SST 11 Podcast

Eric Neal:
Welcome to the State Support Team 11 Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Neal. Today we are joined by Mandy Froehlich. Mandy is an author, education consultant, and keynote speaker. She's written The Fire Within, Divergent EDU, Reignite the Flames, and The Educator's Matchbook. Welcome Mandy, how are you today?

Mandy Froehlich:
I'm doing well, thank you so much. How are you?

Eric Neal:
Good, thanks. It's great to have you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

Mandy Froehlich:
Yeah, absolutely. I really started off as an elementary educator, and then I was a technology integrator and then a Director of Innovation and Technology for a school district. So, I did a lot of the tech things. That's actually how I started consulting, was through doing Google training and stuff like that. So, EdTech is still a piece of my work and something that I love doing. But right before the pandemic, excuse me, I just needed to make a decision if I was going to continue consulting part time or full time in the district, and I decided to take the leap and go into consulting full time, and mostly that came about because of my work in educator mental health. That started because when I left the classroom, I left because I was disengaged. I was emotionally not connected to my work anymore and I was burnt out and demoralized, and I didn't know how to come back from that and there were no manuals on how to do it.
And so I started really this adventure of trying to figure myself out, and in the process, when I talked about it people would say, "Well, how do you do that? Because I feel that way too," and so then I started speaking more publicly about it. And so I consulted full time all through the pandemic, and recently I just took a part-time position as a Director of Innovation and Philanthropy for a school district in Wisconsin, but I'm still also consulting full time and continue to do that work. I'm also the COO of EduMatch, which is a company run by Dr. Sarah Thomas that really tries to support educators through the entire ecosystem of what's happening. Anything that's going on, we try to support teachers, but really leaning into supporting people who haven't traditionally been supported in the past. And so that's kind of where a lot of my heart work is as well.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, there's a lot of talk out there right now about teacher burnout, and you mentioned you prefer to focus on the emotional connection teachers have to their work. How does that connect or contribute to, or the lack of it, contribute to teacher burnout?

Mandy Froehlich:
Yeah, so I think education is different than a lot of other professions that are out there, in the way that we get into it knowing that the pay isn't very good. We used to have great benefits. That is even iffy anymore. There's not a lot of community support or social support for education. We get in knowing these things and we still do it because we want to. That's where we feel our heart is, that's where we feel like it's something that we were called to do. And so from that standpoint, it's different than any other type of profession, and so what I figured out over time was that there are things that are involved in wanting to stay to be a teacher.
There is obviously your own mental health, which includes your past mental health issues as well. Things that you've gone through in your personal life, there is the burnout and the reasons that you disengage. But the reasons that you stay are because you're emotionally connected to that position. You want to be that person who makes a difference. And so when we start to want to leave our work, it's not because of the pay, because we already knew the pay was crappy when we got in. It's not because of the disrespect. We kind of knew that was a thing already. It's because we have emotionally disengaged from the work. And some of it is because of those same things just taking a toll on us over time, some of it is because one thing that maybe we didn't expect is the incredible workload that comes along with the job, and all of those things then slowly over time diminish our emotional connection.
One of the things that I've been asked repeatedly over the pandemic is how do we stop teacher attrition? And I would always say, if you're at that point, you've already lost them. You needed to start way before at looking at the climate and the culture and the workload, and all of those things that were impacting teachers that slowly chipped away at their emotional connection that then made them want to leave, but waiting until they're actually leaving is too late. So, I think when you look at a lot of jobs that don't have that emotional connection there might be different reasons why people leave, but for us, it's that emotional piece of it.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, educators have been dealing with an increasingly stressful work environment over the last few years, and we know the pandemic took a toll on all of us, but there are those other factors as well that you talked about. Do you think that there is an acceptance of the mental health issues that teachers face? Because sometimes people don't even talk about it.

