Inside Olympia
Inside Olympia -- WA State Teacher of the Year Blaire Penry
Host Austin Jenkins sits down with 2024 Washington Teacher of the Year Blaire Penry. Penry, from the Auburn School District, has been interviewed by Bill Gates, and has a lot to say about online learning, artificial intelligence in the classroom, equity and diversity in education, and more.
- Broadcast on:
- 05 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Support for TVW Podcasts provided by the Washington Indian Gaming Association. This week on Inside Olympia, meet Washington's Teacher of the Year, Blair Penry. How would she change public education if she were in charge? What are her thoughts on preparing students for a fast-changing world? She's our guest this week for the full hour. From the TVW Studio, it's Inside Olympia with host Austin Jenkins. And welcomed Inside Olympia and the start of our new season. We hope you had a great summer. We've already got a packed lineup of interviews scheduled for this fall. But we begin this week and next with an in-depth look at the state of education in Washington. What's working and what's not? What are the new challenges and the ongoing ones? How is social media and online addiction affecting students? And what will artificial intelligence mean for the classroom? Next week, we'll put those questions and more to Washington State's principal of the year. But we begin this week with the state's Teacher of the Year, Blair Penry from the Auburn School District. Welcome, Blair Penry, to the program. Congratulations on being named Washington State's Teacher of the Year. No small feat. And good to see you. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation. Before we begin, I'm going to give a brief bio so that we have a little bit of a sense of your background. Blair Penry is an instructional specialist for the Auburn School District with a particular focus on online learning. Previously, she taught career and technical education as well as fine arts. Blair is an active member of the Auburn Equity Leadership Academy, where she promotes culturally responsive practices throughout the Auburn District. She has also helped to create student equity groups and equity and diversity professional development for elementary, middle and high school faculty. She says she is committed to making sure that all students are prepared for the future that they choose. So, we're talking at the beginning of a new school year. Everybody's coming off of summer, they're excited, refreshed, we hope, ready to go. What is going through the minds of teachers and teacher coaches, instructional instructors like yourself as you head into the school year? What are we not seeing? What's happening behind the scenes as a new school year launches? Yeah, a frenzy of work. So, for teachers and for educators and for all of the people who support our kids, it is really about making sure that we have everything that we need. For students to step foot into an environment where they know and understand that they are valued, that they are seen, that they are heard, that they are welcomed. Because this is their learning community, this is their learning environment. And so, a lot of our effort is put into making sure that when students walk into our classrooms, that they feel comfortable to let down that guard and to be ready to learn. Learning is a two-way street. We learn just as much from our students as they learn from us, but we have to build that community. And so, for teachers, for educators, for all of our really wonderful staff at schools, the first couple of weeks is about building that community. It's about getting to know our kids, about getting to know what they like, what they don't like, what works well for them, what doesn't work well for them. So that we can start to build this environment as a whole to where we are lifting up everybody in this learning community. It takes a lot of work. It does take a lot of work. And my sense is, and I'm just curious to know from your perspective, is there more focus on building community in schools today than there was historically? I certainly don't remember, from my years in school, what I'm now seeing with my own kids in terms of what those first days and weeks look like, and kind of all of the effort that goes into making kids and students feel as comfortable as possible, and as a part of the community as possible when they walk in the front door. Yeah, I do believe that there's an increase. The focus on belonging on mental health has been brought to the forefront of a lot of educational forms and environments. Even when I was a kid, we didn't do half the things that I did with my students or that my teachers do with their current students now. I had a mentor who would always kind of tout the relationships before rigor. Relationships before rigor. Yeah, relationships before rigor, we need to know our children, our students. Students bring so much knowledge into the classroom, and if you aren't taking the time to get to know what that knowledge is, then you're not able to integrate it into your curriculum, which means that your curriculum might not be relevant to the kids that are sitting right in front of you. And if your curriculum isn't relevant, then they're going to have a harder time engaging within that curriculum. So when we spend the first couple of weeks of building those relationships, getting to know kids, establishing that community, what we're really doing is laying the foundation for successful learning. Well, we'll talk more about the complexity of and the diversity of students in Washington State Schools in a little bit here. But let's step back and talk about this honor being named Teacher of the Year. And what that means for you, why you think you were recognized, and what this platform affords you. So we'll kind of break that down. What does it mean to be recognized in this fashion? Yeah, it is such an honor. And I feel like it really hits close to home for me because I grew up in Washington. I'm from Washington. I graduated from a Washington high school, and then I went and did college outside of the state. And I ultimately came back to continue my teaching career. And