Lassoed: How Illinois SEL Leaders use the hit show to inspire educators

Ryan Wamser and Matt Weld from Regional Office of Education 40 are leaders in the world of school Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL. Together, they staff the Area 5 SEL Hub in Southwestern Illinois – one of seven regional hubs that offer professional development to local teachers and school administrators on trauma-informed practices and all things SEL.

By far the most popular workshop they offer is “Leadership Lessons from the Lasso Way.” The duo uses the hit Apple TV comedy Ted Lasso as inspiration to discuss what it means to lead a team -- or a classroom -- while prioritizing the mental health of both the team and the leaders. They spoke with guest host Lindsay Record, who leads ISBE’s public relations efforts focused on Illinois pandemic recovery efforts. To get connected with your SEL Hubs, visit https://isbe.net/selhubs.
Our theme music is by José Rivera.

Transcript

Transcript

Lassoed: How Illinois SEL Leaders use the hit show to inspire educators

RHODES  0:02  

Hello, we are the Illinois State Board of Education, and we love Illinois schools. I'm Dusty Rhodes, part of the Public Relations team at ISBE. We have a guest host for this episode. My colleague Lindsey Record spoke with Dr. Ryan Wamser and Matt Weld from the Regional Office of Education 40, in Southwestern Illinois. Ryan and Matt offer professional development for educators, including a popular workshop based on the hit comedy Ted Lasso. If you've never watched Ted Lasso, that's okay. It can still transform your leadership practice. Just listen.

RECORD  0:44  

Ryan and Matt, thanks so much for being here. We're here today to talk about your Administrative Academy that is based on the hit Apple TV show Ted Lasso. How did this idea come to be? Does it matter if an attendee has seen the show or not?

WAMSER  1:03  

I'm a huge Ted Lasso fan. I'm a huge television and movie fan. And to be quite honest, Matt is not a huge television and movie fan. And I came to Matt and I said, have you seen the show Ted Lasso?  So the entirety of the first two seasons, it encompasses what it means to be a good leader. It also encompasses a lot of the SEL standards that we're talking about on a daily basis. We need to create an Admin Academy out of this, because it'll be great and be a lot of fun for us to do. I kind of put it on Matt to subscribe to Apple TV, and binge the show. And I think that's kind of what happened, right Matt?

WELD  1:48  

That's exactly what happened, you get to watch TV for work. And that's kind of the way we bring it to our audience. They get to enjoy clips from the show, and learn valuable lessons in the process.

WAMSER  2:02  

Even if you've never seen the show before, you will instantly become a fan. But you're not going to miss out anything by not having seen the show. I think my fandom of it comes from, it has a Midwestern sensibility, it's the humor, and the positivity of it, kind of encompasses our background and our kind of sensibility that we have, that our teachers and administrators appreciate. And so that's kind of why I got hooked on it. You know, and we hear this so often now and what Ted Lasso believes in is, great leaders. Start with being the most positive people in the room. And we've heard this numerous times when you look for the worst leader in the room, and you're going to find the most negative person and Ted exemplifies the exact opposite of that.

RECORD  2:51  

How has the character of Ted Lasso resonated with you as a source of leadership and social emotional learning lessons? And further, what does coaching soccer have to do with leading schools?

WAMSER  3:05  

As teachers, we're good coaches in general. And as leaders, we're good coaches, that's our job, to motivate people. And the reason why I think Ted Lasso resonated was something that we all needed post pandemic was somebody who's positive, and who is the rah-rah person, because we need that in our lives, because we got so much of the opposite of that throughout the last three years. When we linked this back to the SEL work, whether the writers and the creators and Jason Sudeikis, the creator of Ted Lasso, realized what he was doing is so much of what Ted does is research-based leadership. Whether you're leading a billion-dollar soccer club, or you're leading a school district, what he does -- whether intentional, as the writers did, or not intentional -- his leadership style, his work and his self-awareness, self-management, his relationship skills, the social awareness that he puts on, those are the basics of SEL standards. And I don't think they're sitting down and looking at SEL standards when they're creating a show. But it's almost as if the intentions are there, to truly look at what good research-based leadership and social emotional learning looks like. It's resonated that we could link it back to it. It also gives us a reason to talk about my favorite show when we can link it back to important topics like that.

