The Unteachables Podcast

#51: How to become a 'Disruptive Educator', and make the move from high-control to compassion-driven classrooms with Bobby Morgan of The Liberation Lab

• Claire English • Season 4 • Episode 51

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On today's podcast episode I interview probably THE most quotable guest I have had on the show.

Bobby Morgan, the founder of The Liberation Lab, is a spearhead for disruptive education practices that break away from the confining norms of high-control teaching. We unravel the threads of deficit ideologies and reimagine a classroom where culturally responsive teaching and social justice aren't just concepts but are interwoven into the fabric of learning.

Right at the very heart of our discussion, we cast a spotlight on the harsh truths behind punitive discipline in schools, advocating for a seismic shift towards nurturing relationships within classroom management. We dissect the unrealistic standards we set for our students, standards that we, as adults, often fail to meet ourselves. Our exchange serves as a mirror, reflecting the essential need for educators to embody the principles they champion, fostering an environment ripe for understanding, compassion, and true behavioural change.

This episode is overflowing with value, as we touch on:

  • What is a disruptive educator (and how can we be one)?
  • A little about our own roots in education and some  mistakes we have made along the way
  • Teacher helplessness
  • The 4 types of educators you will come across at every school, and finally (but most importantly:
  • A really practical and immediate way you can bring more restorative practice into your classroom to have a positive impact on behaviour.


This is an episode that truly calls for teachers to be the catalysts of growth, nurturing every child's potential through self-awareness and continuous development. I can't wait for you to listen.


Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!

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Claire English:

Hello, wonderful teachers, welcome back to another episode of Yantigebus podcast. I can't tell you how excited I am for you to listen to this episode this week. I have Bobby Morgan on with me today, and trust me when I say that I have never recorded a more quotable episode. He just dropped so many incredible insights that I was jotting madly down as he was talking, and it was a freaking privilege to share space with him on the podcast. Bobby is a speaker and school improvement consultant whose mission is to build disruptive educators, and I'll let him explain to you just what that means. He's dedicated to being a catalyst of transformative change within educators and schools as we all navigate this kind of messy journey to changing school disciplinary practices and ultimately changing the educational experiences and lives of our young people. So I can't wait for you to listen and yeah, let's just get into it.

Claire English:

Welcome to Yantigebus podcast. I'm Claire English, a passionate secondary teacher and leader, turned teacher, mentor and author, and I'm on a mission to transform classroom management and teacher support in schools. It doesn't feel that long ago that I was completely overwhelmed and out of my depth of behavior, trying to swim rather than sink. It took me spending thousands of hours in the classroom, with all of the inevitable ups and downs, to make me the teacher that I am today Confident, capable and empowered in my ability to teach all students yes, even the ones who are the toughest to reach and now I'm dedicated to supporting teachers like yourself to do the same.

Claire English:

I created the Yantigebus podcast to give you the simple and actionable classroom management strategies and support that you need to run your room with confidence and calm. So if you're a teacher or one in the making, and you're wanting to feel happy and empowered and actually enjoy being in the classroom whilst also making a massive impact with every single one of your students, then you're definitely in the right place. Let's get started. Hello, wonderful people. Today on the podcast, I am speaking with Bobby Morgan, who is the powerhouse behind the Liberation Lab, and you might have caught his brilliant work on his podcast, his Instagram and now his YouTube channel. Welcome to the podcast, bobby. It is such a privilege to have you on here to chat today and thank you so much for your time.

Bobby Morgan:

I'm honored to be here to share space with your brilliance and really excited to dive into this topic today.

Claire English:

So I've given you a little bit of an introduction before we popped on, but I want to hear in your own words, just a bit about you, but also what it means to be a disruptive educator.

Bobby Morgan:

Absolutely so. I started in Camden, new Jersey, and for those who are not familiar with geography of that, it's basically it was voted the poorest city in New Jersey, the most dangerous city to live in here in the States, and I started there as my first teaching gig. So I show up, I'm ready to go. Man, I'm so excited I'm going to reach the lies of these kids. And I found out very quickly that, like, teacher prep programs don't really teach you how to teach the teacher subject matter. But, man, I got to stand in front of these kids and actually deliver something. I actually got to inspire, actually got to connect with them, and I failed miserably my first few times. And, looking to try to grow, my principal handed me a book called Teach Like a Champion and I read it and consumed it and I embodied all the actions and quickly found out well, I won't even say quickly. I later found out that it was a lot of high control, high super vigilant methods that were built on a lot of deficit ideology. If you're not watching kids, if you're not, you know, ensuring that every single thing that they do is monitored by you, then you, you know, then you're failing as a teacher. And so I have another name for that book, but I'll leave that. I'll leave that alone. I found out that I was doing more harm than good, so I really went on a journey of unlearning.