so to be named Washington State Teacher of the Year, it feels very full circle. Having been a student in this system, not always having a great experience as a student. To know that my efforts in trying to create really intentional learning environments with my kids have been successful through their eyes. That's why I believe that I'm here. And so it's humbling, and I'm honored to have it. And I also think that it's a time for me to express the work that we have to continue to do for our kids. Because the system isn't perfect. And we have student struggling and teacher struggling. And so part of my platform has really been about that messaging and providing different options in different ways to make sure that all students are really successful. One of the things that you have been acknowledged for, and by the way, you were also interviewed by Bill Gates on my others, is your online learning environment and what you've been able to accomplish in what many think is a subpar or less than optimal learning environment. And we know that during COVID, obviously teachers and students were forced into that environment and many fell behind. But help us understand a little bit about how you have approached online learning and why you see it as a positive, at least for some subset of students. Yeah, so I always want to start with online learning is not for everybody. Online learning is for some kids, but those kids deserve a really engaging learning environment. And so for me, I feel like my online teaching and the teaching that my peers did in our online school, very different than the rushed pandemic teaching that a lot of teachers went through. I know for me as well, when we were given that order, we're not coming back in, we're going to be online. Like, everything felt rushed, like I'm scrambling and putting it all together when Auburn Online was established. And by the way, that is essentially an online academy that is an option for students. It was, yeah, so and it's original mold. It was direct instruction online academy, first through 12th grade, where you had Auburn teachers doing Auburn curriculum. Face-to-face, face-to-face, right, through a Google Meet. But synchronous, not asynchronous. But synchronous. In real time. And it felt, followed a bell schedule, had homeroom, had field trips, right, so it was an integrated program. And for me, what I really loved about this new method was the chance for me as a teacher to really take a step back and reevaluate everything that I had done in a classroom. Because I couldn't take the curriculum that had been working in a classroom and just dump it online and it was magically going to be okay. It didn't work like that. And so it forced me to take a step back and really evaluate who was in front of me, who were my students, who was the community that I was serving. And I had to redo a lot of things and I had to create new ways of reaching students. And it was one of the joys for me of teaching online, was that it forced me to be creative, it forced me to do things differently. And those things were also what was best for my students. So having more project based learning where I was facilitating and they were leading the learning, integrating technology into curriculum. So they were gaining skills that they could immediately take outside of the classroom. Building all of these technology based engaging tools with best practices led to students flourishing online. I had students who when they were in a building they might be overwhelmed or they might have social anxieties or things were happening at home and they weren't making it into the building online. And absenteeism which we'll also talk about is a huge issue these days. So this can be I suppose a way to capture some students who are just not making it. It is one way, and so when we moved online these students were still meeting face-to-face with teachers. We're still connecting, I'm still building relationships, I'm still getting to know them. But now there's also this added element where I am in their home, right? These families can hear what we're teaching. And so when I go and I'm connecting with families they know what's going on in the classroom in a different way than they have before. Because they're able to hear or see it in real time. And so the connections that we're making with families, the bridges that we're building with families were different than what was happening in the classroom for me. And so all of these little nuances and different ways of interacting really showcase to me how an alternative learning environment such online can be such a benefit for some students. What is the lesson there for policymakers? Because again generally I think online learning has earned a bit of a bad rap because of COVID. And the other thing is just as we talked about building community in schools and being more intentional about that. In many ways schools also still look a lot like they did when I went to school. Kids are still sitting in chairs for the most part facing a teacher, maybe they're in clusters. But different learning modules or ways of learning, I'm not sure that the menu, at least from what I see with my own children, is still pretty much either you go to school or go to classroom and learn that way. So what is the lesson or the takeaway from this experience you've had with online learning being a positive? Yeah so we were able to build this program during pandemic with additional funds that we were receiving. And I think that is an important piece to note that we were able to take a step back to hear the community, to hear what they needed and get creative with the solution because we had funding. Because we had the wiggle room to say our community needs something different, we have the money to build something different and we are now shaping it around them. And so funding is critical. Also I was able to be creative in this environment because I was given the time. That's part of the issue, we want teachers to do all these really creative things, when are we giving them the time to figure that out? What are we taking off of plates if we want teachers to invent new ways of engagement? And so I was able to do that