The Fabulous Learning Nerds

Join us on the Fabulous Learning Nerds as we dive into the topic of Organizational Capacity with our special guest, Allison Rodman. Allison Rodman, the driving force behind The Learning Loop, specializes in coaching individuals and organizations to leverage their time effectively and create impactful professional learning experiences. With a background that spans across various educational roles, Allison aims to make learning an ongoing journey that strengthens individual and organizational capacity. Allison shares her insights on moving from traditional professional development to dynamic, personalized learning environments. Explore the balance between self-efficacy and collective efficacy, the impact of meaningful gamification, and the essential practices for nurturing a growth-focused organizational culture. This episode is a must-listen for educators, leaders, and anyone interested in fostering continuous learning within their organization.


 

Key Takeaways:
The significance of transforming professional learning to cater to adult learning needs, emphasizing personalization and real-world application.

Strategies for enhancing organizational capacity by fostering a culture of continuous learning and development among educators and staff.

The role of leadership in cultivating environments that prioritize collective efficacy and sustained improvement through reflective practices and meaningful engagement.
 

If you would like to connect with Allison, you can do so here: 

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodmanallison
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelearningloop 
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/thelearningloop 
X - https://twitter.com/thelearningloop 
Email - arodman@thelearningloop.com 
Website - https://www.thelearningloop.com

 

Books: 
  

Connect with the NERDS:

 

Don't forget to Like, Subscribe, and Share the episode! Leave us a review on Spotify or iTunes; we'd love to hear from you.

 

🎧 Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts.

 

Relevant Hashtags:

#OrganizationalCapacity #ProfessionalLearning #PersonalizedLearning #EducationalInnovation #LeadershipDevelopment #ContinuousImprovement #AdultLearning #DevelopmentalOrganizations #EducationalReform #LearningCulture 


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What is The Fabulous Learning Nerds?

Join the Nerds!
Welcome to the funtastic world of the Fabulous Learning Nerds! Scott Schuette and Daniel Coonrod and Zeta Gardner are Learning Executives with over 50 years’ experience between them. Together they share new ideas, learning tools, approaches and technology that increase learner engagement and impact. All while having FUN! To participate in the show and community please contact them at learningnerdscast@gmail.com 
The nerds are all about creating a community of learning, innovation and growth amongst educational professionals: Instructors, facilitators, instructional designers, learning and development professionals, trainers, leadership development professionals, learning metric gurus, sales enablement wizards and more. So, if you want to learn, connect, grow and have a good time doing it, The Fabulous Learning Nerds Podcast is for YOU!  

Allie Rodman (04:25.283)
Hey everybody, thank you so much for the invitation. I'm super excited to be with you all.

Scott (04:29.739)
What's your deal, my friend?

Allie Rodman (04:32.596)
The funny deal is that educators should be learning as much as our students are. I think so many times in the Ed space we're all about, hey, how are we designing for them? And we get to figure out what we're doing for adults too.

Scott (04:46.371)
That's fantastic. How did you get from where you were to where you are today? And a little bit about your journey into this fabulous ideation of Delta Seed Learning, too.

Allie Rodman (04:57.948)
Yeah, sure. So former teacher, coach, leader, and was really tired of the same old one size, fits all, sit and get PD that so many of us were accustomed to. And I just felt like we could be doing so much better in the space. So started digging into some of the research, really understood how adults learn differently than students, and was piloting a bunch of stuff in the field and figuring out, hey, how can we do this better from a design and facilitation standpoint?

Scott (05:27.351)
Well, you're doing some really great work and it couldn't come at a better time because I think that we all really kind of need it. That's just kind of where I'm at. So folks, without further ado, let's go ahead and get more of this great stuff from Ali in our Topic of the Week.

Scott (05:50.027)
All right, this week we're talking about strengthening organizational capacity, all about adult learning and how we can make everybody better. So Ali, let's start off with this idea we were talking earlier about self-efficacy versus collective efficacy. What does that mean and why is it important that we understand?