Bobby Morgan:

What is it that I learned as an educator that I now need to challenge, to question and to put aside? For me, that's the start of disruption. We've been conditioned to believe that being an educator means that we must you know, don't smile until February, you know make sure that they, you know that they respect you. And all of that means is you just can't be nice to kids, you can't be loving to kids, because if you're loving then you're soft, and if you're soft then it'll take advantage of you and it's a very much so us versus them mentality.

Bobby Morgan:

So being a disruptive educator means we step into these systems understanding that they're not built for us or for the kids to survive or to thrive.

Bobby Morgan:

We step into understanding that if we do not counteract what is happening, then it's going to mean both of our failures. And so we do that, at least on my side. We do that through coaching, responsive teaching, social justice education and restorative practices, because I believe if we do those three things, a lot of the other stuff will take care of itself. If we're truly being culturally responsive, then we, then we combat the deficit ideology that we have about our kids. If we're truly being restorative, then behavior is seen as communication and then we can now have a conversation about what that looks like to repair harm and to make it right and to move forward together. And if we're truly empowering kids with social justice education, then learning doesn't stop in the classroom, it takes place outside of the classroom and and now it takes a life of its own, and kids understand that what you're, what you're doing in the classroom, has a major impact for what they do in the real world.

Claire English:

It's so exciting listening to you talk because I think there's something very beautiful about being face to face with somebody who reflects back all of your own values about education and I think we come across so much resistance about a punitive approach, so much resistance. And I think what you've also just said is we get into the profession and we have had no experiences of actually classroom managing, we've had no support around that, and so we fall back on these practices and I call them our inherited classroom management because it's what we've experienced ourselves in the classroom, it's what we've kind of, it's been kind of society, like society has constructed that around us. So we fall back on that and there's such a pushback on moving away from punitive discipline. Why is it failing our young people and schools and how would you define punitive discipline?

Bobby Morgan:

Yeah, I remember being my sixth grade year sitting down with a teacher. My sixth grade teacher wrote on my fourth Mark and peer report card that I did not belong in the gifted and talented program at my school. She wrote that because there was a lot of behavior challenges that were happening. In my sixth grade year I was dealing with my parents. My mom was going through a divorce. There was just a lot going on and I had a lot of anger and didn't have anywhere to constructively deal with that. So in that class I got in trouble because I broke the rule. What was the rule? I I maybe didn't, you know. I had a disrespectful response to a teacher who was asking me to do something. Maybe I got in a stuff with another or pushed a kid or something like that, right, so so when I broke a rule, I got a consequence I was suspended, I was put in detention, I was removed from the class. I sat in another teacher's class.

Bobby Morgan:

I and all of these things are centered on what rule was broken and and I liken it to the, the old school Nintendo like growing up playing duck hunt, super Mario with the Nintendo and you would you would have to play the game all the way through because there was no safe button, there was no safe function. So when you hit reset, you started all the way back at the beginning. What punitive discipline does is it asks children to learn that lesson to, to figure out what went wrong on their own. You get suspended. That's the end. Now you come back and we just expect you to to have saved your progress. Although we hit the reset button, it doesn't work because we know, developmentally speaking, kids don't work that way. They don't. There is nothing. I don't think adults don't even work that way, which is like the mind boggling thing. You don't just give somebody a consequence and then they learn from their actions. You have to work alongside them.

Bobby Morgan:

So it's not what rule was broken, it's what was the harm and who was harmed and what are their needs and what does it look like to repair that. So now, instead of having this adversarial relationship between the offender and the principal, where we brush aside those who were offended, now we include those folks in the process of what it looks like to restore. The person who has done the harm comes face to face with the person that they've harmed and has to hear how that has affected that person. They have to now own up to and see the the the extent of their actions. And one thing that I know about kids is kids are self-centered. They just are A lot of adults that are self-centered.

Bobby Morgan:

Quiet, as I skipped, but what does it look like for us to now zero, you know, broaden the aperture. If you will widen the aperture and now see a greater picture of what harm looks like, so kids can understand that when you said that thing because you were mad and all you were thinking about was you it harmed so many others in the process and now we have to do something about that. It calls them in. It makes them a an active participant in the process of restoration. Doesn't mean the consequences aren't there. No, consequences are absolutely still there, but the consequences now have meaning because you brought in the person that has done the harm. You've brought in the person that's been offended and now we can reimagine what restoration, what repair, looks like, moving forward.

