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Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning is the podcast for globally-minded educators seeking thoughtful conversations about how education can adapt to an ever-changing world. Your host is Seth Fleischauer, former classroom teacher turned founder of an international learning company specializing in the teaching of global learning. Each episode features educational changemakers whose insights lead to practical solutions as we explore the interconnectedness of people, cultures, and systems and how these relationships shape transformative ideas in education.
Seth Fleischauer (00:00.974)
Hello everyone. And welcome to make it mindful insights for global learning. podcast for globally. Hello everyone. And welcome to make it mindful insights for global learning. The podcast for globally minded educators seeking thoughtful conversations about how education can adapt to an ever changing world. I'm Seth Fleishauer, former classroom teacher turned founder of an international learning company specializing in the teaching of global learning.
Together we explore the interconnectedness of people, cultures, and systems and how these relationships shape transformative ideas in education. Each episode features educational change makers whose insights lead to practical solutions and lasting impact. And today I am joined again, this is second time on the program, by someone whose work exemplifies this exact spirit, Dr. Trevor Soponis, educator.
researcher and founder of the sustainable large... fuck me.
Trevor Soponis (01:03.537)
You're doing great, I say just keep going.
Seth Fleischauer (01:09.592)
Today I'm joined, today I am joined again by Dr. Trevor Soponis, a friend of the podcast, been on here before. Dr. Trevor, welcome back to the podcast.
Trevor Soponis (01:23.713)
Thank you, Seth. It's great to be back for a second. I thought it might've even been my third appearance, but maybe that's just.
Seth Fleischauer (01:30.178)
I think I was on your podcast that never got launched. I think that's what you're remembering. Let's update our listeners. What's up with your non-existent podcast? Is it happening?
Trevor Soponis (01:41.761)
Uh, you know, like many things it's on hiatus. Uh, but, uh, we'll see how we'll see, we'll see what 2026 brings.
Seth Fleischauer (01:51.246)
Okay, so for today, for our listeners, what they're in store for, you are an educator, researcher, and founder of the Sustainable Learning Projects. You've been a long time collaborator with Banyan Global Learning, my company, and over the past few years, you've provided both in-person and remote support to our teachers in our Teacher Broad Program in Taipei. And that's going to be the focus of today's conversation, the work that you've done with them.
especially in this past month, when we worked together on a powerful week long professional development intensive to start the school year, we were focusing on increasing students speaking opportunities in English as a foreign language classroom. So that is going to be the main topic of today's episode. Trevor, you drew on your years of observation and coaching of these teachers. And in that session, in my opinion, you skillfully.
leverage the collective experience of the people in the room to surface a set of actionable teacher driven strategies. In today's episode, we'll unpack the content from that week, exploring Dr. Trevor's process for supporting teachers across continents and dig into what sustainable, effective professional learning looks like in cross-cultural contexts. Brought to you by Banning Global Learning, let's make it mindful. How does that sound, Dr. Trevor? Good agenda.
Trevor Soponis (03:15.06)
in let's go
Seth Fleischauer (03:16.182)
Yeah, you ready? Why don't we start by like grounding our listeners a little bit. Tell us about your background and the mission of your company, the Sustainable Learning Projects.
Trevor Soponis (03:29.921)
So, former teacher, let's always first and foremost start there. I was a New York City teaching fellow around the turn of the century.
Seth Fleischauer (03:39.25)
my god, I was a New York City teaching fellow.
Trevor Soponis (03:41.985)
Right. I always forget that. I was I was I was a member of the first mid-year cohort. And the statistic that I remember is 250 of us started and 70 of us completed the program. was a very challenging program to start in November, December or January at a brand new school. But I was lucky enough to land at Middle College High School, where I ran an uncensored student newspaper and helped in the career development.
Seth Fleischauer (03:42.893)
Yeah.
Seth Fleischauer (03:49.729)
Wow.
Trevor Soponis (04:12.107)
department as well for teaching some classes. And over a period of years, transitioned to supplemental education teaching, worked for sponsors for educational opportunity, ran my own mentoring program, worked for the district, became the director of university partnerships, the DOE, and that actually helped the teaching fellows program and the way in which the university supported them.
