Want to unlock the superhero within you as an educator? This episode is a treasure trove of insights, strategies, and heart, as we engage in an insightful conversation with Tom Murphy, the founder of Sweethearts and Heroes. This conversation uncovers the profound influence teachers hold in moulding young minds. Tom offers his unique perspective on the heroic role of teachers, emphasizing the importance of teaching with heart and passion.
Join us as we navigate through Tom's book, "13 Pillows for Affective Teachers," where he underlines the significance of understanding individual learning styles and pacing. We unravel the notion that teaching isn't a sprint but a marathon, a journey of understanding and addressing students' challenges. The second half of our conversation is a call to action for all educators, inviting you to join our extraordinary journey to elevate education and empower students. So, grab a seat, tune in, and let's start this inspiring journey together. Remember, you are the superhero your students look up to!
Download Tom's ebook for free: https://www.sweetheartsandheroes.com/book-promo
Listen to the audio version: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8YW0sgR8koHI5-mEYgsMC8sF9e4-9XYq
Download the audio version: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DgMcxWWXIkTr69b_LEC12BX1xkMvYkwQ
Learn more about The H.O.P.E. Classroom series: https://thehopeclassroom.com/
Watch The Hope Series trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCwj9RFOxGc
Visit the Blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog
Follow us on Twitter: @CurriculumAssoc
Follow us on Instagram: @MyiReady
Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Want to unlock the superhero within you as an educator? This episode is a treasure trove of insights, strategies, and heart, as we engage in an insightful conversation with Tom Murphy, the founder of Sweethearts and Heroes. This conversation uncovers the profound influence teachers hold in moulding young minds. Tom offers his unique perspective on the heroic role of teachers, emphasizing the importance of teaching with heart and passion.
Join us as we navigate through Tom's book, "13 Pillows for Affective Teachers," where he underlines the significance of understanding individual learning styles and pacing. We unravel the notion that teaching isn't a sprint but a marathon, a journey of understanding and addressing students' challenges. The second half of our conversation is a call to action for all educators, inviting you to join our extraordinary journey to elevate education and empower students. So, grab a seat, tune in, and let's start this inspiring journey together. Remember, you are the superhero your students look up to!
Download Tom's ebook for free: https://www.sweetheartsandheroes.com/book-promo
Listen to the audio version: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8YW0sgR8koHI5-mEYgsMC8sF9e4-9XYq
Download the audio version: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DgMcxWWXIkTr69b_LEC12BX1xkMvYkwQ
Learn more about The H.O.P.E. Classroom series: https://thehopeclassroom.com/
Watch The Hope Series trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCwj9RFOxGc
Visit the Blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog
Follow us on Twitter: @CurriculumAssoc
Follow us on Instagram: @MyiReady
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 hosts Danielle Sullivan and Sarah Loveris. Here tips, best practices and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We're here for you.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, welcome to the Extraordinary Educator podcast. I'm Danielle.
Speaker 1:I'm Sarah, and this week I am joined by the wonderful Tom Murphy, who is the founder of Sweethearts and Heroes. Tom is a proud husband and father of four living in Vermont, and he was born and raised in Philly, where his parents ran a small shelter and recovery home in their own house, and so Tom has gone on to take this mantra of helping and caring for others in his life's mission, which was very evident in our conversation with him. Tom talked about a ton of ways that you can really think about teaching from the heart as you sort of head into winter and next year with your students, and there are a ton of resources that Tom mentioned, including a free audiobook in our episode with him, and so those are all linked in the show notes for you. So here is my conversation with Tom. Welcome, tom. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:So just to start off, if you don't mind, just telling our listeners a little bit about you, who you are, what you do, yeah Well, I'm a superhero and I've been referred to as a self-proclaimed superhero, and that comes from my definition of what a hero is.