Claire English:

What is really funny is that when people are advocating to keep a punitive approach, they speak a lot about accountability. How is that young person going to be accountable for their actions If we don't give them At attention, if we don't give them a suspension, if we don't isolate them all of those things that are quite punitive, where the opposite is true. There is no true accountability without the process that you've just discussed, because if you you want young people to be accountable for their actions, they need to go through a process of listening to who was harmed, thinking about what's been done and how they can make that right, and the process of like a restorative approach. It is so heavily hinged on strong accountability from the person who is doing the harming, whatever context that context that might be in. So it just boggles the mind how the argument against a restorative approach is that students need to be accountable for their actions, because it's just the opposite, isn't it?

Bobby Morgan:

Absolutely. You know, I find that people who have big objections to restorative models, restorative approaches, they have a caricature in their mind that kids just going to get away with everything and they get a snack from the principal's office and they get sent back to class and that's just it. The problem with this is that when we're truly being restorative and here's the part that I think so many schools miss they don't do the work of actually building community before they institute a restorative model. It's harder to harm what you care about. So if we're truly being restorative, then we have community building circles where we actually get face to face with folks, right, and we're we're understanding our commonalities, our differences, we're understanding what makes us tick, we're understanding our classroom, our school mission, vision, commitments. We're looking, we're building that thing together. So when we build it together, now I care about it and now that I've done harm I, now I can, as the leader, right, as a school leader, I can now go back to that student and say this is what you said you wanted. You said you wanted to be a part of a school community that does X, y and Z, that you can belong to, that you care about, and we're seeking to build that here.

Bobby Morgan:

Do you see that? More times than not, the student will see it, and if they do see it, then they're going to work to repair it because now they care about it. What we've asked students to do is to care about something that does not look out for them, and the punitive discipline model that we have now in schools is we'll push you out, we'll move you, we'll put you in, we'll put you over there Because you didn't come the way we want you to come to school. You don't have any say in it, you don't have any control over it. Just come, sit down, shut up and listen to the teacher, and that's. It's just not a way of learning, it's not a way of growth, it's not a way that we can actually move things forward.

Claire English:

Yeah, absolutely.

Claire English:

And it just perpetuates if they have experienced things in their life that have created an internal working model that they're not worthy and they can't trust and the world is not a safe place.

Claire English:

It's perpetuating every single thing that they believe about themselves and others, and so much of classroom management and discipline is relied upon by in and relationships and all the things you've just mentioned and that community and wanting to be a part of that.

Claire English:

And you can't do that if you're just going to isolate and to shame and to blame and to punish when it's the opposite of what they need. And I wanted to circle back to one thing that you said before, which is the expectations that we have of our young people often are more than the expectations that we place on ourselves as adults when they're, like, less able in terms of their neurobiology to meet those expectations their children. So I find that wilds that we have these expectations of our young people to stay in a box and play by the rules that we set for them, and you know they're not able to do that a lot of the time and we can't a lot of the time as adults either, but we tend to expect compassion for ourselves and we're having a hard time when we lose it a little bit. You know, absolutely.

Bobby Morgan:

It's. If we're hungry and then we get angry, like most of us are prone to do. We expect grace and compassion. If the kids angry and says something that you deem disrespectful, defiant or disruptive air quotes there, it's one of those things where the expectation is so much higher for the kids like you talk about.

Bobby Morgan:

I gave you a perfect example and in a school that I've worked with, there was a lot of uproar about the students and dress code. They weren't in dress code, they weren't wearing the polo shirt, they weren't wearing the khakis, they got to be in uniform, so on and so forth. And kids were comfortable wearing a hoodie, like I'm wearing right now. It didn't stop them from learning, it didn't stop them from doing anything. It just was a matter of this was the rule. But if you looked at the staff dress code and you looked at what was required for teachers to wear, maybe 30% of the teachers were wearing what's required of them to be in dress code. They wanted to be comfortable, they wanted hoodies, they wanted sweatpants, they wanted jeans, they wanted these things that were not in the teacher dress code.

Bobby Morgan:

And once you hand that over and you say, okay, but look at this, look what the standards are you set for yourself that you're not meeting? Can you have compassion on a child that's doing the same thing? Now it begins to unravel a little bit. You get to see folks actually come face to face with the fact that, oh, wait a minute, maybe my expectations are a little bit different for the kids than they are for myself. I think if teachers who are looking to make an impact, they've really got to start with themselves. What is it that I am bringing to the table that I believe that I am going to hold myself to versus what am I going to hold these students to? It really speaks to a deficit ideology that we have about students what they're capable of, what they can aspire to and how they must show up in order to be recipients of the knowledge we're trying to give them.