And then about six or seven years ago, started out on my own with my own education consulting company, the Sustainable Learning Projects, and have been working with the Shai Sing School for just about five years. I think it was March 2020 when we did our first remote session. And yeah, there's just a lot around how do we support teachers at distance? How do you support teachers over time?
And I agree with you. think we did a great job this time around. And I think it is based on relationships and just listening and observing the teachers. And I think, yeah, I was really happy with the way this year turned out.
Seth Fleischauer (05:18.86)
Hmm.
Seth Fleischauer (05:23.082)
I was too. and I think the teachers were as well. I'm going to dive in a little bit to the post PD, survey that we provided for the teachers. we asked them some, pretty basic questions that you would ask someone after a week of PD overall this week's professional development was a valuable use of my time as a teacher. Dr. Trevor, why is this an important question?
Trevor Soponis (05:46.261)
I think that's a great question to ask for any good or service that one provides. And particularly for teachers, it gives them the baseline question of, is this, before we delve into all the specifics of it, was this a good use of our time?
Seth Fleischauer (06:00.94)
Yeah. And we got a 66.7 % strongly, no, sorry, that's agree and a 25 % strongly agree. So that's above a 90 % positive on value, which is, if you've ever read one of these, reports, or surveys after a professional development session, that's pretty good. That is above baseline. teachers, famously generally don't really like PD.
But this was this was a week that that provided a lot of value We talked about whether or not people had Relieving the professional development session with specific strategies that they could apply in their classroom. So how practical was it that same above 90 % agree? They found that they were able to collaborate with their colleagues same number. I'm thinking it was the same person each time I was saying no to these I think but
We got 100 % positive on this week's professional development session will help me increase speaking opportunities in my classroom. And that was the whole dang point. And let's see this. Yeah, please.
Trevor Soponis (07:13.633)
Let me jump in, let me jump in, Seth. The background of the listening, I think it's important to say that this collaboration has been going on for four or five years. And part of what was so important was that last year I went in and was able to do classroom observations of all these teachers back in March, if memory serves. so, and not only was I able to observe the cohort of teachers that I worked with, but I was also able to observe
a number of local teachers. to also, we're talking about a dual language immersion program. And so I was able to see kind of what teaching looks like in the other classes that those same students attend. And so that background really gave me the understanding and the insight to focus on listening. And what I mean by that is,
schools, classes in this school are largely teacher dominated or teacher focused. And, you know, I always think about the question, how much are, how much is the teacher speaking and how much are the students speaking? There's a pretty famous piece of research that basically points out that teachers consistently overestimate the amount that students are speaking and consistently underestimate the amount that they are speaking.
and so in my observations, I was pretty, it was pretty consistent, you know, at best, maybe an 80 20 split from teacher to student talk ratio. I'm more consistent is 90 10. And, know, that's understandable. These are classes of 42 students. there, and I also think, culturally there's, some elements around, understanding of what teaching is and you know,
historically, and I would say this the world over, is that when a teacher is at the front of the room and speaking and somebody walks by that's in a position of power, that's an acceptable understanding of what teaching looks like. So it's very difficult to get in trouble as a teacher if you're standing in the front of the room and talking. Unfortunately, we know from decades of research that that's not the best way for students to learn. So we were able to see that and then say, are...
Seth Fleischauer (09:12.429)
Hmm.
Trevor Soponis (09:27.883)
what are, you know, if classroom management is not the issue, if getting through content is not the issue, but speaking and listening is an extremely important part of language acquisition. So what do we need to do? We need more speaking and listening from students. And so that is a little bit around the context of how we arrived, where we did with the focus on speaking and listening.
Seth Fleischauer (09:47.744)
And so I want to paint a little bit more of a picture like how, as you went through and you've observed these teachers in Taiwan, before that we were, providing remote support for the teachers. were also, you, you led this professional development session in August and previous years. But in the past calendar year, the 24, 25 school year, I think that was the first time you'd gone out there and observed them in person. I, I'm wondering,
How what surprised you about seeing an English in a foreign language program in action? And I assume that that surprise probably comes from the differences between what you would find in an EFL classroom abroad versus what you would find in a classroom in America. And I'm wondering if you can unpack that a little bit for us.
