Ep #412: Why Teachers Must Feel Well to Teach Well with Dr. Michelle Chanda Singh

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 412.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly.

Angela Kelly: Hello, empowered principals. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the podcast. Today, I’m going to have a conversation with Dr. Michelle Chanda Singh. She is a specialist in teacher professional development and highlighting how we can bring students of color into our classrooms with as much power and diversity and inclusion as possible. I have been in contact with Michelle for quite some time now. We have been trying to coordinate our schedules, and man, life has been happening for both of us in good ways.

So we’re here today. I am so honored to meet her, to speak with her, and to have you hear the brilliance that she has to offer and how we can, especially in these current events, these current times. Life is a little turbulent in our educational system and for families, particularly families of color. I really am honored to be able to promote this conversation on this podcast because I think we need to be having these conversations on the regular and in ways that I hope Michelle can share with us, but how to regulate ourselves when we are feeling all of this uncertainty in the field of education right now and in the world.

But how we can create a sense of grounding and safety and comfort for students to perform and to learn in their highest best self. And I’m really excited to talk with you about that today. So, Dr. Singh, welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast. Can you please tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?

Michelle Singh: Absolutely. Where do I start? That’s the question. Okay, so well, I’ll start with this. As someone who left my teaching career after 15 years in the public school system in one of the nation’s largest school district, what I do now is I help teachers to find balance and to beat burnout because those are the causes of why teachers left. That’s why I left. It was things that piled up, piled up. Now, what does that have to do with students? It has everything to do with students because if we are not right on the inside, we are not right teaching them. So it starts with us. You talked about grounding and safety and comfort. I wrote it down.

Because what I have realized and what I have experienced from over 20 years in education, not just as someone who was in it and left and I’m in it again because even though I left y’all, I’m still in it because I’m a professor, I observe classrooms, I still connect with students as a mentor. So I’m still very much in it. I just don’t have my own classroom. But as someone who was able to experience different lenses of education from the nonprofit world to the corporate world, to the institution of education world, K through 20, I realized that it starts with us. We have to know and find the things that will help us feel grounded and feel safe and feel comfort before we can create those spaces for our own students. And I’ve done a lot of work. My dissertation is focused on student disengagement and in that research, it goes back to what the teacher is willing to do. How is the teacher willing to incorporate certain strategies and build relationships? And let’s be honest, we can’t build relationships with folks if we don’t have a relationship with ourselves.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: So that’s, I guess that’s the short of the long.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Okay, you’re speaking my language. I love this so much. And I think that people are becoming aware, right? They can feel the dissonance in their bodies. They’re calling it stress, they’re calling it burnout, they’re overwhelmed. They’re putting labels on the experience of teaching as it currently stands right now. And yet, they’re unsure of what to do about it, other than I think there’s an all or none mentality out there, which is I either suffer or I leave. It’s an all or none. And we, I think you and I, what we’re working on, you’re working with teachers, and I’m working with administrators is like the land of and. Right?

How can we be educators and do what we love and be in the passion of the work we were born to do and not at the expense of self-sacrifice and self-suffering. And finding that middle ground where we are serving, but we are also tuned in with ourselves in terms of our own sense of safety, our own self, grounding of ourselves. And you know, I just think about a person waking up and going into school every day. I know how I felt on some of those days, like almost in tears or maybe I was in tears driving to work because I was bracing for the day because I wasn’t regulated.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, yeah. You’re not regulated. You don’t know how to name the things. You don’t know how to manage the weight. You don’t know how to say no, you don’t know how to set boundaries. You just know how to keep performing and keep doing because a lot of times when we’re in these roles, we’re caretakers. And we have been caring not just for our students, but we have likely been in caretaking positions a lot of our lives from the time we were we were children ourselves. And so we come into this profession with that idea of us always being the ones being the doers and being the caretakers, and we don’t know how to care for ourselves, to care for us. And so we feel the feelings and we just keep taking and taking and taking and we don’t know how to say just hit pause or stop until it gets to the point where after 15 years, you got to walk away like I did.

Because I, it just built up and I couldn’t take it. It became a different kind of hard for me. My health was at risk. When I left in 2019, in a year I released 100 pounds. My health was literally at risk y’all for all kinds of things that plague my family. I was at risk for those things. And it took me leaving to get control, to feel grounded, to feel safety, to feel comfort, to be able to finally do something about it. And when I teach and when I speak to teachers and whatever it is I’m doing as I’m helping and supporting teachers, I speak to them from the lens of leaving because when I’m in it, I didn’t know anything was wrong because I just kept on doing and being.

Angela Kelly: Exactly.

Michelle Singh: Kept on performing. You are not able to identify the problems that have persisted for years until you step out and look in. And that’s what I’m able to do and that’s how I’m able to help teachers see that. And I’m not calling for teachers to leave the profession at all. My call is for teachers to be more is to be more aware, to acknowledge, to name and to find strategies that are doable within your already crazy busy workload and day and to find to set boundaries and find balance because you literally have to come first. I know it sounds selfish and I had to learn it. Mother, caretaker of lots of family members, wife, dog mom, all of those things.