Claire English:

And how are we expecting students to respect us as the adults if we aren't modelling the same things that we're expecting from them? I mean, in my early career, the amount of times I would walk into my classroom and I'd be so dysregulated from whatever was happening in my own life and it took me a long time to be able to, as an adult, to regulate and to be mature in a space and sharp for the students in the way that I needed to. If I had students speak to me in the way that I spoke to them in my early career, it would have been totally different and I had to do a lot of reflection on the way that I showed up and it took a lot of. I felt really guilty for the way that I did that, but I think educators to be able to move forward and to adopt a different approach for young people, it will take a bit of reflection, but it is so crucial and what you were saying about you know you weren't fitting in with the rules, so you were pushed out in a sense, like I was.

Claire English:

I was a gifted and talented student. I don't really like the label, to be honest with you, but that was me in primary school. Then I got into secondary school and I speak about it in my book, actually and all of a sudden things at home went really south. My mum had really severe mental health issues. My dad treated me like I was.

Claire English:

I was the next girl in line, so I was the housekeeper and I had so much going on at home and all of a sudden I went from being a student who was really engaged in my learning to one that didn't give a crap I didn't care, you don't care about me, I didn't care about this and little by little because you're pushing the boundaries a little bit at school and that then snowballed into something that was so much bigger for me, where it could have just been me being a little bit cheeky, and then it's exploded into two years later, me being isolated, me not being able to come into the class because of the way that you're treated and the way that you're isolated and the lack of care, the lack of relationships there.

Claire English:

So I also also think how many young people can we keep out of like? I know this is a really extreme example for what I'm saying but how many young people can we keep out of the prison system If we just go back backtrack, let's go back to year seven what could we do possibly in those little micro moments to be able to keep them engaged and connected in the school environment? And I know that's like a big pry from what I was talking about with myself, but that's just my own experience of how there are so many opportunities for us to work with our young people, not against them, and those opportunities are so missed when we're not working with a restorative model.

Bobby Morgan:

Absolutely and to think about it. Before those actions of pushing you out came, there was probably a label that was attached to you, that was assigned to you. That label isn't something that we, the teachers, carry with themselves. It's something that is spread in teacher, in the teacher staff lounges, right. It's something that's spread in the PLCs when they're talking about kids and becomes a venting session. It's something that's spread when you go home and now, in this digital age, it's spread on on TikTok and and YouTube and when we're venting about certain behaviors and things that we're seeing.

Bobby Morgan:

And I get it right in a real way. I get the frustration because I deal with it every day. The problem that I see with where we are headed is there's so many of us playing this playing game. Well, you know, on this other side of COVID now, we're experiencing these behaviors and these things and really all I think COVID did was just expose what was already there. We didn't have systems for, for really reaching out, helping students to deal with. You know what's going on in life, have outlets for those things, their mental health. We didn't have all of those things in play and and so we get into a place where those things are needed. We didn't have them, and now we're struggling. We're playing catch up.

Bobby Morgan:

So we can either sit here and complain about the behaviors, we can complain about the academic progress of our kids, or we can collectively parents, admin, teachers, staff, school psychologists, guidance counselors, lunch aids, whoever you are, if you are in a building we can collectively take ownership of the responsibility that we have to educate and empower our kids and do something about it. Right. And so that doesn't mean that it's going to get easy. It just means that I'm going to stop pointing the finger somewhere else and say what can I do? And I think once we do that, I think we'll start to see some progress. But much of the, the rhetoric, and I'd even say much of the the issue that I see with what's going on is that we'd rather assign blame than take ownership.

Claire English:

And I saw a brilliant reel of yours and I saved it. I send it to so many people. It was so powerful. And you pose the question what is your role in all of this? And you like, and you started the real. I mean, I'm sure you could talk through it better than me, but you started the real by talking about when students say, oh, it was him, or why are you? Why are you focusing on me? And every single teacher can connect with that idea. I love that you started with that, because every single teacher was like yes, yes, you know, like that is exactly what I've experienced. That's so frustrating. Why are you picking on me? Why are you blaming me?

Claire English:

And then you speak about how we do that with behavior as well, and we like to make up excuses and deflect and pass the blame. And you call the teacher helplessness. And I think there is a hell of a lot of that. And I don't blame anybody. I'm not shaming anybody. I don't say that. I don't say that. I'm not saying that we're blaming teachers as a no blame, no shame Space always, because we cannot make any change if we're shaming and blaming teachers, but we do need to work with teachers and that's exactly the work that you do, and teacher helplessness is bred by a lack of support, a lack of understanding. Just, you know them feeling disempowered by whatever's happening in there in their space. Can you like what were you thinking with that real? Is that kind of like where you were going with it?

