Hello, and Welcome to Coaching Conversations, where we explore the transformative power of coaching in education. I'm Jim Knight, your host, and today I'm thrilled to have Mariah Rankine-Landers, EdM, join me for an inspiring discussion.
Mariah is a visionary educator who challenges the status quo and advocates for the integration of contemporary arts into the educational system. Her passion lies in redefining the purpose of education, placing the role of artists at the forefront of nurturing imagination, innovation, and critical thinking in young minds.
With a firm belief that tending to our hearts and embracing the arts can dismantle oppressive systems in schools, Mariah leads with love and conviction. As the co-founder of Rise Up! An American Curriculum, inspired by the musical "Hamilton," she is on a mission to revolutionize teaching and learning through creative inquiry.
In our conversation today, Mariah will share her insights on how to cultivate environments where students can fully bloom and thrive. We'll explore the transformative potential of integrating the arts into education and how it can shape attitudes, assumptions, and patterns of knowing for both teachers and students.
Please join us as we dive into Mariah's journey as a catalyst for change in education. This episode promises to be enlightening, inspiring, and filled with actionable strategies for educators looking to create sanctuaries of learning where all students can flourish.
I'd love to hear your feedback about my weekly Coaching Conversations. Please consider leaving a rating or review and subscribing to our channel.
To learn how our 16 week Instructional institute can make an impact on your teaching or district, click here.
To learn more about the Paris Institute and how to attend, click here.
Hello, and Welcome to Coaching Conversations, where we explore the transformative power of coaching in education. I'm Jim Knight, your host, and today I'm thrilled to have Mariah Rankine-Landers, EdM, join me for an inspiring discussion.
Mariah is a visionary educator who challenges the status quo and advocates for the integration of contemporary arts into the educational system. Her passion lies in redefining the purpose of education, placing the role of artists at the forefront of nurturing imagination, innovation, and critical thinking in young minds.
With a firm belief that tending to our hearts and embracing the arts can dismantle oppressive systems in schools, Mariah leads with love and conviction. As the co-founder of Rise Up! An American Curriculum, inspired by the musical "Hamilton," she is on a mission to revolutionize teaching and learning through creative inquiry.
In our conversation today, Mariah will share her insights on how to cultivate environments where students can fully bloom and thrive. We'll explore the transformative potential of integrating the arts into education and how it can shape attitudes, assumptions, and patterns of knowing for both teachers and students.
Please join us as we dive into Mariah's journey as a catalyst for change in education. This episode promises to be enlightening, inspiring, and filled with actionable strategies for educators looking to create sanctuaries of learning where all students can flourish.
I'd love to hear your feedback about my weekly Coaching Conversations. Please consider leaving a rating or review and subscribing to our channel.
To learn how our 16 week Instructional institute can make an impact on your teaching or district, click here.
To learn more about the Paris Institute and how to attend, click here.
Many of our students are often not seen or valued for the range of gifts that they have. We often have a particular idea about what is gifted or what is intelligence, what is smart. And as we're striving to build a sense of belonging and inclusivity, I think it's really important that we provide the gift of really seeing our students for who they are, their fullness and their genius. I really believe that everyone has a genius to them. And that, in turn, is a gift to everybody. So if everyone can see the strengths that we have as people, as individuals, the talents that we have, and step away from a limited sense of a mind that thinks correctly versus a mind that doesn't leaning into that neurodiversity space. Popular right now is to accept people for how maybe. Maybe it's more about having an unconditional awareness of their range of diverse thought and being on the planet and being okay with that. I'm Jim Knight, co-founder of the Instructional Coaching Group. And you're listening to Coaching conversations where I talk with coaching experts from around the world so that all of us can learn better ways to make an unmistakably positive impact on the people around us. Hi everyone. It's ICT consultant Jessica Wise. Host of the Coaching Questions on the Coaching Conversations podcast with Jim Knight. Are you interested in learning about tools and resources to build and maintain a successful instructional coaching program? If so, join our Instructional Coaching Institute designed for instructional coaches and administrators in this 16 week course led by Jim Knight. You'll learn how to establish a proven foundation for success, develop a deeper and complete understanding of the coaching process and practices, and cultivate necessary communication skills for healthy conversations. We will also explore engagement in the classroom and coaching tools and resources. Learn more by visiting Instructional Coaching dot com. I look forward to seeing you at the institute. Mariah I'm so excited about this presentation about love. I mean, your your book that you wrote with just a brief Moreno is called Your Lessons Love Your Students. But and I think sometimes love gets pooh poohed like it sounds soft then