with this program because we were given the gift of time. We had very intentional meetings beforehand examining different ways to engage students online. We met as a school-wide PLC, which is professional learning communities, where we're discussing common practices. And so now it's not just the English team meeting. We're given the time to come and connect and to make a really synergistic, if we want to use that word environment. Because we all have the same students and we're all talking about what's best for those students and then given the time to create what is best for those students. And so that gift of time is also really important. So asking teachers to do more with the same resources or without adding some people to the mix to try to do new innovative and creative things probably isn't going to be successful. The reality is these things cost money, it requires extra people. You can't be teaching in a physical classroom and also teaching online. No, and I've done that and it was not easy. So another cadre of teachers had to be running. We were completely taken out of the building. And what is the status of this online academy? So it has now transitioned into a more alternative learning program to where it is more independent. Is that because the money ran out? It's funding. It was federal funds. And that's a part of it, right? It's not all of it. But you couldn't sustain. The district could not sustain this in the same fashion because the money ran out. Well, here in Washington our funding also is based off of regionalization. And so for our district our regionalization got cut. And so it was no longer matching what we had been receiving before. So in addition to ESSER monies running out, our regionalization being cut, there were things that had to be taken to make sure that our district is protecting our students. And protecting our staff. I think that my district in particular did a really good job of shepherding that. And while this program doesn't look like it did, we didn't have to riff teachers, right? Well, since we're on this topic now of funding, let's pull that thread a little bit and help us understand how the sort of valuability or the ups and downs. Affect the work that teachers and principals and everyone else involved the staff who are trying to deliver this education to these one million plus students in this state. How does that affect the work? Because on the one hand you're describing this moment where there was real innovation happening. And then you're also describing reality struck. The money wasn't going to last forever. You had to pivot in order to kind of keep doing the basic things that district had to do. This special thing had to change. Great. And that's what happens. And so when we talk about the funding going up and down and being variable, what happens is that student learning suffers from that. We can't sustain certain programs or we can't sustain the support structures like after school tutoring or fine arts programs or after school enrichment. These are all things that require money, but as soon as the money starts to flexes, a lot of districts look to come back very quickly because it's the first go to. And so student learning gets affected. Student belonging gets affected. School culture gets affected. You're taking away the elements that enhance and enrich students' lives. And then we wonder why students don't want to go to school. When we take away all the fun stuff, we take away the stuff that was school. And what's the drive? What's the drive? And this is a conversation that's happening in school districts across the state right now. How to balance the budget. We've got declining enrollment, which is affecting the bottom line. The end of the COVID funding. Let me just pivot for a moment and ask you about your shirt. Representation matters. What does that mean from your perspective? Help us understand why you're wearing the shirt and what it means. Yeah, thanks for drawing attention to it. So for me as an educator of color, representation matters because it is important for all of our students. In the state of Washington, 87% of our educators identify as white, while our students are growing more and more diverse, which is a really beautiful thing. When we talk about student success and when we talk about students thriving, I think sometimes we miss the element of making sure that our teachers and our educators are more diverse. Because that adds to student success. When there is an educator of color, when there are more educators of color, then all students do better. Students who identify as white do better, and students who identify as students of color do better. Test grades go up, discipline goes down, creativity, critical thinking skills, all these things increase. And so it's a really important piece of the puzzle that sometimes gets left out of the conversation, and it really should be more towards the forefront. Because when we increase educators of color, student success goes up. And so for me, representation matters is just that. Representation, when students walk into a building and can see themselves represented, it matters. When students are learning and there's representation in their schoolhouses, it matters. It matters to achievement, it matters to identity, it matters to belonging. I didn't have a teacher of color until I went to college. I didn't even think that I could be a teacher because I didn't see anybody who looked like me. So representation matters for a lot of different reasons. What do you see as the biggest barriers to diversifying the teacher core? So there's issues in attrition, there's issues in retention. I think personally for me, it's creating an environment and systems that support diverse educators that don't expect them to go into a building and assimilate, that honors the natural brilliance and creativity and things that they bring without trying to stifle it or shove it into a box. I know that myself being in a building where I was the only educator of color, I got a lot of comments of, "Oh, we're going to give you these kids because we know it'll be okay." Why do you think that? Is it just because we have the same color of skin? What's