Trevor Soponis (10:46.205)
Absolutely. I was very surprised based on years of supporting at distance and hearing from the teachers that classroom management was a problem and going to visit the classrooms and not observing classroom management being a problem at all. It's very possible that, you know, I certainly have my own bias about many years of being a New York City public school teacher and observing
hundreds of classrooms in many contexts from Alaska to Louisiana. Classroom management just looks a lot different. Even with 42 students, what I observed was that students, yes, they could get loud, but students were engaging with content consistently across all the classes that I observed. I think the...
you know, and I'm a firm, firm component of the value of observation and feedback. and what I really saw was that students were ready, willing and able to learn. that a lot of these classrooms could advance to deeper learning and deeper understanding from a student perspective, if they were given the opportunity to, to have some more opportunities to speak. It's just that I was just, I was really struck by.
class or management not being an issue at all. And again, I think that's a cultural issue. just when you're looking, when those teachers are looking at other classes around them and seeing as they're not as well organized. But what I saw was that 42 students, whether it was in grade one or grade six, students were consistently ready, willing and able to learn. And that's really what you want to see so that then you can really focus on
What are your instructional practices to engage those students?
Seth Fleischauer (12:47.83)
Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting that you frame it as, like, not, not a problem at all. and, and as a cultural thing, right? the, remember transitioning from New York city public school kids to the kids of Taiwan. I was just like, I'm in heaven. They're doing almost everything I'm telling them to do. sometimes when I'm interviewing people for these teacher propositions, I say that
42 fifth graders in Taiwan are about equal to like 26 in America. Like you still have the same kinds of behavior issues. There's still going to be like those kids who are popping off. but generally speaking, the culture is one that, values, education highly. It also, is,
the filial piety, acknowledgement of the authority in the room, these are all things that are baked into the culture versus America where we're all about our Boston Tea Party and making sure that we are questioning authority always, right? It's built into our culture. so...
Coming into a situation where you hadn't seen that in action. Yeah, it must look like it's it's not an issue at all. Whereas the expectations of the administration and of the teachers there are just a lot different in terms of what classroom management should look like. And that goes back to your, you know, person with a clipboard walking by the room, seeing a teacher talking in the front of the room, there's very little to a sale there, because that's what teaching quote unquote should look like.
And this has been a huge challenge of our program, right? Like when I started this program in 2008, we like, was teaching at the earth school in New York city, a super progressive school. was like, I'm a bring progressive education to Asia. Here I go. And I got there and I was like, no, I am not like it. And over the past like 17 years, we've like, like
Seth Fleischauer (14:58.644)
gently pushed it in a direction of something that is more student centered that looks more like what we would do here in the US even at this point. But it is still seeped in traditional culture. And there are elements of it that that still look like that even if we can provide opportunities where it doesn't look like that the baseline is going to like go back to that like, you know, the sage on the stage as opposed to the guide on the side.
And I'm wondering for you, you are seeped in that progressive pedagogy. That's what the Sustainable Learning Projects is about, to be able to create student-centered projects that have real application in the world. We, again, have been pushing our program in that direction. But when you're working in English, you have to have a
baseline of the language in order to be able to do the types of cool stuff that you do in sustainable learning projects and be like just be able to engage with it with that type of project in English, right? And so there is a recognition that some of the traditional methods for language acquisition are are a component, an important component of them then being able to apply their language.
towards more progressive projects and pedagogy, which is where we found ourselves in this program. I'm wondering for you, what's it like being seeped in that progressive pedagogy and then coming into this situation where there's a mix of progressive and traditional, and how do you support teachers there, even though, you know, if you had your way, just like when I...
founded the program in 2007, we'd be pushing this towards a more progressive pedagogy completely, but we're not there and we may never be there completely.
