washington, who speaks to us about advocating for yourself, which is obviously such an important topic, but something that is not necessarily talked about enough.
Speaker 2:No, and oftentimes I don't know if you felt this way, but I felt sometimes really alone teaching, even though I was a co-teacher, but it can be a very isolating profession. So I love how Zach is really encouraging community and asking for help and connecting, but doing it a way that doesn't suck your will to live, which I thought is also nice.
Speaker 1:Right, exactly, and he shares really great insights into how you can actually do this on a day to day. When are there opportunities to talk to your colleagues that don't require you to get to school at 5 am or stay super late. So we're really excited for you to listen to our conversation with Zach and how he ties it back to what it's really about at the end of the day, which are your students. So enjoy our chat with Zach.
Speaker 2:Hi, zach, welcome back to the podcast. We're so excited for you to be here.
Speaker 3:Hey, thank you for having me again.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to the podcast, zach. It is so great to see you. You recently wrote a blog about advocating for yourself and I'm curious, just to start how did you get interested in this topic?
Speaker 3:Yeah, when I first started, I kind of dove into a big world that had a lot of needs at my school at the time and I had to kind of play around in that space of figuring out where I was needed and where I needed a lot of help with, and so advocating for myself and advocating for some of my fellow teachers became kind of an important thing just for us to all be successful.
Speaker 3:We had a lot of struggles and a lot of needs in that school that I was able to help with a little bit, but I also was a brand new teacher and so I needed to call on the expertise of a ton of people around me including my family and who are all educators including some of my friends who are educators and also just my new colleagues who had literally hundreds of combined years of experience to help become the best teacher I could be. And I still do that, and I'm not really any good teacher. I feel like should be doing that at all times is calling on the people who have experience and listening and learning from them, Not a job you can just sit on your laurels with.
Speaker 2:No, and first off, it's really important to be able to ask for help. That is something that I feel like, as humans, we struggle to do and sometimes, as teachers, we feel like we should just figure it out. So how did you realize that that was something that was okay, like it's so great that you asked for help, but then also, what are some of the things, like some of the ways that you created support or asked for support, like, what are some of the systems that helped you gather people?
Speaker 3:Yeah, my first year of teaching, I had 32 kids and I was in fifth grade and so, as an affordable, had 32 kids. My program that I just come from was a fully independent program. So even just from my Getting my master's degree to get into education, I was completely on my own, so I had to ask for help. That's what that whole program was based around is making sure that you could advocate for yourself. And so that whole program taught me through city university, taught me how to Make sure that I could find help where I needed it and then be confident in what I could do. But also, you know, get those resources, get those help, find those people who knew what they were talking about so that I could know what I was talking about. And so when I got my first job as a fifth grade teacher with 32 kids and affordable, it became really apparent that that was a very valuable skill, because You're just in the deep end, right, all those kids are standing there and there's like three inches of space between them and you're like, well, okay, when you get your degree, when you become a teacher, you're given the right to teach. You're not an experienced educator yet, right? So everything you do, you're learning from and everything you see you're learning from and everyone you talk to you're hopefully learning from, and I very quickly realized that that was not just important but a necessity to Survive that particular year.
Speaker 3:And there's a lot of really, really high needs in that class as well, and so I had to go to other people because I was like I don't know what to do with this.
Speaker 3:I have no idea how to help this kiddo.
Speaker 3:I don't know what to do in this situation, and so very quickly, I was kind of forced into making sure that I could find the people who were good at different things and who had experience with different things and use them as a resource and then learn from them.