and weak. But I have a book on my shelf over there that says love alone is credible by hands, first of all. And both are, which I love the title, so I can get a chance to try to say his name and I add it on my screen for a long time as when my screen popped up. I would say love alone is credible. So I am excited to talk about what does it mean to create lessons that love your students. So thank you for taking the time to meet. I'm excited. I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. So your book, the very first line, if I'm not mistaken in the book, is what do we mean when we use the word love? So what do you mean when you use the word love? And I don't really think of lessons loving. So I'm curious to see how that all plays out. Right. I was a teacher, you know, I'm a credential in 2001, what No Child Left Behind started. And my teaching process or, you know, learning was I, I had a student. I was as a student teacher, I walked into a space where I was meant to teach ELA for the morning and math for the afternoon. And it lacked a joy. It just was a complete lack of joy. And it was a really miserable experience for me and considering that I thought teaching would be creative and fun and vibrant, which is what I had experienced as the child of teachers in my family and, you know, as a lifelong learner. So I really think that I went into teaching, wanting it to feel joy based and knowing that it could be creative. And when I walked into a space that was telling me that it's time for ELA and math instruction, stripping out everything else, I took an intervention. And so the interventions that I took were to get aligned with my values and my values. That was one that was always coming from a stance of honoring the humanity in other people and having a reverence for, you know, anyone's particular position on the planet. So in that study in anthropology, I had this wide lens of and curiosity about people. And I also have a fascination with time and how much time we're given on the planet. And so I'm sorry if this is going to sound too existential at the time. I like it. Bring it. Bring your brain. Okay, you're you're speaking my language. Nobody else might like it, but I love it. So. Okay, So that I so I have this preoccupation with time because, like, someone that lives with a lot of health disability from childhood. Right. And so I've always had an awareness that I might not be on the planet very long, but I could be right. And so in my teacher lens, I got very occupied with how our students spending their time. This is a space where they are. We are nurturing their minds. We're nurturing them as full and complete people. And the experiences we were providing for them lacked a lot of inspiration and joy in the in the school system that I was in. So I was really occupied with, again, figuring out how I could be the best teacher that I could be for my students. Evolving in a stance that was based in my ethic of love. And with that comes this energy and a, you know, awareness of what the arts can do, what the arts have done for me, what are they doing for teaching? And that was a process that I had to learn, actually. I didn't step into teaching knowing much about the arts and education, but it became something that I studied and fully understood and saw how it made a complete difference in my teaching practice. So what I'm hearing, see if I've got this right, is that a focus on love is a focus on joyful interactions. Joy is a big part of it, but it's something more than that. I'm wondering if I don't know if, you know the the Dostoyevsky line, but beauty will save the world. And what does that says is that when we appreciate something beautiful, whether it's another person or its music or its nature or some deep moment, it's almost bigger than language. And so take I'll give you an example. The Tracy Chapman thing on the Grammys, there was something going on there that transcended language. It was the fact that those two people, her and I forget the country singer's name right now but of course but it yeah right there the something happened there that was that was really, really important And so I wonder I probably getting way off track but I'm so excited about the topic. But does that fit in with what you're saying when you talk about joy and love? Yeah, it's a part of it. I know that joy is a real big part of the discourse right now in teaching and learning, and I think that's coming off of the pandemic. But more so, what I'm really wanting to get people resonating with is this idea that love and education is about a futuristic vision for our students, one that is placing a high value on how their mind can think and the ways that we can build up the qualities of mind for them to have creative minds and also critical minds and the two go hand-in-hand. So it's leaning into that depth of knowledge where creativity and critical thinking live and pushing into that because there's levels of thought that happen within creativity. And that is the place where I am most fascinating with in terms of what it can do for humanity, what it can do for us on a social level, because I feel like there are resonant solutions when we get to that space. So yes, it is a joyful place. It is a place where I'm concerned and wanting to make sure that we are doing our best teaching and learning or creation of of in systems for students that are activating and prioritizing their mind. I have a lineage, I'm Jamaican, have Jamaican, so I'm going to just bring up Bob Marley for a second. That's something. That's it yourself from mental slavery, right? Like this idea that there's an emancipation of the mind. And I am really connected to that idea that we should be in service of everyone's whole capability to think broadly, expansively, without