Trevor Soponis (17:05.803)
Part of me wants to dive into the rabbit hole of kind of, it possible, is progressive education possible in every context? To which I would argue yes, even this one. But to more directly answer your question, I just think that you have to meet teachers where they are. And so there are a number of teachers in any group of teachers. You get a group of 20 teachers. Some are going to...
be comfortable with this. Some are not, right? Some are, as you point out, perhaps in a survey, say this was not useful at all. Because people, know, what's interesting is kind of in the data that I collected as part of the New York City Teaching Fellows Program is that teaching practices get entrenched almost immediately. First year, know, fifth year, 10th year.
Those practices and what teachers believe works and what they're and the way in which they're going to structure their classroom happens very Quickly and that's actually a survival strategy in very stressful environments The evil that you know or the challenges that you know are always going to be more appealing than the ones that you don't But what we're trying to do is just meet teachers where they are and just ask them simply is there something about your teaching
about your classroom that you'd like to change or improve upon, right? And really, if you take the time to get down to that, there's really no human endeavor where you're not trying to somewhat improve or make some sort of change or it becomes boring and tedious. I think that's where a lot of the turnover comes from is if you're just doing the same thing day over day.
it does become boring, it does become tedious. You're not actually engaged in the learning process or in any kind of process. And so the foundation of lot of the work that we do is just the cycle for continuous improvement. I usually use the PDSA cycle, plan, study, act. What's the challenge? What are you gonna do? How are you gonna collect data? And is it improving? And once you teach that, which takes roughly 15 to 30 minutes around kind of here's the cycle, here's you do it.
Trevor Soponis (19:29.759)
The most common mistakes are that it needs to be this grandiose thing. You can simply have, you know, it takes 90 seconds for my students to settle down when they come in. And I want to get that down to 30 seconds. Okay. What are you going to do to help make that change? The focus being on an actual change in teaching practice. It's curiosity driven. It's curiosity based and it's outcome oriented.
And so once you're able to frame that, you can engage every teacher, whether they are the most stand and deliver type of teacher that's, you know, they're going to talk for 99 % of the class or the most progressive teacher who is deeply invested in this. You can engage every teacher as long as you develop that relationship and put a framework around what are your challenges? This isn't about
Like, yes, listening is our focus, but when do you want to put listening in your classroom? During what lessons? During what sections? During something? And yes, we did a little groundwork and said, is listening and speaking an important part of learning a language? Yes? All right. So let's move from there and move forward from there.
Seth Fleischauer (20:47.352)
So, and I know that the work that you've done with the PDSA cycle, is fiercely teacher centered, right? Like a learner centered, right? Like they are bringing up problems from their classroom and ideating on actionable strategies to be able to improve those things. At the same time, you told the story of going into their classrooms last year and recognizing that there was this deficiency in speaking opportunities.
And so we created a, uh, a week long intensive training that focused on increasing speaking opportunities in English as a foreign language classrooms. And I'd love to break down some of the ideas that were shared here and how we got to those.
Trevor Soponis (21:31.285)
Yep. So I always start with, I like to start, you know, especially in a multi-day training, start with kind of things that seem obvious, but upon closer inspection, aren't as obvious as you might think. So one of the first things we did was we just use turn and talk and examine turn and talk. So what that means is I asked, I started with,
I think it was a three to five minute writing exercises of when you do turn in talks in your room, we had established that everyone did them in some format or another, write down exactly what you're saying and doing with students during the turn in talk in your classrooms. And then we had a pair share, then another pair share, and then a group share. And the idea behind that is, and this is what I based on the observation and based on observations the world over,
is that we say turn and talk and everyone does it differently. What are you actually asking the students to do? Do they read something? And then the turn and talk is to assess comprehension. Are they actually tasked with higher order thinking and creating something during the turn and talk? Is this a recitation technique, where they're actually just practicing sentence stems?
And what teachers found out of that is that the turn in talks look differently in every classroom. And then what teachers consistently in all professional development say is the most important thing is talking to their colleagues and borrowing strategies from them. So just examining an existing and common strategy that they all use and then say, actually in this case, Seth, didn't know you did. That's how you structured turn in talks. And then do you do it?