Speaker 3:And Through that and talking with multiple people, I was able to take some of those experiences that I was getting and then sharing it with them. And I found very quickly that if you listen to people and they feel valued, when you Listen to them and try the things out that they recommended to you and then you tell them about that, said hey, this worked or this didn't work, they feel confident, they feel valued, and then they want to share more and that becomes this really cool reciprocal relationship where you guys are able to Help each other out through different things. Even if that other teacher has been teaching for 30 years, they can still learn from people who are new or learn from people who have been there for a little while. But that open communication is essential for that to happen. And that only happens when people reach out, when people learn about each other, when you take the time to just stop by and say hi and talk with them.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for sharing all of that, zach. I think just to start it's just thank you for normalizing, asking for help and then also talking about how it relates back to Relationships and trust, just logistically speaking. If our listeners are hearing this and they want to seek out help, how do you do that? During a school day, you barely have time to fill your water bottle. As a teacher, you might not have collaborative planning time. When did you find time to do this during your first year of teaching?
Speaker 3:Yeah, finding time to do that is hard, especially when you're first starting out and you're trying to figure out everything. You have new curriculum that you're learning. You're trying to get your head around all the PD and get it head around you know who is willing to talk to you and who is willing to share their experience at first, and that can be tough. So some of the things I recommend doing is using your time really efficiently. There's few and far between when you can actually like talk with people. It's not like avid elementary. We're just like I leave my kids and go talk with another teacher for 20 minutes. You have to find those times so it could be like during breaks or while your kids are at specialist. You go in and you drop your kids off at PE and then, if the other teacher is on the same schedule as you or their kids Are at recess or whatever, you can go in there and talk with them, ask them a question really quick.
Speaker 3:I'm talking with your admin is really important too with that, because if you have a good admin they'll have multiple avenues of Communication with them that you can utilize to be able to figure out what you're comfortable with and how you're able to Kind of ask for help and use them as a resource, because an admin is there to help you do your job better. They're not technically even your boss. They're there to help you be successful and help all those kids learn and help all those teachers be good teachers and to get you what you need. So thinking of them in that way, as someone who can help you be more successful, is A great way to do that. So stopping by their office and saying, hey, I have a question about this. Or shooting off quick email during transition time or your break or when you're at lunch, go to lunch with the people you work with. If you can not everyone has like a big break room or anything, but Staying in your room just makes it so that you're only communicating with yourself and you're only around the kids, which is great.
Speaker 3:But talking with those people during lunch, talking with those people after school or during those times where you have a minute to just like go over a problem that you're having or go over a thing that went really well and share your successes those are really important because not only do they let you help solve problems, but they also help you build those interpersonal relationships, which are essential to being able to get help when you actually need it or to share those experiences.
Speaker 3:It makes people feel comfortable with you and you feel comfortable with them.
Speaker 3:So if there is ever a problem or if there is ever a situation where you need more help, then you can really handle on your own that.
Speaker 3:You have that resource and that person can come to you too, because it's not just about you getting better, it's about you making everyone around you better, because if that happens, the kids benefit, and that's the most essential part of this is not just surviving as a teacher, but making sure that your kids are also being successful, and ultimately, all of this comes back to that. If you can share ideas with other teachers, if they can share ideas with you, if you feel confident, if you feel comfortable, if you feel respected and you feel good about the situation that you're in being a teacher at your school and everyone is supportive of each other, the kids feel that the kids pick up on that and that makes them also more supportive. It makes them feel better and makes them feel more confident, and that again reciprocates back to you because you feel like you're being a good teacher because of their reaction and because of the way your coworkers act, and all of that comes around to making it a better place to be.
Speaker 2:Well, zach, that is wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today, but just listeners to find out more. We're going to link Zach's blog in the show notes and we just appreciate you reminding us all that we're. We don't have to do this alone, like we can ask for help. That's really really important. So we appreciate you so much, zach. Have a wonderful school year.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on Twitter, at curriculumassoch, and on Instagram at myirety. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or want to be a guest, email ExtraordinaryEducators at cainccom. Subscribe where you listen to podcasts and if you'd like to help more educators like you, join the conversation. Please leave a review.
Speaker 2:Remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educator podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Editing by Whiteboard Geeks, social media by Atzity Hannan, guest booking by Ceri LaBearis, production by Hailey Browning. This podcast is copyrighted. Materials and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.