People might say, oh, you're doing too much for kids. And I would say, we're never doing too much for kids.
Whatever we need to do to help that child feel safe, secure, connected, engaged, we do. Once you're doing that, now their confidence starts to grow.
When you're safe, you're connected, you're grounded, you start to be able to go, I'm freaking resilient.
Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education Podcast. The space for Education Meets Resilience. I'm Dr. Joey Weisler, and in each episode we dive deep into the personal stories of educators, students, leaders, and frontline advocates who are navigating the complexities within modern education.
Whether you're just starting your teaching journey or are a seasoned professional looking for inspiration, we'll explore how to foster meaningful change, prevent burnout, and build trauma-informed communities within our schools. Now, let's take a seat at the front of the classroom as we get started.
Welcome back to the Classroom Narrative podcast, where today I'm joined by the resilience guy, Dr. Rob Martinez, educator, author, and longtime advocate for resiliency in schools.
Dr. Rob Martinez brings more than three decades of experience across education, from school psychology to district leadership, and he's perhaps best known for his book, "Recipes for Resilience". And what makes Rob's work so authentic is how it's grounded in lived experience, both the personal and the professional, and asks the deeper question of, how do we help students and educators persevere when the systems around them are stretched, fractured, and even exhausted?
So in this conversation we'll talk about resilience not as a trait you either have or don't have, but as something that's cultivated through relationships, reflection, and intentional practice as well. And Rob's perspective sits at the intersection of leadership, vulnerability, and care, inviting us to think differently about what sustainability and education really looks like.
Rob, welcome to the show. The Oh, thank you
so much, Joey. It's such a pleasure to be here with you, and to hopefully engage with the audience a little bit and give them some things to think about.
Absolutely. So Rob was suggested as a contact to me through Principal Jeremy Brooks,
shout out to Jeremy for putting us all together. Oh yeah. And I recently read Dr. Martinez's text, "Recipes for Resilience", and I wanna have Dr. Martinez share a little bit about the backstory to that text, and then I'll share my own thoughts about it as well based upon my own readership. Go ahead.
Thank you, Joey.
Yeah, so the book was a long time coming. I always thought, will people be interested in the story I have to tell, to help them? And so I started writing and started putting it together, and it was really based on a personal memoir of some of my childhood experiences.
And I wanted to share with people that my childhood was not one of daily trauma for years and years and years. It was actually built out of a beautiful, loving home, a caring family, connected family, we seemed to have it all together, but, as with many families, we have loss, we suffer things,
but the one traumatic loss for me as a young child, a 13-year-old, was a loss of my mother. And it was a significant traumatic effect at the time that I felt very personally. I didn't even really realize the depth of that loss on our entire family. And so, what I share in the book are some memories of me growing up and the connectedness between my family and the love and the passion and the warmth that was there that was nurturing for me early on.
But then again after that loss, seeing kind of a deconstruction of my family. My siblings were older and were away from the home, but my dad, who for years and years had the love of his life, my mom, and he lost her. His soul, his heart, he was fractured.
And so it really created a demise across our family, and as I grew up a little bit, I knew from my early nurturing that it wasn't a healthy place for me. It wasn't a healthy environment. My dad who had found another person to be with, but then that was a bad relationship.
But he was so desperate for love and care that I became kind of a second thought at that point. But for myself, knowing that I wanted better, knowing that that was not sustainable, I left home at 16. I left home, and just ran, you know, I escaped 'cause I didn't know what else to do, but I know I couldn't stay in that place. So I left. And I found a safe place to heal. I found a safe place to be nurtured, and that was with one of my older brothers, George Martinez. And George was a single guy, had a house, had a job, had a career, had everything. He was not ready to be a dad, but here I am at 16, walked into his house, and it took us some transitional time to reconnect and
he helped me rebalance my life. And from that moment, again having conversations with George, resetting myself in a school system, 'cause I had stopped going to school. I had really kind of escaped from school every day to hang out in the park, and he reset me. He said, now if you're gonna live here, here's how we're going to do it. And so it was a remembering, if you will, of my early childhood. So as again, the story goes on in the book and I talk about conversations with my brother George, and really fostering this idea of resilience and recognizing that I could do better. I had strengths, I had resources, I had skills, and through the nurturing that he gave me and reconnecting to then my other family members, really found some success at school. And those nurturing teachers and environment that took the time, that took the moment to say, "are you okay? I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here." And so when I wrote the story, and then I thought about
my 30 plus years in education, other ideas started to come forward about how I believe I've succeeded a little bit with not just me, but teams of people. Amazing educators, working to put ourselves in a place to support students. And that's, you know, when I think about education, being in that place to help a student get to their next step.
If we can do that, we can do amazing things. But we have to be cognizant about that. We have to be conscious. We have to effectively have strategies that focus on that process. If as educators we're not caring about the students in front of us, we become lost. The most successful educators I've seen are able to escape the system for a minute, and,
simply see the students before them and figure out what they need. And they start supporting them. And so in the book, I tell some lessons about, well, maybe think about it this way. Maybe think about it that way. And as you kind of mentioned, I write about resilience not being just something you find off the shelf and sprinkle it on yourself.
