Whether you’re facing a sticky situation with a student and a tricky behavior or a sticky conversation with a colleague or students’ loved ones, choosing to find and provide hope is necessary. Ruth Ayres and Becca Burk decided it was time to chronicle their journey of interacting with kids.
Show Notes
Choice Literacy sponsored this episode.
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Quotables
In those sticky moments, what we want to have is hope.
In those sticky situations, choosing to find hope and provide hope is a way to move forward together.
Hope that sticks even in the stickiest situations.
Hope is what propels us on those days where it feels rocky; what gets us through is hope.
In those moments it’s most crucial to stop and find hope. The hope is in what happens after and the moment before.
In the moments when I’m able to choose hope is when I see growth.
The act of teaching is an act of hope.
There’s not one answer that will work for every kid.
It wasn’t “that kid is lazy” or “they’re attention-seeking,” but it was “are their needs met?”
We don’t know all the answers, but let’s get started.
How do we hold onto hope even when things get really tricky?
In reflecting on things we’ve faced we learn new things and notice what worked. That is a source of hope.
Transcript (AI Generated)
Together, we can make a world where all children grow mentally fit and cognitively strong. But what about the days, and there are many, when we feel completely, totally, and undeniably disheartened? The days that threaten joy and attempt to swipe our hope.
These are the days when we need tools, resources, and mostly straightforward conversations to know that hope can stick even in the stickiest situations.
Hey, everybody, welcome to our first straightforward conversation on our new space called Sticky Hope. So, Becca, do you remember the first time we were toying with the idea Sticky Hope?
Yeah. We kind of had this funny response, and at first I was like, Sticky, really? I’m not sure that’s the word.
Yeah, ew. But then, as we kept talking, as we do, we realized all of the meaning that Sticky held, right? And we thought through Sticky Hope.”
First of all, that’s a quirky enough title that it kept us thinking, it held our attention, and it really kind of describes what we’re trying to do, right? Sticky can mean so many things, and sometimes some of the things we’re facing really make us feel ew, right? And it also really made us stop and think about moments that feel sticky as educators, and in those sticky moments, what we want to have is hope, right?
And so whether you’re facing a sticky situation with a student and a behavior, or a sticky conversation with a colleague or a parent, in each of those interactions, choosing to find the hope and provide hope is a way to move forward together.
I think so, you know, and we’ve been kind of thinking about hope that sticks, even in the stickiest situations. So, for me, I like, sometimes I don’t like hope. I feel like hope is a liar, you know?”
I think about, we think about trying to help kids, and we have these routines, and we’re going through them for weeks on end, and it feels like there’s no movement, and feel like hope is kind of a liar to me. I know I’ve felt that a lot. And so, this idea of hope, it is what propels us.
And in those days where, there’s some years where it feels like a rocky class, or feels like it takes a lot of grit to get through the day. And what’s getting us through is hope. And so, I’m thinking about some of these sticky situations, and you and I have been talking about them.
And we kind of, I feel like we’ve kind of had like a continuum. And I wonder if, you know, other people feel this way too. So when we’re thinking about tricky behaviors, it can be like from distraction, you know, where it’s just maybe a kid is, you know, like head is down, or they’re rolling on the carpet, or it starts snowing and out the window, and everybody’s distracted, we lose our focus.
It’s the end, yeah. So like these distractions, but it can be all the way up to like destruction in our classrooms where kids are maybe throwing chairs or knocking books off the bookshelf. So we’re kind of thinking of this continuum, right, of tricky situations that we find ourselves in.
Yeah, and I think as you and I have had these conversations, we’ve realized that in those really tricky situations, it can be the hardest moment to find hope, right? As teachers, those moments where you have three kids shouting out and one kid’s rolling on the rug and another kid got up for their 13th drink in your lesson, like you’re just like, are you kidding? Like when are we going to be able to move forward?
When are they going to understand? Where’s the hope, right? And in those moments, it’s most crucial to stop in and find that hope.
And the hope is in the moment after and the moment before. And I think that’s part of what you and I talk about is we spend a lot of time thinking about the antecedent, what came before those hard, tricky, sticky moments. And then how did we choose to move forward?
And we don’t, in my classroom every day, I’m not perfect and not every moment is a perfectly hopeful moment, right? But in the moments that I’m able to choose hope is when I see that growth. And the act of teaching, I was just thinking earlier today, is an act of hope, right?
We know that as we make these moves, we are going to make change with these kids, and they’re going to help change us and teach us as alongside the work that we do with them. And in the real growth comes those really tricky situations. And we see a lot of the moments of distraction a lot more often.
But another thing that you and I spend a lot of time thinking about together is we’re seeing a lot more of those bigger destructive and disruptive behaviors in classrooms than we ever have before. And it’s a really hard conversation, and it’s a conversation not many people love to have because it is scary at times, and it’s intense, and it’s hard to know how to handle them while preserving dignity of the child and the other children in the class, but also protecting us as teachers and knowing how to move forward together to keep making growth.