Bobby Morgan:

But I just loved it so much.

Bobby Morgan:

It was a very real example. I had a student in my class who, every time, like he could have been caught in the middle of the act and you would say something to him, he's like you're not saying nothing to him. You're not saying nothing to him and I'm like you're literally doing the thing that I'm asking you not to do right now. Right, and so there was all this deflection. There was never any accountability, never any like. You know what? You're right, he couldn't just utter those words. Everything was a fight. Then I started thinking about me. Right, I started thinking about when. So in my schools they always used the, you know, danielson framework, right? So I mean, we're coming to my classroom and because there were two students talking in the back, I got this three instead of this four. And now, or there was some reasoning for why I didn't get the score that I wanted, or I got some feedback, or when admin came, they had some criticism for me and I could easily say you mean to tell me to kid that doesn't listen in any class isn't listening in my class, and so that's my problem and all of this other stuff. But what am I really doing there? I'm beginning to make excuses and reasons as to why not every student is learning in my class. Right, I'm accepting that as normal. Does that mean that I'm going to be successful? No guarantee, but I can guarantee it won't happen until we start to take that approach, until we start to say, no, every student must learn in my classroom. And how can I make that happen? How can I make that a reality?

Bobby Morgan:

So, yeah, there's a learned teacher helplessness, where we feel like I'm doing everything that's being asked of me. But are you really? Could you improve? I feel like the moment you stop learning and stop growing, you should just quit, do something else. If you feel like you've reached that level, that pinnacle, where you've been doing this for X amount of years and now you have this thing down, I don't need to review this, I don't need to unpack standards, I don't need to do this. Well, if that's the mentality that you have, then what you're saying is you've outgrown the profession and maybe you need to move on. The way we stop to stop learning, the day we stop growing is the day we need to stop, period.

Claire English:

Let's talk about those two kids at the back of the class as well, because there's something very interesting that happens when it comes to those kinds of students. I call it like the. We have the bar, the expectation bar, and the level that we set. That bar is where the students will reach up to. And you were saying how powerful the way we speak about our students is and our beliefs around our students, and that's perpetuated by the conversations we have in the staff room and you know, the teacher before that had the students.

Claire English:

If those young people walk into our class and we have this preconceived idea that they're not going to work anyway and they don't work in any class and that why would they work in my class? We're already setting them up to fail because we have space at the bar. We've set the bar low. They know that. And what is that communicating to the people?

Claire English:

Like the young people in our room, those two students at the back of the room are thinking we might think, oh great, they can just have a great old time and talk. They don't care what they're actually thinking without realising it is. I'm not worthy of being taught. They don't care if I learn. That's exactly what those two students at the back of the room will be thinking so I think, when it comes to us putting up our hands and going not my problem, because I don't care about their learning anyway there's a lot that needs to be reflected on when it comes to those particular kind of beliefs that we hold as teachers, and I completely agree with you that we I don't know everything Like I think that's why I speak to people like yourself and have you on the podcast or talk to anybody else. There's so much power in us saying I don't know at all and I think we constantly need to reflect and we constantly need to do better.

Bobby Morgan:

Absolutely. Humility is is, I think, a missing ingredient, if you will, in a lot of our educational practice, a lot of our educational what I'm going to say malpractice comes from the fact that we feel like we know it all, or that our approach isn't working, that something's wrong with the child. Perhaps, just maybe something's wrong with the system, something's wrong with the program, something's wrong with the approach. And this is why you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, like the focus must be to create the conditions from which students can grow. My grandfather he was.

Bobby Morgan:

You know, I was raised primarily by my grandparents and my grandfather was like a stickler for certain things, like on Saturdays he would wake me up early, like just these ungodly hours, and we would go out and work on the yard. One day he wanted to to plant a garden and it was on the side of the house. I remember, like it was yesterday and he had me come out there and I'm this lazy, maybe tween, you know, 12 years old going outside to help and I'm like, okay, let's just throw the seed down and let's go back inside. Like what are we doing? And my grandfather was just, he was like no, if you don't take care of the soil, then that seed doesn't matter. It's never going to grow.

Bobby Morgan:

And so he had me do this, telling the ground and putting different soils in and making sure that the, the, the pH was right. And then we planted. And for me I always take that with me. You're asking students to grow, but I'm asking you what's the soil like? Are you planting the students in the right conditions for them to grow? And if they're not in that condition, that's not on that's not on the student, that's on us as the adults in the building to make sure that those conditions are there.