And now I'm resilient. It really becomes a process that I believe every single person has the ability to grow their resilience. And it's not to wear it as a badge like I made it through, but it's to help them really recognize the resources that are available, focus on the relevant things, focus on what they can do to be successful, put it into action, and start recognizing and build that self-confidence. And our systems need to be there to support them in doing that.
Thank you so much for that. And when I was reading "Recipes for Resilience", what I noticed is that it's complimented by both vignettes from your own experiences and upbringings, mixed in with your own skills and strategies for what you call rather those recipes and those tips as well.
Exactly.
A number of the themes that really grabbed my attention were just how we make connections with students, how we have what I call, I'm going to be invitational learning, where we invite students to be a part of our conversations we're we're not forcing them to talk. We have things happen on an invitational basis, almost like when they're ready.
But for you, that also comes to creating collective rules like instead of compliance, you have community. And there's also this idea of what you mentioned about spreading positivity, mapping out goals, coaching others to reach theirs, as well as just the main value of being authentic in our school settings.
One of the things that I focus on in the book is responsibility and you know, way, and I frame that term responsibility. It isn't a list of here's a hundred things you have to do. It's really more of a recognition of, I need to empower myself to take responsibility for some decisions that I make.
And, I always think back to a little group that I had as a school psychologist, and I called it the, "I'm a great person" group. And it was just a way of, again, having students come in and maybe some of these children were not having the best experiences as a six, seven, 8-year-old. And it was a kind of a reframe, again, not technically therapy, but a process to help kids go through, well, whose education is this?
And I would take 'em through a little bit of a lesson of having them hold their hands out and taking a little imaginary seed and putting it in their hands and really him holding onto that seed and say, okay. Let's grow it and how are we gonna grow it? And then have them start talking about, well, you know, you need a little water.
Okay, so let's sprinkle some water on. Okay, you need a little light. I know things grow in the light. And we walked through this process and they said, now what if this is your education I'm giving you, what if it's your education, what would you need to do? And they'd start talking about, well, I'd have to read, I'd have to do my homework.
I'd have to do this. And, and so we'd see kind of a transition for some of our children who are struggling. And they start seeing, it's not, we're forcing you to learn. It's, we're here to help you learn and grow. And that little mind shift sometimes really made a dramatic difference for some of our children. And so, I think of it that way, and as you said, it's that engaging students in a respectful way, in a positive way, that connects where they are to where they want to be. So many times in our educational systems, we have goals directed. These are the goals and we're gonna get you there.
And we forget about the journey. We forget about how are we going to actually help you to travel from point A to point B. And so I always focus on traveling. How are we gonna do that? And you don't get there in one day. Sometimes you get there in lots of little steps. And so that process, even for our educators to understand that, that the pressure isn't getting them to the point of the end.
The positivity happens every day in those little routines, in those little systems where children can actually then start fostering their own learning. That's the best place for our teachers to be when we're helping those students grow.
I think one thing that's really grabbed my attention, which is, and I talk about this at the university level where I teach, but also in K 12, that education and instruction tends to be very transactional.
What I mean by that, at the university level, there actually is funding involved where you pay the tuition, you should get quote unquote the grade. But at K 12, it's like if you need to get a hundred points in a class in the nine week quarter, you're almost like banking those points and you're not even really focused on how you'll get there.
You just want to get the grade and the outcome. And I'm sure there's a lot of parents listening onto this that feel, seen because they're advocating for that as my own parents were as well.
Absolutely.
But it's, it's very transactional. The point that we miss the main point of the growth and the journey.
Because I was on a training yesterday where somebody said, in terms of classroom management, teachers know subjects, but they have to know the teenagers or the elementary schoolers. You gotta know your kids over the subjects because that's gonna really form the lifelong aspect of that much further than the knowledge will go.
Absolutely. And I, you know, I, I talk about one of the other tenets of respect. We sometimes get so focused on, you must respect me as the education system or the educator, and that level of respect has gotta go both ways. As an educator, whatever education place, you are in the system,
we have to foster respect for our students and where they are, what they walk into the room with. If they don't know particular mathematical equations or mathematical systems, then we start there. We have to be able to understand that our students are absolutely the most valuable thing in the classroom.
And so if we're recognizing that, how do we support them, not hold them to a level of accountability that they've never been taught to. So we have to start with where they're at to help them move forward.
Absolutely. And you've been a superintendent, I can already tell you that I wish I had worked in your district and I would've loved to work under you.
But based upon what you've experienced in your youth as well as in your role as the superintendent, what have you found to make schools a safe space? But at the same point of that question, how does school also turn to become a toxic place for some, and why?
Wow, that's a huge question. And I'll say it this way, every school system is different.
