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The Make It Mindful podcast, hosted by Seth Fleischauer, explores education through the lens of mindfulness, focusing on practical, transformative solutions for teaching and learning. Each episode features conversations with educational changemakers, authors, psychologists, and leaders as Seth uncovers what they do, why it works, and how listeners can incorporate those insights into their own educational practices. By applying a mindfulness lens, the podcast encourages listeners to look objectively at what’s really going on in education, using that perspective to create positive, lasting change.
Seth Fleischauer (00:00.662)
Hello everyone and welcome to Make It Mindful, the podcast where we explore how to keep schools relevant by looking through the lens of mindfulness and asking the question, what's really worth paying attention to here? My name is Seth Fleishour. My cohost Lauren Pinto is on a break, but together we delve into the world of education by interviewing change makers and focusing on practical, transformative solutions for teaching. And today my guest is Nicole Schaeffer. Nicole, welcome and thanks for being here.
Nikole Sheaffer (00:28.078)
Thank you, Seth. It's been great to get to know you and to also, I'm so happy to be part of this conversation today.
Seth Fleischauer (00:35.446)
Excellent. Well, thanks again. Could you please introduce yourself to our listeners?
Nikole Sheaffer (00:42.734)
Sure, I am an artist, a mom, a writer, and truly an educator and facilitator. I've been playing with that idea of, you know, I went into teaching to teach, but actually now as I'm moving into this third stage of my career, I think facilitator is a better description of what I do. But I came to education in a very different pattern or pathway. My background is in environmental studies.
I spent some time in India. I was really thinking that I wanted to get into nonprofit management and work in DC. And what ended up happening is I became a writer of annual reports. And in the late 90s and early 2000s when corporate sustainability became the hot topic, I was the bridge between sustainability and business writing.
And then this thing happened called 9 -11 and I was working very close to the White House and decided that I was going to quit my very, very lucrative job working at a firm and went back to school to become a teacher. And went to become a teacher's aide during the day. So I actually like did the whole went to school at night to do that.
you know, later on in life, I decided that I needed to move back towards my home in Pittsburgh here, where I was able to start a family and be closer to my family here. And I could not find a teaching job. Western Pennsylvania had been kind of a space where you had to get a job based on someone that you knew. And so for me,
I was determined to find somebody that didn't know me that understood my creative endeavors. And one particular day I was jogging in our natural park with my baby buggy, as we say here in Pittsburgh, and came across this school called, that was just starting up called the Environmental Charter School. And at that point in time, I met the CEO and he kind of told me a little bit about what was happening. And I said, you know what?
Nikole Sheaffer (03:07.918)
I think that I can do all of the things that you're just asking me asking or looking to do, which was curriculum writing, developing a connection to the environment and getting kids outside. And so soon after that, I was the second employee for what has become the environmental school district. We started at 30 kids at each grade level at K through three.
And today we'll be graduating, well not today, but in June we'll be graduating our first class of seniors and we're at about a thousand kids now. So that's a little bit about me.
Seth Fleischauer (03:42.454)
Wow. Okay, gosh, I have like nine lines of questioning here. Just to based on that bio. Okay, I'm going to start at the beginning. You said you call yourself a facilitator, not an educator. I think that like a lot of movement and education right now is pointing in the direction of teachers in general, being facilitators and not educators. And I'm wondering if you can unpack that for us a little bit. What does it mean to be a facilitator, not an educator?
And how does that apply to your current position? And how do you see those same things applying to like the teacher's role in general?
Nikole Sheaffer (04:21.23)
Yeah, a couple things. I actually have been reflecting on this as I've been working on a hiring process to kind of find and uncover innovative leaders around the country that can facilitate the kind of learning and progressive leadership that we need in schools today, which is a little bit different than the traditional superintendent. That said, what you do when you go through a process of learning about other people's stories as you start to think about your own, and I,
Seth Fleischauer (04:47.862)
Hehehe... Hehehe...