Mandy Froehlich:
I feel like where we are right now, and it's a journey, everything that we do in education is a journey to create real lasting change. I feel like the pandemic has proven that it doesn't just happen, because if it did, the landscape of education would look totally different right now. And so it does happen slowly over time, and I think what's happened is when I first started talking about this ten-ish years ago, the message was very much, "We don't talk about that." That we don't talk about sad teachers, we don't talk about teachers with mental health issues, because the students could, quote, unquote, "catch it" or it could somehow negatively impact students.
And over time, it slowly started to shift to, "Well, we're willing to talk about self-care and we're willing to acknowledge that teachers need to do things to help themselves because they are a very giving group of people overall." And so we're willing to talk about self-care and we're willing to talk about things that would fall under positivity, and I still feel like that's where we are now. The difference is that people are starting to rise up and say, "Hey, look, I practice self-care," or, "I don't have time to practice self-care because there's so much on my plate." And so we're starting to get this, and it's been happening for I would say at least the last year and a half, two years, where people are starting to say, "That message has to stop. We need to talk about the hard things." And so, right now, we're still not super willing to talk about the things that cause disengagement in teachers, because that would mean that we would have to create actual change. We would have to change things that, in reality, we're just not ready or willing to change.
And so I think that we will get there eventually, but it's going to take time. It's going to continue, we're going to need to continue to have people that say, "Look, this isn't okay. Self-care is not going to fix me. It's not going to fix the system. It's not going to fix what's happening, so we need to dive deeper than that." And I also think that we're going to go into this sort of era, I guess, of healing, where everybody is going to need to recognize that everybody has healing to do after the pandemic. We're all still in a place where we haven't totally processed what has happened, and we're going to have to go through that process as well before we really start digging into that change. That's totally my opinion, but that's what I've seen over time and just being embedded in this for so long.

Eric Neal:
Yeah. No, I agree, not talking about it is the main thing, but what are some of the other ways that we've let teachers down when it comes to supporting their mental health needs?

Mandy Froehlich:
Well, I think that there's a few places. I think there's really practical things that we can do in a district to create change that people just don't do, and I don't really understand it, to be honest. I don't know why people don't take these on. But there are things like just really taking a look at our insurance, and this sounds so simple, but it's true. We have insurances, our insurance has gotten... I mean, when I first started teaching, our insurance was covered. We had no deductible, there was no money that was put in some account that you could use for prescriptions, and there was none of that. Everything was just covered, and it was one of the reasons why you took a lower salary, was because the insurance was great and it was worth something. And we've now gotten into this era where there are corporations and businesses that have better insurance than we do, but we never got a pay raise to make up for that.
And within that scheme of insurance, we also have lost some of the benefits that we used to have, especially when it comes to mental health. So, there's a few things with just the insurance, and again, I'm zeroing in on something that's very practical, that is something that everybody could do. Answer some of these questions. How long does it take for somebody to actually make an appointment to see a mental health professional? How long does it take for the average teacher, so not your HR person, not somebody who's super familiar with insurance, how long does it take the average teacher to find the place where they can find the mental health professionals that are covered under their insurance, that they can find one that is actually accepting new patients? How many do they have to call before they find someone who's accepting new patients, and does the insurance on the backend actually show the right information? There's all of these pieces. So, just getting that initial contact.
How much do they have to pay? Because one of the things that I've noticed as I've dug deeper into insurance and even just using it myself, is that they will say mental health sessions are covered, but what they actually mean is you pay on your deductible until you've met your deductible, which to me is not covered. I mean, yes, they're covered towards your deductible, but you still have to pay out of pocket. Well, if you're making $38,000 a year and you're paying $150 for an hour of therapy out of your pocket, you probably are not going to be able to afford that.

Eric Neal:
No, definitely.

Mandy Froehlich:
So, how much are they actually paying? The other piece of that is a lot of people will say, "Well, we have the Employee Assistance Program, so they can pick up a phone at any time and they can call somebody," and I think that that is great when the issue is not emergency-emergency, but it's important, it needs to be talked about right now. They can call somebody, they can have that discussion. I think that's great. The problem is that having a different person that you call every single time you need a therapy session is not best practice in healing. You need to go to somebody who knows your history, who knows who you are, who's able to pick apart what's happening and find those places that they can help you heal, and calling somebody different every single time is not going to make that happen. So, even though those numbers are good in theory to have, it's not actually going to get you the help that you need.
So, when we talk about how have we failed teachers as a system, and our insurance costs, our insurance, the way our insurance works, the complexity of our insurance, what we're offering, is actually a really practical thing that we could dig into, a really tangible item we can change to make things easier on teachers.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We do a lot of work trying to support systems that improve climate and culture in schools, but do you think beyond that system approach that it's necessary to address teacher wellness from an individual perspective as well as programmatic or system?