the things that we have in common? But it's this assumption that educators of color will just naturally do something that you don't expect anybody else to do. And so valuing what we do bring to the table is an important piece of that as well. You mentioned retention, I mean there's the recruitment, there's the retention, there's attrition out of the profession, and whether we're talking about teachers of color or teachers generally, those are ongoing issues. This is a hard job and the demands are constantly increasing. You talked about using the term "rigger" earlier, there are standards that need to be met, benchmarks that need to be reached, topics, and coursework that has to be covered in a certain amount of time. What are some observations you have about what is happening right now with the teacher recruitment retention, at least in your district, and what can be done to recruit the next generation of teachers and keep them? Yeah, so like you had mentioned, this is a nationwide conversation. Our teacher preparation programs are at the lowest numbers that they've ever been. And education has been politicized, it's been demonized. You have a profession that you tout as noble and then you have people attacking educators. It's really hard to promote what is really a wonderful profession to younger generations when they're seeing things on social media all the time, that there's no respect, there's no pay, there's no work-life balance. Parents are screaming at us, we're being pushed and pulled in a political arena. You take all of these things, you shove them on social media, younger generations are seeing this, why would they enter it? We have Gen Z coming up who has the strongest ideas of work-life balance that we have seen. And it's pretty clear that they're like no, no thank you, there's no balance there. And so I think there's so many elements to it, but that's part of it. It's the messaging that we're not we as educators, but that people are pushing about what this profession is and how hard it is, which it is incredibly difficult, but it doesn't ever help when we're demonized. There are no quick fixes, but are there a couple of things that the powers that be, whether they're the funders or the people at the district level who do to start to turn the coin to the wrong? The very first thing I think of is pay student teachers. Pay student teachers. Pay student teachers. When you think about the medical professional, you have residents, they get paid for their work. It's a four year program, they get paid, they move on, they continue to get paid. We don't do that for teachers. We expect teachers to work for free, student teachers to work for free, and then to get their certificate and then enter the profession. So if you're trying to do this as a mid-career transition, especially. So hard. There's going to be a period of time there where potentially you're not able to earn an income. Well, and especially for like all certs, alternative certification, they have different paths. And so sometimes they could be teaching as a student teacher for a year, and they're not receiving an income. Sometimes they are contracted, but they might have a master's degree in engineering, but they're getting paid at the base level because they have no teaching experience. And so there's all these little bits and pieces that devalue the work that teachers do and the time and effort that it takes to get this training. Is there too much priority placed on seniority in this profession? And I know that that's something that the union contracts promote. Is that true? But to your point about diversifying who's coming into the ranks, sort of in the global sense, making it more financially feasible, does there need to be more flexibility? Do you think about paying for experience even if it's not directly in the classroom? Absolutely. If we are going to, especially like when we look at the world of CTE, career and technology education, if we want industry professionals to come into teaching, we cannot say that, oh, you have been doing journalism for 20 years, we're going to start you at step one. That does not encourage people to come into teaching. And so we do have to do some shifting on that. Yes, they might not have been teaching for 20 years, but that is still valuable experience that students are going to get so much out of, and we have to start recognizing that value. Okay, let's take a quick break, we'll be back to continue our conversation with Blair Penry, our teacher of the year, in just a moment, back after this. Stolen vehicles are a problem, we need a solution, pursuits are not the solution to that. Washington State is not missing high-speed police pursuits. Washington State is missing the possibility of a high-speed pursuit. All right. And welcome back to Inside Element B.I. Genomee once again is Washington State's Teacher of the Year, Blair Penry. I want to hit some of these kind of hot-button issues that we're hearing a lot about in the education space these days. One is just the ongoing lasting impact of the COVID pandemic, both on academic performance, but also on the emotional well-being of students. I know we're a few years out from the worst of it, but what are you observing about the long-lasting fallout or effects? And maybe more importantly, are you in the camp that thinks that this is sort of going to have a generational impact, or that students who went through that are going to be able to rebound and catch up? This is interesting for me because last year I was in a middle school building, and so I was able to interact with students at that level, and it's not a level that I had been around in a long time because I am high school. And so I was able to see them kind of come back into the building, come back from the pandemic, and see them struggle a little bit. See teachers having to pivot how they're teaching things in order to make sure that we are engaging them and that it's relevant. I think one of the biggest shifts that I have seen since coming back from the pandemic is this need for relevance. How is the information that we are teaching relevant to their world now? And when we think back to how the pandemic kept us in our