Allie Rodman (06:13.768)
students we know that to some degree while we don't want to be all about external incentives they do work right and I'm curious without like aging myself I'm curious as to how many of you like remember the Pizza Hut Book It program where you would like read the books and you got the stickers and then you hit a certain goal and you got the personal pan pizza it was like the ultimate thing for yeah do we remember this

daniel (06:35.609)
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Zeta (06:37.172)
So many pizzas. I love books now because of pizza.

Scott (06:39.558)
I'm in the shape of a... Yeah, I'm in the shape I am today due to Pizza Hut personal pan pizza sausage. My personal favorite. But continue.

Allie Rodman (06:48.512)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So the ultimate model of self-efficacy, particularly for an elementary and middle school kid, the reality is it doesn't end when we're adults. How many of us have trackers that we're looking at and want to hit that 10,000 step mark, or we're checking in on how many ounces of water we're drinking? It's Stanley cups. I can't even begin to understand. But.

That's where this concept of self-efficacy comes from. So I think the real challenge in adult learning is moving that idea of gold stars and progress at the individual level to then the team and organizational level. How do we help folks baseline where they are, set some really meaningful and intentional goals, and then find ways to incentivize them in a way that prompts teams to move forward from that place of collective efficacy? So when we're talking about

strengthening organizational capacity. It's not just about looking at the individuals in our system, but the ways in which we can support teams and schools and systems as a whole.

Scott (07:57.859)
That's really interesting. It begs a question, at least on my part. I would love to get your opinion then. How does this differ from, oh my goodness, I'm going to say it out loud, gamification, which was really, really big for some times, but I've had mixed results with my experience in it. So could you delineate on your opinion of this idea of collective efficacy versus gamification?

Allie Rodman (08:27.432)
I don't know that they're distinct, Scott, right? I'm gonna be completely transparent about that. Like we set student growth objectives as individual teachers, and we've got certain benchmarks that we're looking to reach as a school. But I don't know that we do a really good job of spelling out the step-by-step and having that discipline to check in with our teams and really want to continue to move forward in a way that feels measurable and fulfilling.

Instead, a lot of these goals are just kind of given to us. We're not involved as co-creators in the process. We don't get a chance or enough time to collaborate with peers and strategize around how we're gonna be able to be thoughtful about sort of moving the needle related to those goals. And there's not a lot of incentive and sometimes to get there. So when I look at gamification, I...

that might be part of the missing piece as it relates to collective efficacy. I'm still trying to think through what that looks like from a process standpoint, but there's definitely a relationship there.

Scott (09:35.115)
I think you hit it on the head when you talked about meaningful. My experience a lot of times people go, I'm going to create a leaderboard and that's going to be gamification and that'll entice everybody because we're all competitive to learn more. I think it works really, really well in certain environments. We know that it works, say, on the PlayStation network. If I get more trophies, I can go, hey, look at me, I'm really great. In the corporate learning environment, my experience has been really limited effectiveness.

because what does that really mean to me? So without meaning, I feel like gamification really falls flat. I think he really hit something on the head. If you're going to be involved, if you're going to involve or take the time to create those kinds of measurements and those kinds of scoreboard touch points, so to speak, for my audience, really be careful and really be thoughtful about what is the meaning, what is the relevancy.

from my audience and are they gonna buy into it? Cause all the time I feel like some of us just say, yep, and check that gamification box. We got a leaderboard, they're gonna get stars, they're gonna get achievements, and this is gonna drive success. And my experience has been without that relevancy and meaning, it becomes a tool for measurement, but that's about it.

Zeta (10:51.324)
Oh, I.

Allie Rodman (10:51.668)
Can we look at the disciplines? Yeah, go ahead, Zeta, jump in.