Every community of students is different. And I think for a superintendent to take the time to actually understand where our students have been, and recognizing the fact of, it's not just the students. What kind of training and support have our educators had? I've walked into some systems where the educators have just been on their own, I mean, whether it's as a principal or superintendent, and they've been kind of on their own and floundering, and there's been no structure, guidance, collaboration.
And oftentimes you really need to start there in the sense of helping everybody kind of release some of the things that they have been doing so we can all begin to work anew together. When you have systems, and I'll give you this example as a principal of a 1200 student year round elementary school, when I became the principal, we had a lot of students and we had tracks going in and out of the school.
Every month a new set of students would come and go, we were doing this because we didn't have the space. So we had this big year round school and we started a process called Project High Hopes. And, you know, I just, I, I might've had the little idea, but I built it with the team. And what we said was, we wanna know every student.
We wanna know where they're at, not by data points, but know the students and we wanna figure out where they are, what they need, what some level of motivation might be. So then we created safety nets. We had the safety nets that were, well, this is gonna be this special reading group that maybe the custodian will do over here.
And then there's gonna be a special group over here that the administrative assistants will help put together. And then we're gonna have the te and it was groups of activities that were unique to the different children that found their interest. And again, we started those conversations about how do we support each one of these 1200 students by name, by what they need?
And we really fostered that growth. And I think at one point won a year round education award for our program because we were really striving to get to know the students and fostering their own personal growth. Now that can be exhausting. Let me be honest. I mean, there's some programs that are beyond stretch, but the point is that we did it together as a team.
The teachers, the support staff our special education crew, everybody was part of this. And we all bought into this and we started actually folding in the parents as well. 'cause they loved what we were doing. So that level of community support, I go back to that whenever I think about entering a new system or working with an old system. If the community is coming together, you're going to be better situated to support every child than if you have random folks.
You might have the most amazing teacher in the world at your site, but if they're not collaborating with the other teachers and the other teachers aren't trusting that person, that's not gonna spread across the system. So fostering that level of collaboration in an authentic way, you can't just be fake about it.
You know, we're gonna collaborate today, this one time a month. Good job. Well, it doesn't take, it's every day, the conversations, the support of the personnel, the engaging with each other both onsite and offsite, quite frankly. And really caring. I go back to the more you care about the people and they see it authentically,
the more they're gonna care for each other and the students.
I love that you mentioned collaboration. And one thing that I experienced when I was teaching K 12, I was an eighth grade instructor for three semesters. I started as an interim educator in August, right. Just after Parkland, back in Parkland at their middle school.
That was very challenging to be there in the aftermath of their tragedy. And come January now, the year 2019, I was hired for a different side of the district once more, teach eighth grade lateral position, eighth grade gifted and accelerating. And I stayed in that contract until the end of my probationary that December, 2019.
And when it comes to collaboration, I think one thing that I was always worried about, because I think it was the way that my leadership was pushing us to do, is that collaboration was synonymous to standardization where we're all working to teach the exact, like I was in trouble 'cause I was not teaching page two of The Monkey's Paw like my two peers on Monday doing the same read aloud and vocab iReady practice with them.
Right, right.
What are your views on standardization? How can we find a difference to talk about, like you mentioned authenticity back in your work?
Yeah. No, it's a great question. The goal of having levels of standards that we're aspiring to have our students get to this level that are thoughtfully actually created because we know that if you get to a certain level, you're gonna be ready for the next level and ready for the next level.
One of the best processes that I've seen with having standards is a level of spiralization towards those standards, not just hitting a standard and then, okay, you've got it, let's jump to the next one and start attacking that. It's that level of awareness that we have some main goals. But having teachers in lockstep process, whether it's at a grade level or even at a content level, to me, has never been the way to go. Having standards that, again, have that base level and then having teachers, because they're each individual, bring their respective talents to the forefront for the students. Now should all teachers have an awareness of differentiation so that in my 30 students, your 30 students, I know I'm gonna have a variety of students.
So I have to be able to come with a visual over here and the audio over there and the pieces over here. Of course, you need to have differentiation. If only somebody is standing and lecturing to a group of 30 every day, they're gonna miss kids. So having teachers talented and provided support to have an array of teaching strategies to be able to work with the students, I think is more important.
There are some instructional designs that I think work better than others, and again, and it's that awareness of. If I never talk to the kids, maybe they won't hear me well. Yeah. So we have to be able to engage with strong vocabulary, with some content that is agreed upon so that when we're getting to these 90 kids to go to the next grade level, they have a consistency of education so that they can get to that next level.
We had some programs in one of my previous districts that was kind of the, the reading program, and everybody had to read the same story every day for the two weeks and then get onto it. And, I mean, talk about destroying a teaching staff of mm-hmm engaging element, you know, primary teachers who were used to being just everywhere for a group of 30 children and you're trying to lockstep 'em.