Yeah. I think that’s what I’m excited about because we don’t have it figured out, right? Yeah.
And just when you think you get it figured out, something else happens. That’s just kind of the nature of life. Yeah.
And there’s not one single answer that’s going to work for every kid. It’s just going to really take some time and just understanding. So I remember being in your classroom, and there’s a kid who is kind of distracted, and you were like, are you hungry?
Do you want something to drink?
And I was like, no. You know, it wasn’t, oh, that kid is lazy or they’re attention seeking, but it was like, are their needs met? And as we do that, does that work every time?
No, it doesn’t work every time. But sometimes, and so I think I’m excited about just kind of chronicling some of the thinking, talking about the things that are surprising to us, and then thinking through how does that prepare us to be ready to go the next day. I think that’s one of the reasons why we kind of were like, hey, it’s finally time to start.
Like we need to do something, right? We don’t know all the answers, but like, let’s get started. And so I think it’s looking like these conversations here and sharing some tools and resources and books with people as we just really begin to think about how do we hold on to hope even when things get really tricky.
Yeah, I’m excited to figure things out together and learn alongside each other and face new things together in reflecting on situations we’ve faced. We learn new things and we also notice what works. And that can be another source of hope, right?
When you’re able to look back and see what has helped and to think through what you could do differently the next time. Like you said, we don’t have all the answers, but we can see that it’s time to start thinking through how to find some answers to some of these things to give hope for ourselves, but also for the teachers out there who are also facing these tricky things.
So, Becca, the thing I’m most nervous about or worried, like is that we’re going to get, like life can be a little bit chaotic for us. And like, like that con, like are we going to be able to have these conversations and how does that work? So I just want people to know, like we have these really beautifully messy lives outside of school.
So like, do you want to tell people kind of what you’re home, like what happens after school, after school hours?
Yeah, so I teach kindergarten all day and it’s a beautifully chaotic, wonderful place of learning. And then I come home to a changing number of children. My husband and I are foster parents, and we range in number of kids from four to seven at times, and they range in age from four to fifteen.
And we think they’re the most incredible kids on earth, and also they can make some really interesting situations come up. So life can be really messy at home, and also it can be really beautiful. So, yeah, chaotic is a great word for our life.
We call ourselves a circus, because there’s always something happening, and you can never count on a chunk of time. And also we’re getting to a phase of life where we’re starting to be able to make chunks of time work. So I’m excited to be able to figure this out, but it’s going to be a journey to figure out how to make this time work.
Definitely. And I think what’s so interesting is we connected because of writing and literacy. And then in one of those first conversations, you shared that you were a licensed foster parent.
And I was like, oh, my goodness, we’ve adopted our kids from foster care. And so I think it’s an interesting perspective. It’s one of the reasons why I really enjoy our conversations, because you keep us grounded in the reality of like the daily life with kids and some who have really been scraped by hard parts of the world.
And then my kids are all older now. So when we adopted them, they came to us when we had one that came to us at birth and then one who was four years old, a six year old and a seven year old, but in different adoptions, they didn’t all come at the same time. And now they are all young adults.
They’ve all graduated from high school and they’re out living the world. And so we have this perspective, right, of, you know, in the moment, but then also what we’re gunning towards. And, you know, for us, we were really hoping that they would heal in childhood.
And what I’ve realized is how that happened because of teachers and coaches and the school community. And they wouldn’t be the healthy adults that they are now had it not been for teachers. And that’s what I wish I could go back and tell myself, like my younger self, or when I was just beginning my career, is like, what you do matters, especially on the days where it feels like we didn’t make any difference.
And so that’s that idea of sticky hope.
I feel so fortunate because you have that perspective. You can’t go back and tell your younger self that, but you can tell me that. And that has really helped me.
I never expected to be the parent getting the phone call about my child being the reason that classrooms are being cleared or needing a 40-minute restraint. But in those moments when I am answering those phone calls, I have learned to say, thank you for what you did to help heal my child’s heart today. And teachers don’t know how to respond to that.
They’re kind of used to us now. But at the beginning, when it was really sticky, it was really tricky, they expected us to be mad that these situations were happening at school. And when my husband was also a teacher, and so they’re calling these teachers saying, your kids are doing these really unpredictable things, they expected us to blame them.
The teachers expected us to think the teacher did something wrong, or they didn’t do enough, or they triggered the child. And instead, we thanked them for keeping the child safe and for the work that they did to help heal the child’s brain and heart that day. And so now the teachers expect that of us, and they feel safe in calling us and having these conversations.
But it was hard at the beginning, and without your perspective, I would have been frustrated, right? I would have been like, oh my gosh, like why did they have another hard day? And it was hard to see the hope, but because of you and the perspective you have, we were able to find it.
So we’re hoping to be able to share that with others too.
Always let hope stick even in the stickiest situations.
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