RECORD  4:25  

Okay. There are so many great lessons to draw from on this show. But I'd like to hear from each of you. Can you pick your favorite Lasso lesson? And Ryan, I'll start with you. 

WAMSER  4:37  

That's hard. In our PD, when we do a full day for administrators, we boiled it down to eight lessons. In reality, we have about 100 that we could choose from. Probably, the overall, the overarching one of what the show is about is that we have to believe in something and that's kind of our first lesson. That's kind of what Ted believes in, you see the term “believe,” that's the sign hanging up in the locker room. As leaders, administrators, and superintendents, we have to make sure that we are letting our staff, our communities know what we believe in. We believe in public education, we believe in the work that we're doing and the importance of it. You need to have a driving force. And if you're not constantly putting it out there and communicating it, letting people know what your mission is, what your vision is, then you're not doing the best job you can do. So that's probably my favorite, our number one lesson, which is to believe in something and make sure we communicate it.

RECORD  5:33  

Great! Matt, how about you?

WELD  5:37  

Well, like Ryan said, there are so many possibilities. I think, I'm going to take the more SEL route, and I'm going to go with the lesson that's admit when you're wrong and learn to forgive. Every one of us in the room as leaders, we're human, right? Humans make mistakes and there's always going to be conflict when there are people interacting with each other and that's inevitable. That's an assumption that we have to make when we work with schools, and when we work with people, and so we need to repair those relationships that have been harmed with conflict. That's hard to do when you're supposed to be the leader who has all the answers. People look up to you as like, you know, this is this, this is the answer key to the school standing right here. We need to be able to step back and repair those relationships by learning how to apologize when it's necessary. And then what makes a good apology. But on the other side, if someone apologizes to us, we need to learn how to forgive. Right? It's for us. It's this two-way street of repairing relationships because relationships are key to, well, everything. So that would be my favorite one.

RECORD  6:59  

Great, I'm sure one of you is going to say be a goldfish. So, we'll have our listeners Google that one.

WAMSER  7:07  

It's like your favorite child, which one's your favorite child? I love them all.

RECORD  7:13  

Ryan, you had mentioned a little bit about the character, Ted Lasso, was known for his positivity. What are some ways that school leaders can adopt some of these lessons to create a more positive and inclusive school culture? 

WAMSER  7:35  

Absolutely. One of the lessons we talked about, the key to success of any leader is relationship building. It’s whether a positive leader can build a coalition, build relationships with people. That's what makes Ted the leader that he is, is how he builds relationships with people, just the simple little minute things that are in the show that you think are not really big deals. But those are the big positive deals that make people want to work for somebody who has a positive leader. It's just little things like, everybody's equal, everybody has voice in the room, everybody has the ability to contribute so that no one in the school district is better than anyone else. 

From the moment, Ted walked on onto the screen, we meet Ted on the show; from the moment he meets his cab driver that picks him up at the airport to take him to the job at the soccer team. To the moment he meets the clubhouse attendant, everybody is treated the same, with the same amount of respect. No one is better because they have a title of superintendent, or they have the title of janitor, custodian, secretary, teacher, AP teacher versus PE teacher versus whatever. I think that's one of the positive things. 

That's sometimes we forget that the functioning of an of an elementary school, our teachers are important, our principals are important. But, if our cafeteria workers aren't part of that team, and don't realize and we don't let them know how important they are, how our playground monitors, our bus drivers; those people who sometimes we forget about. Ted reminds us that we need to be positive and need to make sure that we're incorporating everybody on a daily basis into our entire systems that we're all part of the team. 

