Maia Heyck Merlin—The Together Teacher

[00:01] Justin Baeder:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:16] Maia Heyck Merlin:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and today I'm interviewing Maya Haik-Merlin, author of The Together Teacher. plan ahead, get organized and save time. And I'm very excited to speak with Maya because as you probably know, organization and productivity are big interests of mine.

[00:34] Announcer:

And now our feature presentation.

[00:36] Maia Heyck Merlin:

So Maya, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us. So I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about yourself and what your focus is in your life's work.

[00:46] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Yes, and I like that you frame it in life's work. So I would say my number one mission is basically to help people who work in or near schools manage their time and to-dos, but in a way that fits their role, their school, and their personal habit. So not a one-size-fits-all in staying together.

[01:05] Maia Heyck Merlin:

What was it that led you down the path of pursuing organization and kind of getting together as a professional interest?

[01:14] Maia Heyck Merlin:

That's actually a very good question. It's been a 15-year journey. And it started as I was a teacher myself, both fourth and fifth grade, all subjects, wild amounts of prep. And then spent another five years in the world of teacher preparation and started to get worried about, you know, teachers not being formally trained in this area of togetherness. And you and I both know the minute you turn your back to fumble for a piece of paper, what happens to behavior behind you. And then I also saw people just drowning, staying up, you know, till midnight beyond working on everything that goes along with teaching.

[01:51]

And so I was really worried about both effectiveness and burnout. And, you know, while I was worried about those things, I was continuing in the world of teacher preparation. And then I stepped into the world of charter schools, also becoming more and more worried about these issues. And over and over, I was just seeing teachers weren't being as effective as they could be, and they were burning out. And so on the side of having a very full-time day job, started giving basically underground workshops around the country, specifically focused for people who worked in schools. Because what I found is most of the great literature out there, and I know you and I have read a lot of it, whether David Allen or Julie Morgenstern, there's a million of them.

[02:32]

They seem to be for people behind their desks in office jobs, which was not the environment I knew and was familiar with. And they weren't fundamentally resonating with me in the same way because you're on your feet. It's more unpredictable. There's more paper. You have more stakeholders. And so slowly over time, I said, this has to be what I do because nobody is teaching it to teachers, principals, central office folks in a way that works in a school or school supporting context, which I fundamentally think is different.

[03:01] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Absolutely. And I've found so much of that research to be very geared toward business people or, as you said, people who work behind desks, computer programmers. But our work is so complex. And it's complex, I think, in large part because we deal with that wonderful variable students. So what is it to you that defines a together teacher? And how does a teacher who is maybe disorganized right now or kind of overworked and overtaxed and stressed, how do they become a together teacher?

[03:32] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Yep. I mean, it is a very long journey. As you've noted, the table of contents in my book is quite long, but I think it fundamentally comes down to planning. And we're familiar with whether in alt-cert programs or traditional education programs, teachers are hopefully taught a lot about lesson planning, maybe behavior management planning, But they're rarely taught, if at all, about how to manage the limited amount of time they have, which is basically before school, after school, and a prep and lunch if you're lucky to have it. And, you know, I get to shadow teachers for a living. I'm very fortunate.

[04:09]

And what I see in most schools is if you don't have a plan for your time, it will have a plan for you. And it comes down to the classic example of you have a prep period and you have a behavior issue that emerges. And what most of us do as nice human beings who love children is turn on a dime on the behavior issue. And half the time that is probably the right answer, but half the time it may not be. Your time may have been better spent working on that unit plan or analyzing that data and, you know, whether you have to have that student right beside you writing an apology or whatever it may need to be. But what I see is schools are so unpredictable and sometimes crisis-driven that But if you have a plan for your time in place of an entire week, then at least you can make the conscious choice before you automatically pivot, which as human beings who work with other students who we love, the instinct is to pivot.

[05:06]

And so I just want people to make the intentional choice about when they do and when they don't. And the only way to do that is by having a firm plan.

[05:13] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Well, I like that idea that you brought in at the end there of intentionality. And that's something that I think took me a long time to really identify in my time management because I was a big fan. I am a big fan of David Allen's work in getting things done, which is a fairly intuitive approach to kind of deciding at any given moment what should have your attention and what you should be working on. And what I realized through some kind of hard experience was that I got quite a bit more done when I was very intentional and even almost kind of rigid with myself about what I needed to spend my time on.

[05:50] Maia Heyck Merlin:

And I see the same. I mean, for people like principals, of course, who essentially choose what they do all day long, that becomes a prioritization issue. Like, where should you spend your time? For teachers, sometimes it's a pure efficiency issue. And what I see, Justin, it's not that teachers want to waste time. Like, of course, who doesn't?