Speaker 3:It's just someone that's willing to do things other people aren't willing to do. And I've looked at educators more and more as superheroes because they do something that a lot of people aren't willing to do. That's really bringing in a set of values to young people. We used to get our values from our grandparents and baking with mom and working on a car with dad and in the barn with grandpa and unfortunately, many of those values have evaporated in our society today. And I believe with all my heart that educators are the most important people in North America today and they're superheroes because of the work that they do and the value system and structure that they're bringing to our young people. And we've spent the last 15 years crisscrossing this great country bringing a message of student empowerment, hope and action to over two million students. My speaking partner and I and excited to be here and hopefully we can give you some great tips that have come from some of the great, effective educators that we've met over the last 15 years.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you so much for that. And you are absolutely right Teachers are definitely superheroes, considering what they do every single day and the impact that they have, and so, in thinking about your work with them and your students, and just what sweetheart's and heroes is at its core, what? What do you think about in terms of sort of strategies or techniques that teachers can use with their students in, you know, building relationships and really elevating their students?
Speaker 3:Well, you know I'm gonna and I'm going to give you this book for any of your listeners. We wrote a great book and I'm going to give it to you for free, the audio as well as the digital copy, but it's called the 13 pillows for A effective teachers, and we do a lot of work in New York state and in New York there's a, there's an assessment called a PPR, and every teacher is assessed on their effectiveness, which I think is a bunch of who we. You know, the great Benjamin Bloom said there's three domains of learning right, the cognitive, the psycho motor that interacts with the world. But he said, if you really truly want to connect the head to the hands, you have to go through the heart or the, a effective domain. And I could write a book, which we did, but I could probably write 10 books on all the great things I've learned about teaching from the heart. And you know, if I had to start laying these out, I'd just start with pillow number one, which is you know it's a marathon, not a sprint, and I think a lot of times in education, especially young teachers that get right out of school, they want to jump into into education and start teaching all this stuff to kids. But I think one of the greatest strategies and I like to tell young people all the time that life is not a talent contest, it's a strategy game and one of the great strategies is making sure that every kid that comes into your classroom that you understand that they're probably in some kind of crisis and if you're a middle school educator, you're going to every kid is in crisis, whether it's their hair, whether it's their friends or whether it's these bigger issues like poverty, gender, race, all these giant issues that we're facing in our society today.
Speaker 3:One of the great things that educators must realize, no matter how long you've been in the game, is that life is a marathon, it's not a sprint, and that's how we must handle our children when we deal with them is to understand, just as Benjamin Bloom said as well, that every child has a different learning style and takes a different amount of time. He came up with something called mastery for learning or learning for mastery. That didn't get very much traction in education because, because you know, the bell rings and you got to move on to the next subject. But Benjamin Bloom truly believed that you know, any kid could learn just about anything with the right strategies, you know, and the right amount of time for them. So I always start there with teachers, because you know we get all excited about what we're going to teach kids, how we're going to handle young people, but we lose sight that most young people are in a marathon, not a sprint. So that's typically where I start and that's how this book that we wrote starts our young friend Bruce, which is a fictional allegory, and he just has to learn that that. You know he got into teaching to turn boys into men and men into champions. But he was making a huge mistake because he takes our good friend Tim or the janitor to teach him that great lesson right out of the gate, you know.
Speaker 3:And then you know I kind of just jump into the next one that I'll let you jump in. But you know, I think the next thing I like to talk to teachers about it's called broken windows, and you know George Kelling and his buddy Wilson came up with this criminological theory back in the early 1980s and they said that if you have a building where there's a broken window, it's only a matter of time before that disorder turns on the street in which the building faces. And then all of a sudden, that environment turns to chaos. And one of the things I do when I walk into a classroom, when I walk into a school, is I pull back curtains, you know, on the auditorium stage and you know I'm looking at people's classrooms and I'm looking at the disorder that sends all of these subconscious signals to young people that says do we really care as educators? And it's really easy to point at the big things and say you know, attendance matters, grades matter, all these big things that we focus on in education.