Angela Kelly: Yeah.

Michelle Singh: Yes, the dogs count too because they…

Angela Kelly: Yeah, they’re like having other children.

Michelle Singh: Yes, yes, exactly. That’s a whole other story, but yeah.

Angela Kelly: That’s right.

Michelle Singh: I didn’t start putting myself first until I left the school district in 2019. Until my daughter left for college in 2022. That was the first time in 2022, this is 2025. She’s a senior now at Howard University. When my daughter left, I had to find myself again because once she’s my only child. And two, I’m like an empty nester with me and my husband trying to figure out, look, I had my daughter when I was 22, and so here I am trying to do life now without this child that has been attached to me since I was an adult. I adulted with her. So like, what is my life now?

Angela Kelly: Yes. Oh, I feel that. I felt the same way when my son went to college in 2017. That was literally the year I resigned from my position, sold my house, started this business. I literally, I’m like, what was I thinking back then? But I think I was so unsettled with him leaving, I just was like off the deep end. But it’s – in hindsight, it’s the best thing I could have ever done for myself because I too, I lost 20 pounds, 20, 30 pounds. I had high blood pressure. My weight had gone out of control because I was, you know, eating and over consuming just…

Michelle Singh: Yeah. Or not eating at all. And just, yeah. It was like all or none, right?

Angela Kelly: Yeah. Or you wouldn’t eat all day, so you’d be ravenous, or you were snacking on like the donuts in the staff lounge or like grabbing a, you know, handful of M&Ms, just something just to get you going. But it wasn’t healthy, but it was the stress that was getting to me. I had like numbness in my fingers that they couldn’t identify or explain where it was coming from. There was all kinds of physical manifestations of the stress. You know, like you said, I just I was just in it so I couldn’t see it.

Now, I would love to hear because I think about the decisions I made and the space I was in mentally, emotionally, physically, when I decided to resign, and I think other people see, look at people on the outside like you and I as consultants and they’ll say, well, I guess I have to leave teaching. So like, tell me about your business and how you support teachers and the message that you send them to keep, we want, we need teachers. We want them in the classroom. And so how can they get healthier, be more grounded, and be a teacher, a mom, a dog mom, you know, a wife.

Michelle Singh: All of the things, right? Yeah, so, so interestingly enough, in October, an article I wrote for the Education Leadership magazine, which is geared toward school leaders and administrators. The title of that article, and I’ll share the link, that article was called Why I Left Teaching. So it’s about a short story about my journey in the education system from when I started to why I left, but what I do in this article is I actually offer five concrete things that school leaders can do to keep teachers of color in particular, because my own experience, the school system in which I did and all of the things that I endured. But it can certainly apply just for school leaders in general just to keep good teachers. So what I do is I work with the teachers directly and one of the things, one of the programs that we have in our company, LCTE Learning Solutions, is called The Restful Teacher. So this was something that I learned when my daughter left and I went on my very first experience without child, without husband, without family. I went on a retreat all by my lonesome.

Angela Kelly: Love it.

Michelle Singh: And it was just me and women that I was getting to know. So at that retreat, one of the things that we learned about was Dr. Sandra Dalton’s seven areas of rest. I had never heard of about this before, ever in my life.

Angela Kelly: Oh, can you share that? I haven’t heard of that.

Michelle Singh: Absolutely. Okay, so I was so intrigued and I was like, I didn’t realize that one, rest is not just sleeping, right? Because we hear rest and we always think, oh, I’m going to take a nap or I’m going to go to sleep early. I’m going to have a bedtime routine and blah, blah, blah, because I need to get, I need to get some sleep because that’s going to solve all the problems. No, that doesn’t solve all the problems. Okay. So that part. So these seven areas of rest by Dr. Sandra Dalton is about what our body’s needs are in order for us to feel that sense of balance. So the areas of rest are your creative rest, your mental rest, your emotional rest, your social rest, your spiritual rest, your sensory rest, and your physical rest. Physical is the actual sleeping and exercising part.

Angela Kelly: Right. That one little part.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, but it’s only one of seven. So then when I learned about those different areas of rest and I started to kind of look back at my just life, I realized, okay, I was deficient in sensory rest. And so that’s why that time when my husband wanted to go out on a Friday night and he took me to like a concert-like event where there was a lot of bright lights and loud music and a lot of people, I completely shut down and we had to leave.

It was Friday at the end of the school week and I was overloaded and I didn’t know how to name it and I didn’t know that I was deficient in it. That is why when I feel stuck and I’m creating something and I’m writing something and I feel stuck and I just don’t know what to put next, that’s creative block. That’s why it helps when I go outside and take a walk or when I just completely do something new, like go play with my dogs or just take a shower, it refreshes. Like, there’s science behind all of these things. And so when I learned that stuff for myself, I was like, oh, this is like the hidden curriculum, y’all. Well, let me unhide it.