bubbles and we had information at our fingertips, everything was super relevant to what we were doing, we were able to seek it out, and I think that is continued into the classroom. It's also really interesting because I have a five-year-old, and so I see like he's a pandemic baby and he didn't go to daycare, and so I'm seeing like that side of it as well, and now that he is in kindergarten, I'm seeing them catch up very quickly on social skills and other academics. And so there's kind of the swing and range of what's happening at different ages that I think is really interesting. Generally, would you put yourself in that optimistic or pessimistic or what camp are you in when it comes to thinking about, again, the long lasting impacts here? Learning loss is a term we hear a lot. Yeah, I am in the cautiously optimistic camp. I think teachers are working incredibly hard to connect curriculum to their students, which is going to help with the learning loss. I also recognize that there are structures that are deeply rooted in inequitable systems that will continue to prevent us closing that gap if we don't do something about it. Whether that is equity training or whatnot, until we fix those inequities, until we really work and do the hard work, that gap is going to be hard to close. We've talked a lot on this show over the years, and it's a constant discussion point, the opportunity gap, the achievement gap that we see between white students, students of color, in particular African American students, Native American students, and those numbers, as I understand it, have actually, that gap has actually gotten worse, not better in recent years. Obviously, the goal should be to close that gap. So equity and access become key issues. You talked about representation matters. On the flip side, in terms of access for the students, not just to perhaps a teacher that they can relate to or who looks like them, but in terms of equitable access to an education, to academic rigor, to a program that can work with them, no matter what their background. How are we doing in that department? Yeah, I don't think it's a different side of the same coin. I think it's the same side. When we look at academic rigor, particularly for our black and brown students, our biases as educators and our misconceptions as educators can play a big role in the amount of rigor that we present to black and brown students. And so to say that access is different than representation, it's the same for me. What do you think about the focus on people look at the test scores? They see what percentage of students are meeting math standards, for instance, or English standards. And there's a lot of hand-wringing about the numbers not being great. Parents worry about their own kids' scores, and more collectively, we look at the overall scores and say, "Are our kids meeting the mark? Are enough of our kids meeting the mark? Why aren't more of them not meeting the mark?" This has become an issue in the race for, say, school superintendent. There's been finger-pointing about this. Who's responsible? What's going on here? It's a competitive world out there. It is. I also think it's important to take a step back and examine the test and see who is writing it. Who is it being written for? I have opinions on testing. I wonder if sometimes we get hung up in the numbers. But I also recognize that that is the benchmark that we use, and that's the measurement. I think it does go back to how are we presenting the curriculum? How are we building academic vocabulary in our classroom? How are our teachers connecting with students? I think it's more than just a numbers debate. Regardless of whether you think those map scores are maybe the best metric, since you have an inside opportunity to observe what's going on, using the metrics that are available to you. Again, how concerned are you about student achievement generally, and at least in your district from what you're seeing? Should we be concerned as a society, should parents be ringing their hands? Or is your sense that we're doing all right or we're headed in a better direction? What's your honest appraisal? I am more concerned about the gaps between scores than the actual scores, if that makes sense. That gets back to the opportunity gap we're talking about. Making sure that expectations are high for all students, that the rigor is there for all students. That we're not leaving kids behind. That's where I am. What is the gap? And if it's getting worse, not better, that raises folks. Is there, again, to bring this back each time to those who have some power over this, who control the purse strings, who can set the policy? Is there something you'd like to see from the front lines from your perch that would start to do? Because again, we talk a lot about this opportunity gap. We haven't yet to close it. Yeah, I don't have an answer for it. Is it more resources, though? Is that all? Yeah, it's going to be more resources. It's going to be more support. It's going to be smaller class sizes. It's going to be teacher autonomy. There are lots of elements that are going to be a part of that puzzle. It's not going to be one thing that solves it. More money will help. Lower class sizes are going to help. If you don't put 31 students in a classroom and expect one person to deliver incredible results, yeah, that's going to help. So if we're looking at policy, then those are the things that's going to close those gaps. Having more educators of color, having deep equity training, those are all pieces of the puzzle. So is it your sense that districts with the current level of funding are able to meet expectations, do the basics, but that if we really want to turn a corner or crank it up or go that next step? Because we're also talking post-COVID, we're talking post-McGlery. There was a decades-long lawsuit against the state over not adequately funding public schools, not meeting its constitutional paramount duty. And then over a number of years, more money was put into education. Teachers got raises, but now it's starting to slip again as a percentage of the state budget. So sort of in this post-McGlery environment, what would your thought or message be? If