the limitations and boundaries that a lot of our curricular ideas placed on students or a lot of the standards even. I think that there's I'm not ever going to say that there's a black and white to everything, and everything is nuanced. Everything is has all its complexity. But I am taking a stance that I love and education is really grappling with How are we building methods holding pedagogies that are concerning ourselves with the way that people get to engage in this world? Hi everyone. I CG consultant Jessica Weiss here to share an exciting announcement about our upcoming Paris Institute. The instructional coaching group is partnering with Chapters International and taking the Intensive Instructional Coaching Institute to France. This spring. Led by Jim Knight. This unique learning opportunity will help coaches and administrators establish a proven foundation for success and develop a deeper and complete understanding of the coaching process and practices. Join Jim Knight and Paris, France for the five day Intensive Instructional Coaching Institute, an event you don't want to miss. To learn more, visit instructional coach income. Yeah, I promise I'll get off this pretty quickly and we'll move into more specifics in the book. But so my definition for why I think there's C.S. Lewis talks about four different kinds of love. But I would say the kind of love we're talking about here. I would I would describe it as I'm going to say a couple of things, and then I'd love to get your response and see if I'm on the right track. But it's engaging my will for the good of the other person. And when I engage my will for the good of the other person, I'm not taking control. I'm not telling them what to do. There may be times when I have to create a structure and I have to intervene, but everything comes from a place of my desire to do what's best for you. And what's best for you is for me to see you as a full human being. Not an object, not a kid with learning disability, not that kind of person. But I see you and your humanity, which gets into things like seeing your suffering, seeing your pain, seeing what you're going through, seeing you as a real human being. And so so that's that's how I see it. Is that sound your take to you're completely on track? Yes, I okay. Well, tell me if you don't mind, and you give us some of some of this, but would you like to say more about the inspiration for this book? Was there anything in particular that was kind of like, this is my inspiration? And it was trying to remember the year I think was like 2000 as the early, early 2000. I had a really difficult class and it was a class. You know, we all have those years where we're just struggling and it was really difficult to show up for my students and I did not enjoy the way that I felt walking into class, and I knew that it was a disservice and I knew that I wasn't loving my kids, right? So I made a decision to write a throughline I was practicing and learning about through lines and the through line that I crafted was We are the things that we love, but, you know, just kind of catty at the time. And what it did for me was I wrote it up in my classroom. I dropped all of the learning and the content around this idea of we are the things that we love. So we studied the rainforest that year and I was like, We love the rainforest. We're a part of the rainforest, right? This is this is kindergarten. And it but it really helped me to get grounded in an orientation of respect and care that I typically would have. But for whatever reason, just the makeup of this class was one that it made for an exhausting experience and me really grumpy. That's just facts, right? And so how do I get past that? Well, let me turn to the insistence of love. So if I can walk in every day, remind myself of the value system that I hold, come from that place, and then build our learning around that idea. It just turned the year into a really, you know, lovely experience, a juicy experience where, you know, we got a lot done academically speaking. Wow, that's interesting. And so, yeah, that must be something to go. Wow. When I changed my take, look what happened to the kids. You know, that's pretty. It's a pretty cool thing. You talk about the concept of sacred teaching. I love this concept. What do you mean by sacred teaching? Yeah, I think we've touched on it. Yeah, we touched on this. You know, the way that we show up for each other, the way that we respect fact that you're on the planet. I am on the planet. And I take that very seriously. And I take again, I'll go back to this idea of time that and I take it really seriously when I am responsible for others well-being on the planet. And I hold that as a sacred, sacred thing that needs my utmost attention. So everything that I am bringing in that time and space that I have with a student or a set of students, I want to make sure that it is respecting who they are becoming as people that it's helping them meet their academic goals, their social emotional goals. And, you know, we really supporting them to live into a fuller self that they might have. I mean, you know, they might have as as people themselves, but even their families or their communities, you know, might often place limitations on who they might be in the world. And so I always like to think about there's there's so much to explore, There's so much to be curious about, and there's many things and places that we can go. And I think the mind is what we need to get there. Well, I mean, if you think about the teachers in history stretching back millennia upon millennia and it's something to be taken seriously. Yeah. And for some people it's it's it's almost a matter of life and death. So to say it's sacred is to say, well, it's a manifestation of love, I