How many times do you do it? How many times do you do it during a class? How many times do you do it during a week? it's different each time? with grammar you're doing it this way, but with spelling you're doing it this way, and with reading you're doing it this way. Again, there are million ways. And then to hear that from your classmates, and then to borrow strategies in that genuine, authentic way of just A, writing, and then B, having conversations with your colleagues, that's a great place to start, and that's exactly where we did stuff.
Seth Fleischauer (23:50.901)
Yeah, just the the opportunity to hear from colleagues in a structured way with a focused question. That's not necessarily something that people are going to bring to teacher happy hour, right? Like, how do you guys break down turn and talk? Probably going to come with some other stuff on a Friday afternoon. But part of this PD was that we were with our distance learning teachers. You were working with the teachers in the room.
who teach abroad in Taiwan in the later grades, the students transition into a distance learning program. And I was online with the teachers of that distance learning program going through the same PD. So it was a, it was a hybrid PD process. and that's just a, like a pro tip, right? If you're going to have, if you're going to have a hybrid process process, really great. If you have an extra facilitator who can just handle the online portion. so that's the role that I was taking. and.
It was, it was amazing to hear just even amongst our teachers and we have a pretty tight culture. try to, express really clear expectations to have different people talk about their different processes for this. Cause it's not something that we had focused on to break down, was I think really, illuminating and, and useful and valuable for the teachers in the room. keep, keep, going. Where did the, where did the PD go from there?
Trevor Soponis (25:22.081)
So at that point, once you have that conversation going, what you want to do is also reflect back on the things that you've done in the past. So prior, the year prior, we had focused on writing. And so one of the things that are most harmful, I believe, around most professional development learning sessions is they operate in a complete vacuum. Here's a new strategy. Now you have to go ahead and implement it.
in a new context and with new content without a lot of direct support. And so what we did is we just talked about, we asked the question, all right, how does this connect to some of the writing strategies that you have used in the past? And again, based on observations, I saw that about 50 % of the teachers were using whiteboards. I am an enormous fan of whiteboards, both.
as an individual strategy, but also as a pair strategy. So I asked the question, how could you use whiteboards during your turn in talks? Again, this addresses the differentiation around particularly students with high levels of language capabilities and students with lower levels. How are you mixing and matching writing, speaking and listening? So that, and I just want to make a explicit point to your
distance learning teachers were one of the biggest challenges of distance learning is that they cannot hear individual students in a room full of 42 students. So I simply asked, could we have a concrete outcome that they were sharing with you that you could see? And in this case, a whiteboard is a very clear example. Again, to address what's the most common criticisms.
from the teachers around turn and talks, they're speaking their native language. They're not focused on the question at hand. How do you do that? You have a concrete system of accountability. and holding up a whiteboard with an answer is a very simple strategy of doing that. And again, once they do that, they can do that in pairs and then share their results in pairs. They can then add, right? One of the things that we also talked about was open versus closed end questions rather than saying,
Trevor Soponis (27:43.938)
I'm thinking about vegetables, you know, there was a question I remember observing last year around, it was a closed end questions where the result, the answer was I think carrot, right? It was like, what's an orange vegetable, an orange and green vegetable or something like that. Right. And there was very clearly one answer, right. Rather than a listing open-ended question of saying, list as many vegetables as you can.
right, and write them down. All of a sudden that whiteboard becomes a list, right? That higher level student is going to be able to generate more than the lower level student, but in that moment that higher level student is teaching the lower level student the names of vegetables that they don't know. And then you turn it into a contest, right? How many did you have? How many students got more than three? How many students got more than five? How many students got more than 10? And particularly in classrooms where there's
They're using dojo points, a reward based system. It's an easy way to say anyone that had over any group that had over five vegetables, you get extra dojo points, right? Again, the mixing and the matching of the writing and speaking, the mixing of competition into that, and focusing on open ended questions so that students aren't fishing for a single correct answer. They're trying to.
use all of the knowledge that they've gained up to that point in a foreign language that they're using again in pairs and smaller groups and then the whole group so that you're actually building upon something for meaningful authentic language acquisition.