Zeta (10:54.164)
Oh, I was about to say, I totally agree on this. When it comes to making it relevant, the team play, it's keeping each other, kind of holding each other accountable, helping each other, like you said, getting together and having these discussions. That's the key point I think that we need to include in our gamification. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

Allie Rodman (11:14.808)
No, not at all. And what you said leads perfectly into some of sort of the disciplines of execution that I was going to outline when we think about this, right? So the first thing is that they're important goals. They're not just kind of passed onto us, but there is that sense of co-creation in, in the process. When we look at the scoreboard that you mentioned, Scott, it's got to be compelling. It can't be that thing that we just kind of throw up on the wall and be like, Oh yeah, that's cute. We checked off three boxes and we're moving on, right?

or we got that badge, right? And that sometimes has that feeling and microcredentialing and teamwork and things of that nature. But then there's two components on either side of the scoreboard that I think are really important. One is that we're not just looking at the lag measures, the things that happen after the fact by which we're sort of measuring our success. But as a team, we're really talking through what are the lead measures? What are the things that we're gonna do every day? What are the things that we're...

going to proactively engage in each week that are going to push us incrementally closer to the goal and how are we going to make those ongoing commitments to get there. And then on the other side of that is sort of, as you were saying Zeta, this cadence of accountability and accountability has become, you know, somewhat of a dirty word in education. But there's a way to have, you know, that partner and a clear playbook and times for pause.

daniel (12:29.639)
Yeah.

Allie Rodman (12:37.992)
that can make accountability incredibly powerful and meaningful in a way that not only advances us closer to our goals, but makes that scoreboard feel more meaningful and less daunting than perhaps it could in other spaces.

daniel (12:52.105)
You know, you bring up accountability and so often like when I've been working with people as like mentor or coaching or whatever, and they, I asked them like, okay, who's going to be your accountability partner on this? Who's going to hold you accountable? And more than I'd like to hear people go, oh, my manager will make sure I get this done or like my leader will make sure I'll get this done. I'll be like, oh, nope. Like that's, that's not a good accountability partner. You have to have, have somebody to like be your accountability partner who like isn't.

somebody you report to. And I think too often, especially in corporate structure, like we've hit around it, we build a lot of goals that don't mean anything to us. And the people who are checking and holding us accountable are the people who just wanna know if we got that number, you know, like check the box, move on. So yeah, no, I love it.

Allie Rodman (13:43.252)
People ask me all the time, right? Like, does this actually work for you? And I'm like, yeah, I've got like four accountability partners, right? And I check in with them about different things. So there's one that I check in with asynchronously on Voxer, which is like a walkie talkie app. And we check in weekly to see like, hey, how are you doing on these personal life goals? There's another where we text commitments to each other weekly and we're like, hey, you said you were gonna submit this. Did you do this? Where are you? And then there's the simple accountability partner, like that.

jumps on the Peloton with us at six in the morning, right? Because we say, hey, we're gonna do this workout together. But unless we're putting those systems in place, both personally and professionally, we're not gonna feel that sense of either self-efficacy or collective efficacy in our work. And that's when we're gonna burn out. That's when it's not gonna be fulfilling in a way that sustains us for the long game.

Scott (14:48.528)
Yeah, and

Scott (15:01.667)
place to think about things before I go do something silly. So I really love that. Thanks for sharing that. One of the things that I thought was really, really interesting in your books was this idea of organizational learning. And how maybe some of the institutions, like our schools, that are supposed to be models for learning in our industry, kind of fall short. Could you expand a little bit on that for us?

Allie Rodman (15:30.868)
Absolutely. So I have been a fan of Peter Senge's work related to organizational learning for years, really thinking through those different components of personal mastery, mental models, the ways that we engage in team learning. And as I worked through this particular manuscript at the individual, the team, and the systems level, one of the things that continued to surface for me as a lifelong educator is for whatever reason.

our schools are not models of learning for other professions, right? So we look to the medical profession to be models of health. We look to the business profession to be models of efficiency and financial growth. It would only be natural then for an external standpoint to look to education to be this model of learning at the student level and the adult level. And I think...

Certainly, we've taken that place as a profession at the student level, K to 12, even in the post-secondary space. I really want us to embrace the opportunity before us to become deliberately developmental organizations that other professions look to for, this is how we do training, and this is how we do development, and this is what staff meetings should and could look like. Just not there yet. So.