Nikole Sheaffer (04:50.03)
I'm not sure. I didn't, I wasn't an amazing teacher. In fact, I was probably pretty average. But if I look back now, the reason I probably didn't do well on those observations at the beginning of the year is because I was really about facilitating the experience for kids. And so there was very little of me talking and explaining, but rather digging into big hairy questions.
making kids feel intellectually uncomfortable that they had to kind of discover something that they didn't know or make connections between something that did not feel like they had connections. That makes me actually feel kind of proud that I was kind of in that space and bucking the system at the time.
As you know, fast forward to what we're looking for in terms of leadership and in terms of what we need in classrooms, you know, one of the questions I ask key candidates that are in leadership roles is, you know, what are adults doing in our schools? What do you, in a perfect and ideal space, if you could wave a magic wand, what are those adults doing? Are they standing at the front? Are they sitting on the floor? Are they talking with students? Are they asking questions?
Are they frowning? Like what is actually happening? And the better answers that I get are the ones that are utilizing those facilitation techniques, questioning, moving away from things that we know of being the stage on the stage. But it's even more nuanced than that, I think, as we move into this kind of post pandemic era of really helping kids or adults thread the needle.
but not kind of give them the whole package because you were so easy. And maybe this is a parenting lesson that I've learned. It's so easy to kind of give the answer or to make the struggle or the grappling easier, but a really effective and powerful facilitator can get you right to where you need to go to make the next step independently and empowered to do it on your own.
Seth Fleischauer (07:09.302)
Fascinating. So, so in your mind, facilitation is essentially, if you want to like kind of put it in the zone of proximal development, it's like pushing as far onto that edge of where a learner can go with help as you possibly can, but not actually giving them the, any of the tools you're letting them develop them on your own. Is that, is that essentially what you would say?
Nikole Sheaffer (07:35.758)
I would probably add a slight caveat to that and that I think exposing tools and allowing kids to become resourceful is part of the way, part of the necessary landscape or conditions that you need to actively facilitate discovery, curiosity, learning.
If a kid is coming from not knowing how to connect with key people in their community, or if a kid doesn't understand how to break down a problem to smaller chunks, or if a kid doesn't know what tools to use to cut something from large to small, that is our job, is to kind of help guide them to the available tools.
to evaluate those tools so that they can move forward and move an idea or a problem forward.
Seth Fleischauer (08:37.718)
got it. So you're not totally throwing the traditional methods out the window. There's still room for direct instruction. There are skills that they need to have in order to be able to do this more open exploration on their own and to dig into these big hairy questions. But but that is not done in a vacuum or without a foundation that you're establishing.
Nikole Sheaffer (08:56.974)
No, and that's actually, you know, that's the equity piece that we've got to get better at. Instead of, you know, one of my major faults, I think that as I was even designing the the inch, the curriculum infrastructure at ECS is I was designing from my perspective and what I believed was the ideal experience. And when you're wrestling with where kids are coming from, what experiences they've had or not had.
that ideal experience might look different and the tools and the resources that you need to kind of support a kid to get to that point are different and more personalized.
Seth Fleischauer (09:38.742)
And so how do you incorporate the experience, the varied experiences of your students when trying to get them toward some sort of ideal or does the ideal change? Do you frame it differently, right? Because you still want to have like a vision for where the student is going, but you want to be able to accommodate the different backgrounds, the different ways that someone might get there or is it the different ways that there might look once they're there?
You know what I mean? Like, like, are you are like, how do you change the vision of where you want education to go based on incorporating the various backgrounds of your students?
Nikole Sheaffer (10:05.71)
Right. Yeah.
Nikole Sheaffer (10:17.07)
So boy, that's a really powerful question. And I was thinking about this today with one of our colleagues. And I'll give you an example. I'm not sure that this is the most concise or vibrant example, but it allowed me to think about letting kids fail so that the next time that they are moving forward in a problem, they have now.
Seth Fleischauer (10:39.958)
Hehehe.
Nikole Sheaffer (10:43.054)
gained some of the access and opportunity based on that experience. So the experience was, is there was a group of kids that one of the, you know, at the ECS middle school, their focus is on agency and really moving kids to take that teenage, that early teenage hormonal angst and do something about it, right? And so that, yeah, or yeah, or do something with it. But as many, and this is actually not, I think a kid problem, but maybe an American problem, I'll just say that.
