Thriving as a Special Educator Tip #7: Find Your Tribe
One clear finding in the research is that special educators are often isolated in their schools. To thrive, you need a tribe. You need mentors, listening ears, and more.
Thriving Tip #7: Find a Tribe
The research on special educators is pretty dismal. One piece of the dismal puzzle is how alone many teachers feel. Admins often don’t understand special education and there are often no other teachers at your site who do exactly what you do. That means that many people have extreme lack of job clarity and are left floundering in the dark trying to figure out what their schedule should look like, how they will meet students’ hours, and how they will squeeze in and find interventions. Basically, it sucks.
To thrive, you need a tribe. You need a stan, a group of people who can support you and provide you with answers to your burning questions on topics ranging from why the break room smells like that to the best intervention to use for a student. The challenge is that it isn’t always easy as a special educator to find your tribe. I pieced mine together– and I changed schools a lot and position titles a lot which meant my tribe kept shifting and needing to be pieced back together. The bigger your tribe, the better but as long as you have at least a few people you can call on, you are so much more likely to feel successful and not “you against the world.”
For me, a tribe was essential. I am a believer in the “It takes a village” model of teaching. Every single year something happened where I was like umm wait? Who do I call? And also, what do I do? My last year before I went back to school, I had the most flattering drop in ever. A sister brought her 18 year old brother to my elementary school. He was Deaf and had just come from a refugee camp. She was going to help her parents enroll him in a local high school but she wanted to know what she should say and do to get him the help he needed. She had heard good things about my school in the community and wanted to see what our recommendations were so she would get him a fair deal. Best sister ever. The moment was definitely a career highlight because finding out that folks were saying good things and not trash talking behind your back kind of rocks. But also I REALLY did not want to let her down. It was a tribe moment. I sat there furiously texting and emailing the folks I knew in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing department. By the time she left the school, her brother was on their radar and they were making sure he get excellent supports. I was able to deliver on my school’s reputation because I had folks to call– but it took me YEARS to get there. Some folks in my tribe were more colleagues like the folks in DHH while others were work besties, but they all built my confidence, my knowledge base, and my joy in teaching. Here’s how I met some of them– and leveraged them to be better and feel better at work.
Way back when I started, we did a district wide orientation for folks supporting students with more extreme behaviors. I glommed onto J. We never taught together and, TBH, had really different teaching styles but J. was from the area and knew EVERYONE. She knew the ins and outs of district politics. Over the next few years, I visited her classroom to get a sense of how other people were approaching the same challenges and drew on her insider knowledge to learn who to ask for help for what. We also did happy hours throughout our first few years, providing each other with pats on the back and promises that really, it would get better soon.
I had some rocky para relationships but I also had a few that sustained me. When I started, my para was an ex-Marine with an almost done degree in therapy. To say that nothing phased her was such an understatement. She also knew so much about how to support students who had experienced trauma and talk kids down when they were getting escalated. I spent two years watching her and trying to copy her expert moves– and learned so much about trauma informed practices from her. Years later, I had J., the Queen, who was deeply enmeshed in the community. The families trusted her and she looked out for the students and for their families. My skills in family engagement were a work in progress across most of my career and most of what I learned, I learned from watching her.
I am slightly obsessed with related services, mostly because I met my first school OT after years of working in schools and realized her key daily activities involved swings and a trampoline and I was just devastated that I hadn’t gone down that path. Like seriously though. So cool. Anyhow, I have always been one of those people who thinks social skills and self-regulation are fabulous, but also totally opaque subjects. Anyhow, at my first school both the OT and the SLP were pretty much busts. They did not want to be part of my tribe or share wisdom with me. But eventually, I got lucky. I got an OT one year who had a trainee. The trainee was so excited to teach me all of the self-regulation programs and to give me all of the fun toys. I wound up with theraputty that I could use while stuck in traffic (it helps soooo much) and this cool exercise I could do where I massaged pressure points around my collar bone with one hand and could drop my blood pressure. For real. I also wound up with tools I could use to teach self-regulation. After that first success, it was on. I became an OT stalker at each new site. About half of the ones I worked with really just wanted me to go away but the others totally made up for the slightly embarrassing rejections. Same with SLPs. I really wanted to know how to teach social skills beyond telling kids to be nice. M. talked me through the amazing Social Thinking curriculum and taught it to my students with me in the room so I could learn more.
There are folks who will tell you that what we do in special education is totally unique and totally different from what folks do in general education. I’ve always wondered if those people have watched the experts in action– the teachers who can pull off, with no support, a grade level lesson AND a targeted intervention during the same exact time slot. These are the teachers who have seen the fads come and the fads go and have a rock solid set of interventions and tools they can draw on to help students who need extra support. These teachers are hands down the ones who taught me to teach special education. I learned how to teach the alphabet, phonics, phonemic awareness, counting, and so much more from seeing them do it. I put my own special ed-y twist on many of the things I learned from them and sometimes replaced their programs with the equivalents that my district thought were research based– but the essence of how I taught and helped push students to grade level came from them. Kind, expert, veteran general education teachers are worth their weight and gold and were at the heart of my tribe.
Speaking of which, I learned all of my case management and so much more from the handful of special education veterans I met. These folks are so few and far between that spotting them can be like looking for the white whale, but the ones I found were amazing. Mrs. H. gave me my first assessment kit and taught me how to run a productive, time efficient, and collaborative meeting (and yes, a meeting can be all three). Ms. N. showed me what it looks like to serve students with a wide range of needs and how to push students while loving them. Assistant Principal T. way back when I was a para listened to me when I broke down and found ways to make my job make sense to me. I just wish there were more– special education teachers do not, sadly, last and the veterans I met were so amazing…. But I just never got to meet that many.
So let me tell you, these are rare. I had one school with the nicest principal ever– who was also very depressed and stopped coming to work and once cried through an IEP of mine. I had one who was a preacher (it was a public school) and into the gospel and humiliating teachers, not leading. But man, when you get a supportive admin– and one who gets it– your life is golden. Ms. S. had my back. When we had a student in foster care who was going to have to bounce around schools, she moved heaven and earth to keep him with us. When the district tried to pull my amazing para, Ms. S. fought for her. I never really found that admins were helpful for things like relationships with parents, building a schedule, or figuring out what and how to teach. What I did find was that having a good one in my tribe meant I had someone at my back when it counted.
My tribe also at various points included parents, custodians, and school psychologists. The point was that my tribe was big and consisted of everyone who I could draw on for help, inspiration, and sanity on a daily basis. I didn’t always have the luxury of someone else at my site who exactly got my job (or did the same thing), but I was always able to pull together a coalition of folks to have my back and to keep me from fumbling in the dark.
What’s your tribe? Who are the people who keep you going at work, who help you grow and stay sane?
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