It's been really exciting for me to think about as a professional learning designer and facilitator, how do we support teams and schools and systems to design really powerful learning, not just for students, but also for adults with the opportunity to potentially be that model across fields and not just within field.

daniel (17:18.558)
You talk about educators in schools not being in these zones for how learning happens. Can you dive in a little bit? It's been a long time since I've been in school. And so when you say that learning isn't happening there, are you meaning that they're not staying on top of current trends, that they're not investing in their personnel? Can you dive in on that a little bit?

Allie Rodman (17:46.288)
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not saying that learning isn't happening. What I'm saying is it hasn't been as personal, strategic, and intentional as it has the opportunity to be. So for example, when we look at the business space and they're looking at an ideal customer or a group of customers, they're doing some really careful market research to understand what's driving them, what's motivating their purchasing power and their decisions.

We're not doing that with educators in the space, right? We're looking at student achievement and we're seeing what standards they're progressing on and where they need support. But a lot of my work with schools quite transparently is looking not just at the student achievement and growth data, but looking at needs assessment data from across the system and looking at teacher observation data and triangulating those points to say, okay, what are the pieces that we need to continue to facilitate?

whole district, whole school? And what are the areas where there's an opportunity to personalize learning and really get those pieces of information to the folks that need it most in a format and implementation method that's gonna best align to their learning preferences? It's the same thing that we ask teachers to do in the classroom with their students, but we're just not keeping pace in the adult learning space to make sure that we're doing the same, if not better, with our educators.

Zeta (19:10.7)
And I'm wondering if there's a difference in that and the reason why we're not doing that because the division between pedagogy and androgogy that maybe they think because of the external is the best way to do it with pedagogy but you know internal motivations is more with adult learners. I'm wondering if they're like, oh, we can't really learn from that. We have to do it a different way and

daniel (19:10.708)
Okay.

Allie Rodman (19:12.284)
I'm wondering.

Zeta (19:34.92)
With each organization, it's a little bit different, and they want to do it their own flavor. And then there's not much of a tangential overlap.

Allie Rodman (19:45.156)
And that distinction that you make, Zeta, is so important, between those two sort of bodies of work of works of research, but also approaches in the learning process. So we know for adults, it not only needs to be personalized, it also needs to be job embedded. We've all sat in those trainings, and we're like, OK, this is great. It sounds really flashy, but what does it mean for me in my work tomorrow? So that's a very critical part of the design process, as is opportunities for social construction,

troubleshooting so that when you're sitting in that workshop and you're like, okay, yeah, this sounds great, but you don't know my kids or you don't know my class of 30 that I'm going into fifth period tomorrow, there's got to be time and space for educators in that moment to be able to raise those concerns, to be able to workshop through them together and leave not just with a good idea, but with a great action plan.

And I don't know that the way that we currently construct a lot, but not all of professional learning opportunities right now allows for that time, not just for co-creation leading up to the workshop, but also then social construction within the workshop space itself.

Scott (20:56.279)
Where's the biggest gap, do you think? From a design perspective, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about this idea of turning back to Covey, beginning with the end in mind, what's gonna be new, better, or different when we're done? That should be the focus. We have alignment there. The rest should be easy, maybe not always easy, but at least we're aligned on that. But if you think about the things we were talking about now, what's the big gap? Is it that alignment of what needs to be new, better, or different, or is it a little bit more nuanced?

Allie Rodman (21:25.812)
So I think there's two major gaps, Scott. One of them is this feeling that every professional learning experience just needs to be a strategy or a tool dump, right? So we gather all this stuff and we just kind of give it to people without strategically thinking about, what do we want them to stop doing in the same breath? Because there are practices and strategies and tools that served us really well 10 years ago that, quite honestly, are not the best fit.

for where we are for adult learners or student learners now. And that doesn't mean that we misstepped or we made the wrong move in that moment. It just means that brains have continued to evolve and the learning experience has continued to evolve in ways that none of us could have anticipated. So I think the first thing is moving beyond just sort of that strategy dump, but helping educators say, if I'm gonna start doing this, I'm gonna stop doing that.

and then giving them, as I noted, time to dig into those, to socially construct and troubleshoot together. So that's the first thing. The second thing is I feel that we're neglecting some of the gray space in between our professional learning sessions, whether those are happening synchronously or asynchronously. So we just give folks some tools, they might even create some things together. We might even give them an action planning or an observation tool to leave with.