Things Ted does, he accepts ideas, he gets information from everybody. He uses everyone's name, he learns everybody's name, those are the minor things that we forget. But if you can remember everyone, if you're a superintendent, and you can remember every kindergartener’s name that's kind of worth its weight in gold. He (Ted) gets up, he goes when he wants to build relationships. He doesn't wait for people to come to him. He goes to people, he talks to people with respect, he's positive. Even when the going gets tough, he still responds with kindness and love. That's something that we can all do. Whether we're, disciplining a student as a principal, or we're disciplining an employee, we can still do that with respect and with love. That's one of the positive things that I think, we see throughout the TV show, and why I'm really drawn to it.

RECORD  10:24  

So now I want to kind of shift and talk a little bit about your work. Both of you are part of an effort to support schools in establishing and expanding SEL programming in your region. Can you tell me a little about your roles and the work that you're doing? And Matt, can you start us off here?

WELD  10:48  

Yeah, so I am the SEL Coach for the Area Five SEL hub and Ryan is the Grant Director. So we are kind of co-spearheading this effort to bring SEL or social emotional learning awareness to the districts in our area. In area five, there are six areas plus the Chicago Public Schools. In those 13 counties, our role as we've defined it, is to bring teams together and take them through a self-assessment process, and then an action planning process. Then bringing them together, supporting them as they develop these action plans throughout the year. And then following that.

WAMSER  11:43  

We're lucky enough, we get to provide, any SEL-related professional development as part of the grant to support the work. We’ve even linked this SEL hub work back to Ted Lasso, because when we do our presentation, we sell the work throughout the state that’s going on, not just in our area, but like Matt said throughout the state. 

One of the lessons from Ted Lasso is to be curious, not judgmental. That's huge. If we had to pinpoint the one scene that I would have to show somebody, it would be the scene about being curious, not judgmental. In our workshop, we take them through the TRSIA [Trauma Responsive Schools Implementation Assessment] that we do as part of our grant work. We tell them, when you're doing a self-assessment, and you're using data, sometimes we use data to pinpoint problems instead of using it. Which is to be curious, not judgmental about the results we get from it. 

In our SEL work, we really talk about that curiosity, and not having not forming judgment about what we're not doing or what we should be doing. Instead, let's be curious about how can we improve. We linked that back to student achievement data. Too often we use student achievement data as a gotcha for teacher evaluation, or a student achievement data on what we're doing wrong, rather than let's be curious about why we're not achieving where we need to be. Or let's be curious about, what are we doing good, and let's celebrate those positive moments as well. 

And so, everything somehow links back to Ted Lasso. And even in that work, we're able to do so. And we've been able to do this with 28 schools or so, in the last two years that we've done this assessment. We bring our teams together every summer and do a weeklong intensive SEL summit to take them through and look at their action plan and take it from rough draft form implementations. It really has been a blessing and kind of, life-changing for me in terms of what we're able to do to support our school districts. 

Looking at trauma intensive programming and staff self-care is what we need to be doing and making sure we're taking care of the adults in the buildings, and things that we really have never done before. In my career as an educator, now we're focusing on what I think should be important. And again, linking it back to Ted Lasso. Ted doesn't always do good job of that and we make sure we reference that when we do our presentation as well. Ted doesn't always take care of himself like he should, because he's so focused on everybody else in the room. That’s the same thing with our leaders and our school districts. We give, we give, we give, and sometimes we put ourselves second, and we need to start, shifting the focus and focusing on ourselves because we know teachers and administrators can't do anything for kids or their co-workers unless they're taking care of themselves first.

RECORD  14:47  

How are you supporting schools, who say okay, we know that we need to do more to make sure our staff are okay? What can we do about It? What are specific strategies or practices that schools are putting in place to help support staff self-care?

WELD  15:09  

I'll take a stab at this one. I think that the really important part is that we do not go into the school and say, “This is what you should do.” I think it's vitally important for the person who wants to self-care, wants to improve their self-care. They need to figure out what self-care means for them because it's so individualized. What we do is we go into the schools and we kind of, say, how can we help? So just like Ted says, be curious, not judgmental. We want to go in with that curious mind and say, how can we help and listen to what the school needs. Then we find the resources to help support the schools in their journey to staff self-care and well-being.