guess. And what you're doing as you're doing the teaching, but it's also about moments that are really powerful, deep time. I would think I'm creating situations where people have a meaningful interaction with if it's a teacher, meaningful interaction with what they're learning with each other, with the world around them. So that's pretty awesome. So in your book, one of the ways you talk about love is you talk about the love protocol. So, so so what do you mean by the protocol and sort of what would it look like if it's just one sort of picture of what it might look like when it's implemented at classroom? I don't know. I know you're not. Well, you have to do that. All you have to do. you sign like a rule. It's going to be adapted to the human being. But. But how will it all play out. Yeah. It is currently being used as an assessment tool, as an evaluative tool for educators, and I get to see a lot of how teachers are applying it to their lessons at the practice. But what it does is it stretches the mind. So one of the high school classes I got to observe a month ago, the teacher was having students compose these lyrics and build songwriting and connection with their unit. And so the students used to the LO protocol, they had it written out as a graphic, and so students wrote their own reflection CDs about their own pieces. So they were able to think about and highlight what are they loving about their work, what are they observing about the connections they're making, What do they value so far, and then what are they going to work on? So how is it going to expand or evolve? And the teacher reported that it was just a powerful tool that students could see their own learning in real time and also assess their next steps and make, you know, deliberate choices and make creative and critical choices within that. So that was really powerful to see. And then I had a principal that started using the protocol as an evaluation for for teachers. And I was like, Let me know how it goes. And well, I'll ask you, what do you think happens in. Well, I think it would depend on how it was used. I think if it if it was if it was like you get a one out of seven on L, you know, it's not going to be so well. But if it was a it was a conversation where the humanity, the other person was seeing the dignity of the person was seen, then it could have been a really powerful thing. If it was like a third point for dialog, it would be great. Yes. And that is what happened. So the principal used it as dialog and it really made a pivot into the climate of the school and so I'm adoring that very much. There's another principle that just kind of uses it to frame their meetings, right? Like they walk in and they're just using it as like a observation call for the week, which I just think is fantastic. And then another principal used it as a way to start the meeting, their ASL team meetings. They did a quick walkthrough of the environment, so they're kind of building up their capacity for building studio like space classrooms. And so they would go through and do a huge noticing using the protocol. And what feels lovely about that is there's a warmth immediately. So you're activating what is positive, you're acknowledging and making observations of what you do see, which also means that there's room for what's not said that maybe a teacher is like, I thought that they would see that I set up my rainbow fashion or whatever. And then it really highlights the choices that that teachers are making in the design of their learning spaces and allows for the ideas to keep evolving, which is, again, I think the most important part is what's that next step going to be? So remind me again, what is the what are the what are the elements of the love protocol? What are the different parts? Yeah. So you don't want to wait on to narrow it down to it's got to do these four things. But yeah, what do you love about, you know what X-Y-Z So it might be you know let's just think different Yeah whatever. Student work. What do you love about it? What do you observe and what do you value? And then what do you, where are you going to evolve or expand upon? So it's flexible in that you can, you know, make it precise and consider like a specific question or you can open it up. It can be really broad, it can go in so many directions. But the elements behind the construction of it are that it's coming from a strength based approach, asserting that some there's always something to love and to have a positive frame about. And then it makes the effort around the evolving less about a critical feedback that might be super painful to hear and more about. Like, I see you where you are. What? Let's keep going. And allowing the learner themselves to identify that is really incredibly powerful is learner knows what they know and they can also see I don't have a stopping point because there shouldn't be a stopping point. When you're learning, you're constantly learning. Well, that that being said, the next thing I was wondering about is that the relationship you describe between creative, creative thinking, creativity and social change. So can you say a bit about that? I have loved the process that I've been on to understand the art world, so I'm going to tell the story. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying ceramics and then, you know, declared myself an art major and my family was not having it, Absolutely not. Maria So then I was like, Well, I'll go into anthropology because I have this fascination with people and culture. Okay, that was acceptable. And then, you know, what are you going to do when you're out of college and you're broke? The thing that I knew the best was teaching coming from a family of educators. So I went into that and hurt you know pre my are per my, my previous discussion around how I found the arts and wanted to make learning creative and accessible. That point of really being introduced to the studio habits of mind being introduced to the ways that I might use the arts to inform my learning and enhance learning goals was so powerful and allowed me to go on a journey of understanding arts in a new way. A particular part of learning was seeing and understanding the role of the contemporary artist in society. I had no idea what a contemporary artist was. Even when I was studying ceramics, it had no no concept. When I understood what that role was, it became almost like a North Star. So a contemporary artist is someone that is asking the deepest questions about society and they're looking for solutions and the way that they're looking for solutions to the questions that they're answering or studying is through, you know, the way that they can critically think about and engage with the world. And then they put it into a form, whatever their form is, and that's what you and I get to have a discourse or a dialog with. Is that right? For instance, Hank Willis Thomas makes incredible art and he has the piece, the Cotton Bowl, right? The Cotton Bowl, which the Super Bowl is coming up, that there's a football player and there's a person that looks like he's picking cotton. So an enslaved person is what it is. And they're looking at each other, they're mirroring each other. And so he is Hank, as a person is asking this question, like, how are we understanding our history? How are we connected? How's our past connected to our future, and what things are still in place from our past? So he's drawing a direct connection between picking cotton and playing football. Well, there's so much to unpack there, right? So going back to the role of a contemporary artist is to bring us some awareness and to get us stirred and thinking about things in a new way. And if we're able to bring that to education, I think that's the most powerful place. Because if we have creative, critical thought in place, we're able to think about anything in any subject, in any discipline. How does that and maybe it doesn't, but how does that relate to your concept of liberatory learning? Again, the expansion of the mind, knowing that there are qualities of the mind that we can develop, knowing that creativity is a muscle and knowing that creativity is not, you know, they're not just creative geniuses. I think that's myth and we when we can activate that part of us, there is deep freedom and there's deep a there's an ability to think more reflexively and freely and critically about our daily engagements. And that to me is what I'm always struggling to do and what I have wanted for my students to have that skill set. So when you love your students, your your, your, your the act of love is and I don't know the right words for it, but it's that's at the heart of the matter. And that's it's because I love my students and that I'm engaging my world for the good of my students that they're able to grow. And I have I don't diminish them. I amplify them. I but I, I had a school I went to and there is a teacher that everybody loved and they and somebody said she's like Miracle-Gro for kids. So that's kind of that's kind of it. yes. Access to one's mind is the most powerful thing that we can have. Do you want to talk about the spiral framework and how that works, what that idea is? Yeah. So it's studio pathways is the beginning of the S for ESP in the spiral at that is the concerning oneself with the environment of learning. And I'm a big fan of MAXINE Green. MAXINE Green always talked about the esthetic of learning. I saw her many years ago. Eric She was wonderful. Yeah, I never saw her in person, but yeah, there's new science that tells us that when we walk into what's actually old science, when we walk into an environment, our body can pick up cues, so our nervous system can pick up cues around us to let us know for safe or unsafe. And so applying that into the context of a classroom, you can walk into a classroom and your body will know if this is a space that is built for you or not. Like a student might feel more agitated being in a space that looks lifeless, like maybe there's no color on the wall, maybe there's no posters, maybe there's no you know, might be messy, might be just plastic manipulatives that I don't think anybody that's going to cause some agitation. Right. When you're in a messy kind of chaotic space, it's not great when you're in a space that is inviting you to participate with your mind, that it's inviting you to that, you know, gives you signifiers. For instance, that is a declaration of your personhood that feels good. So we concern ourselves with how is a classroom being designed to increase a sense of connection and belonging and making it a space where it's holding the body so that the person can richly learn The eye is for the inquiry, right? A lot of us are in, you know, injury driven processes, so I feel like that, self explained will add the creative to that. So that inquiry is something that you can creatively explore and then we'll move into the R, which is for reconciliation. Now not saying reconciliation is going to happen right now, but we believe that it's a goal that we can achieve, maybe not in our lifetime, but it can happen in the process of reconciliation is reckoning. So how what are we reckoning with? First of all, we're reckoning mainly with systems and beliefs, values and old patterns that have not served all of the diversity of the United States. And we are dealing with a US based caste system. So there's a lot of reckoning that happens within that realm that will move us into better places. Then we move into the A is for artistic research or the arts, and how do we