And then we say, okay, we'll see you for the next topic or for the next session, without as designers clearly constructing how that gray space should be utilized. So what do I want you doing in between point A and point B? What are you gonna try and report back on and work through so that when we come back to this collaborative space together, we have more data to share and experiences to share that are gonna push our work forward collectively.

Scott (23:18.219)
Yeah, that idea of flavor of the month training, which I can tell you is still very real in corporate America, right? Like, hey, we're all going to feel really good today. We're going to get chocolate ice cream. John, do you want chocolate ice cream? Great. I'll see you in six months. We're going to have strawberry ice cream. And I'm like, that's wonderful. That's great. But there is no... I mean, if we wanted to change behavior, just having that dump of information, maybe even a tool without that accountability.

daniel (23:23.178)
Hahaha.

Allie Rodman (23:31.108)
I'm here to say...

Scott (23:46.079)
just talked about accountability. Without that accountability, giving our leaders the tools that are necessary to follow up on those behaviors and measurements for change, identifying what those measurements need to be so that when we do get together for strawberry ice cream, that we all had our fill of chocolate and we get it and we love it and we want something new that's gonna make our life even more fulfilling. I think that's really, really important. So thanks for talking.

daniel (24:12.999)
pizza

Allie Rodman (24:13.332)
Absolutely. And that's natural. Go ahead. Yes, Daniel. What flavor are we going with? I would like a cookies and cream.

daniel (24:15.901)
I was gonna say, I was gonna say, I know. I was gonna say between pizza and ice cream, I'm very hungry. Ha ha ha.

Zeta (24:24.833)
Thank you.

Allie Rodman (24:27.298)
So thinking about that dip, right? Like Scott, you were saying we move from initiative to initiative flavor of the month. And this is so common in the adult learning space, whether we're talking about education or other fields, because you've got that really strong leader with the best intentions who comes out and says, OK, this is what we're going to do. We've got a clear vision. And then folks are like, whoa, wait, hold up. Like you're asking me to change my practice. Like I got to do what now?

So then we hit this like period of storming where folks just go completely off the rails because we're asking them to move and do different things than they have previously. And the leader starts to doubt their vision, right? So they back off and they say, oh wait, maybe I picked the wrong thing or I didn't do the right thing. And they go after the next shiny ball. And we end up sort of at the top of that curve again and we just keep storming and then starting again and storming. Instead of having that

Scott (25:06.959)
Mm-hmm.

Allie Rodman (25:24.348)
and that vulnerability to say, okay, yeah, this is what you're supposed to feel. As an adult learner in the space, change is really a grieving process because we're asking you to get rid of some practices that you engaged in previously and replace them with something new. But if you can get out of that dip and if you can have the fortitude as a leader to kind of get to the other space where individuals start working together and performing even independent of you, that's where the real magic happens.

Scott (25:53.123)
Yeah, it's kind of creating a growth mindset need for folks because I, I.

It took me a while to get to a place where I internally have the growth mindset. Right. I'm always working on Scott 2.0 or whatever it's going to be today. Um, and that's really important to me. I just really value that, but I gotta tell you, that was really hard. And my experience with my peers is like most of them. Aren't even thinking that way. Like I'm just not even thinking that way. Cause I need to get from point A to point B. I don't care if I get better at point A or point B.

or because it's just so hard on the ego. And you're right, change is a grieving process, but change is really hard. And so yeah, been there as a leader like, oh gee, maybe I overstepped my bounds. And I think you're right. I love the word of courage, right? Do we have courage as leaders to say, I know this is right? Or I'm pretty sure my hypothesis is right. We're going to stick to it. Then we can evaluate it at the end. But we're not going to give up. It's kind of like your Peloton friend.

at 5.30 in the morning. God bless you. We're getting up. We're going to go. Dennis Morton. We love him. We're going to get on there. We're going to rock and roll. It's going to be great. The thing that I love with your book is the title, Still Learning. I love the meaning behind that. Could you go ahead and go into a little bit of depth on that, what you meant by that, and why it's so important?