Angela Kelly: Yes. We’re not talking about this stuff in teacher prep classes, right?

Michelle Singh: No, they don’t talk about this stuff ever. I had to pay out of my pocket to go on this retreat that was a non-education retreat to learn about this thing. Okay, when are teachers getting access to this?

Angela Kelly: Never.

Michelle Singh: Okay. So I decided that, okay, I wanted to share what I was learning and also what I was practicing along the lines of the seven areas of rest. I’m like, I’m not a gatekeeper. So I am going to just share this on the socials and I did a whole 30-day challenge where I was sharing all the things I was doing every day related to the seven areas of rest. And like, people were messaging me from countries I didn’t even know existed. And I’m telling you, like, it just spiraled. And so created what’s called The Restful Teacher.

And so it is grounded in those seven areas of rest, but it’s also grounded in culturally responsive teaching. One, we have to take care of ourselves, but with what we do to feel well, it’s going to trickle into how we teach well. So it marries those two areas. And I’m able to help teachers to incorporate activities and strategies in their day to day that’s going to help them show up better for their students. But that’s also going to help them model for their students what they can do so that if I’m in elementary school, I can learn about techniques that’s going to help me self-regulate that I don’t have to learn when I’m 40 plus.

Angela Kelly: Thank you. Right.

Michelle Singh: So that’s what The Restful Teacher program is. And so I definitely do workshops. Actually, just did a workshop for a new teacher program here in Miami and it was just on the area of mental rest and what the teachers can do for just all of the decisions and the cognitive overload and all of the things that, you know, we experience day to day. And one of the things I spoke and I truly believe in is the power of reflection. And I launched Breathe Between the Lines, which is a reflective journal for teachers. And what I did in this journal was I framed it around the seven areas of rest so that there are topics and prompts for us to reflect on as it relates to our needs. There are breathing techniques that we can try because we know that breathing, scientifically breathing is also a strategy that we could do anytime.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: In between classes, while we’re sitting at our desk, in front of the class. Listen, do it with the kids. We need to calm down together, y’all. Let’s try this. And so there’s that, but there’s also reflection questions that are geared toward being a culturally responsive teacher. So it’s there for the teachers. It taps on what our limiting beliefs are and what we have been told about those different forms of rest, but it also connects it to their craft and it gives them questions that they can think about and challenge some of the ways that we have been taught to traditionally teach. Do my students associate calm with safety or silence with control? So that’s just one example.

But I really put my heart into this because I was like, this is something that I wish that I had as a teacher, especially a new teacher, because it’s opening my eyes and the teacher’s eyes to things that we would need to be that balanced teacher, to find that grounding, to find that safety amongst the chaos and the system that we work in that honestly doesn’t honor those things.

Angela Kelly: Right. Right. Yes, exactly my next question. Like you read my mind there because I was going to say like, I can hear teachers saying, this sounds great. Like, this makes sense to me. And the overworking, all of the pressure to perform, the pressure to, you know, get kids on track, get kids, well, one, get them in school, and two, keep their attention, and then three, get them to perform. And with all of that pressure, what are the common, what are the most common like objections or kind of roadblocks you hear from teachers when it comes to mindfulness and restfulness for themselves?

Michelle Singh: Oh, well, I don’t have time. I don’t have time for that. Or how can I, how can I do this in my classroom when I have to teach according to this and the test and the standards and blah, blah, blah and It works the same as when we have to integrate technology in the classroom. We find pockets within the curriculum, we find space and we find time because this is not something like I got to carve out an entire hour to go to the gym. That’s not what this is about.

This is about finding those moments throughout your day. So even if it’s like three times throughout the day, in the morning, in the afternoon and at night, where can you insert in those pockets just a few minutes to implement some of these strategies. And you can mix them up, but you have to be intentional about finding those pockets and then doing it for yourself, but you then you can also include the children, include the students and it will be a lifesaver for them to be able to be exposed to these things. And I know that there’s also another objection from the teacher standpoint where this is not something that the school or the standards are aligned with, well, we have or if you’re in Florida like me, we’re going to be breaking the law when we talk about social and emotional learning. Right?

Angela Kelly: Yes. I have clients in Florida and we just discussed that a couple weeks ago.

Michelle Singh: Or if we dare say the word culturally in the second most diverse school system in the country, we can’t use the word diverse, which is a whole another thing, y’all. But I digress. We don’t have to name it those names.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Michelle Singh: We can practice it without naming it those names.