center and use artistic research as a frame for all of the learning that we're doing similar to project based learning? And then the L is for liberation, which is the outcome that we're striving for, and connecting us back to this idea that love and education is being interested enough that our students all have access to their minds in the best ways that we do that. So within that frame, there's a lot of work to do, which is I'm going to now jump to the core for with talking about our analysis, narrative's, lineage and embodiment. So if we're to construct learning to be this loved based way that we hold our young people, we're not a homogeneous population. We're so diverse and eclectic. And that means that we have to have the ability to understand power dynamics in relation to historical truths that run our lives, but that we operate within, that we need to even understand power dynamics, such as am I being teacher centered or am I being student centered? And dynamics between into narratives? What are the narratives that we need to fully understand how our narratives, narratives are just entrenched in teaching and learning processes? So which narratives were fronted and which ones are not many and understanding beyond identity? What are the lineages that we have? And not just blood lineages, but the lineages that construct how I come to understand the world. So for instance, I'm a tap dancer, so I come from a lineage of tap dancers and Gregory Hines is one of my favorite tap dancers. I love him. So I kind of walk in the world with a phrase or a beat that is very closely connected to my rhythm tap practice. And then embodiment is orientations, right, Though How do we hold these things and walk in the world grounded in these ideas is enough so that when we're making a choice on the spot about a child, we're coming with it with a fully developed awareness around the power dynamic, the narratives that's playing out, the lineages that are intertwined, and can I be in a place where I'm making sure that the wholeness of this child is intact and decreasing the barriers, as we say, instead of increasing more barriers? So at the core, for primarily use by the teacher to kind of interrogate what's happening or is it also something students would do? It's a developmental, you know, question because I would not introduce the core four to a five year old, but I would to an eighth grader, right. You know, certainly in high school that they're already dealing with right now. I was thinking that if the students, it might give them tools and to enable it, for example, power dynamics, that they're able to look at power dynamics from a different perspective. It might help them have more control over their other lot, their own lives, you know, and and that's how I was seeing it. And I'm going to go back to love a little bit. So you have a phrase the gift of being seen and heard is a manifestation of all of this. And so what is interesting is you have these protocols and the core four and these tools, but they're all they all take place in an environment and in a relationship that's the opposite of dehumanizing. So I guess that's what liberatory is, the opposite of dehumanizing. So so how does the gift of being seen and heard, what is that and how does that play it? Many of our students are often not seen or valued for the range of gifts that they have. We often have a particular idea about what is gifted or what is intelligence, what is smart. And as we're striving to build a sense of belonging and inclusivity, I think it's really important that we provide the gift of really seeing our students for who they are, their fullness and their genius. I really believe that everyone has a genius to them in and that in turn, is a gift to everybody. So if everyone can see the strengths that we have as people, as individuals, the talents that we have, and step away from a limited sense of a mind that thinks correctly versus a mind that doesn't mean leaning into that neurodiversity space so popular right now is to accept people for how maybe, maybe it's more about having an unconditional awareness of the range of diverse thought and being on the planet and being okay with that and connecting that to this idea of liberation, connecting that to this idea of love, that to see you is to see the wholeness of humanity and to respect that maybe. Yes, I like that. How does having an understanding of trauma help seeing and hearing students? And I'll tell a story about So I'm a Type one diabetic and I was diagnosed in junior high, and the way that I was diagnosed was that I peed my pants in seventh grade in front of every trauma. That is deep, deep trauma. Right. The way that I made it through the rest of junior high was that I had very caring teachers, a few in in particular. And what they did was they created a classroom in which I felt safe. So my needs at that time were to make sure that I always had some sort of like glucose around. Right. The teachers that said, Maria, there's going to be juice for you here in this classroom or there's candy in my desk. I knew I was safe in that classroom, and when I felt safe, I had better academic performance in their classroom because that I knew that I was being looked after in the classrooms, that I knew the teacher maybe didn't have an awareness or didn't care in the art, in the forefront of my mind, I was constantly concerned with my body, and this is before technology. So I didn't have access to know my blood sugar was doing so. It was a guessing game and I could only check it, you know, my blood sugar a couple of times a day. I would be constantly worried if I go low in the next 10 minutes, you know, that fear became my experience in the classroom rather than relax, you know, someone's here for you. And I