[06:08]

But the sheer adrenaline of a school day where you may be lucky enough to get a 45-minute prep, by the time you use the restroom, fill your water bottle, maybe check your email and take a brain break, your students are coming back. But if you head into the week saying, with this prep I'm going to grade, with this prep I'm going to plan, and with this prep I'm going to phone parents, You're much more likely to get down off that adrenaline high and move those things forward. And, you know, the caution I like to issue, you know, after workshops I do, you know, I say the takeaway isn't put your head down and don't interact with your colleagues or kids all day. But I know how much work teachers take home and how late they stay up at night and all the different things. My husband's a teacher as well. So, you know, I see it day in and day out right here.

[06:55]

And, you know, I just want them to be able to have lives outside of their jobs so they can do their jobs for a long time.

[07:01] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Well, and that idea of efficiency, I think, is so critical and one of the big differences that we see between new teachers and experienced teachers. And I think there's a temptation, and I know I felt this as a new teacher. I would look at my colleagues and, you know, eventually you figure out who's stronger and who's not so strong. I would look at when people left and when people arrived. And it's very easy to mistake hours put in for effectiveness. And I think one of the big things that happens with experience is you learn how to be more, hopefully you learn how to be more efficient with your time and kind of break that one-to-one relationship between hours put in and effectiveness.

[07:43]

What are some strategies that teachers can use if they're not very efficient right now, say with planning for the week to become more efficient?

[07:53] Maia Heyck Merlin:

So a few strategies, like if you are a teacher at the very beginning of togetherness, and so likely if you are earlier stages, you're working a lot of weekends, you're working late at night. Step number one is to just pause and map out the week ahead and to, and to really say, what am I going to do with each aspect of my flexible time? It doesn't mean that you can't move things around. Um, you know, when the unexpected emergency or opportunity comes up, but If you go into the week with a plan that includes personal and professional, everything feels so much better. The second thing I would say is for teachers really thinking about their own togetherness is when you make that plan to think about your energy. The common thing I will say when I work with teachers is if you say you're going to do unit plans after school, no, you're not.

[08:46]

Like, let's be very honest with ourselves here. At 4 o'clock, what most of us are doing is wandering around the building looking for a Coke or some chocolate or somebody to chat with. We're just fried. It's exhausting, the work that we do all day. So to really think about what your energy allows you to do when. I'm a huge fan of Tony Schwartz at the Energy Project.

[09:08]

And he has worked a lot with athletes and then other corporate folks to say, what are you doing when and why? And I've been fortunate enough to be able to talk to him. And if we apply that to the world of teaching, you know when you can get the heavier brain work done and let's plan for it. And you know when you might need to do some more mindless data entry. So let's be prepared for that. And then the third thing you can do right away to help is any time you create materials or design something, think about how to make it last.

[09:40]

So for example, you know, I see a lot of elementary school teachers make a lot of different charts. It sounds very silly, but think now, how are you going to laminate it so you can just replace the pictures with new students next year? Or when you do those detailed lesson plans with those beautiful PowerPoints from my middle and high school teachers, how are you clearly naming them and archiving them such that you can reuse them the next year? These small steps we can make along the way will save us so much time in years to come.

[10:07] Maia Heyck Merlin:

So Maya, I think in every school, every principal sees teachers struggling with these very issues, with time management, with being prepared, with just having a good plan for how the week is going to unfold and how those prep periods are going to go. What is something that every school leader can do when they realize that a teacher is in that situation?

[10:27] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Yes, I see this happen a lot. I think there's three things. And And some of it depends on the principal's own level of togetherness for him or herself and even how together the school is, which I'm sure we'll discuss. But if you are coaching a teacher who's struggling, three things I've seen to be helpful. One is to actually identify somebody's motivation for togetherness. And so for some people, it might be they want to sleep enough at night.

[10:54]

For others, it might be they really want to finally run this marathon. For others, it might be they have real goals around parent and family contact over the course of the year and they want to meet those. But tapping into somebody's motivation is very, very helpful. And if you can't tap into it, then you have to show people the impact of not being together and really highlight it for them. And everybody's motivation is different. And for those principals who are more together, there's sometimes the assumption that people inherently value togetherness, which is not actually the case.

[11:26]

The second thing you can do to help teachers who are struggling is to be as flexible as possible. So what I see, and I'm fortunate enough to coach a lot of people individually on this topic, is what usually happens when one person gets coached on togetherness is, here's the way I use my Outlook calendar, you should do it this way. Or here's the way I use this paper planner from Staples, you should do it this way. And to somebody who's struggling, that just feels like strangulation. And so you've got to If you're coaching somebody else, you've got to have enough of a variety of tools to meet multiple different styles of needs. It's the exact same thing as teaching well, right?

[12:06]

You just have to have enough in your toolkit to help people get over the hump and to have it be flexible enough to work with them. And then that leads to the third thing. If you are coaching teachers on this topic, I really encourage principals to be outcome-oriented as opposed to, let me say, tool-strict. So I was just working with a principal who was contemplating requiring every teacher to turn in a weekly schedule in a certain Word document. And I said, pause. You're going to have rebellion.