Claire English:

So funny you mentioned that particular metaphor, because in my very early career I've always had these values around teaching right and I like before I was a teacher I was a youth homelessness service case worker Like I've always wanted to do work with vulnerable young people and the reason I went into teaching was because I felt like by the time I worked with them in these environments it wasn't too late I don't think it's ever too late, but I wanted to do work that was more preventative. I knew that education was powerful and they needed teachers that gave crap about them. So I decided to go into teaching. Go into teaching and one of the first year like I think it was my first year I saw a quote that was very similar. That was, if the I'm not going to say the quote, right, if something's not growing, you change the conditions, there's nothing to do with the sprout, something like that.

Claire English:

And I remember saying that in a meeting and I was dragged through the mud by one particular staff member that was very experienced, who was, you know, obviously for a punitive approach.

Claire English:

This was 13 years ago, so the restorative kind of dialogue hadn't really taken any impact yet.

Claire English:

But I remember feeling as a very new teacher, so disheartened by that and feeling like I had gotten it wrong, that my values in education were stupid, that I should just kind of go with the flow with it a little bit more and not shake things up, but it really made me doubt my own belief in what I knew was right for these young people.

Claire English:

So I just want to say that, because there are a lot of new teachers that I work with and a lot of them come to me saying thank you so much for the work you do not even for the strategies, just for the validation that where my heart is is true and rise. And I'm not a weak teacher, I'm not a soft teacher, I am strong and I am compassionate and I can do incredible work. So I just wanted to say that when you brought up that story, because it's so important and I believe that so wholeheartedly that the conditions that we create I call it and with teacher helplessness, you're making me ran away now, but in terms of teacher helplessness, there are so many things we can't control, bob. We can't control the system, necessarily as an individual teacher, we can't control our schools, but what we can control is our little island of safety, which is our classroom.

Bobby Morgan:

Yes, yes, I can't affirm that enough. I think you know, as you were talking, I thought about the fact that for that new teacher, I read a book by Anthony, dr Anthony Muhammad, that Transforming School Culture. And then he talks about this like four groups of teachers in your building. He talks about the believers, the tweeners, the fundamentalists and the survivors. And the believer is that teacher you're talking about, the one who is ready to charge the hill, feels like if we get these things right and we can really make some difference right. And then you got the tweeners who have kind of felt that way but are kind of like in this middle ground of is this really going to work? Is it going to work here? Do I have to move on? What like they're in this, this middle stage.

Bobby Morgan:

But the fundamentalist is that teacher that said that to you, the teacher that says I got this right, I went through school like this, I got mine, I got my degree, you got to do the same work now and has these expectations, has not changed, will not changed.

Bobby Morgan:

They are fundamentally this, teacher, the problem in a lot of our schools is from an admin level, from a school leader level, if you're not doing the work to protect and to empower your believers. They're going to get pulled into either this survivor camp that's like I'm just going to get through today and I'm not going to do anything else, or this fundamentalist camp that says whatever you're saying about restorative practices, whatever you're saying about SEL, whatever you're saying about these these new age approaches isn't going to work with. What these students need is tough love emphasis on the tough and so the the to that new teacher. You're not crazy, you're. You haven't lost your mind what you believe about students, the way you want to approach them with compassion and love and understanding, while still holding them accountable for the greatness that is in them. All of that is where you should be, and I hope that if you hear this, that you're encouraged to keep going.

Claire English:

I love that you said the greatness that is inside, that holds you accountable for, the greatness that is inside you, that frames it so differently than you need to be held accountable for your bad behaviour, which I say a lot like not bad behaviour I don't speak about it in that way. But when I talk about, like, holding students accountable, I mean for their actions. But I love the way you just framed that holding them accountable because they have greatness inside them that they might not have the skills or the context at the moment to be able to meet because of whatever's going on for them, but they do have that and we need to see that in every single one of our young people, even if they're not presenting in that way because they're not their behaviours.

Bobby Morgan:

Absolutely. I had a conversation with a young lady at my school. I served as an assistant principal at my school and the young lady was just going through a really tough time and she was acting out. She was yelling in my face like not really like in my face, but like she was yelling right in front of me, and in that moment there were teachers watching and those teachers some of them I know wanted me to let her have it. But what I saw was this this young lady was advocating for herself the best way she knew how. And two, if I matched her energy, then we never get to a resolution. So I sat there and I listened to her and she yelled and I said is that right If I talk now? I'm not saying anything against what you just said. I just want us to have a conversation. Is that all right? And she matched me. She lowered the volume, we had a conversation and she understood why she had a certain consequence for behaviour that she was exhibiting at the time.