WAMSER  15:58  

One of the really cool things that Matt does is, as a part of this grant, is he helps school districts that want a practice. And he does something that's really cool, called Mindful Mondays, and tell him about that, Matt?

WELD  16:13  

Well, alright, so two Mondays a month, after school, it's all virtual. And I get on and demonstrate and take people through five different ways that they can approach wellness, or more self-awareness. Which is the first of the SEL standard for both Castle and for Illinois. We start with an intention, just having something in the back of your mind that you can refer to and is your kind of North Star for the day, or the month or the year. Something that you have guiding you throughout the day, that keeps you focused, because, we tend to live inside our brains, and we get scattered quickly. Having an intention is a good thing. 

We also do some breath work, dealt in grounding. We do some desk yoga, because we need to move our bodies, our bodies were designed to move and I think, personally, that one of the reasons we're so stressed is because we don't move our bodies enough. Moving helps get all those stress chemicals out of our muscles. Then we also go through a mindfulness practice. Whether it's something simple, like, writing your name, and assigning your name, but then going back and really concentrating on each of the lines that you created; there's a bunch of mindfulness activities. The last thing we do is finish with a guided meditation. It usually has to do with the theme of the week, which changes every time. We had great responses. At the end of the year, we had more people attend that last week of school than any other time during the year so I consider that a win. 

RECORD  18:04  

Sounds like a good way to end the school year. So what are you hearing? What's the reaction been from schools that have engaged with your SEL hub? 

WAMSER  18:14  

Well, two weeks ago, we had 16 district teams representing 30 schools for a weeklong SEL Summit. And by the time they walk out of there, overall, we're hearing refreshing positivity, giving them the motivation to get the school year started, helping support the work that they're doing, and we're helping put them on the right path for climate and culture, self-care plans, all those things that they're working on. Not to toot our own horn. But when you do this work throughout the year, and you have three, maybe four times -- Matt, correct me if I'm wrong -- you have people tell you that the work you're doing has given them that nudge they needed because they were contemplating leaving the profession.

WELD  19:00  

And they stay because of the work that we're helping them do. 

RECORD  19:04  

That's really powerful. So great when you hear from the school who had such a positive experience, and that probably helps to bring other people along. However, if you had an administrator, for example, who didn't attend the session and hear the excitement, and they just think that SEL is just one more thing on an already full plate, what would you say to them? 

WAMSER  19:29  

Well, that's usually the first response we get from, people that are hesitant. What we say is, first of all, we're not here to be one more thing. This is SEL, which means we're here to take things off your plate and we're here to be a positive addition, so even having the conversation with that administrator about this program is going to cause stress. That's not what we're here to do. But what we come back with is SEL is the foundation for everything else that we do throughout the year. It is not an extra thing. It is the school improvement plan, it is the evaluation plan, it is the school discipline plan, it is everything we do, it comes down to relationships. And if we're not able to know how to positively interact and positively have that social emotional connection with people and within ourselves, then nothing else we do matters. And so that's kind of what we do. We have teams that come in that are the trauma team, and they're part of the SEL program, we have teams that come in that are the school improvement team that are part of the SEL program, we have teams that come in that are the school climate and culture team, and they're part of the SEL program. All of those teams, are really SEL teams, even though they call it something different, Student Assistance Program team, or whatever they may be, because truly SEL is part of all of that, it’s not an add on. It is an integrated process throughout everything else that we're doing.

WELD  20:54  

One of the things that we try to emphasize, when we go on visit schools, or when schools come to us, or when we're talking to individuals is that SEL is not one more thing. SEL is the one thing, like we can't run a school without it. We've been doing SEL, since humans started interacting with each other, having those relationships, making sure that the community has been built. That we have communication in place and procedures that are inclusive, welcoming and recognize because everyone wants to belong. Everyone wants to be heard. No one can argue with that.

RECORD  21:36  

So, I want to ask about SEL and adults. I know that some say that the role of teachers in modeling SEL skills and behaviors is really important. How can schools provide support and resources for educators to enhance their own emotional intelligence and effectively incorporate it into their classrooms?

WELD  22:03  

That is the million-dollar question. Go for it, Ryan.