Allie Rodman (27:04.936)
doing it.

daniel (27:07.861)
Hehehe

Allie Rodman (27:28.596)
Sure, so this was a work that evolved from a group of thought partners that I really trust and have, you know, some of them accountability partners that I have worked with for years of being able to just sort of like put my heart on the page and say, hey, this was really my intention in putting together this piece. Can you help me come up with a title that conveys that? And after a variety of different iterations, one of the things that...

we came up with was this double meaning behind the word still, particularly in education. So when we talk about still learning, a lot of folks pick up the book and they're like, yes, you know what, as an educator, I'm supposed to be this model of continuous learning for my students and for my colleagues. I'm dedicated to my craft and I want to continue to evolve, not just in the pedagogical part of the practice, but androgogically as well. And that very much is part of our responsibility as professionals. But the part

of our responsibility that sometimes and many times perhaps even gets overlooked is the stillness of our job. Right? So we look to students as individuals who can engage in reflection and we encourage that in them at the end of a quarter or following a summative assessment to be able to say, hey, what did you learn? Where can you grow? How can you push yourself?

But for whatever reason, our profession continues to value and overvalue this constant state of busyness, where we're multitasking very inefficiently and we're continuously on the hamster wheel in a way that we're now beginning to see the ramifications of, as we face a number of staffing shortages, as we're struggling to keep folks in the profession.

We've got to embrace that meaning of stillness with the same value on the side of pause as we do busyness. And when we're constructing professional learning opportunities and staff meetings and thinking about the ways in which we craft and schedule educators time, it has as much value to give them that opportunity for pause and reflection as it does to push them forward to another meeting or another workshop or another.

Allie Rodman (29:45.024)
point of collaboration that might not be the most intentional use of their time.

Zeta (29:50.956)
I love that Allie. Rest is not a luxury. It is a necessity for us to be able to digest and be able to think and ruminate and reflect on what we learned that way we can then share it with others. That's key with the process. You need to have those moments. I'm glad you brought that up.

Scott (30:10.431)
Yeah, I can't remember where I heard this from, but I find it to be so true. A lot of people say, well, you learn by doing, right? And, but no, we really learn by thinking about what we did. And I think you're right. We don't take those times for pause. I mean, you know, from an instructional design perspective, building that in after class, and then maybe that little reminder days, weeks, hours later to continue that thinking process for learning is great.

but also from standard practice, post-mortems, right? This, hey, did we do okay? What did we learn? How can we get better? We live in this quadrant one world of everything is on a rush and everything is so urgent and important and we never take that time to evaluate if we're doing things the right way or if we can innovate and get better. And I think that's where the rubber hits the road. And I think I love the fact that we're talking about that stillness, that

that pause of, hey, can we get any better? Or you know what I'm saying? What are the numbers telling us? Where are we at with all of this? Because oftentimes, by the time we discover that there's something that we could have done better, it's too late. It's too late. And now, I might be facing a layoff or I might be facing business results that aren't

what I expected or people results that aren't what I expected. So I think that's really awesome. I really thank you for sharing that.

Allie Rodman (31:43.664)
And one of the strategies that I talk about in the book related to that are after action reviews, right? So how are we stepping back? And sometimes those reviews were a bit hesitant to engage in them because we think, oh, we're going to sit down and identify all the things that we went wrong, or that went wrong. But actually, some of the most powerful reviews are the ones where we engage in success analysis and say, hey, let's figure out all the things we did right, and then figure out how to replicate.

So I encourage folks in your work to become more deliberately developmental organizations to not shy away from some of those nurture, from nurturing some of those candor generating practices that can help us really think through, how do we get honest and real and transparent with each other about how we do this work better?

Zeta (32:33.681)
I totally agree.