Seth Fleischauer (11:01.398)
Or do something with it.
Nikole Sheaffer (11:12.878)
is that we jumped to the solution. And so this particular group of women plus girls, they decided that they wanted to take on banned books. And they were writing this big long thing about how they're going to come to the board and tell the board what they thought because of banned books. And I knew and all the other adults know that actually ECS doesn't ban any books. But they jumped and
forgot to kind of miss, they missed a bunch of steps before you would go to the board. And so they had, you know, the teacher or the facilitator had to say, okay, well, before you go to the board, who are the kind of the first people that you should talk to? And so leading them to the tools or the mechanism or the kind of processes that are in place is something that I think we assume that kids know, or we assume that,
Seth Fleischauer (11:44.79)
Yeah.
Nikole Sheaffer (12:12.27)
that if they don't know it, they should, right? And so I'm trying to kind of nuance that question of what you're saying of how do you scaffold kids that have had experiences is actually, I think you have to let them explore, make mistakes and not self -correct before they decide that they need to move to the next step. So they had to go back to the drawing board and rethink their strategy.
Seth Fleischauer (12:36.886)
Yeah, but I want to press in a little bit because you were saying I find it really fascinating this this notion that you said that you had this vision for education. You realize that this vision was embedded in your personal experience, but then you realize that you were discounting the experience of your the students with different backgrounds than your own. So how has your vision changed because of that? Right? Like is it still is it just that you need to provide scaffolding for them to get to?
Nikole Sheaffer (12:56.11)
Mm -hmm.
Seth Fleischauer (13:04.886)
the vision that you've established or is the vision different now?
Nikole Sheaffer (13:08.974)
The vision is not different. I think the, that's a really good question. And I will tell you when, when that moment happens and you're kind of, you're thinking, my gosh, have I been designing from a place of privilege? Have I been designing from, you know, my blind spot as a white middle -class woman who had a very kind of quote unquote American experience of, of schooling. when you,
have to rumble with that and you don't know the other lived experiences, it's devastating. It's emotionally raw, I will tell you. And I don't mean to be trivial about it. But to me, the mechanism is building more understanding that certain pieces of that vision are non -negotiable regardless of
of socioeconomic status, of race, of background, of religion, right? And so some of those, in my case, my belief is that kids need to connect with the outdoors, not only for the mental health and benefits that we know for the long -term physical spaces that we live and grow, but also for really being able to build
empathy and connection to space and place and people, as well as see how what impact you can make in your backyard can actually create ripple effects in other spaces. So it's the how that I think has changed. It's not the vision or the why. It's the mechanisms taking a step back.
being a facilitator, allowing kids chances to skill up or build more capacity to have more cultural competency in their neighborhood, understanding where and how to utilize resources and people in different ways. It's the how that I don't think I had right.
Seth Fleischauer (15:23.158)
Yeah, okay. So the vision remains the same, but you've gained greater awareness, greater consciousness, greater mindfulness around the path to get there. Acknowledging that your experience, one of privilege, is not necessarily the experience of all of the students that are going to come through the door and that you need to meet them where they're at in order to bring them to this space that all of the educators at ECS have shared in the vision of creating.
You talked about some non -negotiables. You talked about the outdoors being one of those connections to the outdoors. It sounded like you were talking about systems thinking in terms of how interacting with the outdoors in this one place might have a ripple effect on something else. You talked about empathy and connection to society and culture.
Am I hearing you right that those are some of the other non -negotiables? And if not, what are the other non -negotiables?
Nikole Sheaffer (16:24.302)
I think you nailed it, right? A system is designed perfectly for the outcomes we have, right? And I would argue that our current system, if we think about the lay of the land, is perfectly designed for the types of, the way that the institution of education has pumped out its people, right?
We're polarized. Well, why is that? Because we're not teaching perspective building in K -12. We are not sensitive or empathetic or compassionate to another's lived experiences. Why is that? Because we're not embedding it into the spaces and places. We don't value thinking about how one action could impact your built, your natural, or your social environment.