[12:38]

Do not do that. And we dug in. And she said, you know, what do you really care about? And when I asked her that and we uncovered it, what she really cared about is lesson plans were in on time, a certain number of family phone calls were made, and unit plans were reviewed in advance, like the unit diagnostics. And I said, okay, great. So what you care about is those things are met, but there's a number of ways people might get there.

[13:03]

So what you care about is everybody is capturing and recording deadlines and they have blocked time to deal with families. So if we focus on what the outcomes are, not mandating tools, you'll have far better success in coaching people.

[13:17] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Right. And that comes down to basic autonomy, which I think is critically important for teachers.

[13:22] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Exactly.

[13:23] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Absolutely. And I like that idea of kind of an outcome-oriented, you know, maybe a benchmark and saying, you know, okay, we need to have this type of planning done by this time. You need to go through this process and how you go through it or what tool you use, you know, doesn't really matter all that much to me. But I appreciate that about the flexibility.

[13:41] Maia Heyck Merlin:

You'll always meet the teacher who just bangs it out, incredible teacher, manages time really well, and you can't figure out what the heck their system is. And that's okay. Don't mess with that person. You know, see if you can tease out what they're doing in a way it can help others. But for those people who sort of have it figured out, we don't want to mess with them either.

[14:00] Maia Heyck Merlin:

And I think that's one of the difficult things, especially as a new principal or a principal in a new school trying to get to know a new staff. There are a lot of things that look like they're indicators of competence and really aren't or are maybe associated with competence but not 100%. I can think of a teacher I worked with who was probably the strongest teacher I've ever seen. And one day she was out sick or at a workshop or something, and the substitute was looking for something, so I was helping her find something in the room, and we opened a desk drawer, and all the markers were categorized by color. I mean, the level of organization went from the big picture unit plans all the way down to the markers in the drawer. But I know that that doesn't mean, that's not what tells me that that was, you know, a teacher who was doing a fabulous job and really on top of everything.

[14:52]

That was just kind of a side effect of some other characteristics that she had. And I know we have other teachers who are way less, you know, particular about where their markers go, but are also very intentional about how they use their time and what they accomplish with students.

[15:08] Maia Heyck Merlin:

And I think I see, you know, you just have to be aware as a principal that of false indicators in an interview process or even when you walk around the building of, you know, a beautiful classroom does not necessarily equal a good teacher. A terrible classroom, you know, terribly organized classroom does not necessarily equal a bad teacher. At the same time, you start to see efficiencies in classrooms when students can find the materials they need and when, you know, the best classrooms I'm seeing, it's not that they're beautiful, but they're self-run. So if I look at some of these middle school classrooms I was in this morning here in Washington, what I could see is there were clear systems for what to do if you were absent, for what to do if you needed to turn in work late, for where the bathroom pass was, you didn't have to ask. There were basically systems built around everything that students could run themselves after training.

[16:00]

So teachers could be purely focused on instruction and very little with the administration that goes with running a classroom.

[16:08] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Which is something we see certainly at the elementary level, but I think at the middle school level, students need that just as much and teachers need it just as much, but it may be less common to see that in practice. Yes. So Maya, the book is The Together Teacher. Plan ahead, get organized, and save time. And obviously people can order that book at the bookseller of their choice. If people want to connect with you online and read more about what you're currently up to, where can they find you?

[16:36] Maia Heyck Merlin:

They can find me at, the best place would be my website. So www.thetogetherteacher.com. Soon to be expanded to the Together Group for the book, The Together Leader due out in June, 2016. So focused for anybody in a leadership role, either in a school or supporting a school.

[16:56]

You can reach out to me through my contact form there with questions and follow-ups. And we do keep millions of materials free for both coaching and actual teacher instruction on togetherness.

[17:06] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Fabulous. So if principals do have a teacher who's struggling with keeping their plans together and being organized, they can certainly check out your website and check out the book, The Together Teacher. Maya, thank you so much for joining us. It's been great speaking with you.

[17:21] Maia Heyck Merlin:

Thank you for having me.

[17:22] Justin Baeder:

And now, Justin Baeder on high performance instructional leadership.

[17:27] Maia Heyck Merlin:

So high performance instructional leaders, what resonated with you from my interview with Maya? One of my favorite statements that I heard Maya make in our interview was the idea that in the best classrooms, there are systems in place so that students know what to do and they can kind of run the classroom on a day-to-day basis by themselves because the expectations are clear. And that's so powerful because it frees the teacher up to do what only the teacher can do. You're not bogged down with, can I sharpen my pencil? Can I go to the bathroom? There are procedures in place for how those routine issues are handled.

[17:58]

so the teacher's attention can be devoted to what really matters. So I want to ask you to apply that same line of thinking to your own work as an administrator. Do you have clear systems in place with your office staff so that you don't have to be consulted about anything that's routine? When you put those systems and those clear expectations in place, your attention can be more devoted to the work that only you can do.

[18:22] Announcer:

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