[00:01] SPEAKER_02:
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 Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Steve Heisler. Steve is an education consultant, and he works in school-wide professional development focused on student success skills, and he's also a senior program coordinator at the School System Improvement Project at Rutgers University.
[00:35] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:38] SPEAKER_00:
Steve, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:40] SPEAKER_01:
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:42] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, so we're here to talk today about your book, The Missing Link, Teaching and Learning Critical Success Skills. Now, Steve, in the work that you do with schools, what was it that you saw as you got into schools, worked with students, worked with adults that told you that this book needed to be written? What need did you see in our profession?
[01:01] SPEAKER_01:
Well, it's kind of interesting that I came to teaching relatively late after a fairly lengthy career in the arts, which I was not making a living doing. But what happened was that I had kind of struggled personally all throughout my academic career. I had gotten lots of positive feedback, but I never did particularly well. I actually flunked out of college once. I dropped out of college another time and had been really struggling to be a writer and an actor for many years. And I realized at a certain point in my life that I was simply getting in my own way.
[01:39]
And I really began to find ways to kind of take control of my life to really develop the ability to do the things that I wanted to do. Now, I was able to be successful in terms of being able to produce work as a writer, particularly. And, you know, even though I was not able to make a living at it, I wound up teaching kind of by accident. But almost from the moment I began teaching, I realized one really critically important thing. And that's kind of defined how I've taught and what I've taught and really was the genus of this book almost from the beginning of my teaching career. And it's simply this.
[02:21]
The difference between a kid that's successful and a kid that is unsuccessful is actually incredibly small. Kids that are successful in school are not necessarily smarter than kids that are unsuccessful in school, but they are better able to marshal their resources. And I guess because I saw myself in a lot of the kids that I've struggled with, that really became the thing that I was focused on. How do you get the kids who can't become the kids who can? I don't want to misspeak myself. There are kids who are very gifted and very gifted in certain ways, but they're gifted across the board.
[03:07]
But what people who are able to succeed can do is they can make decisions and They can organize themselves. They can persist. They can self-regulate. They can manage their times. And they can also interact appropriately in a public setting socially. And that's the difference between a kid that succeeds and a kid that doesn't.
[03:31]
And being able to define these things has given me an ability to be able to look at how I bring those skills into the classroom and how I bring them into teaching and how teachers bring them into the classroom, into their teaching as well. In a facilitative way.
[03:49] SPEAKER_00:
And one thing I'm hearing there is that those are not fundamental traits of people, right? That those are not fixed characteristics, but those are skills that can be learned or kind of behaviors that can be taught. Is that your view of them?
[04:01] SPEAKER_01:
Oh, absolutely. In fact, I don't think anybody's born with these things, though some people have certain skills that are almost innate in them. The ability to play basketball, for instance. You know, very few people can be Michael Jordan. And there's certainly a gift there. But there are many people who have those skills who have not been able to persist or to manage themselves in a way that has allowed them to see the fruition of those potentialities.
[04:34]
So all of these skills that I talk about, these six critical success skills, they're all things that everybody has to some extent or has the potential to some extent For the most part, you find that these skills are taught to kids at home. Successful families tend to produce successful children simply because whether they're doing it purposefully or they're doing it just innately, they're teaching kids these skills. So for instance, how does an unsuccessful student tell a teacher to go jump in the lake? What they say is, I'll use you as a teacher if you don't mind, Mr. Bader, go jump in the lake. But how does a successful student say the same thing?
[05:28]
What he says is, oh, thanks for the input, Mr. Bader. I'll think about it. It's a really good idea. Same sentiment, though. Same sentiment, exactly.
[05:36]
What you learn from parents who know how to deal with social interaction, you learn how to say what people want to hear while you're thinking whatever you want to think. And that is a powerful, powerful skill. I'm not talking about teaching kids subterfuge. We're not talking about, you know, we're talking about learning how to regulate yourself so that you don't have to say everything that's on your mind because in the end, it may not serve your end. Successful kids learn this from successful parents because successful parents know how to do this. Successful parents know how to make decisions short-term and long-term.
[06:21]
They know how to regulate themselves. They know how to say, No to a cocktail party on a Friday night when they have to go to work on Saturday morning You know and meet with the big bosses for a big for a big program You know, even though they may want to do that thing They understand the implications of being able to withhold pleasure in order to gain something greater further down the road the problem that that I saw in schools and the problem that I continue to see in schools is is that all of these success skills are expected and they are demanded, and kids are constantly reminded to apply these success skills. But they're never taught, or at least they're never taught with the focus and the importance that, say,
[07:18] SPEAKER_00:
counting skills are taught right because you know in in schools you know like we we understand we're able to teach skills that kids don't have we're you know we're capable of doing that and we recognize that you know if if we're in a math class we recognize that if we want students to understand something that they don't currently understand we've got to develop curriculum for that we've got to have assessments and lessons and activities and But if we have that disconnect where we know that we learned these skills, but we don't necessarily know how we learned them, and we certainly don't know what to do with students who didn't learn them the same way we did, and they show up without them, it seems like that's where the big disconnect is. It's like the kid has gotten to college and hasn't learned multiplication, and the college teacher kind of says, well, I don't even know how to teach multiplication. This is calculus. Exactly.