Bobby Morgan:

Now I bring that up to say a couple of things. One, the idea that we have to reject being soft or perceive the soft. It is easy for me to go into that situation. Hear that student, have them yell and then we shut it all the way down. Matter of fact, I know that about myself, like in the reflection area of me really looking in the mirror and knowing what kind of teacher I am. If you want to go there, oh, I'm going to crack a 500 jokes. I'm going to. I will win that battle. And knowing that about myself, I have to decide beforehand who I will be in that moment. So for me, I've decided before she started yelling at me, I'm talking to myself. She is upset. This isn't about you Hear what's not being said. I'm literally coaching myself through the moment because if I let myself get in the way, then what I've done is short circuited, any momentum for how we move forward and how we repair this moment.

Bobby Morgan:

So I think we have to reject the notion of softness versus being tough. The world is tough, life is tough. It doesn't mean that I then have to be tough on my students to prepare them for that life. It means that I must be compassionate and real with them about what's coming and the preparation work we need to do to make sure that they can be successful in this tough life. That's already there. They know it's tough. They walk in with it. That's the invisible backpack, right? They're carrying in all of these things and if we're not cognizant of that and if we're not compassionate with it, then we will add to the weight that they already are carrying. And that's what's happening in our schools now.

Claire English:

And they'll take that backpack and they'll leave anyway. They're not going to stay around for that kid's vote with their feet and they're not going to be in that class doing what you need them to be doing. Oh my goodness, it's just so crucial what you said about coaching yourself through the moment, because we are human beings at the end of the day and being a human being in a position where you are face to face with another human being in regards of who that person is whether it's a partner, a family member, a student when you are having abuse hold your way, when you've got things that are coming your way, you need to be very prepared to co-regulate with that young person, to be able to tell yourself that it's not something that you're doing. You know what. Sometimes it is what you're doing and I think teachers need to all.

Claire English:

I don't like that.

Claire English:

Don't take a personally thing, because and I've done a podcast episode of actually because you should be taking it personally.

Claire English:

Sometimes it's not always about you, but you have a very big responsibility to make sure it's not about you as well. But, yeah, coaching yourself through that moment, and in my pregnancy, at school, because I work with really kind of volatile and really challenging young boys. I had a very hard time coaching myself through those moments and I had a lot of moments I'm not proud of in the school because I would explode. I'm not going to blame my hormones. I'm going to blame the fact that I was trying to keep myself safe and I'm a human being and I think it's really important for us to recognize that, but always knowing that there's going to be a really tough job going into these interactions of being able to regulate so we are in the position to co-regulate with our young people and hold space for them and then be able to do the work after that, because we can't do the work if we're going to match, as you said, match the energy.

Bobby Morgan:

Absolutely, absolutely, and it's incumbent upon us to do that Right, like we have to remember that kids deserve that. They deserve our best, and if we go into it with the labels, with the deficit ideology, with these punitive approaches that assume the worst of students, then they're never going to get our best. They're going to get this manufactured version of ourselves that looks at them as the enemy, and we're going to win the battle. It doesn't have to be that way.

Claire English:

So if teachers are listening and they want to go into their classrooms tomorrow, into their little islands of safety and just do one thing differently to live a more restorative approach in their practice, what would you suggest they do? Where do they start?

Bobby Morgan:

Yeah. So I'm always going to advocate to start with self. I'm always going to advocate for that teacher to begin to reflect on their own schooling experience and what values they took away from that and maybe now bringing into the classroom, because we don't stop being ourselves once we get into the classroom doors. Right, and I think restorative practices, restorative models in schools fail because we try to do if you've ever seen the halftime show at a sports event with the person who's spinning plates on the stick, and they run around and they're spinning all the plates and we're trying to do all the things, but you have to run frantically around to try to keep everything up and then, sooner or later, it's all going to come crashing down because we're doing all of this at one time. So my advice would be just to start with restorative language. That's it. Restorative language is going to be the very first step Before you get to community building, before you get to any community circles. Just shift your language. So, instead of you know what's wrong with you or what were you thinking, right, and again, tone as matters, it becomes something where we're not lined up across each other.

Bobby Morgan:

And now I'm coming at you for what you did. I stand beside you and say, okay, what happened just now? What was going on? How can I support you through this? Because here's the expectation, right, we're not going to shy away from the expectation. The expectation is that you do X, y and Z. Is there something that I didn't do to support you? Is there something that is you know, that I didn't see in the process that maybe affected you?