this is a priority, if education is a priority in Washington state, then it needs to be funded as a priority. And so I think it's really, we can see it across the nation, but where we put our money states what our priorities are. If we're going to say that our children and closing the gap, funding fully funding education is a priority, then the slips that we're seeing can't happen. I hear you saying you got to put your money on your mouth. Yes, you got to back teachers up. A lot of people are reading Jonathan Heit's book, The Anxious Generation, a lot of teachers, school administrators, I've seen it on the desk of the front desk assistant at my kids. It's a little cool, actually. It's prompted a lot of conversation. So two questions about that. One is, what is your observation about the social, emotional, well-being of students these days, especially young girls, adolescent girls? Do you share the alarm that seems to be that Jonathan Heit is talking about and that seems to be sort of the current conversation that kids are in trouble, especially young girls? Yeah, absolutely. As a marketing teacher, one of the things that we do is we kind of take a deep dive into social media, and we particularly talk about how it makes students feel. And when students have these real conversations, it's very clear to see that they are struggling in a way that past generations have not because of the constantly connected world that they have at the very tips of their fingers and the damage that it can do. So, yes, I do believe that this generation is in crisis in that way. What can be done about that? I feel like this is a question that everybody asks. That's why we have states suing social media companies. So everybody is asking this question, and I do not have an answer, but what I do with my students is talk to them, make sure that they understand the implications, have them build those critical literacy skills when it comes to digital literacy. One of the really great things about marketing is that we get to look at social media in that lens, and what it means to be a consumer of social media, and how businesses and people are making money from their consumption. And sometimes that lens because it is so focused really helps them understand that, oh, I am being fed these messages because of my search history. They're taking the cookies and putting the pieces together, building a profile, and then making money off of selling my data. But if we're not teaching, if we aren't leading them through that journey, how are they supposed to know? That has to be a part of our curriculum. Every school should be working on a media literacy, an AI literacy program, digital competency. This is their world. Part of our job as educators is to get them ready for their world. And so building in those structures that curriculum is important. The state office of public instruction recently put out guidance about cell phone use in schools. And essentially, this is up to district by district, but said there should be a uniform policy. There are a lot of schools and districts in the state and around the country that are now banning them during the school day, or at least restricting them in the classroom. Do you have any strong opinions or views on this? I really think that it has to be whatever the policy is, because as a CTE and technology teacher, I think it's really important that we teach students how and when to use these. But I do recognize that they are an incredible distraction in classrooms. What I think is important is that districts have uniform policies that stretch to all of their schools, and that schools have uniform policies. Because what I'm seeing is that in schools that don't, it's fractioning school culture and school community. Because now you have teacher A who isn't allowing phones in their class, but teacher B is allowing, and so kids are wanting to go to teacher B rather than teacher A. And that is not going to better your school culture. It also puts the teachers in a tough spot. Right. So making sure that whatever the policy is, is that it is uniform to maintain that cohesive culture. This issue of chronic absenteeism, which is also a national issue, what have you observed in your own district? And do you have any thoughts about, I mean we talked about how online learning can be an alternative, if it's available, and that requires money. But what can be done about so many kids just not showing up for school? So again, this is not if we just do this, it will get better. Right. There are, I was reading an article about Rhode Island, in particular, who has really been recognized for their top down kind of methods on tackling chronic absenteeism. And really what they had mentioned was that it is a lot of little things. It is phone calls home. It is home visits. It is after school activities. It is creating school council groups with kids who necessarily wouldn't have volunteered in the first place, so that they have that incentive of going. And so all these little things that build community are one way to help with that. Also presenting different modes of education like online, like the aviation high school, right? Different options for students so that they can get what they need. When you think about kind of what the future holds here and the complexity of the world that these students are growing up in, and the ubiquitousness of technology, which as you say, it's not going away, you got to learn to live with it and perhaps use it effectively. And yet there is a lot of despair right now about the state of the mental health of our students and how to wrangle this and how to wrestle it down, right? Because it was sort of like a decade or so ago, kids started getting these devices, access to social media, it seems like we've done this sort of giant experiment on them. It doesn't seem to be going well, of course there's still a lot of argument about the cause and the correlation. And I see how distracted my own kids are, I worry about attention spans. Help us, as you're thinking about this, and as the parent of a young child, what's your advice? How do we navigate this? Yeah. I think we have to navigate it in a very holistic fashion, making