Carla Tantillo Philibert, a Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and mindfulness expert and co-author of Everyday Self-Care for Educators, talks with us about about the importance of listening to educator voice when determining equitable entry points for well-being practices and tips on how attend to your own personal self-care. Get inspired to redefine how we talk about mental health in the education space and provide more access to all within the area of self-care.
How did you get started with your work around educator self care and mindfulness?
I was part of a team that started a school in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood 17 years ago and when we started the school, we thought we had thought of everything: the rigor of the curriculum, access to material that would help them be college-bound or ready for a trade they're excited about. In that regard, we checked all the boxes.
What we had forgotten about was the social emotional learning needs and the wellbeing needs of the students sitting in the desks in front of us. And that was quite a misstep. We were invested in the families and students in the community, but we were not listening to their needs. There was sadly a shooting in the community. And that following Monday, I had my lesson on the board and the kids came in and they were super chatty. I asked what was going on and they told me Marcos was shot. While we didn't have Marcos in our class, my students had gone to school with him in earlier grades. One of my students asked me, "What should we do?' And I realized that as an educator with a masters degree, I was not qualified to serve my students at this moment. I thought of teaching as just the delivery of academic content, not the whole child.
So at that moment, I just froze. I told everyone to do a double-entry journal on why gang violence is bad for our neighborhood. The students look at me like, “Really?” and I realized at that moment, we were not doing the job that we promised that community we would do. So we all needed to meet, teachers and administrators, and figure out what to do, to do something different. I didn't know what that difference was going to be. But what I did know was it was not a fair ask of us to ask students that no matter what is going on outside of the school, "Here, sit down and look at the board and focus on the standards and learn." That’s not a fair ask.
So I started practicing yoga and mindfulness with students and then that grew into self-care and mental health work. The reason it grew though was because the students were patient with me and informed me in the process.
When you look at the traumatic year educators experienced in this past year, why do you think attending to self-care is so important?
When considering education as an industry, we need to look at how we look at educator wellbeing. We talk about the importance of education, but we rarely discuss the wellbeing of the educators we ask to teach our students. If we are saying it is important, we have to ask how equitable are those opportunities for coaching, training, and developing practice. We have to examine the access to those opportunities.
On average, my organization, Mindful Practices, works with 75 school districts, both large and small. Superintendents will call me and say, “So, we put some money into wellbeing. We’ve got a salad bar and a yoga class. No one is eating the salad bar and no one is going to the yoga class.” I’ll say, “Alright. Did you talk to the educators and ask if this yoga class after school will work for them or will they feel guilty being away from their family after being at work all day? And by the way, how much will childcare be to be able to go to that yoga class?"
These are not accessible or equitable points of entry into the wellbeing work. So to do this work in a way that is impactful and sustainable, we all need to learn that point that I learned the hard way with my students. Let's work first on listening to folks. For people of color, wellbeing work will look different. For women, wellbeing work will look different. Understanding that points of entry for different folks is something we have to listen to and pay attention to.
Then when we listen, we also can pay attention to curating a definition of wellbeing and self-care that speaks to the diverse and rich communities that districts serve.
In your book, you talk about how teacher stress is an equity issue. Why do you say that?
When we look at that intersection of wellbeing and mental health in schools and how we talk about adult mental health in schools and equity, often we are presupposing needs and we are offering pre-packaged solutions. There is not the opportunity for people who are receiving wellbeing solutions to test and iterate what works. There isn't an opportunity to speak openly and freely around wellbeing needs. If English is not my native language, maybe I have the opportunity to speak via a translator or a feedback form or a post it note left on your desk. Oftentimes what happens when we think of voice, we are not there for adult learners. We don’t think about pieces around secondary trauma and compassion fatigue. Depending on our histories, maybe we have shame wrapped around mental health or self-care needs. So I think when we construct solutions without voice and multiple stakeholders present, then these practices are not equitable. So it’s really about listening before we define.
If you want to hear more from Carla on these topics:
How educators can do better in terms of being advocates for themselves on the topic of self-care
Practical first steps for self-care
Why mindfulness is important
Activities educators can do when they’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed
Listen to our podcast episode with her here: https://anchor.fm/personalizeSC