[08:05] SPEAKER_01:
And that's the thing is that that most of the teachers that kids will encounter really have developed a pretty good set of success skills. You can't basically you can't finish college until you can at least apply. Now, you know, doing these successes doesn't mean you do them all the time. Every day you apply things as necessary. You know, when you do something wrong, you learn how to fix it. You know, that's that's.
[08:32]
This is not a not a lesson in perfection. And anyway, what I always tell kids and teachers when I'm working with them is that, you know, the road to perfection is the road to misery. The road to excellence, though, is the road to excellence and excellence is being able to use skills appropriately and as necessary to put yourself on the path toward the accomplishments that you want. This is really about empowerment. And in order for teachers to teach empowerment, in order for anybody to teach empowerment, in order for parents to teach empowerment, they've got to get in touch with the self that learned those things. Now, for me, that actually wound up being really easy as a teacher because I had only learned them when I became an adult.
[09:25]
I really learned how to make decisions, how to make good decisions. I really learned how to self-regulate. I really learned how to break down a complex problem into smaller sub accomplishments and persist through them as an adult so that the distance between when I learned these things and was able to apply them I actually learned them all throughout my life. But until I was able to actually understand them and apply them, I was already a man. I was in my 20s. So I was really able to sort of capture that learning much more easily than than many of the people I work with, because most skills that we use in life, most any skill that we use in life, we don't even think about them.
[10:16]
Anymore, we just apply them There's a great metaphor that I use a great example that I use if you think about I don't know how old you are But I'll let's assume you're in your 30s and you operate an automobile I do when you're driving down the street and you have to make a left-hand turn on a scale of 1 to 10 how frightening is Is it to make a left hand turn? One is who thinks about it? And 10 is, oh, my God, I have to make a left hand turn. I think I'll sell my car. Yeah, probably a one or two, depending on the street. But if you go back in time to when you were 16 years old.
[10:51]
Where on that scale is a left hand turn?
[10:54] SPEAKER_00:
Everything's a 10, right? Anything other than sitting in the driveway is a 10, right? Exactly.
[10:58] SPEAKER_01:
And that's the point that what's complex and difficult to do takes lots of conscious effort. And so how we learn in general, we learn from the external to the internal. ultimately to the automatic when we're learning things that are important enough to be automatized. So now when you drive your car, no matter where you go, and I assume if you're like every other human being in the world, you're driving with one hand on the wheel, the radio up to nine, two or three different cell phones in your ear, and possibly listening to podcasts and watching television at the same time. And yet you get home no matter how far you drive, for the most part, without killing anybody or getting into accidents, because you so automatize these complex series of actions and questions and answers that you're constantly doing, that it just becomes life itself.
[11:56] SPEAKER_00:
And I wonder if we could get into one particular example that to me seems like it's a little bit of a black box, and that is decision making. For kids who haven't learned the success skills that go into decision-making. What did you discover that actually contributes to successful decision-making? Because honestly, when I look at something like that, as an educator, I would say we want our students to make good decisions, but I couldn't tell you where to begin when I see a kid who is not able to make good decisions on a consistent basis. So break that one down for us. What does good decision-making look like as a learned skill?
[12:31] SPEAKER_01:
I have to preface this a little bit by saying that there are certain things that teachers have to do. In order to be able to get to that. And I'm not going to get it. We don't have a great deal of time today. I know. But like teachers have to, first of all, make a commitment to being facilitative rather than directive.
[12:48]
Right. And one of the things that happens when you facilitate is that you get kids instead of telling them what you think they should do. You ask them what it is that they think they should do. So what happens in any decision-making, any decision-making, there's really only three things that happen. There's vision, there's initiative, and then there's action. Now, there's a lot of stuff out there about teaching decision-making, and this is not something I've invented.
[13:25]
But in order to make a decision, you need to know what it is that you want at the end of that decision. So let's say you're having a conversation with a student and the student wants to do better in school. And there's a whole thing you can do with this, but I'm just trying to keep it simplified here. Student wants to do better in school. So you ask them, what is it you want to do better for? Well, I want a better grade because I want to go to a good college or I want to get a good job or whatever it is.
[13:53]
OK, so what are some of the things that you can do? in order to ultimately get a better grade well the student will say i think i need to do more homework excellent let's make some decisions let's take some initiative toward doing the homework which we know is going to connect to these bigger ideas that you have which are much much further down the road so you say to the student okay so you want it you want to do your homework When do you think you need to do that homework? Well, it's due tomorrow, so when is a good time to do it? I'm gonna do it this evening. What is the student actually doing during this interaction? Well, they're actually making decisions.