And that's because we're not getting into systems thinking and how interconnected kind of this ecosystem of the world we all partake in. Beauty is another one. Beauty and love, I think are often just counted as trivial or not something that needs to be part of the school day. But beauty and love are the critical pieces to understanding
art or appreciating and providing spaces and places for people to express themselves in free and open ways. And critically to the importance of maintaining an effective and stimulating democracy in which other people's views and opinions can be valued. So going back to if we change the values and the things that we find important in a K -12 setting, what would the outcome look like?
if it was across the board, if we had a chance to go back and redesign it.
Seth Fleischauer (18:23.094)
And I wonder, cause when I think about systems, human systems are so utterly complicated, right? And, and, you know, I live in Portland, Oregon, without getting too much into like the local politics here. I'll just say that there are some extremely good intentions that don't turn out with the impact that people intend. and I'm, and I'm wondering if, if that is at all a part of your teaching of systems that.
They are somewhat unpredictable that you can have good intentions and try to do good things. Yet the outcome might not be of that same impact if you because you've inevitably missed one of the infinite threads that impact, you know, this outcome, right? Like is that part of what you talk about or are you basically like, you know, this is the way you should think about systems. You know, these five things are going to happen if you do this one thing and you're just trying to kind of
It's like it's like a game of chess, right? Like you're you're trying to teach like strategic thinking.
Nikole Sheaffer (19:23.374)
Totally.
Nikole Sheaffer (19:27.31)
So you can never, and this is the science, I'll put my science hat on, you can never eliminate the variables. And so allowing the opportunity to gather and allow folks to know that there's no unicorn, there's no perfect solution to anything. I mean, global warming, the education sector, politics, one solution.
is actually very polarized or mindset, right? That's like saying that it's very linear to change something that's actually inherently human and not linear. Teaching that in spaces looks different, not only to, and I work primarily with adults now, to students and adults. And I will say the amount of systems thinkers that we have working with students,
is it's not prolific is what I'll say.
Seth Fleischauer (20:27.554)
Laughter
Nikole Sheaffer (20:30.67)
But what I'm finding, and again, this is a total mid -course correction, I think, in my head of what I thought, innovation and how you spin change or how you make the inflection points actually resonate and maybe not change the whole system, but make some impact that has a ripple effect, which...
is still a win, right? And that's the optimist in me. It's still a win even if you didn't solve at all. You've got a little chunk in that armor that's pulled out. But I think we try too hard to solve for poverty when really it's like, okay, well, can we think about that problem in a different way? Can we think about it at the local level? Can we think about it on our street? So making sure that we're actually
scaling down and trying new ways of thinking and exploring a problem. And every idea or every way that we approach that problem then isn't going to necessarily scale either. But the inflection point is what you're looking for. And that's what I try to tell teachers and I try to tell kids. It's like, you're not going to solve for world peace. But what's something that we could do in this classroom to make sure that we speak.
Seth Fleischauer (21:39.638)
Hmm.
Nikole Sheaffer (21:51.278)
in civil tones to each other, that we talk to each other. And then how might that look when I go into the cafeteria? Or how might that look when I go into the board meeting, I'm really hot about some issue that really ticked me off? So it's drawing those connections. And that to me, and this is me being a hypothesis, that's my hypothesis of how you actually create long -term change is these tiny inflection points that keep building over time.
Seth Fleischauer (22:20.822)
Yeah, absolutely. That's, you know, that's culture, right? And it sounds like one of the aspects of your culture at the environmental charter school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which by the way, I first learned about when a good buddy of mine from college sent his kid there, like a long time ago. and then I met Vicki, your colleague and she works there as well. I was like, can't believe it's the same school. And so I've been, I've been a fan for a while. I just, I think that the work that you guys are doing is, is really on point.
Nikole Sheaffer (22:35.054)
cool.
Seth Fleischauer (22:50.198)
And what I'm hearing, which is no surprise, but it's delightful to hear, is that you are in an active negotiation with your culture around what it means to fail. You're trying to change the relationship to failure from one that is seen on an A through F letter grade scale to one that becomes like an opportunity for growth.