Mandy Froehlich:
Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the downfalls of the pandemic and the way that self-care was used. It's often said that self-care was weaponized during the pandemic. I don't think it was intentionally weaponized. I do think that what was happening was a lot of systems didn't know what else to do, and so they were saying teachers need to practice self-care in order to feel better. I do believe that it was coming in general from a good place. The problem is that what the people who were saying that didn't realize was things needed to change in order for teachers to be able to do that. Now, there's still that piece where a lot of teachers are very giving people, they're very put themselves second, put everyone else first. There's still those pieces of that, which means that self-care is still important.
Scientifically speaking, self-care is still a way to improve your mental health, to improve your physical health. It is still a way to support yourself, to build resilience. Self-care and taking care of your own self is one of the ways you do all those things. The problem is that the way the system is set up, it doesn't always allow us to do those things, and so people get bucky about it and are like, "I can't do this because you're not doing this," and then they don't do anything at all. And so in the perfect system, what would be happening is there would be systemic changes in the district that provide opportunities for teachers to lean into self-care in whatever way that they feel that they need it.
And so an example would be, the obvious example is taking things off people's plates and taking a look at initiatives, finding are we still asking elementary teachers to put literacy grades in three different places because three different people need to see them in three different ways? Are we still doing stuff like that? Because that is an easy way that we could take something off people's plates. But even in the way of taking a look at sick days, for example. Another super tangible, really easy fix. Sick days should be allowed to be used for mental health, period. There is no alternative thinking on that. They should be allowed. Sick days should be allowed.
What I've found is that there's sort of three levels of how people think of that scenario. There's sick days should not be allowed to be used for mental health at all. Then there's sick days can be used for mental health, however, we get to arbitrarily determine if that way that it's being used is right or not. And so at this level, what they do is they feel like, "Well, if you're using a mental health day, you should be staying at home watching Netflix relaxing on the couch." They determine what self-care looks like for that person.
The best case scenario are the districts that say, "You can use your sick days for mental health, for a mental health day, and that day can look however you need it to look. We don't care if you are going out to lunch with your sister in a cafe, and we see you there and that's what you consider to be self-care. We don't care if you are going to the spa and spending the entire day getting a manicure, a pedicure, and a massage. We don't care if that means that you need to go shopping for the day, because that's something that's going to make you feel better." There are these weird, strange compliance things around the way people are using their self-care days and what that expectation is by the district on those people, which doesn't make sense.

Eric Neal:
Right. They want you to treat it like you're sick, not like making yourself feel better, whatever, going for a walk in the woods, just whatever.

Mandy Froehlich:
Yep, exactly. It's whatever they deem to be acceptable self-care on those days. And that needs to be let go, because it's not up to the district to decide what is acceptable self-care at that point. It is up to the individual. So, it's another area, again, that's very tangible, a very easy fix. All that is is a mindset change. That's all that is. And so rewrite the policy, change your mindset, allow people to use those days the way they want. And so kind of back to the question, yes, we should still expect that teachers take responsibility for their own healing and their own self-care and those types of things because they need to as a human, not because they need you as a teacher, but then we also have to provide them the opportunities to do those things at the district level as well. And so it really does go together.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm thinking about that individual teacher support. What are some ways, if you're thinking maybe from a principal perspective or something like that in a building, how can they support teachers on an individual level?