Angela Kelly: Brain break, yeah. Call it what…

Michelle Singh: Exactly. We’re going to do a brain break and do some gentle stretches or some breathing or we’re going to do a brain break and do some desk exercises or we’re going to do a brain break and just honor our senses, right? We can do these breaks for ourselves and our students. And so for me and what I teach, it’s not about overhauling everything that we’ve done. It’s about inserting and integrating these little pockets of strategies that are going to help us when we are intentional and consistent in applying them to our daily lives so they become a habit for rather than I’m just going to go to the gym when it’s close to the new year because, you know, I want to get my shape in order for 2020, whatever. Go for a month.

Angela Kelly: Yes. It’s like a teaching lifestyle adjustment, a change, and it’s a mindset.

Michelle Singh: Yes. And that’s the first piece. And so that’s why whenever I teach, no matter whatever the subject is, because, you know, an aside is I also teach emerging entrepreneurs about business too. But that’s an aside thing. But no matter what I teach, I always start with those mindsets. I always start with what our limiting beliefs tell us about whatever the topic is because we want to confront that. Because if we don’t confront and acknowledge it, how can we move past it?

Angela Kelly: Right. Exactly. I think that a lot of teachers, like, once they understand the value of something, like, this is aa valuable use of my time, it’s a valuable practice and exercise because it creates these extended results for myself. Do you have any stories of teachers who have applied these practices that you’ve taught and your journal, what are some of the stories of people who have leaned in and tried this work and their feedback to you or like their success stories that have been a reflection of their willingness to try this?

Michelle Singh: Yeah. So, oh, let me see which ones. Most recently, a part of The Restful Teacher program, we had a series called Cultivate where we would meet just to reflect and just have conversations related to questions that are not curriculum and not school related, but self-related. And these talks that we had in the Cultivate series, teachers were in tears because we were confronting and talking about things like perfectionism and things like the boundaries and, you know, things like that we often don’t get to even mention, right? And so it’s conversations like that. It’s the reflection questions.

It’s the, oh my gosh, I didn’t know doing something so simple could have helped help me to recenter and refocus after getting home where I don’t have to sit in the car for an hour before I go into the house. You know, like it’s those kinds of things. And I will, you know, say, you’re not going to just do a breathing technique today and you’re going to feel, you know, better tomorrow just by doing it one time. These things are habits that you have to develop. It’s things like I have these restful teacher cards in the restful teacher affirmation cards, what I give them is an affirmation as well as an action. So it’s like an affirmation action. And so they have a set of these reminders sitting on the desk and so they could pull one and say, okay, today I release my emotional burdens and allow myself to experience peace.

So I’m going to practice mindfulness exercises like box breathing to let go of stress and find inner calm. So they have these little mini reminders that they can just pick up every day at their desk just to remind them to do something for themselves. They can also be done with your students, with the students to model it. So it’s them telling me that they keep these at their desk and they refer to them. It’s them telling me that they were able to share this with a parent. It’s them telling me that we did this as a family today. It’s the little things that we often don’t celebrate and we don’t pay attention to and we don’t shine a light on.

I’m not talking about you’re going to, you know, find – you’re going to solve all the institutional problems within the educational system and then you’re going to just walk into the school and everything solved. This is not what that is. Because there are institutional, systemic issues within education that we just cannot even touch the surface. And so as individuals, we have to find ways to be good with us so that we are able to navigate those systems.

Angela Kelly: Absolutely.

Michelle Singh: That’s what this is.

Angela Kelly: Yes, because what people want to do is they want to change the system or the institution so that they’ll feel better. They think if we change the system will feel better. And I think what I hear you saying is if you go inward and learn how you want to respond to the system when it, you know, has its imperfections and it has its discrepancy and it, you know, it has its, you know, isms. Like when those things come forward and you are feeling frustrated or whatever, you know, overwhelmed, it’s who are we being as teachers in that moment? And how can I show up one for myself, two for my students.

And I love how you said this isn’t just a one and done. You don’t go to the gym one time and build muscle. This is like – it’s like dusting. You kind of got to do it because the dust keeps building up or cleaning out the closet or, you know, organizing. Things get messy in the classroom and you reset and you reorganize once a week or whatever. That’s what this is. And it’s like those little reset moments, when you do them every single day, then there’s not this big layers upon layers that you have to unveil because you haven’t done the work for days, months, years, right?

Michelle Singh: Yeah. And you can always get back on track. Just like, you know, with our diets and our exercise.

Angela Kelly: Exactly. Yeah, there’s no perfection here. It’s about progress.

Michelle Singh: 100%. Yes, that and that’s something that I still have to practice and still learn because a lot of times we struggle with that perfectionism too because we’re expected to perform, especially in our roles where that’s honestly the expectation, right? And so that’s another thing that we have to undo ourselves to be okay with doing these things in smaller increments and not a big overhaul.