WAMSER  22:06  

You can't teach AP Chemistry unless you can build a relationship with your class. And whether you like it or not, you also can't teach AP Chemistry unless you have the skills within yourself to self-regulate and to have a relationship, intrapersonal commitment. If we're not self-regulating ourselves, we're not going to be able to work with young people. Teachers that don't have the skills themselves are the ones who are sending the kids down to the office more often. 

We are always going to have those teachers that think that this is hippie dippie. I'm one of those people that this is hippie dippie. So I need the reminder of the research, that this is having has a direct impact on discipline rates, and student achievement data, and all of those things that we can pull from research being done by Castle, and the research that we're doing locally, to show that this impacts. 

Another one of the things that I think we really have enjoyed hearing from our SEL teams that we've done this process with is when they get to take it back to their schools, they start to slowly integrate this process with their teachers, is we hear about those teachers that tell them, I'm not a fan of this. They come back a couple months later and they say, I tried these strategies, I'm doing these things with these kids and I realized that this is important. I need to be doing this because it makes me a better teacher. It helps the kids be engaged and be in my classroom, in a better place. So that's something that's been pretty powerful too.

RECORD  23:39  

Is there something that you have found to be helpful in your personal or professional life that you have learned through doing this work?

WAMSER  23:51  

Being able to be the Grant Director for this is not something that I saw myself doing. Three years ago, I was the sitting school superintendent, I wasn't in a place that I was being a positive leader, you know, I wasn't healthy, I wasn't happy I wasn't dealing with the stress of the job well, and I walked away from the superintendency. To be able to help other people with the practices that I lacked in and be able to work on that myself, to be able to better multiple school districts has truly been a blessing in my life. 

And so focusing on myself and making sure that I take care of myself is one of the lessons that we do when it comes to the Ted Lasso workshop. It’s about making sure that we're healthy, that we're exercising, taking care of ourselves, and that we're focusing on our mental and physical health. At the end of the day, we can't do anything for our school districts if we're not taking care of ourselves. I was one of those educators who walked away from the profession and have been blessed enough to be able to be drawn back in and do this work. I love this work and I’m ready to do whatever I can to support educators so that there aren't people like me who choose to walk away that we can keep people in the profession because it is the most important thing that we can do, is to be an educator.

RECORD  25:12  

Fans of Ted Lasso may be wondering what's going to happen, if there's going to be a season four. But I want to ask you, what's going to happen in the next season for you in the Area Five SEL hub? 

WAMSER  25:29  

Well, we want to see this work continue -- that's the biggest thing. We're blessed to have extra money to fund the SEL hubs. We want to be able to have another season. I'm hoping that, we continue to build it, continue to build capacity, and build a strong network of SEL leaders throughout our area five. Then continue to build it from there. 

One of the cool things that we are helping to coordinate, on February 20, the day after Presidents Day, will be the first Illinois statewide SEL conference. It will be in Springfield at the Crowne Plaza and we're going to have three amazing keynote speakers present throughout the day. We’re going to mix in with those three keynote speakers, resources, and more information about the SEL hubs and the REACH process and all of the work that we're doing throughout the state. I hope that people can join us in Springfield on February 20, for a 100% free conference that is all about SEL, positivity, and everything that Ted Lasso stands for.

RECORD  26:43  

So great, I'm glad you shared that. I was able to attend your Administrator Academy at the special education conference earlier this spring. And as you know, I talked to a few attendees after the workshop to ask what their impression was, and I heard so much positive feedback, including one attendee stating that this was the best Administrator Academy she had ever been to. So I think just job well done. I appreciate so much you taking the time to share about this workshop and SEL work that you're doing and best wishes going forward.

WAMSER  27:22  

Thanks, Lindsay.

RHODES  27:24  

You've been listening to Ryan Wamser and Matt Weld, who staff the area five SEL hub. If you'd like to connect with any of the SEL hubs go online to isbe.net/selhubs. Again, that's isbe.net/selhubs. And if you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe on Apple or Spotify and share it with your friends. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed mostly by https://otter.ai