And it just didn't take. It's an inauthentic way to educate. And so again, my overall process, yes, we need to give our teachers as many instructional practices and strategies so that they have an awareness and they can pick and choose. But again, teaching is an art, right? It is an art. It isn't a cookie cutter system that has every teacher doing the exact same thing because the children are not the exact same child in every classroom.
I think that's the greatest paradox that we see in standardized assessment is that come May 14th, the students are gonna be sitting in the rooms for three hours, all reading the same five passages, getting tested the exact same way right from the first day of school up to then we preach differentiation in a way that allows learning to be variagated and personalized, and yet we don't assess their skills and ultimately label them based upon such outcomes.
And I think that's one of the reasons why school becomes this toxic place where it's all about compliance and rigidness to get students to I won't even say learn, but be identified through that label
right
from the end of the year. So let's go back to thinking about different ways that schools have been
like we said by differentiation a place of resilience for students, but also how can we avoid turning it into a place of toxicity?
Right. And that level of toxicity can be so detrimental to everybody who's part of that educational community. And you know, I think sometimes it comes with despair that educators have felt and some have felt that.
People don't care. The students don't care. The administration doesn't care. And I've walked into schools where you just kind of feel it and it's it just is so disheartening that people have lost the passion, that they should have brought with them into this educational environment to care for students.
I think it's not to their fault because it is sometimes we've had some bad leadership in different places and uninformed leadership. So people who thought, well, my master teacher said it had to be this way, so I'm gonna make sure these teachers do it this way and we're gonna have all these rules in place to stop kids from having fun.
You know, no giggling in the hallway. I mean, just kind of that process. And there's a forgetfulness about when learning takes place. And we talked earlier about that reflective process about, well, how do I learn? How as an adult would I learn now? I want to be engaged, I wanna be connected, I wanna like the people who are teaching me. It's the same thing for our little kids. They want to be loved in that educational environment and they want to love the educational environment, but we sometimes feel that by allowing students to be who they are, we need to control, control, control. I wrote this chapter in another book and it was a a hundred things not to do kind of thing.
And it was, why yell at the child if they don't have a pencil? Well, here's a little trick. Have a box of 150 pencils already sharpened ready to go, and it doesn't matter. Why are we going to shame and argue and be frustrated because you don't have your pencil? We've just wasted time. Instead of saying, oh, here's another one, let's go.
Personalization from an educator standpoint, when we see the actions of our children as attacking, as personal as against us, our defenses come up. And so as an educator, being able to understand this isn't personal. This is us supporting our children in their process. And again, any frustration that a child generally brings towards the teacher is not directed at that teacher.
It's from somewhere else. It really is. So being able to be supportive of that child and figure out, maybe I can't fix that thing that you're dealing with at home, but I sure don't have to perpetuate it when you walk into the school. Perpetuation of toxicity in an environment is really what brings about more hostility, more frustration, and again, I've been at the schools where everybody's upset with the sixth grade boys 'cause they're just really playing too rough out there and causing this and that.
So trying to look at that differently. 'cause we can control all the sixth grade boys. You sit there and you sit there and you don't have any recess. Good job everybody. That's not the way to do it. It's empowerment. It's, you're gonna be my leader over here and you're gonna be my leader over here, and this is what I want you to do to lead and you train and you support and you engage.
And so we have now a whole team of sixth grade boys going, no, no. I know the rules. Dr. Martinez said it was like this and this and this. Okay, this is how we're gonna settle the fight. We're gonna do 1, 2, 3 magic and you know, or whatever it is. But empowering them with systems and strategies that they can settle things and solve things.
Then the teachers start going, oh, didn't even think of that, because we were so stuck. We were so stuck in punish. Or, you know, just tell 'em, be quiet. But again, going back to a little bit of. We can change things. We don't have to let toxicity linger in our educational systems.
We have the power to do reframing. We have the power to start a new system. And guess what, if the system's not working, change it. Toss it up again and try something different. We're never stuck unless we believe we're stuck.
I had to chuckle, 'cause every time I speak with, especially someone like you, Rob, who's been in educational leadership on my show in the moment, I always begin to psychoanalyze my time in the classroom from now seven years dated and that one year teaching eighth grade.
And this is a story that I shared a couple times in the past but for our fresh listeners, I'll repeat it here. So, I was teaching still one of my favorite books of all time to these eighth grade gifted high achieving students in a really well off school in a school, always in a school, and a really good district as well.
When I was teaching Of Mice and Men, I decided to just think about different ways to talk about the text. And again, I've admitted this innocently a couple times, but I found this lesson off a teacher's pay teachers.
I was like, okay, other teachers must have used it, and I'm sure it worked. So I did that. And the journal exercise was, have your students talk about times and they felt like they had been an outsider before. And if they can talk about being an outsider, they now connect to characters such as Crooks, to Curly's wife, to Lenny, and all these different characters that are in this story about the American dream in isolation.
So I facilitated that journal and by the end of it I was like, okay, your journals are done. Just pass 'em up and we'll move on with our lives. But they wanted to read their journals and that's not what I was ready for. Here I am. It's Oh, when was. Uh, like seven or eight weeks in end of September, start of October.