Angela Kelly: Right. Right. Yeah. And I love that you brought up the perfectionism thing because I do think teachers want so badly to do right by their students, but they do it at the cost of themselves because we kind of created a culture of, and I’m not trying to disrespect this term, but I do think that it ended up getting misinterpreted and that’s servant leadership or servant, you know, just we’re servants of our clients, which are our students. And I definitely believe in contribution and providing value and being of service and teachers of influence and inspiration and evolution, like that we’re in the business of human development here, and also not, I think we misinterpreted as I say servant leadership, but I mean servant education and that mindset of like relentless commitment, no matter what, we put ourselves on the line every single day.

And what we’re finding is that is so integrated now into the institution of education that people are – there’s a cognitive dissonance that comes when somebody, you know, like you comes in and says, hey, you have permission, it’s okay to like take these breathing exercises or do a, you know, a brain break and do it with your kids or do it with yourself and to recheck in with yourself because we were like, wait a minute, weren’t wasn’t I, am I not supposed to be in service? And so I like how you said that this practice actually is in service of your students in addition to you.

Michelle Singh: It’s both. You have to feel well first to teach well. Feel well to teach well. And it’s again, I said this earlier, you got to be selfish. And we are taught that we cannot be that.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: But it’s okay. I’m giving you permission. We’re both giving you permission.

Angela Kelly: That’s right.

Michelle Singh: Be selfish in that way where you’re taking care of yourself because in order for you to show up whole and right and ready and sharp, if your brain is not sharp, you’re not going to make the right decisions that are going to be the best choice for your students because you’re mentally and emotionally overloaded.

Angela Kelly: Exactly.

Michelle Singh: And the students that need you the most, that’s a missed opportunity because you didn’t take time for yourself. That’s not being selfish.

Angela Kelly: Right. That is the most selfless act you can do is to be, to have your buckets full. Like, like all of those areas of rest to provide yourself that to be 100% ready to serve in the time that you’re it’s go time, right? To be able to serve students. And you see teachers dragging in and just trying to get through and kids feel that. They know. They know you’re coming in, you know, and you’re overworked and, you know, you’ve overextended yourself. But now that we’ve created awareness, I think as an industry, you know, that’s where I love the work that you do and, you know, what I am seeking to do in my mission and my movement into empowering principals and teachers is really now that we’re creating awareness around this skill. And we’re all saying the same thing. I wasn’t taught this as a kid. If I had known this as a kid, now, why don’t we teach it? Because we know that this is – it’s an essential part of the human experience.

Michelle Singh: It is. And it trickles. It trickles. We’re teaching it to the kids. The kids are sharing it with their families. I just workshopped recently for an organization, a community organization. So I called it The Restful Girl Experience because it was about how young girls are able to incorporate these strategies within their teenage to preteen lives, but I also incorporated ways that the parents could do it with them too. So it’s not, this is community impact. This is not just classroom impact. This is community impact. Like, if I knew this as a young mother, as a young teacher, as a young child, how much different would my experience have been had I known this? We don’t know what we don’t know. And so when you know better, you got to do better. And so now that I know, hey, I’m spreading the word.

Angela Kelly: Me too. I get it. And knowing better and doing better is teaching better and makes learning better.

Michelle Singh: Absolutely.

Angela Kelly: Because regulation, you cannot access learning if you are not regulated and if you are not rested.

Michelle Singh: Yes. Maslow, basic. Right? And when I observe classrooms for the teachers who are in my programs at the university, you know, the common thread is these basic needs aren’t met. The basic needs of the students aren’t met, and that’s where the disengagement comes up. And so how do we tap into the things and the strategies that we need to ensure that those students are not disengaged? Well, the same way we do it for ourselves. You just have to do those things and incorporate those things within the curriculum as well.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: So yeah, we have to take the lead first, we have to model it and we do it with our students.

Angela Kelly: I love this. How do you, I was just thinking, how do you support teachers in a conversation with their staff? So I know some schools are really strict. Like, they’ll do walkthroughs and they expect to see like pacing guides and, you know, objections posted on – like they have all of this checklist of things they’re supposed to be seeing. And if they walk in, I think some teachers are afraid if they walk into my classroom and I’m doing some kind of breathing exercise with my kids, they’ll be like, what is this? How do you help the administration come into alignment with the teachers to show like this is an integral part of teaching and learning? And how do you work with your clients and your schools when it comes to that, you know, kind of agreement?

Michelle Singh: Yeah, I think it has to do with mindset shifts about what teaching should look like. And so it’s not going to always, you know, silence does not mean that they’re learning and same as chaos doesn’t mean that they’re not learning. You know, so it has to do with what are our perceptions and our biases of what teaching should look like. And how do I get in front of those now that one, I can acknowledge these biases and that they exist. And so when I go into a teacher’s class, I won’t have these biases. And so I got to ask questions. So if they’re doing this, just ask a question, knowing that you have this bias around this. If I understand it better, then I am able to see what the reasoning behind this if I don’t know. But I think it all goes back to the biases and just our understanding of and our expectation of what teaching should be.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: We have to disrupt a lot of that. We have to question and interrogate a lot of that because those things have to change.