could open up to the learning. And I think that is very true of our students, our students that come with a range of traumas. If we can create spaces where they feel safe enough to learn, we don't know. We don't know what their traumas are. But we know that if we can make a space that is inviting, that if we can use methods of practice that are supportive and nurturing the mind rather than agitating them further, it's going to be beneficial in the end. And there's enough research out there around trauma informed practices that we know what works and what doesn't. Well, I think people or I do speak for myself. I think me I tend to not enter into it. I tend to want to move on. And and that isn't the best way of being a compassionate human being and loving the other person. So I was in a meeting last week on Zoom, and there's a group of us who meet periodically, and when we get together, we talk about our whatever we're dealing with right now, and then we all comment each other. And one person was talking about her situation and it wasn't really necessarily negative or positive, but she sort of cried a little bit while she was talking about her situation. And I was all ready, move on to the next person. And someone asked and said, Debbie, I think you might have been crying a little bit about that. Do you want to talk about that? And I thought, you know, that's really being present to the person and seeing the person. And she didn't impose and say, you have to talk about it. She just said, I think I saw this. Did I get it right? And do you want to talk about it? To me as reading about trauma in your year and love, it seems to me to be able to do that is a powerful thing. That's a way of say because I felt she felt see Debbie when she went when when the facilitator asked that question at the belt, she felt, See, yeah, yeah. I think there's an edge there that we can't raise everyone's trauma and talk about trauma all day. And I actually believe that everyone, you know, life presents a lot of pain for everybody. But there are things that we can do, like we can respond with a caring question. We can, you know, we can invite a practice that is going to center and focus the mind before we do a lesson. We can do a lot of movement and gesture that supports the nervous system and breathing techniques that again support young learners to be open and mindful and receptive to the learning rather than be in an a stuck place. And then, as we know sometimes there's just so much trauma that we can't meet the need and there's some other intervention that's needed. And there are generalities where we can be supportive and loving and caring by leaning into that space, unfortunately, getting low on time. So I'm going to ask I've got a couple more questions. I've got a list of 15 questions I want to ask, but we'll just have a couple. So what advice, if you want to use those words, do you have four coaches who want to embody love and the work their work as coaches? I mean, orientation is particularly relevant when we're coaching. I think we have all been in a place where we've been in a coaching dynamic where you can tell if someone likes you or not, right? Or they feel. And so coming from some unconditional space of just looking beyond the construction of a person, there might be a lot of messiness in people. But if we can kind of get to, you know, some place where I'm honoring that person, I'm going to see that their spirit is talking to that space and knowing that I can always love the spirit of a person because it's not holding the messiness or at least kind of designing them that way, that there's a better resonance that can happen between two people. And so having an orientation where you want to just kind of forefront the way that we're going to engage with that as a place, because I'm also, when I'm doing that, holding up their strengths and holding up and acknowledging the gifts first. That is so helpful. I mean, we know as coaches that when you forefront something, if you're about to say something that's like, I need to do a correction here, you always say something lovely for us, right? That whole sandwich approach. So again, it's like, let's get grounded in a place of there's always something of beauty as you spoke of, there's always something that is of value that you can see and name, and there's places where we can all evolve. I mean, my last question, what are two things you want people to take away? It doesn't have to be two, but one or or a number or a small number of things. Do you think these are things that people read? My book. I want them to take these big ideas away, and I'm sure we've been talking about it this whole time. Well, one thing I feel like we did not talk enough about the arts, because the arts are so closely aligned for me with this aspect of love in the classroom, to see oneself as an artist. I think the artist is also maybe even entertained by humanity. It asks these really profound questions because they have a love for humanity, so that raising our ability to understand the role of the artist in the world is really pivotal. And then seeing how directly that it supports teaching and learning is phenomenal. Yeah, there's a lot to say. Jim I know, I know, but. Well, what did they. Well, it's been wonderful having this conversation in your book. It makes the world a better place. I'm really grateful for you doing it. It's. It's wonderful. And I bet I have. I've said this to everybody I've talked to recently, but I hope this is the first of many conversations. So I'm very grateful for the chance to talk. I'm so honored. And yeah, thank you so much for having us, because a lot of folks in education do steer away from the concept of love in education. But I think it's time and I think so, too. Thanks. Thank you.