I have to say that I'm still unpacking that at 44. I had to check myself recently because something I was doing at work was I just invested way too much in the possibility of it succeeding and had lost the frame of reference where really what it is is a learning opportunity. Everything we do is a learning opportunity, but we're in this zero -sum culture where everything's a win or a loss.
Nikole Sheaffer (23:16.59)
Mm -hmm.
Seth Fleischauer (23:41.206)
and you're trying to get wins and you're trying to avoid losses. And I think that that, that, being able to teach that relationship to failure, I mean, all the entrepreneurial books, all the like, you know, best business leaders, like this is what they all say, right? Like be willing to fail, be willing to fail. but there's that emotional component of it. That's so difficult for people to, to unpack when so much of our culture is telling us to win. so I, I, I love that. That is a, a part of the culture that you're building.
I'm wondering how else you could describe the culture of ECS and how that relates to like what you guys actually do, like what a student's day actually looks like.
Nikole Sheaffer (24:23.886)
sure. So I use and I hope this does not sound too cheesy or ridiculously optimistic and Pollyannaish, but there's a quote by David Orr that we use all the time and this is from back in 2008 when we first started working at the school and that's this quote. The plain fact is that the planet doesn't need more successful people, it does desperately seek more
peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world more habitable and humane. These qualities have little to do with the success as we have defined it. So, I use that quote not only with students and faculty, but with parents and guardians and caregivers, because honestly there are...
Seth Fleischauer (25:10.295)
And as we have defined it, that's the important part, right?
Nikole Sheaffer (25:23.534)
this definition of success leaks into any of the best practices or work that we want to do. And it's based on nostalgia, it's based on mindset, it's based on habit, honestly. And so changing that definition, that has been a system that I think has been really difficult to shift as we...
Seth Fleischauer (25:40.246)
Mm -hmm.
Nikole Sheaffer (25:52.462)
work with students and students and I know that Vicki has talked to you about this like we have to unschool students in many cases by the time we got them to middle school we're doing a project right now kids don't know how to a be resourceful or b
not raise their hand to ask a question. And that sounds super, again, super simple, but we've created spaces that kids have these routines and procedures that actually hinder the opportunities to try and fail, to make a crappy first draft. They don't want to really hear feedback because the job really is, I get rewarded once it's done, not necessarily when it's...
half done or partly or it didn't work. And so I'm not going to lie. That has been an incredibly difficult challenge. I will. I when we were working on the high school and designing the high school, I actually used kid focus groups to design what would make you know, if you could wave a magic wand and create a new high school, what would that look like? And honest to God, kids essentially designed the same thing that they see already. They could not.
Seth Fleischauer (27:12.438)
Hmm.
Nikole Sheaffer (27:13.134)
imagine not having bells, for example, or not moving from class to class in a synchronized way. And to me that was, I was like, no, no, guys, stop thinking that. Like, let's think about like, what if you could add video games? I could not even fathom. And these were high performing kids. These were kids that are getting straight. They were like, nope, I know the system. This is how I'm going to succeed. So, right. So, un.
Seth Fleischauer (27:38.39)
Yeah, they're getting straight A's within the system.
Nikole Sheaffer (27:42.318)
schooling is, it's complicated. It's complicated in front of kids and it's also complicated to communicate to families. And then you gotta also believe that teachers are saying, okay, what's okay if kids don't raise their hand and maybe aren't sitting in their seat or turn in a half project to me. And that's also another kind of barrier that we're challenged with as well.
Seth Fleischauer (27:51.286)
Yeah.
Seth Fleischauer (28:09.43)
So it sounds like you're, I mean, you operate at a school, you just use the term unschooling. Like you're essentially like trying to unschool school, but it's still school. So which parts of school are the non -negotiables that you want to keep in school and which parts are you unschooling?