Angela Kelly: Agreed. I think we need to recalibrate what we what the purpose of teaching and learning is. I think it’s time to have those conversations and to come into agreement that the mental and emotional experience is highly valuable to address and to integrate because, and I think about it, it’s such an easy sell. So, hey, principals out there, if you’re listening to this, and I know a lot of teachers listen to this podcast too, but for the principals and district leaders out there, I want you to understand like if people are learning how to self-regulate, I want you to see the impact and the value it has for you because if a teacher can self-regulate, she’s not going to be in your office crying or venting about a problem that she has or that she’s just on overload and wants to quit.

And the same holds true like when these teachers are regulating and teaching students how to regulate, your referrals are going to go down. And what you’re going to spend your time on is actual instructional leadership versus, you know, managing and maintenance and, you know, investigations and referrals and summaries of meetings and all of those things which are in reaction to the lack of teaching emotional regulation. So if there’s anything that sells you on what Dr. Singh teaches, it’s that helping teachers and giving them permission to practice self-regulation for themselves and their students positively impacts your day, your experience as a school leader. So I just had to sell that.

Michelle Singh: No, for sure. Like, we know teacher shortage is on the rise. We know that. We know there are vacancies, so mid-year, you got new teachers coming, there’s retention because they just can’t, they can’t last. What is the root of that? We may not be able to answer that in one sentence, but it all boils down to we have a system. This system doesn’t work for everyone. So what can we do within our own space as education leaders, as principal as administrators, what can you do within your sphere and in your space to ensure that when your teachers and your students are with you, going back to those three words, they feel grounded, they feel safe, and they feel comforted in the space that you create.

In order to do that, it cannot just be traditional curriculum. Let’s teach to the test, let’s do the. It has to be about holistic wellness. Holistic teaching. And the strategies that I have been teaching are brain-based. They are supported by research. These are not new things. These are just things that happen outside of education that have now been integrated in the education realm because I’ve experienced them as an entrepreneur, as someone outside of the field in different worlds, and now I’m saying, this should have been taught to us in our education programs, but it’s not. So let me do it right now for you.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes. Amen to that. I’m here for it. Can I just tap your brain? I’m just dying to ask you this. I know it’s a little, well, it’s not off topic. You had mentioned that you did your dissertation in student disengagement.

Michelle Singh: Disengagement.

Angela Kelly: Okay. So people, I have to ask because I think people are dying to know like what was your findings on disengagement? What’s working, what’s not? What’s what are the components of the disengagement? I mean, not to do the whole dissertation, but if there’s just…

Michelle Singh: Okay, so disengagement is not just something that happens when our students are disruptive in classroom. It goes a lot deeper than that. We have to look at the emotional, we got to look at the social, we got to look at the intellectual. It’s not just what we see on the classroom is just the surface. What’s the deeper thing? Well, relationships between the teacher and the student is the strongest is the strongest antidote because when the teacher understands and knows the student and has a relationship, there’s trust, there’s safety, there’s comfort.

I didn’t find anything that was so outlandish and so crazy that it’s brand new. The things that I found in my studies, there were 10 themes that I found in my studies from the research participants and they’re all things that have been talked about that we should be doing in classrooms with students and it all stems back to what do we know about those people that we’re interacting with for 180 days or more.

Angela Kelly: Six hours at a time.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, what kind of relationship are we building with them? How are we bringing those things in the classroom to brain-based science, help activate prior learning to make that interest spark, to make that curriculum relevant, to make the experience innovative. It’s all back to those, you know, those things that we have read. It’s just making it concrete. Here’s what you can try. So you want to build relationships with students, here’s what you can do. You want to make your curriculum more innovative, have you tried this? This is what some teachers have done to do this. You want to bring the calm and address the social and emotional needs. Here are what these teachers are doing. And another thing that stood out in the research is learned helplessness and how that affects because I did it on Black students in high school language arts classes. That was my focus.

Angela Kelly: Okay.

Michelle Singh: Learn helplessness happens from childhood and they carry that weight all the way to high school. And when that is not addressed, when those stereotype threats and those mindset issues are at the forefront for these students, no way of getting in. No way. And so there’s also that issue where we kind of have to be coaches for the students in addition to teachers. Right? In order to be a coach, you got to have a relationship. You have to know if you don’t know what they are coming from, how are you going to be their coach? How are you going to be their teacher to really help them into developing a relationship? So that’s why I say everything goes back to the relationship. Because that’s how you’re able to know them to be able to do better for them.

Angela Kelly: Yes. That is such a light bulb moment for me. It’s we need to recalibrate or redefine the relationship between teacher and student. And when you said the word coach, that’s when it clicked to me. Like, you know, I identify as a coach, a mentor. Like I kind of wear both of those hats from time to time. Coaching is different than mentoring, right? And there’s a time and a place where mentoring is a little more direct and coaching is that more open-ended letting the client come to their own, you know, conclusions.