[14:34]
They're actually planning, organizing, making decisions. I'm gonna do it at four o'clock when I get home. That's the time I'm gonna block out for tonight. I'm gonna go home at four o'clock, I'm gonna do my homework. Okay, great, that's a decision. That's a vision.
[14:52]
That's initiative. Now, what happens, though, is that very frequently and I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but it certainly has happened to me. Sometimes I decide to do something. Sometimes I put a plan in place and sometimes that plan never happens. So typically in an interaction with a student and a teacher, the student will come in the next day and the teacher will say, Johnny, did you do your homework? And the kid says, I kind of got waylaid.
[15:25]
Timmy called me up as I was leaving school and he said, let's go play some baseball. And I played a little baseball and then I left my homework at the baseball field. By the time I got back, you know how it goes, right? The typical response from the teacher would be, well, Johnny, I guess that's just not getting you where you want to go, is it? It's the sort of negative response. I thought you wanted to do better.
[15:49]
I thought you wanted to achieve. I thought you wanted to do better in school. Instead, a teacher can do what successful people always do is they don't say, oops, I screwed up. I guess I'll just quit. They say, oops, I screwed up. How can I do things differently?
[16:09]
What different approach can I take? Why did one thing get in the way of the other? And I can't go back and redo this homework. But moving forward, how can I do things differently so that I can be more successful at what I do? So instead of saying like, well, you screwed up, you say to the student, well, OK, what was your aim last night? My aim was to get my homework done.
[16:35]
And what got in the way of it? why weren't you able to affect your plan? Let's talk it through, you know, and sometimes that does take a bit of time. And I know, believe me, I've been in the classroom and I've had, I've taught in New York city and I've had sometimes 50 and 60 kids in my class. I know this can be onerous, but there are ways of doing this that, that make it simpler to do. Um, So you take a childlike little Johnny here and you say, okay, well maybe you can get him talking a little bit and finding out what, what happened was he made a plan, but it wasn't, it wasn't a solid plan.
[17:15]
It wasn't at four o'clock I'm going to do this. So maybe Johnny needs to be a little bit more careful about organizing. Maybe Johnny needs to learn a little more about time management. But anything that a child really wants, and this is something that I have found to be true of every kid that I've ever met in my life. Every single student that I've ever met in a quarter of a century in education wants to be successful. If they can't be successful at being successful, they'll be successful at screwing up.
[17:54]
But they'll be successful. The trick is the same powers, the same persistence, the same ability to be unsuccessful can be moved to become success in a better way. And I know I hear this all the time. Absolutely. This is something parents should be teaching their kids. But if parents don't teach their kids this stuff at home, Where are they going to learn it?
[18:26]
It's up to us. Well, either that or, you know, either they don't learn it or they learn it accidentally. And again, I mean, that's, you know, look at successful kids. They are kids who simply are able to do these things. You know, some kids are exceptionally bright and they can skate by on a lot less of these things. And some kids have to work more.
[18:49]
It's just a question of, again, it's vision, initiative, and persistence.
[18:55] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Steve, if people want to learn more about the work that you do, about the book, about the training that you provide to schools to help students develop these success skills, what's the best place for them to find you online?
[19:07] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I have a website, www.sheisler.com. That's S-H-E-I-S-L-E-R.com. And all my contact information is on there.
[19:20]
You can call me, send me an email, smoke signals. I respond to smoke signals. I'm very passionate about this particular subject. And the thing that I really want to also mention, if I can, is that the things that I'm talking about, the teaching that I'm talking about, does not have to be apart from everything else that we have to do as teachers and administrators as well. All of this stuff, all the things that I'm talking about right now can be infused into the regular school day through contact with students, infused into existing lessons. And in fact, a lot of of this kind of teaching dovetails perfectly with critical skills development as well.
[20:08]
I'm not saying that teachers need to do more. They just need to tweak it a bit. They need to do it a little bit differently.
[20:15] SPEAKER_00:
So the book is The Missing Link, Teaching and Learning Critical Success Skills. Steve, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.
[20:24] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.
[20:31] SPEAKER_00:
So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Steve Heisler? One thing that stands out to me is just how foreign this idea is to most of us as educators. The idea that we would need to explicitly teach these five traits, these five skills that Steve talks about in his book. And I think one thing that really makes Steve stand out as an educator and as an author is that, as he said, he learned them As an adult, most of us who are educators were successful in elementary school, were successful in middle school, were successful in high school, were successful in college, and we don't know what it looks like to learn those skills in school. We don't know how to teach them in school. So what I wanna challenge you to do as an educator in your school is look at how you are teaching those skills.
[21:17]
How are you teaching students to persist? How are you teaching students self-regulation? and see those as an essential part of the curriculum, and especially as a gap-closing part of your curriculum.
[21:30] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