Nikole Sheaffer (28:28.686)
So we're doing it in again these kind of small.
inflection points where we can, right? Because we're not in a, we don't have the conditions set up even in a charter school, even in an innovative space, even with being able to pick and choose who we hire and fire. It's still not, it's still not the conditions for rapid iteration to happen like it would in a startup. However, I would say the pieces that we can try to exercise consistently,
is like out the door learning. And when we call out the door learning, that's not going out and hugging trees or, you know, creating, you know, picking up litter. This is like I am too, you know, that's my yeah, but we're not doing that. But we are thinking about, OK, well, you know, who are the organizations in a community that we can connect students with who are going to have real conversations and there's not going to be a power dynamic between.
Seth Fleischauer (29:12.79)
Personally, I'm a fan of hugging trees, but go on.
Nikole Sheaffer (29:32.238)
who knows more and who doesn't. Where are the resources or assets in our community that we can utilize when we don't have funds to go on a field trip, right? So where do we go? We can go to the library and kind of talk to the librarian and figure out where we might get a little money. So figuring out the spaces and places that out the door learning can happen is one way that we think that we do not negotiate on. Another piece that I would say depends on the season.
but is really critical is interdisciplinary learning and shared contexts. So we know that kids, that the learning gets juicier and more sticky when the context is relevant and wide. So if we can have our kindergartners go on a field trip and investigate all of the playgrounds in the city of Pittsburgh and measure how high, you know.
with using very basic hand movements or things like that to understand what makes a really great playground, they can come back and practice their early math literacy skills to design the most ideal playground for the city of Pittsburgh, right? So it's taking an idea and really blowing it up so that kids almost recognize how the skills are related to a context that is important to them and interesting, to be honest.
Seth Fleischauer (30:57.078)
Yeah, it's, so what I'm hearing is that the out the door learning gets them to engage with members of the community that, provide some of that context that you're talking about of like how these things actually operate, how these, concepts actually operate within out in the real world. they also get to the, the systems part of things where, where you can see how things are connected to each other as the more connections that you make.
in the community. And by doing that outside the door learning, you're reaching some of those inflection points, right? You are getting to the point where students can see the relevance of their work beyond the classroom walls. They can see the way that different subject areas weave together to become the fabric of life. And they're not just these silos that you have to get good grades on.
Nikole Sheaffer (31:55.886)
Correct. Nobody asks you about your statistics grade after high school, right? Like no one cares. I try to tell everybody that. I'm like, no one really cares how far you went in math. They don't. Unless you're maybe an engineer, but.
Seth Fleischauer (32:07.83)
Yeah.
Seth Fleischauer (32:11.734)
I think there's some incredibly interesting conversations going on right now around the future of education and what the purpose of education is in a world that is changing so rapidly and where the skills that seem incredibly relevant one day fall by the wayside and seem irrelevant the next day where...
You know, when we were kids, like being a plumber was something that was, we were told that like the lesser people like, you know, went to that, those professions. And like right now I look at that job and I'm like, that seems awesome. You can work with your hands the whole time. You get paid well. That seems great. Right. So, so, and, and when society is at this like rapid rate of change, it can be really difficult as educators to look out into the world and.
predict what it's going to be like and therefore decide what we're doing with our students. And I think that a lot of teachers, the answer to that question is like, well, okay, I'm just going to follow the standards, right? The standards that I'm supposed to be teaching, that's my job, that's what I'm here to do. But you're in a position of innovation where you can actually make some of those decisions. You can actually make some of those predictions and...
change what is being done on your campus based on what you see. And I'm wondering, as a last question here, like where do you see the future of education going?
Nikole Sheaffer (33:38.766)
Can I just add a change first? Can I reframe your question to where do I see the future of the teaching profession going? Because I think that that, I'm not sure. It's a little bit of chicken or egg, which is going to happen first. And at first, I mean, for the last 20 years, I've been thinking, we're going to change the system. We're going to change the system. I'm actually beginning to think that the system is actually going to.
Seth Fleischauer (33:51.83)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that answers some of my questions. Yeah, I like it.