Scott (32:38.071)
Did you have something to say again?

daniel (32:39.345)
No, I was going to jump in and be like a hundred percent. I love it. I love it. I actually do. I do want to go back. You mentioned like multitasking and multitasking has become such a part of like how we get things done nowadays for better or for worse. Mostly I think a lot worse. Like in the book, do you talk about like how to get away from like, like you talk about stillness and stuff like that. But do you have like any specific strategies you talk about?

about getting away from the multitasking trap.

Allie Rodman (33:12.956)
So some of the most brilliant research in this area comes from Laura Vanderkam's work, and she has done some fascinating time log research with individuals across professions and different socioeconomic levels. And one of the things that she finds is that we actually overestimate the amount of time that we spend working. And it's not because we don't value work, but as you noted, Dan, like we...

spend a lot of time working and doing other things at the same time, right? So let's think about the typical educator. Like you're home in the evening, you might be responding to email and watching TV, or grading papers and watching TV. And if you were to log that in a time log, you would probably say that's work time, right? You're not being particularly efficient on the work side of things, and you're not getting true recovery on the personal side of things. That idea of multitasking is just really inefficient.

single tasking. Our brain cannot code switch in a way that meets that demand. So being very real about our goal setting processes, and I work a lot with educators in a variety of different roles on this, to say, you know, what are the goals that you're setting professionally, but also in regard to your relationships with other people and the ways that you're centering yourself individually? Because those are equally important.

And then how are you taking very disciplined action each and every day to say, hey, you know what? This is the time block that I'm gonna commit to this. And when that's over, I'm gonna move to the next thing and to be very comfortable doing that instead of using our inboxes and other mechanisms as the action plan for the day. Really being intentional about what those goals are and how they're driving the day-to-day action so that we don't look at the end of the day and be like, wow, that was a really great plan I had, but I've done absolutely nothing.

related to my goals.

Scott (35:09.563)
I kind of live that every day, sadly. It's one of those things. Um, fascinating. I love that you brought up the myth of multitasking. It's a myth everybody knows such thing. Hey, as we begin to sadly think about, um, winding things down, I wanted to give you an opportunity, Ali, you know, is there anything, any advice or any, um, thoughts that you really wanted to talk about tonight, but you haven't had?

daniel (35:11.093)
Ha ha ha!

Allie Rodman (35:12.425)
Thank you.

Allie Rodman (35:20.828)
Yeah.

Scott (35:36.427)
that opportunity to share with our audience. That'll give you a couple minutes to kind of share those ideas with everybody listening.

Allie Rodman (35:44.072)
Certainly. So one of the things I would encourage is to just really get to know yourself as a learner. What are the ways that shows up in your personal life as well as your professional life? And how does that help you better relate to other individuals as well as connect and continue to see forward progress in your personal goals? So whether that means you're better understanding your personality type or the ways in which you connect or what some of your own personal strengths are.

really understanding that growth profile for yourself as a learner can continue to help you better connect with other individuals at your school and your district, as well as yourself, and be able to move that practice forward. I also want folks to know that related to the book, I was really intentional in its design to make sure that it wasn't just a static piece of text, but instead continued to evolve in much the way that our learning does. So,

Every chapter includes a QR code that goes to a bank of online downloadable and editable resources. And as I continue to engage in this work in the field, those have been updated and revised and changed so that we have that community of learners that continues to support one another in each of these disciplines as we continue to grow.

Scott (37:05.919)
Allison Rodman everybody. Thank you so much for joining us your book still learning strengthening professional and organizational capacity We'll have a link to it in the show notes. Be sure to go check that out Allie, could you do us a favor? Could you let everybody know how they could connect with you?

Allie Rodman (37:22.868)
Absolutely. So check out my website www. I'm also on all the social media channels at The Learning Loop, and I am hosting a free monthly webinars and would love to see you in that learning space so we can continue connecting and growing together.

Scott (37:39.715)
Fantastic. I learned a ton and oh my gosh, love the energy. We'll make sure that we have you back someday to talk about that third book you write, right? And all the other groovy stuff that comes with that. Again, Ali, thank you so much. Daniel Son.

Allie Rodman (37:54.004)
Thank you.