Known 'em for a little while now. But as we're sharing these journals, all of a sudden, and I always sit them in a circle, so we're already in with this kumbaya kind of layout
right
now. They're talking about their depression. Now they're talking about their suicidal tendency. Now they're talking about their questioning of their sexuality.
I had one male student get up and hug another to say, it's okay, I deal depression just like you. And all of this discourse entered this space that I wasn't ready for, and I finally just said, okay. I've heard from maybe three, four, maybe five of you from now, how many of you are actually like really like easily able to come up with this moment in your lives at the age of 14, 13, 14, eighth grade, where you felt like an outsider at some point in your lives? This group had known each other since they were five years old.
All their hands went up when I asked that question without any hesitation that they had all at some point felt like that they were a misfit or an outsider, even though they had all had each other and had always had each other for their entire upbringing in school here, they aren't having eighth grade. And they didn't stop there.
They said to me, Mr. Weisler, now that we have shared this with you, what are you going to do to fix this? Because you're the only person in this school, there's Pandora's Box, you're the only person in this school who cares enough to ask us this, right? And so I did that. I went down to the principal, this is why I didn't last beyond my probation.
Went down to the principal, went down to the AP, went down to well, she was my chair third in command of the entire school curriculum specialist. And they all said, get rid of it. We are not ready to hear what these children are dealing with. Just get rid of it. And it made me understand that when I was looking at my colleagues, like you mentioned, there were a ton of my peers with respect that were there to cause problems on a day-to-day basis, right?
For the climate, perpetuate that for the students. And now I was seen as the problem because I wanted to help. I wasn't like them. I was trying to subdue versus perpetuate. And because I was the misfit amongst them, now I was seen as the problem person for not working to perpetuate that toxicity.
Yeah. Oh gosh. Uh, and, and, and unfortunately I've seen that happen as well, where it's people aren't ready to recognize that children are actually human beings. Yeah. You know, and, and really they're bringing so much with them. So much amazing, but so much angst. And in our day to day process of now social media screens everywhere, information, complete overload, the life of a child has even become more complex than ever before.
And even if we think we're raising them in a very secure, safe environment, there's an awareness. There's an awareness, which even again, creates more need for nourishment of the heart, the mind, the soul, more care of the trauma that they're experiencing. I'm reflective now. I have two of my sons are fathers, and they are the most amazing fathers I have ever seen.
I think of my own dad as being a, strong, amazing working man. He worked and worked and worked and again, through all of our troubles that we had, we reconnected later in life, and I respectful of, of what he had to endure. 'cause I had to think about that later. And he found some healing himself, which was always amazing for our reconciliation.
And for me, again, trying to support my children and my own four sons, in the way that I believe they needed to be supported, and now to see it in their care for their children is just so amazing to me because they're purposefully aware. They're purposefully connected. They're aware of their children's feelings, emotions, what they need, so supportive, and I think that wasn't just by magic. I think it was the support that my wife and I were able to give to them. I like to think so that we played a part in that and to see it come around. I think of the same thing for students and for educators and for support staff that we may not see it at that moment, but it's us carrying ourselves with care for them.
It's us making sure that we're connected to our people, we're supportive of our people, we're giving them what they need, not that what we think they need, but what they need as they grow as educators, as support staff so that they can actually do that work with the children that are in our care. You go back to in loco parentes, right? It's like we are the parent, we are here. We can't blame the parent. We have to do our part in the raising of children. And I think that's one of the most important things that I think as education personnel, we sometimes forget because the system doesn't focus on that.
That we really are the care for the child. And I've seen too many times where people who are in our education system are not thinking about the children first. They're thinking of themselves first. And when they do that, it's like bad things are gonna happen. Classroom systems are not gonna be effective. It is just gonna create havoc sometimes. And so from the personnel side of the educational systems, being aware, supporting and caring and growing our teachers, but then also cultivating when people are doing any harm to our children, this is not the right profession for you. And having them leave the system so that, that's the other side of that.
And not to get that blurred with what we call permissive parenting. But I was talking with Rob here on the pre-chat where there is a text that I teach in my literature course called Push by Sapphire, the name of the author Sapphire. And I always opened up this text, which is about a young girl who's growing up in Harlem, New York City, and it's kind of about her navigation through poverty and how the school system both failed her and how it helped her succeed when she moved to a private institution.
But I normally start that text with the question to my college level university students, when has school helped you succeed and when has it failed you? Let's talk about how has system has once failed you. And again, not to make it a therapy session, but I always sit them in a circle and that is always like, they'll tell me at the end of the term, that was their favorite conversation the entire semester.
Because what they don't realize in that conversation, which is not something that I honestly realize until I became a professor, I don't blame 'em 'cause I didn't realize it at their age either. Students don't realize at all levels, I would say, that they really have an incredible voice and they have the right to be vocal in their own system, in their own education system, that the whole chain of command is incomplete if we don't include the voice of the student in that process.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you're making me think a little bit about my own education as child, right? The primary school I was at, beautiful, connected. I have just amazing memories of the teachers, the people who were there, the support. And our whole family was still together, right?