And I think we’ve had such an authority figure mentality as teachers, I’m the adult, I should be respected, I’m the holder and the knowledge of all the power and all the, you know, wisdom and the information that and the skills that you need versus seeing children in their empowerment at a developmentally appropriate level, of course, but having a more collaborative, co-facilitating kind of learning teaching experience where you’re coaching people while also coaching them mentally, emotionally, psychologically in addition to academics.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, and not just that, when we think about ourselves not in those deeply authoritative, showing up perfect type of teacher role that we have been taught to see and expected to perform, we become human. And we become able to create classrooms with cultures. I call it the you know, creating a culture of experimentation where failure is a learning opportunity rather than get out my class because you suck. Or I suck, you know?

Angela Kelly: Yeah, somebody sucks here.

Michelle Singh: The end all be all.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Michelle Singh: So we create that culture of experimentation and the students see us processing, failing, learning, growing, reflecting, and they see that as okay and then they then are okay with doing those things and trying and risk taking and curiosity, all of that, you know, flourishes when we become human and not perfect.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And we had such a different, challenging relationship with – it was pass/fail. You passed or you failed. You made grade level standards or you didn’t. And now we’re saying like failure is the path. And so it’s like when you’re assessing students, you’re assessing their progress, not whether they passed or failed. They know or they don’t. You know, and working with them on and changing the way we think about testing and the and data even at large. Like it’s progress based and it’s what we’ve, you know, we tried, this is what, you know, we didn’t understand and now we’re going to learn that and try it again. And this just spiraling, I hate to say spiral review, but like a spiraling of learning.

Michelle Singh: And just the power of feedback. One of the things I will always remember, so I am a teacher of the gifted. You know, I taught gifted students throughout my career as a language art, secondary language arts teacher. You know, I was the gifted department chair for the school with over 400 gifted students. So I have a Master’s degree in gifted education. And the reason I call that out is because I didn’t realize, one, that you could get a master’s degree in gifted education. And when I did, I was like, oh, I need to learn as much as possible about these students that I’m teaching.

And I will tell you that the things that I learned in that Master’s degree program opened my eyes to what teaching should be. And I had to pay for this degree. I had to be a teacher with that specification to be able to get this degree. This is not something that’s open to all teachers. So that’s been another mission of mine as well as I teach teachers, I teach them about gifted strategies because I believe this should not be hidden curriculum that only works for certain types of students. That’s just a whole ‘nother thing that I’m very passionate about as well. But I say all of that to say that I was I was teaching a gifted summer program one year because y’all know as teachers, classroom teachers, we have to have summer jobs.

So this summer, it was at the University of Miami. I’m in Miami, Florida. And it was, I forget, some kind of institute for the gifted program. And in that program, there were not grades. It was performance feedback. And it was the most fulfilling experience for me as a teacher who was sharing with parents and students about their progress because it wasn’t just a number or a letter in the grade book. I was actually able to share this is what the student did holistically. Here’s how you are as a learner and give feedback on the learning experience and what their strengths and opportunities and examples of where they can go next. It wasn’t based on grades at all.

And so I was, I took that and I used that skill when I do, you know, score or evaluate even my college students because I want them to have that level of feedback. I’m not even looking at the percentage that the rubric gives you. Pay attention to the written feedback that you’re getting from me about your work and what to do next and how you’ve grown and what your strengths are. And I think when we focus on that kind of evaluation process where it’s not just about the test and the number and the score and this and that. Sure, those things are necessary. I get it. I get it. But we also have to integrate other ways where our students can feel, can get some confidence from their growth and from their performance. Because the test is not going to do it for a lot of our students. And if that’s the only thing that we focus on and we don’t focus on formative assessments that are frequent and we don’t focus on, you know, feedback that’s rich, our students are never – that learned helplessness is going to continue.

Angela Kelly: It is. It really is. It really is. And that’s something to just be aware of as a teacher. You know, where might we be implementing or like enabling a little bit that helplessness? I was talking to another teacher a while back and she was saying like, you know, I just want my students to need me or you know, like there was something there about really wanting to be needed by her students. And we brought that up the idea of the helplessness. And I would say like for school leaders keeping that in mind as for our teachers, right? We don’t want our teachers relying on us. We want them to be empowered.

I mean, that’s the whole mission of my coaching program is seeing the empowerment in our students and in our teachers and in ourselves and identifying as a person who can continually evolve, who can step into their empowerment, who can redefine what’s going on in their mind and I know it’s scary sometimes to be out there teaching when times are uncertain and when families are being disrupted and when the pressure is on and now you’re being restricted about what you can teach, what you can’t teach, what you can say, what you can’t say. We’re tiptoeing around a lot, but all of this to say, no matter who you are, what seat you are on the bus currently in education, you do have personal power, internal power to regulate yourself and to guide yourself and what a gift to give students, the gift of self-awareness and self-regulation because that’ll take you through life.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, and the gift of you as a human being. And I’ll tell you this, like I’ve learned this along the way, especially after leaving, but I remember doing sprinkles of this, but as a professor in college, talking about my experience has been the most, I would say, impactful thing that I hear from them when they come back to me. Thank you for sharing that example. Thank you for telling us how it worked for you because those stories are the things that they remember. And we have a lot of times we want to separate us, you know, ourselves from the classroom, but we got to be human. You know, I am okay with talking, I’m an immigrant. I am from Jamaica, right? Now, my family, some of my family members are going through the hurricane in Jamaica. My brother just called me not a couple minutes ago. I’ve been checking on them, checking the news. Thank God they’re okay.