sure that there are mental health resources in our schools, which is incredibly tough. Like when you think about the number of students per counselor that is funded, because in reality school districts are trying to do better, but that means that it's coming out of their budget, not the state budget. So the amount of mental health counselors that are funded by the state per student, that has to be fixed. So mental health resources, community resources, so connecting kids with programs like the YMCA, creating enrichment opportunities for after school so that it's not just go home, get on a screen, making sure that there is media literacy, curriculum and classes in the schoolhouse, having an integrated approach throughout all subjects. When we are in English, let's talk about those clickbait headlines. When we talk about persuasive writing, how does it connect with what you're seeing? When you are in social studies, how has technology impacted propaganda and elections? And when you're in marketing, how has social media taken marketing and done a complete shift of the industry? It shouldn't be that students are only exposed to technology in one subject. It should be throughout all of their subjects. Or in just one way, which is it's when I'm at home looking at social media, right? That's the only way you engage with technology. You're missing a lot of pieces of the puzzle. Exactly. Okay, a few last questions. One is if, I don't know how many teachers are watching this, but since you are the state's teacher of the year, and I like the fact that you have made it abundantly clear there are no simple answers or silver bullets to any of this. But is there one piece of advice or one thing that you have learned as a teacher that you would pass along to your fellow teachers? Or people who are thinking about the profession? I think one piece of advice for educators is to get curious, to get curious about your kids, to get curious about different ways of presenting your curriculum, to try something new, to not be afraid to get in that learning pit with them. I think they're all really important pieces. I also, as a student who didn't really feel valued by my own teachers or who felt that their expectations of me were just lower than some of my peers, I think it's really important for us to check our own stories and to check our bias and to see what we're walking in that door with and how it's interacting with students, because we have so much power as teachers. We can impact students in so many ways that I hope that this year we're getting curious and we're impacting in really positive ways. What about a piece of advice to policymakers who maybe don't work in schools and around students, but control your budgets? Get in schools, get into the classrooms, see the humanity behind the numbers, see the incredible things that teachers do with really limited resources. I don't know how you can make decisions just based on numbers without going and seeing the toll of that. Get into those classrooms and not just to the high achieving whatever your perception of that is. You need to get into all schools across the district and to see what's going on. I asked an educator friend of mine what I should ask you because I knew I had to have some blind spots. He said, "What's one thing that you believe all schools can do well but are not prioritizing?" I thought that was an interesting question. They could do well, but it's just not a priority right now. Anything come to mind? I think that all schools could do well integrating student voice into decisions, whether that is through student council or having students on equity teams or having student principal committees. I think that all schools have the capabilities of integrating student voice into their decision making. Not just we collected surveys, this is how they're feeling, really folding them into the fabric of how schools move forward. I don't think that all schools are doing that at the moment. So then the corollary is what is the barrier, the challenge that keeps them from doing that? Sometimes it's time, it takes time to build these structures, it takes time out of people's day, it takes effort, which takes time. I think that is the most precious commodity that we have in education as an administrator, as a teacher, it's time. It goes by so quickly and there's so much that we have to do or that we want to do and that we can get in our own way because of it. There's so much push-pull between adapting to the times and also sort of sticking to traditional math reading and whatever else. Is there something that you think that schools need to do to sort of pivot to and embrace this uncertain future and something you'd like to see them stick to no matter how the world changes around us? I don't think there is something that I want everybody to stick to because I don't think-- So constant change and constant adaptation. Yeah, I mean that's teaching. Teaching has changed and teachers are flexible and we have to adapt. The kids that are in front of us now aren't the same kids that were in front of us ten years and so if we're not willing to be flexible to change things then we aren't serving the students in our classrooms. What is something that the public or the media gets wrong about schools and education? That teachers are trying to indoctrinate students that we have some secret agenda and we don't. We're trying to teach them to be successful, to be happy, to be a part of a global community. Okay, we have just a few seconds left, a final word, final thought. What did I not ask you that you'd like to say in fifteen seconds, twenty seconds? In twenty seconds. Where do you want to leave us? I am excited by innovation and forward thinkers and people who are tired of slow change and I am excited for this generation who are brilliant and funny and creative to come in and shake things up. Okay, Blair Penn rate, the state's teacher of the year. Again, congratulations and thanks for the conversation. Thank you. Appreciate it very much. Thank you for watching Inside Olympia. Next week we continue our in-depth look at public education with the state's principal of the year. I hope you can join us. [MUSIC] You