I mean, my mom was a PTA president for goodness sakes, here. She was a Hispanic lady who grew up picking fruit in the Central Valley and, graduated her high school through the adult school and became a PTA president. She was in charge and en large. And man, it was just an amazing environment.
And again, after her passing, I went to the high school or the junior high across the street from us. It was right across the street and. I never really connected there to the teachers. What I connected to were the extracurricular activities. Because after her passing, it was like, okay, I'll play football, I'll play baseball, I'll play band, I'll go in the chorus, I'll do this, I'll do anything to kind of get away from the house.
And so I was at the school for a ton. And then as I tell him the story in my book, my dad met a new woman, bought a new house, and we're gonna move 25 miles away. And it was like, what? I'm connected to this place with all of these activities. So I actually convinced them that I could get up in the morning and take the city bus, you know, 25 miles to get to school in the morning so I could keep going to school.
And that was my sophomore year. And I thought, I gotta a plan. I'm gonna get through high school doing that. And then they said, no, you're gonna change schools. And my world crushed. And so I couldn't even tell you at the new high school that I went to, well, I was supposed to go to for, you know, eight months or so
what happened there. I think I did go out for football for a, a hot minute and then just stopped going, but I never connected. And, and it wasn't the school's fault. Uh, I mean, quite frankly, I didn't even give them a chance to get to know me. I showed up a few days. I remember that.
Uh, but it was like. Who's that guy? I don't know. Nobody knows. He's here. He's there, he's gone. And until I reconnected at my final high school that I went to where I walked in and I still was quiet and at that time I was working full time 'cause I needed to pay rent to my brother. You know, it's not like he said, stay here for free, needed to buy food.
'cause I had no income free full-time, but going to high school. But at that high school there was at least one class and it was a government class. And we connected. And, and I remember two distinct things about that class. One is he let us do slide videos, like slide projector with music. We were like the first MTV people and we did skating pictures and something else.
And I think I just joined a group and they let me join them. But it was like the most amazing thing ever to participate in a group again. We also collected canned foods and we got the big picture in the yearbook for collecting the most canned foods for a class. Those are two things that a teacher coordinated that had nothing to do with reading, writing, math, science, any of the things that I was supposed to have been doing.
And somehow I graduated high school to go to the junior college. But those are the memories of a teacher working enough to put groups of kids together. And I share that because again, we don't think about as educators, the successes that we might be planting on the day-to-day basis. But it's putting people together. It's connecting students.
It's having them be safe in a place. That type of learning is far beyond any kind of content that we studied on that particular day. I mean, I'm sure I learned things, but those memories are what kind of kept me going, all right, I'll keep going to school. I'll try the junior college now, because I felt safe for those two moments at least, and probably more than that.
But that's what I remember now. I felt safe. And if we're not making our kids feel safe, what are we doing? What are we doing?
I love that. 'cause i'm a twin and in our eighth grade year, we had three out of our six classes together. Like most of the time we had a lot of the same teachers, but different periods. But in this one particular year, we had the same three classes. Like I'm sitting here, he's right to my left, and to this day, 17 years later, we still talk about at random, like it just happened a couple minutes ago.
We will randomly bring up our favorite memories from our Spanish one class with profesora because just the way that she brought it to life brought this whole community together. We had so many laughs in and that that's what we remember. I, I don't speak Spanish, but I remember all the fun and all the energy that she brought into that classroom.
And in my first year of teaching, when I was an interim teacher, my first classroom was right next door to hers. Yes, and all I could hear on the other side of my wall where these students continuing 10 years later at the time, 2018, having the time of their lives in profesora's class and all I could think of like, wow, I, I, even to this day, I wish I could be a 10th of the teacher that she was, just because she knew how to run a classroom climate.
She knew how to bring people together and make it memorable.
Absolutely. So essential, whether that's, you know, running, sitting in a classroom, whether it's working with a cabinet level group of people, whether it's working with your board members, having a memorable experience. And I think it's one of my friends, Dave Burgess, and Dave is a teach, like a pirate guy.
And, uh, he actually the publisher of my book, and Dave says, you know, you have to have an uncommon experience for the children every day, and they'll be wanting to get back into your door. And Dave was like a teacher extraordinaire, but big personality. And he, he'd turn his classroom into science experiments and we're walking on the moon today, and he'd walk in his classroom.
It'd be like, it's the moon, you know, and, but, uh, just wild things and why not? Why not? You know, I know that there's a lot of educators who think, oh, that's a lot of work. And he is like, yeah, it's a lot of work, but the payoff is so big, so big and so memorable for students that of course, why wouldn't you wanna do it?
Why wouldn't you want to go to the overboard and make sure kids are going to remember? So I always think about that.