Speaker 3:Meanwhile you've got ceiling tiles that are broken, you've got little pieces of gum wrappers on the floors and people are stepping over them, and we know that the brain does 10 quadrillion things per second.
Speaker 3:I don't even know what that means, but what it means is those little brains, those growing brains, which is another one of the great pillows to understand that growing brain. It's absorbing all of those things and what it's really saying is I don't know if they really care about me as a student or human being, and you don't say that consciously, but when there's disorder and chaos, young people need organization. So what is that? So that's kind of the next pillow is we tell educators all the time you gotta clean up the broken windows, especially the smallest parts of the immediate environment, and then of course, that translates into psychological broken windows. The language that we use, the inflection in our voice. You know, when you just sigh when a kid walks into the classroom late, what you're saying to all of the other children or students is you can treat that young person any way you want to, because I did so. There's the two opening pillows, but they're two great strategies that we must think about when we deal with young people.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and thank you so much for sharing all that. I could definitely talk to you all day about both of those things. I think, just in terms of the fact we only have a few minutes left here. If I am a teacher listening to this, obviously you know I'm gonna agree with everything you said so far. I'm curious for the second one. What can I do tomorrow in my classroom aside from, you know, ensuring the space is clean, my posters are hanging on the walls properly, and that you know there's? There's certain things at the school that I am, at their sort of, out of my control. So how can you sort of Russell with that? And what do you advise teachers to do in terms of making sure that the broken window doesn't happen in their classroom?
Speaker 3:Well, let me, let me change direction on it just a little bit, because kind of the flip side of broken windows is one of the other pillars called the butterfly effect, and I met a woman years ago who lost your son, billy, tragically, and we went and spoke at the middle school, his middle school, and you know, edward lorenz, that the weather physicist or theorist said that you know butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the planet. You know it can create a hurricane on the other side, and one of the things we love giving the teachers and I know a lot of educators do this but we call them emails instead of emails. We call them emails after, in honor billy and billy's mom, carol, who's a good friend of mine, has been on several stages for us. You know she didn't hear about all of the hope that he had given to other young people. She didn't hear about any of those things until she was standing by his casket Listing to all the great things that billy did for the young people in school.
Speaker 3:And so we develop something called a b-mail and we ask educators to make sure they write down all those character things, those human skills that they see young people doing and make sure that they send those things home in emails, in notes, because when a kid comes home and he's got a paper in his backpack that moms gotta sign because he failed a test, but mom gets one of these b-mails, you know, nothing else really matters than the relationship that we have with other people and our educators have such a great opportunity A mom that's in chaos herself with her life and other kids and work. But when you start sending these b-mails they clean up a lot of those broken windows that proliferate, the psychological ones between the school, between the district, between the parents, between the kids all of these things that sometimes make it really messy to be a teacher. We find that sending b-mails really just helps everyone in just about every area of this chaos called education.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's so true and also just reminds people to see the good right. I remember when I was a teacher I'd always try to call all the students Families before the first month ended. Just be so. That way the first phone call home wouldn't be a negative one. I remember sometimes the response from a family members just what do they do or what, how? It's like no, I'm just calling you, say that they help a friend, or they had a really great explanation.
Speaker 1:I think, like the way that we function as a society, it's always like what's the problem, how can I fix it on to the next right? And so what you're saying really resonates with me and, I hope, with our listeners to so. Thank you so much, tom. Unfortunately that is all the time we have for today, but really appreciate you sharing your insights and and we will link all of your resources in the show notes for our listeners. Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on twitter at curriculum so she, and instagram at my I ready. If you have feedback about the podcast topic of interest or want to be a guest, email extraordinary educators at c a Com, subscribe where you listen to podcast and if you'd like to help more educators like you, join the conversation.
Speaker 2:Please leave a review and remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The extraordinary educators podcast is produced by curriculum associates. Editing by whiteboard geeks, social media by at city hannon, guest booking by serri, laborious production by hailey browning. This podcast is copyright, material and intellectual property of curriculum associates.