Seth Fleischauer (29:26.254)
Yeah, and it's it struck me throughout the week how kind of simple a lot of the ideas were. But when seen in a in a an exhaustive exploration of any given strategy or approach, it really is that proverbial like
tools in the toolbox that all teachers want out of a professional development session. Teachers are fiercely independent. They really trust themselves to know their students better than someone who's not in their classroom. And so oftentimes they want that. They just want to know what are some things they could do, not necessarily what do they have to do. Right. and I felt like this really nailed that tone of like, let's
Let's, let's focus on these specific things. Let's, let's, solicit as much, as many good ideas from the group as we can, but let's give it a framework that's going to make it easy for people to organize the information and act upon it. And, know, in the survey, we had a hundred percent positive on the sessions were relevant to my grade level and teaching contents context. I feel confident I can apply what I learned this week in my classroom.
I believe these strategies will improve student engagement and learning in my classroom. Like those are, that's some great, some great data. and I think that the reason we got there was because of this approach that, that you led. I do want to talk a little bit more about your process specifically with the remote aspect of it. you provide remote support to the teachers.
throughout the year. And this PD again was a hybrid PD where we had people who were accessing the content remotely via live video. I'm wondering like, over the years, as you've provided this blend of online and in person support, what have you learned about how to approach
Seth Fleischauer (31:39.816)
remote support effectively, especially given the fact that the teachers you're working with are on the other side of the world from you.
Trevor Soponis (31:47.925)
Yep. That's a good question.
Trevor Soponis (31:53.515)
First and foremost, let's schedule time together. And I like to do that in the morning, you know, with the enormous time difference. I like to do it in the morning for them. That's when they're freshest and most thoughtful. So usually before the school day starts or during their first period, just to get them at that peak time of kind of thoughtfulness rather than at the end of a long day. And we've done Zoom calls.
And so usually, so the remote support is that I will reach out, you know, asking kind of just general questions. And if anyone responds, around that, we'll set up a zoom call to, kind of delve deeper into a specific problem of practice. And once you have a zoom call with at least 30 minutes set aside, it's very, I've never found that teachers are reticent about sharing.
what's going on in their classroom. So it usually doesn't take more than what's going on in the classroom. sometimes it needs to be focused a little bit more towards, can you share one of your most recent lessons and just walk me through it, right? So depending on the teacher's level of, I wouldn't say comfort, but kind of curricular mapping.
Seth Fleischauer (32:57.102)
you
Trevor Soponis (33:19.019)
concepts off the top of their head, are they able to kind of say, you know, their students aren't able to use conjunctions to put together a two part sentence when that is the explicit goal over the course of this unit to more general, you know, problems of practice around, you know, students aren't spelling well, right? Just more for more specific to more general.
And then have those teachers in those moments walk you through what their challenges is and say, first and foremost, what do you think you could change about what you're doing? Right. And then once they provide a solution or two, I build on that. If they are, for instance, a first year teacher who might not be very familiar with a lot of potential solutions, I, at that point, could begin to offer some, hey, have you thought about breaking into small groups? Hey, have you thought about
using your workbook pages in this way. Hey, have you thought about independent writing before they need to share out? I'm always happy to do those, but those are really a moment of last resort because most teachers that I work with have some ideas and it's really about building collaboratively a solution by the end of that 30 minutes and say, all right, when are you going to implement this next?
and the correct answer is the next class that I have. It really needs to be within that week. And I will certainly direct it in that way. I'm just being like, let's try this today. Try this in your next class. So that these solutions, and again, that's just the cycle of continual improvement with peer support to say, what are your challenges? And let's make an actual change to what you're doing in your teaching practice.
Seth Fleischauer (34:46.158)
Thank
Trevor Soponis (35:11.625)
And then to the best of our abilities, collect some form of data. It can be exhaustive and it can be a checklist that takes you 10 seconds. But hopefully you're taking some form of data so that it's not just a gut reaction or an anecdotal of like, noticed that student really responded, which is nice. And we were trying to talk about, you know, did 50 % of students really struggle and now 75 % of students are doing well, right?
We want to have some idea of how we're moving progress forward with some form of evidence.