Definitely. I mean, I've had many wonderful teachers in my career, but I remember the ones who like profesora who came in and we were talking about food. She dressed up like a chef and she blindfolded us, and she would feed us something.
We had to say what we thought we were eating was. She fed, she fed me a carrot. So I had to say, oh, zapata. And I knew I was eating carrots. So those are, that was like a regular day in her class. But I,
yes,
I remember the layout of the rooms and the teachers and whatnot who did otherwise, but I don't remember their content as much.
I don't remember their content. Yes. I just remember at this point now, 18 years later, just who they were and what they did and how they ran a classroom, but not content, but profesora because she connected with us, I remember everything. So throughout your career, what have you also noticed and seen that schools are doing like that to just foster resiliency and what has been your biggest learning gain from being a part of all that kind of work?
Wow. Uh, that great question. In the last district I was at, which really brought me full circle, I almost retired, before I joined that district. I thought, okay, it's been a good run. I'm finishing as an executive director at a charter school, and I think I'll just retire. I'm just gonna, and then I saw this one district pretty close to the house, you know, and thought, all right, let me go check this out.
I've heard about the district, and it's an impoverished area, but I had a good feeling. So I went and I interviewed with a team and seemed like a great group of people. Again, it was a chief of human resources position. So I've done that job before and thought, oh, I can do this for us and let's recruit and let's do this different thing.
But quickly I got involved with our educational services team as well. From an HR standpoint, there's HR directors who kind of stand alone and do the hiring, and they go, good luck to everybody. And again, from my own personal background being, I, I always think of myself as an educator and yes, okay, I have the expertise in HR, so I can hire.
But I want to foster everybody I'm bringing into the district, whether it's a custodian, a teacher, or a psychologist, whatever it's gonna be, let's foster you. Let's support you, let's connect you. So I have to feel like I wanna know what our educational systems are. And within the district, we really achieved a resilience wheel.
And the resilience wheel was a mindset for every educator that was coming in. And it wasn't, again, do this one thing. It was opportunities and access to build equity for our students. But it was the emotional health, it was the physical health, it was the academic health. It was the goal setting health.
It was an entire process by which the system was starting to recognize the whole child and what we needed to do, not just academics. And so in that environment we set up situations like safe rooms for kids during the day. Like there's just a place to go calm down at all of our elementary schools. We had full-time counselors at all of our elementary schools.
These things aren't cheap, but again, putting resources where it needs to be. The counselors were also engaging with the teachers and teaching strategies because again, sometimes you can have a counselor who feels like all my job is to see, you know, maybe two or three kids a day. But no, the way I did my school psychology instruction was I'm the school psychologist to support everybody here all the time.
And so it's like you want to be in classrooms, you want to be supporting families, you want to be supporting. So our counselors, we started building that system so that they were aware you're here for support for everybody. And so in the sense of restorative practices so that we'd have restorative facilitators working with students, teaching them skills to communicate, it was very much a lot of services to support the entire growth of a child.
And so I was very proud that we were able to, in my last three years, continue that work even with tough budget decisions, because that's the kind of thing that people will see as, well those are extras. No, these become the new essentials.
The essentials that we have to figure out how we keep. There's going to be some other things that we may not need, whatever that might be in the budget. But you have to now think of students differently so that we're having supports in place knowing that new traumas are going to occur.
Building now community schools where we're going to have medical supports on site or accessible to students. Having laundry services at the school. We started working with Whirlpool to actually bring laundry services in so children can bring their clothes in.
And we have a team of people helping wash their clothes and take 'em home so they have clean clothes. So many of our kids stopped coming because they just couldn't wash their clothes. So it's getting to the needs of where they're at. People might say, oh, you're doing too much for kids. And I would say, we're never doing too much for kids.
Whatever we need to do to help that child feel safe, secure, connected, engaged, we do. Once you're doing that, now their confidence starts to grow. They're coming every day. You're supporting them in their learning. Many of these children are already resilient, the lives that they've had to get through.
So it's not like we're gonna teach 'em resiliency. However, when you're safe, you're connected, you're grounded, you start to be able to go, I'm freaking resilient. Mm-hmm. I can get through anything. You know what? I've been through Mr. At five years old, six years old, I can get through anything. Do I want some support?
Heck yeah. That's the empowerment side. So when we recognize that and we're supporting our kids, now, making a plan for their future growth that they actually can take on and say, here's my future growth. I want to be ready. If I'm gonna go to college, great. If I'm gonna do a career tech education, great. If I'm gonna get a certificate, great.
Whatever they wanna do, empower them so that they can make the choices. When I think about equity and access and equity, that's what I think about. I want all of our children to be able to make the choices that they want to make. They don't have to make the same one, they don't have to make it at the same time.
But we want to have them recognize that they are worthy, valuable, and have every opportunity that we can give and make them aware of. We want 'em to take it.
That's a mic job. Thank you so much for that, Rob. So, and we've talked about this already, but let's just go ahead and revisit that as part of our conclusion here.
