Episode 3: Meet the New Book- Reimagining School Climate
Description: In this episode, Tina Boogren introduces her brand-new book, Reimagining School Climate, co-authored with Mario Acosta, and unpacks the four essential conditions behind a healthy climate: feeling safe, supported, valued, and fulfilled. Whether you're a teacher, leader, or anyone working in schools, this episode offers a preview of a practical resource built to help you build a healthy climate day by day.
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Resources: Buy Reimagining School Climate from Solution Tree, Marzano Resources, or Amazon. Buy The Schools Our Students Deserve from Solution Tree, Marzano Resources, or Amazon.
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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to Everyday Wellness with Dr. Tina H. Boogren. I am your host, Dr. Tina Boogren. I am so happy you are here. This is episode three of season seven, and I'm really excited about this episode because I want to share with you a brand-new book that is out that I co-authored with my friend and colleague Mario Acosta. The book is published by Solution Tree and the title is Reimagining School Climate: Creating the Conditions for Safety, Support, Value, and Fulfillment. So as many of you know, my background is in education, so we wrote the book thinking about educators, but I would make a strong argument that climate and culture really apply no matter what field that you work in, so it won't take a lot of mental strain to make some connections to whatever environment that you work in.
So what I want to do is just kind of overview the book, hopefully get you excited about it, and make a nudge to go check it out. It's available, of course we'll include all the links. It's available via Solution Tree, Marzano Resources, and Amazon. So let me just read you kind of the description that we came up with, Mario and I, to kind of give you a sense of the book.
So let's start with this. So school climate is the emotional weather of a school. In other words, it's how it feels to walk through the doors each day. So what we do in this book is we help educators, including leaders, teachers, paraprofessionals, anyone that works in schools to understand climate as distinct from, but reciprocally connected to school culture and learn how intentional attention to daily climate can influence the culture that develops over time. What we also examine is the interconnected relationship between educator wellness and school climate, including how the well-being of adults influences the climate they create for others and how the conditions within a school system can either support or erode educator well-being.
So some of you are kind of going ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know the work of Mario Acosta which is really all about school culture. He wrote the incredible book, The Schools Our Students Deserve, and I bring the expertise around wellness. And so what we discovered is climate sits, if you think of a Venn diagram, right, if we've got overlapping culture and wellness, at the middle of that is this idea of school climate. So we really put together this research-informed framework where we spent a lot of time drilling down to figure out what the four essential and interdependent feelings are that shape a positive school climate.
So these are feeling safe, feeling supported, feeling valued, and feeling fulfilled. What we do is we take a deep dive into those, and we examine what the sub-emotions and traits are those, what it looks like when those conditions are missing, what you start to see in terms of adult and student behavior, and then ways to focus on them and build them up across adult-to-adult, adult-to-student, and district-to-school leadership interactions. That's what's really exciting to me.
So we provide all of these different strategies of ways that we can think about fulfilling our commitment to each of these four core conditions. So in other words, how do we make sure adult to adult that we feel safe, supported, valued, and fulfilled? How do we ensure that adult to students, we are also really focusing on these core feelings? What does it look like from a district-to-school perspective? Because all of these relationships matter, right? If we think of school climate as the daily weather, it shifts, and it can shift very quickly. But the patterns of the day-to-day school climate, how we feel on a day-to-day basis, is what will eventually lead to our culture. And so much of how we feel on a day-to-day basis depends on how the adults are feeling, right? Adult behavior precedes student outcomes.
So that's what the book takes a deep dive into. What we're really excited about is the practicality. So we start with a deep dive into the research. That's always really important to us, but then we get into the nitty-gritty. And really, we think about this book as a choose your own adventure book so you think about, "What do those in my care need today?" So if you are a school leader, you might pause and consider, "What does my staff need today?" Well, they need to feel supported. Or you might be a teacher, a classroom teacher, and you think, "What do those in my care need to feel today?" And it's the beginning of school, and so first and foremost, my students have got to feel safe. Or you are a bus driver and you are thinking about what do those in my care need to feel? And first and foremost, we gotta get 'em safe so that they feel good on their way to school.
From there then, we offer up specific strategies that you can try, and then give you prompts that you can type right into whatever AI that you utilize to get really specific. You know, we always know that whenever we include strategies in books, people always want the specific strategies to be individualized to their particular situation, right? I need to know what this looks like in my seventh grade English classroom in a suburban middle school,right? And we want to be able to provide that, and that's kind of one of the beautiful things that AI can do for us. So we've created these prompts that you can kind of cut and paste and put into AI and figure out for your particular situation some very, very specific strategies that you might be able to try.
From there then, we've got just all sorts of ways that you can do a little audit to see how things are going. Again, more strategies. We also, in the back, we've got a whole list of tools in the appendix that can be really, really helpful. We give you this diagnostic tool to utilize. We give you, again, an overview of those essential strategies that you can try. We give you an implementation protocol that you can think about utilizing within your school.
So we hope that it really feels very user-friendly, that you don't necessarily just sit down and read this book from cover to cover because we don't absorb much that way. But instead, you spend a little time getting into those first few chapters of understanding really what we mean by climate, what the connection is to culture and to wellness. And then this is the book that you pick up and set down, and pick up and sit down again and again and again when you identify that those in your care, we need to pay attention to these particular feelings. Or if you yourself are feeling like, oof, boy, I need to help myself feel a little bit more safe or supported. That's the wellness piece.
So we're really, really excited about this book. We hope, hope, hope that you go check it out, that you dig into it, that you utilize it either on your own or with your team or with your professional learning community, with your school, with your district, that leaders use it, educators use it. We really wanted this to really encompass all audiences to the best of our ability because school climate involves everyone.
So that's a little bit of an overview of the book. We're just so excited for it to get out into the world, to start doing professional learning on it, to hear more about how it's going and yeah, we just hope that it fills a void of and becomes a really helpful resource, especially those of you that are working within high reliability schools. This is your level one resource to help you think about building that safe, supportive, collaborative culture, and it's really a fresh perspective of thinking about the wellness piece from this different angle, which feels fun and fresh and exciting. So I hope that you will go check it out. We're really, really, really proud of it. As I said, we're going to include the links to purchase it through Solution Tree, Marzano Resources, and/or Amazon, available everywhere you're able to purchase those educational resources.
So I hope you are able to check it out. I can't wait to hear what you think about it, and that's it. That's the new resource out in the world. We hope that you enjoy it. I am cheering so hard for you. Again, super grateful to Adrienne, Solution Tree, Marzano Resources, and to you, this badass squad. Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming back each week. I hope you have a great week. I love you.
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