Bobby Morgan:

Help me understand, right, once we do that, it doesn't mean that they don't still get a consequence. It doesn't mean that they don't still have to repair harm. It doesn't mean that they might not in some cases, be suspended, but it does mean that now they're not seeing you as the issue, or at least you've given them the opportunity not to see you as the issue. But we're standing shoulder to shoulder, looking at the obstacle and saying I believe you can get through this obstacle, whatever it is that's in your mind, whatever it is in your heart. But how can I support you to do that? And we're still going to fix what went wrong here. But help me understand how that happened. If we could shift just our language, I think it'll do so much in the process that come after that. So, moving away from blame, shame and empowerment, support and accountability, I think is the biggest shift.

Claire English:

The language that we use is absolutely everything and every single thing that we say to our young people, whether it's about their behaviour, whether it's about their learning. It's either a connecting or disconnecting thing to say, and the more connecting that we can be, the better. We can immediately disconnect with the young person for a very long time and I've made the mistake many times in my career just by saying something in the heat of the moment, which is why the inner work is important and then really focusing on what we say and I love that example as well and it is the tone, it's our body language, it's the way we're standing. Are we standing over them, looking down at them? Are we sitting beside them? Are we coming at them as a threat that's going to increase their stress response? Are we helping them to de-escalate in the moment? Everything that we do comes from our language and how we communicate, what we're trying to communicate.

Bobby Morgan:

I just want to say really quickly, I think that there was a situation where a young man looked just young black male in my class. He was charismatic, funny, everybody knew it, but he had an aversion to math I was a math teacher and so he would deflect to Humber because he didn't feel like he could do it and so he was like kind of like the class clown and one day it got to be a bit much because we were doing something that was a little bit more difficult. A sentiment to the hallway to have a conversation. I was raised in a military family. My grandfather shake your hand firmly, look me in the eyes. Yes, sir, no, sir, that was how you showed respect.

Bobby Morgan:

When I go out there to talk to him, he's not looking me in my eyes automatically because of the way I've been conditioned and I'm seeing this as disrespect To him. Though it was shame, it was guilt. I don't want to look at the person who I respect, who I love, outside of this moment, because I know that I harmed them, I know that I hurt them, I know that I didn't do what I was supposed to do. Our conversation doesn't go well because I immediately labeled what he was doing as disrespect, before just seeing him as an individual and understanding where he was coming from, added circle back, apologized, owned my mistake and then we could work through it together.

Bobby Morgan:

I think that there is a problem in our education system where we expect children to show up on our terms instead of allowing them to show up and then meeting them where they are. I think that's the heart of what you're getting at there too as well. I just wanted to share that because I think sometimes people look at folks like you and I, who are trying to encourage others to do these things, and say man, you got it all together? Absolutely not. I mess up all the time, but I hope that you would join me as we continue to mess up together right, fall forward, get up and keep moving.

Claire English:

And when we talk about repairing harm, the most effective way we can do that is by modeling it ourselves. If you can go to a student and say I'm really sorry for the way that I spoke to you this morning, because I was having a bad morning and what your behaviors you know, they were really struck like I struggled with that, like it really triggered me in that moment and I'm really sorry for the way that I responded. I shouldn't have spoken to you like that. My gosh. There is no more powerful thing than being able to apologize to a student for your responses, for the way you spoke to them, modeling everything that we expect from them, also having compassion for ourselves as human beings.

Claire English:

Bobby, honestly, it has been so brilliant talking to you. It is so wonderful to sit across from somebody with so much knowledge and expertise, but also so much compassion and heart for what we do as educators, and I have nothing but respect for you. I encourage every single one of you who is listening to follow along. I follow Bobby on everything that he does and I strongly suggest you do the same thing. Where can all of my listeners find you?

Bobby Morgan:

Yeah, so you can find me on YouTube and Instagram. It's at liberationlab on both platforms you can find me there.

Bobby Morgan:

You know I am at the time of this recording it's MLK Day, doing a live with some really fantastic educators talking about is the dream dead, is MLK is dream dead and how do we check education's pulse? So I'll be doing that periodically. You'll see that at least once a month, going live with some really phenomenal people, and then, in addition, later on in February about in middle February I'm going to be doing a workshop on what it really means to be culturally responsive. You know, I think the word gets thrown around a lot and people see these examples and sometimes they don't know what to do with it, and so we're going to break it down, we're going to talk about it and make it really actionable for folks, and so be on a lookout for that. More information will be coming out real soon but just really excited to serve educators and really to. Like we said, they'll disrupt the educators, who understand that if we don't do something different, you know the default mode is going to destroy us all, and so we got to disrupt.

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