So, when it comes to just factors that help make a classroom, both trauma safe versus trauma triggering, what do those practices look like and how can we sustain them as teachers, leaders, and community members for both the sake of our students and ourselves as teachers and leaders as well?
And what are just some closing thoughts that you have for our listeners here too?
So when I think about making things safe, again, I think there's an awareness that we have to communicate with people and we have to do it together. Sometimes you'll walk into a room, oh, there's a list of rules there.
Don't do this, and don't do this, and don't do this, and don't do this. And be sure to not do this. And when we apply rules to a group of people without communication, without referencing that actual group, without norm building, we really set ourselves up for failure. And so when I try and work with our teachers, I always think about have you set the norms and have you gone through a process to set the norms?
And I talk about this a little bit in the recipes for resilience, a strategy by recognizing, well, hi everybody, how are you? This is who I am. And. How do you think we should be treated in here? Just, I mean, a kinda a simple question and maybe people are like, well, what do you mean? Well, I don't know.
I, I don't wanna be yelled at, oh, okay, well I'd like to not do this and I'd like to not do that. And getting input from the group. What teachers fail to recognize sometimes is that, that list that you maybe had, these kids will come up with a better list or the group can come up with a better list.
Like, well, I don't wanna be gossiped about, or I don't wanna be social media blamed, or, I don't want, whatever it is. Get it. Now, obviously an educator could facilitate that process and I walk through in the book a kind of couple of different questions and if there's something they really missed and you can say, well, since I'm gonna be the teacher I don't like, and you can add your things, and they'll go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that too.
I don't want that. Okay, so you can create your norms. I did this with one of my human resources teams. 'cause I don't know if you've ever been in an office where you have maybe 16 people and everybody's got different ideas about how they wanna work things. And there's maybe one person who says, well, we have a binder over here that tells us that 45 things we have to do and we're gonna live by that binder.
I said, who wrote that binder? And they say, well, uh, Gladys. Well, where's Gladys? Gladys retired 25 years ago. It's like, well, guess what? We're gonna throw that binder away and we're gonna write a new binder that we're going to put together, teamwork, coordinated collaboration, input from everybody, and get the information and sign it.
We're all agreeing, but then you don't stop there. Now, when that gossip occurs or when the name calling occurs, you go, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Time out. Time out like you do in basketball. Time out. We might have a foul. You walk through what it was, not to shame, but to educate. To educate. If there are rules, then we have to be able to do it.
If you have rules, but you ignore half the rules all the time because, well, I'm gonna let him get away with it and I'm gonna have her get away with it. And well that really wasn't a violation. Is it a rule or is it just arbitrary. So having a system that really kind of puts everybody in the same playing field, that guides the work, that builds that level of safety for the community of students.
Because what might go on at home isn't allowed here and what is here will maybe help them at home 'cause they'll think differently. So I think about that for our systems. When I think about collectively Joey, the entire education system, and, uh, one of my quotes on the back wall there, I dunno if you can see the whole thing, but it says, let the lives we help others live, be the measure of our success.
It's one of those mantras that I just think about all the time, and I think about it when I go to the supermarket. I think about it when I'm driving. I think about it because I want to, in my own mind, be a support to people. I don't ever want to be that hindrance that stops somebody from having a good day, from having a good moment, from having a good experience at a store.
I just don't want to be that person . And I think if more of our educators. If more of our superintendents, government officials just simply brought it down to that idea about, let me help others find their success, we'd all be better off.
And so, I have the recipes for resilience. One of the other books that I wrote it a little while back, and I'm gonna be putting out as a second edition, is the story of Sparkle and Shine. So I'll share with you that just for a second. And the story of Sparkle and Shine. I actually dreamt this book one night.
I dreamt it and I woke up and my, I hit the computer and started typing away. And my wife's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I dreamt this book. I have to write it. And so I wrote this book, and it's about a couple of elves and sparkle is spread, positive acts of kind, loving encounters.
Sparkle and Shine has significantly helped increase niceness everywhere Shine. And it tells the story of Sparkle, the Elf who has just a drone elf going on as a business and decided to change and create sparkle by acknowledging positive acts. And all of his acts led to shine. So I won't give the whole story away, but it's gonna come out with illustrations and it's just a little book for kids and adults, but it really talks about the power of positivity. And 📍 we can change the world if we're positive and we act on it. You can't just think it, you have to act on it.
Thank you so much for that Rob.
So that was Dr. Rob Martinez here to invite us that resilience is something that we practice together through honesty, connection, and the willingness to name what's hard without putting out shame.
And if this episode resonated with you, I encourage you to spend some time with the recipes of resilience and sit down with the questions that Rob raises, not just about how we support students, but how we support ourselves and one another in the process.
Thank you for joining us on the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast. If today's episode inspired you or made you think differently, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts and stay connected with us on the at Classroom Narratives podcast over Instagram and Facebook.
Remember, together we can transform our scars into stars and education, one conversation at a time.