But you know, I don’t mind and stray away from sharing those things because I know that in my classroom, there are going to be immigrants too. And when they hear me say things like, you know, my grandfather, you know, passed away when I was or my mother, you know, or my mother did this for me or my cousin, me and my cousins used to – when they hear us talk about those human experiences, those are the things that are building relationships. You may have that kid come up to you that didn’t say nothing to you for the first quarter of the school year and because you shared something personal – and I don’t mean personal, personal, obviously we’re adults. But when you are able to share the human side of you, you’re going to make those connections with the students because they’re going to see you as not a perfect person, but they’re going to see you as a human just like if they see you out at the supermarket in your shorts. You’re like, oh my gosh, that’s Miss whoever. She actually a human being?

Angela Kelly: Why are you at Target right now? I thought you lived at school.

Michelle Singh: What do you have on shorts?

Angela Kelly: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it just throws them totally off. But I agree with you. I think connection is, there’s power in storytelling and in that, in building connection is about the stories and kids are fascinated. I mean, I taught kindergarten and we would tell stories about our lives, you know, going on little trips, you know, we were teaching them how to write and tell little stories, but that connects kids to you and they see you in a more holistic light because you’re sharing and now you can see them and who they are.

Michelle Singh: Absolutely. Absolutely. Tell them about your kids. Tell them about, you know, your experiences growing up when you were, you know, their age. Like these are things that are going to stick to them, especially if you’re connecting it to what they’re learning. Like when I’m teaching, I always connect it somehow to, you know, what we’re about to do, what we’re about to learn because that’s that prior knowledge, that’s that connection, that’s that relevance. You know, that’s that holistic learning experience. You’re bringing all of that into the learning. And I truly believe storytelling is – it’s the truth. It’s the truth in slang and in actual real definition.

Angela Kelly: And an engaging way, right?

Michelle Singh: Yeah, I think that it’s something that we have in our toolbox that we do not utilize enough at all.

Angela Kelly: Yeah. I feel like I could talk with you forever. I’m just enamored by you. I love the work that you’re doing. And if people want to learn more about you or your company and the services you offer, can you just tell them a little just really quickly? And we’ll put all the resources in the show notes, but I just wanted you to say, you know, where to find you and where they can learn more.

Michelle Singh: The easiest way to connect with me is ConnectWithMichelle.com.

Angela Kelly: Oh, nice.

Michelle Singh: So if you just go to ConnectWithMichelle.com, Michelle with two L’s, by the way, Yes. .com, you’ll get a form, you just put your name in there, it’s going to send you an email and then you’re going to see all of the ways that we can stay in touch and we can be in community together. You’ll see links to the website, to the LinkedIn, to the socials, to the thought leadership and all the articles and the dissertation, everything. So then ConnectWithMichelle.com, you’ll see The Restful Teacher program, ConnectWithMichelle.com. That’s the easiest way.

Angela Kelly: Okay, that’s great because then they can just – it’s a one stop shop. They can come and check out all the things and do a little shopping over there.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, just put your name in and then press submit and you will then get entered.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Oh, that’s great. Michelle, thank you for this hour. Thank you for your wisdom. I really appreciated this and it was just an absolute pleasure and I’ve learned so much from this conversation. Truly, I have. I do hope we can keep in touch. I will connect with Michelle.

Michelle Singh: I love it.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And I just want to send like, I know – as we’re recording this, by the way, we are literally Jamaica is in the eye of this storm right now. So I am sending all of my loves and prayers. I’ve been to Jamaica several times. It’s a beautiful country and I’m sending healthy, safe vibes for your family.

Michelle Singh: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And yes, definitely prayers to all my family, all my friends, the whole island of Jamaica.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Oh, mercy may they be well. So, thank you again for your time. Let’s stay in touch. If there’s anything I can do to support you, I just want to be in sisterhood in this journey together and supporting our educators.

Michelle Singh: And same for me. I love this conversation. It was not scripted. This was all just a conversation, y’all. And very authentic, very real and I thank you for the opportunity to share with your listeners.

Angela Kelly: Yes. I know they’ll appreciate it. Interviews are always top rated on the show. So, thank you for your time and that’s a wrap, empowered principals. Have a wonderful week and we will see you all next week. Take good care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.