Seth Fleischauer (35:45.679)
Yeah. Yeah. Things I heard in your description there, um, really made me think about, uh, how, how, how unique this situation is. There aren't a lot of English as a foreign language teachers teaching abroad who have coaching help. Uh, there aren't a lot of coaches who are living in like an English as a foreign language type of country who are providing these types of services to schools and what I,
I have another podcast called why distance learning. talk about distance learning and the purpose of it. And it's all about creating opportunities where there, there would not otherwise be those opportunities. And so the first step is being able to recognize that you can use this technology to connect those teachers to you. And then it's all of these like basic things about how to support teachers. You're building relationships with them. You're listening to them, you're understanding where they're at so that you're not
offering solutions when they don't want them or you're not, you know, letting them flounder while you're holding back the solutions you could offer a lot of these like basic things and then and then going back to your PDSA cycle of continuous improvement, sustainable improvement, that those are the best practices you would do if you were over there in person. And we can use this technology to be able to
offer these services throughout the year and then occasionally have you go out there and support them in person as well.
Trevor Soponis (37:17.535)
I always say no other human ever.
believes in coaching and support like teaching. There's nothing else that anyone does ever. We have physical trainers at the gym. We have coaches for sports. In the corporate world, there's absolutely coaching, mentorship, support, training extensively at every level. And yet from teaching and
This is where, you know, I do not blame the teachers. They are entering a profession and their professional experience teaches them that I've taught for 15 years and never had anyone who did anything besides tell me what to do. That's not coaching. That's not support. That's top down direction. That's different than what we're talking about, which I will just say, which brings the initial resistance to the work that I do. Right. I come in and the most consistent response that I get in the work that I do is
No one has ever done this with me before. Every level, Taiwan, Alaska, New York City, there is not a culture of coaching and support and improvement. Certainly that's not, that's teacher directed. And this is the hill I'm going to die on. It's really, you know, on a best day, it's a shame. On the worst day, it's an embarrassment to the profession. Right? Why do we have the turnover that we have?
Why are teachers resistant to professional development? It's because of all the reasons that we've already talked about. It's just not baked into the system. And so when there is resistance or worse, I don't blame the teachers. It's baked into the system, but this is the hill I'm gonna die on. We have to do this. It makes no sense that it doesn't exist for the profession of teaching. A profession that is perfectly suited
Trevor Soponis (39:17.505)
to another set of eyes and collaboration in the classroom to help them enjoy and be more effective in their classroom every single day.
Seth Fleischauer (39:29.76)
And it's, you know, so true and yet another way I just have to shout out the school that we work with for having the amazing like bravery to do something like this in a, culture where these types of things don't really exist. and it's, they've given me the opportunity to do some amazing stuff, with the students over there and they're giving you the opportunities to do some amazing stuff with the teachers. And the result is a really,
stable, sustainable staff. A lot of people stick around for a long time because it's a great job. And the experiences that the students have, that's for another podcast, but they are unique and special and drive motivation and engagement and create the kinds of kids who come out into the world being able to really contribute in ways that many other students, especially in Asia,
have resistance to because, they've been too focused on just getting the tests, right. so yeah. well, Dr. Trevor, where should our listeners find information about you on the internet?
Trevor Soponis (40:32.577)
That's right.
Trevor Soponis (40:40.469)
Well, obviously in our previous podcast, that's always a great place to start. good memory. I'm also at the sustainable learning projects. I'm most active on my LinkedIn social media. I find that to be not surprisingly the most meaningful professional place to have some interesting conversations around this. but yeah, it's just, it is a hill I'm going to die on. It's just that teachers need support.
Seth Fleischauer (40:42.542)
I think that was episode like 13, I think.
Trevor Soponis (41:08.747)
Teachers need collaborative support and there are far too few people and entities and organizations that are saying, let's actually collaborate and work with teachers to say, what are the challenges in your room? So that we can just support students ultimately.
Seth Fleischauer (41:30.807)
Yeah. good stuff. Well, thank you so much for being here again. for our listeners, if you were inspired by this conversation, please do share it with a friend. Follow us, leave a review or rating. Thank you as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar. And remember that if you want to bring positive change to education, we must first make it mindful. See you next time.