Nikole Sheaffer (34:08.43)
evolve and change based on the next set of teachers that are coming out of spaces. And some of the programs are cruddy as we know because we're not getting like the highest and brightest and most amazing teacher certifications out there. But I think that the ways in which teachers are working, if we've got the next crop that really starts to define what they need in order to or what conditions they need and
This is not popular or probably you can cut this out if you need to. But instead of unions deciding what the conditions are, it's the teachers that are creating the spaces that are most conducive for learning that are ultimately gonna decide how that looks. So I'm thinking, you know, what the structure of the day looks like. I'm thinking...
Seth Fleischauer (34:44.374)
Hahaha.
Nikole Sheaffer (35:07.502)
you know, no longer classes that are defined by content, but rather by process. I'm thinking that that there will be executive functioning classes that kids are going to have to do as prerequisites to get into a course. I think that there's also in this redefining of the profession that you're going to see more creativity and
artfulness come back into the profession, though science is an important part of an effective data collection is also very important for student growth. I think that you're going to see the next population, this Gen Z group starting to question what they've been sold and then also kind of reinvent what that looks like to make it a more sustainable space to work again for 30 years. Because I think that.
I think it's going to swing back, right? We know that teachers are leaving the classroom in record numbers because the work's not sustainable and it's not fun. And there's so many different pieces to the administrative puzzle to make that teacher even have that job. And I think that it's going to be this next cadre of really young, passionate.
educators that are going to say, no, we're not going to, we're not actually not going to teach like that anymore. And they're going to push the old white superintendents out.
Seth Fleischauer (36:41.654)
I love it.
I love that because it's like, you know, this is an entire generation that you and I and other educators, we've centered student agency as part of the educational approach. So I like that theory that like, you know, raising an entire generation to think that they can implement change might create a generation that implements change. And I guess we'll find out.
Nikole Sheaffer (37:07.246)
That's the hope. I'm very hopeful. I really am. I think that that's going to be, it's a total shift again in my thinking, but I think that it's the facilitators and the educators that are going to totally flip the table.
Seth Fleischauer (37:08.278)
Yeah.
Seth Fleischauer (37:23.03)
I love it. And I love it in the context of the theme of this podcast. You know, we talk about mindfulness. We talk about what to really pay attention to. You've got an entire generation of teachers who are coming up, paying attention to what is going on around them and questioning a lot of what's happening. And that's just part of their process now. and you also talked about, I think something that's incredibly important, that not enough people think about, which is systems thinking, right?
I think that systems thinking is an act of mindfulness. It is an act of empathy. It's an act of like getting outside of yourself and starting to look around and notice things that are happening around you and not just what is happening to you. And so I really like that we brought you on the podcast today to discuss those things that is absolutely in line with our ethos here on make it mindful. last, last question is where should our listeners find you on the internet if you want to be found?
Nikole Sheaffer (38:20.782)
Great question. Well, I've recently launched a new business called the Thinking Lab. And the intention of the Thinking Lab, though it's not all that lucrative right now, is to be a space both in person or virtually or in brick and mortar to solve big, hairy, audacious problems at the community level. Yeah. And then I also at the thinkinglab .com, you can also, it's...
Seth Fleischauer (38:41.458)
Be hag or be happy, I guess.
Nikole Sheaffer (38:49.934)
we're in a phase of redoing the website to factor in both coaching, organizational systems thinking, and creativity and fun in the workplace.
Seth Fleischauer (39:04.886)
Ooh, ooh, I'm intrigued. So let's go to thethinkinglab .com to check that out. Is that the right link? Okay. Well, Nicole, thank you so much for being here today. We really appreciate your time, your candor. This is a great conversation. Another one of those conversations where I wrote down seven questions and I just, I asked you to introduce yourself and we just went from there. I don't think we had any of those questions. We kind of.
Nikole Sheaffer (39:07.758)
in a minute.
Seth Fleischauer (39:29.974)
but it was just such a deep conversation that flowed so naturally and just as we knew it would, right? When we were talking about having you on. So thank you so much for being here. For our listeners, if you'd like to support the podcast, please do tell a friend, give it a follow, give it a rating or a review. Thank you as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar. And remember that if you'd like to bring positive change to education, you must first make it mindful. See you next time.