Mandy Froehlich:
I think that one of the main ways that principals can support teachers is really just by asking them how they need to be supported, and this sounds so simple, but it's true. And recently I saw somebody post something on leadership love languages online on Twitter, and I had talked about that a long time ago. I never even knew it was a thing. But basically what it is is that people receive support in certain ways, kind of like the love languages where they communicate love in certain ways, they receive support in certain ways and they give support in certain ways. A lot of times, principals will give and receive support in the way that they want to be supported themselves, which isn't always the way that teachers need to be supported.
So for example, online I will see people saying negative things about when the support looks like putting candy bars in their mailbox or something to that effect, like little tidbits of things. I'll see people complaining about that, like that's not really support. Jeans Day is not support. That's not support for you, but that might feel like support to somebody else. And so what's happening in those spaces is that those people that don't feel supported by those tidbits, by that little gift giving, those people are feeling like they're not supported at all because they're not getting the support in the way that they need. But the people who like those little things, who maybe gift giving is one of their support feelings, those little pieces of acknowledgement, they're fine. They're like, "Yeah, we're okay. We're good. We feel supported."
So, the best thing that a principal can do is really to, number one, help teachers figure out how they feel supported, because they probably have never been asked before. So they're not necessarily going to be able to tell you, or they're just going to tell you what they think it is, which isn't necessarily true. They may think that they feel support in a certain way, but when they dig down, it's actually a little bit something else. So, number one is help them figure that out. Number two is figure out how they can implement those different layers of support within what they're doing in the building.
It might be that they continue the little trinkets of acknowledgement like the Jeans Day or the candy bars, because they have people that enjoy that and feel supported with that, and they're fine. They might continue that, but they also might have to start acknowledging people verbally with calling them up and asking them to stand up in a meeting and acknowledging the great stuff that they did, because those people need that. And so there's different things that they can do in order to make sure that they're hitting those different layers of the way people feel supported. That to me is a really easy way to get started on changing your climate and culture and starting to create some psychological safety and trust and all of those things that are so important for teachers to be able to emotionally connect to the place that they work.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, it's interesting when you were talking about that, I do a lot of work with Universal Design for Learning, and it feels really similar. If you just stand up there and do a lecture or click through slides on the PowerPoint or do something, that's going to hit a certain number of kids who learn that way, and then there's going to a big group of people that it just doesn't connect with them and they're not able to do it. So, you're really, first of all, trying to figure out how people like to be acknowledged and then going and doing those things so it's matching up.
Also, I think a lot of administrators feel, they feel overwhelmed and pressured just like the teachers do, and they probably think, "Well, I just want to check this off. So if I could just go stick a candy bar in everyone's box real quick, I've done it. We've acknowledged. Now we can be done. Okay, we're all mentally healthy. Great, let's move on." This sounds like it's more of a, if you're going to be sincere about it and really have them feel supported, it's an ongoing process and matching up as much as possible with these different ways that people want to be acknowledged.

Mandy Froehlich:
Yeah, absolutely, and sometimes it's really difficult to balance the understanding of what it's like to be an administrator with what happens in the building, and so I don't want to imply that principals have it so easy that they can just do these things and they're just choosing not to do them. I think it is in a lot of cases being very overwhelmed with what's happening in the building and not necessarily even knowing where to start. I try really, really hard to assume positive intent. It's not that they're doing it intentionally. They just don't know what to do, and there's so much going on that they wouldn't know how to start it if they could. And so it is a little bit of that, which means that our ecosystem in education is so interconnected, that that means that those principals need support from up above as well.
And so what policies are we putting in place? What support are we putting in place for principals in order to be able to do those things? Are they spending every Friday at the district office in meetings? Because they shouldn't be, but I hear that a lot. And so that's one way. Put them back in their buildings, let them do their jobs. That new reading initiative is not so earth-shattering that it needs an entire Friday for it. So, we need to start being realistic in what we're asking people to do, and that includes our administration. The question is, how can we do that? How can we best make those changes for the better of everybody?

Eric Neal:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, and thinking about supporting at this system level, I think of possibly just including teachers in some of the decision-making process could be a way that systemically you could create a climate and culture that had people feeling happy in their work and more supported. Do you think that's helpful? Are there any other kind of system things you can think of that would lead to that overall climate and culture improving?

Mandy Froehlich:
Yeah, I definitely think that's one thing. It's really interesting. So, I was a part of this, when I was a tech director, we put out a survey that asked how money should be spent in the district. Prior to doing that, I said, "I don't think this is a good idea," and here's why. Teachers are not responsible for understanding school budgets or district budgets or anything like that. There are rules and laws even for what we can and cannot do with budgets. If you say, "Where should we spend our money or what should we cut?" because we had to actually cut at the time, "How do we do this?" they're not going to understand that there are things that we can pay for that seem frivolous out of this budget, but nothing else can come from that budget, and so it doesn't impact how teachers are paid or anything like that.
But the administration was really concerned about making sure teachers had a voice, which I understand. Again, I was trying to make it so that we could word it the best way for when we spoke with teachers. And so they put it out there, "Here's a survey, tell us what to do," which would ideally be getting teachers involved in the process. But we had a lot of responses that were things that we couldn't actually do because they didn't follow the rules of budget, because teachers aren't responsible for knowing that. It's not part of their teacher responsibility to understand district budgets. So, we had got a lot of responses that we just could not do, it wasn't actually possible, and what happened was the perception from that survey was we didn't actually care what they said, we only put it out to make it appear that we were using their opinion.

Eric Neal:
Right. We wanted to look like we were being supportive more than wanting to be supportive.

Mandy Froehlich:
Yeah, yeah.

Eric Neal:
It sounds like it's really about being intentional about how you do that, and authentic with if you're not going to address it. I've heard that before as well, and I did an interview and we were talking about empathy interviews and how helpful that can be for your organization, just understanding what people care about and what their needs are in those things, but they said, if you're not going to do something with the information, don't ask them, because people are going to feel really insulted that you even did it if they don't feel like there was anything that came out of it.

Mandy Froehlich:
Yes, yes, a thousand percent. But what I found too is that people will feel insulted if their specific idea is not used, and so even if it's so far out of what was being done, it doesn't matter. So, that does make it really difficult to bring people in to give feedback on things that they're not required to know about. Not that they can't know about it, not that they aren't intelligent enough to figure it out, nothing like that. It's just that their positions aren't required to know that stuff because they're doing other things.
So, yes, I definitely think teachers should be involved in the process of decision making. However, if you're going to do that, you need to give them the background information that they need in order to make decisions that make sense. And so for example, if I had to take that situation that I just discussed and redo it, I would have taken a small subset of teachers, I would've sat down and I would've said, "Here are some of the things you need to know about budget. Here's a document. Before you come in to our next meeting, read it over. Ask me questions. What questions do you have about budgets in general?"
And then before we actually went through the questions and did the scenario and asked the survey questions to just them, I would have made sure that they had all of those questions answered, so that when they're giving us ideas, because I'm sure that they have fantastic ideas because they live it every single day, but before they're giving us ideas, they know the ideas that are actually possible within the structure that we have. So, again, intentionality is super important, giving them the information that they might not just have is super important, and then allowing them to create and be innovate and give us their ideas. Then we can actually use them and put forth what they say.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, tell us about some things you have coming up here in the near future.

Mandy Froehlich:
Sure. I just signed a contract with Solution Tree, so I'll have another book coming out soon in regards to educator emotional engagement and how to reengage those types of things. I'm super excited about that, and really just trying to continue to do the work. My favorite type of work is to get into districts and have long-term contracts so I can see change over time, and so far I've been pretty successful, I feel like, in having those kinds of contracts. Because then I really still get to get into classrooms, I still get to see what's happening at that level and talk with teachers, talk with students. I mean, that's really why I got into education in the first place, so having those opportunities is always exciting.
Again, I just took a position, a very part-time position as a Director of Innovation and Philanthropy for a school district. That's been really interesting and has definitely stretched my thinking in a few different ways. So yeah, those are some of the things I have going on. I'm working with a university right now to build a curriculum around an undergrad certificate for SEL for educators. That's been one of my favorite things I've been working on so far, or lately at least, because I feel like we're going to be able to set up undergraduates for understanding some of those trauma and SEL things prior to getting into the classroom, instead of getting into the classroom, struggling, and then having to pay to go back for a graduate certificate.

Eric Neal:
Right.

Mandy Froehlich:
So, trying to support them as they're coming through instead. So yeah, I think that's it. Just a lot of exciting things going on and staying busy.

Eric Neal:
That's great. So, if people would like to know more about you and the work that you do, where should they go?

Mandy Froehlich:
They can find me @froehlichm on Twitter. That's F-R-O-E-H-L-I-C-H-M. Everybody misses that first H. And from there, you can find all of my things, including my website, which is www.divergentedu.com, and just a lot of my information is on there. I have free resources, links to articles, lots of podcasts, things like that. So, if you want more information, you can always head on over there and find lots of stuff.

Eric Neal:
Awesome. Well, thanks again for joining us, Mandy. It's been a real pleasure.

Mandy Froehlich:
Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Eric Neal:
That wraps up this episode of the State Support Team 11 Podcast. If you'd like to know more about us and the work that we do here at SST 11, go to our website. It's sst11.org. Give us a call at 614-753-4694, or hit us up on Twitter. We're @SSTRegion11. If you'd like to get ahold of me, I'm at eric.neal@escco.org. Until next time, I'm Eric Neal. Thanks for listening.