Dr. Yonek
Recent Interview with Dr. Mary Yonek on the success of the ENVoY program
[I = Interviewer, MY = Dr. Mary Yonek]
I: Thank you so much for seeing me at the end of a long day. You are Dr. Mary Yonek and you are the principal of Chinook Elementary School in Clark County, Washington. And you have been using ENVoY in your school for classroom management. Can you tell me how that works?
MY: We had a number of staff members who went through ENVoY training probably five years ago and a number of trained coaches in the building. And now it’s almost school-wide. I’d say that about 90 plus percent of my teachers have been trained. We have a very large staff, 32 classroom teachers plus specialists, about 800 students. So it works really well and the thing that has made the biggest difference for us is once we got a ground swell going, the ability of staff members to support each other and not rely on the administrator for feedback but instead rely on their colleagues has made just a huge difference. And in fact the big impetus, I think, for change was the point where Michael Grinder decided to offer an advanced ENvoY class which is now known as The Healthy Classroom.
That first year decided he would have the prerequisite be the completing self and peer worksheets on 17 of the 31 ENVoY skills. And because my staff was so enamoroured of Michael and his skills they decided that they would want to participate in that class. And so the previous year we had a number of teacher participate in ENVoY training but we didn’t have systematic implementation. That next year as the carrot, or the prerequisite, for participating in A Healthy Classroom, needing to complete those self and peer forms, we had a — if I had to recall, I’d say at least 20 people who over the course of the year were intentionally engaged in practicing the skills because they knew it was enough of them that it was not something they would want to rely on me to fill out forms for them but instead they just self-organized into small teams. And they hit up some of the building coaches — we have about a half a dozen coaches — but they really’ve been sort of relying on each other whether they were coaches or not to say, "I need somebody to observe me for Freeze Body. Will you come in and fill out the form?"
I: So even someone who is not trained [right, absolutely], because of the way it is set up [absolutely…
MY: And I would like to say that it’s a no-brainer and that’s an oversimplification. But the sheets are so clear-cut and descriptive. And the other thing is that we felt, with Michael’s permission, that we had license. That if a particular lesson or whatever a teacher was doing didn’t lend itself exactly to fit a worksheet that we could take a bit of creative license with that and adapt it as needed because the critical element really is that there is not only the self-reflection of the teacher doing the Self Worksheet, but some dialogue with a peer in doing the Peer Worksheet. So even the acknowledgment that "this question didn’t quite fit" but they could articulate why, it’s prompted a level of self-reflection and peer dialogue that hadn’t been there before.
We also have a very large school as I mentioned, almost 800 students, and we are organized into three wings, 10 classrooms in each wing plus a portable. And we have a specialist area. And my first couple of years in the building I really struggled with how do you maintain that school within a school feeling. But in addition, how do you make sure that people aren’t becoming cliquish or just so isolated in their wings. The wings were very collegial and they were working really well together, but, you know, never the twain shall meet between the houses. And I vacillated between, "Is it really important to have teachers working with teachers in other wings? Or should I just leave them be and say, ‘Gee, that’s… ten classrooms is probably a fairly typical school with 250-300 children,’" and always felt that there was something there that as a whole school we needed some kind of identity or bonding or something.
And I wrestled with it, some type of overriding thematic thing or something. I didn’t really know how to pull the group together. And consequently, going through the 17 skills with so many staff members, they, as they self-grouped for doing those observations, they were crossing wings or houses. And it had that side-effect of providing common language for the staff around a very important topic to them which was classroom management.
I would say it is larger than classroom management. It’s about building a learning community which is very significant. And a step past classroom management. And the teachers were having regular dialogue and it really literally didn’t end up involving me to the extent that at the beginning I said, "Well, of course I am doing several observations during the year but at any time if you want me to come in and do Peer Sheets I’d be happy to do that," and I probably maybe only did a half a dozen during the year because they just built their own networks. And so it’s kind of a joke around my school. People will say, "You know, Mary’s part of the Michael fan club, she’s the banner waver," but so much of what the staff accomplished they really did by virtue of just having a common purpose that they had identified as being valuable to them and then working together to achieve it.
I: It seems kind of paradoxical that your involvement was so strong and yet you ended up not having to spend a whole lot of time doing that.
MY: Absolutely. Since we’ve sort of gone through this process it’s been really easy for me to say, because it’s honest, that we are a staff that is committed to ENVoY. And so, as I bring in any new teachers I say, "We’re an ENVoY school, that’s the expectation. You need to commit to going through training or we have coaches on site that will help you." People come to the school because they know they can get the training with six/seven coaches on site. And that initial training made everything easier between the common language of staff members, the ability to recruit new people who had a common philosophy…
The other thing is that as time has progressed, if teachers are having a problem with a particular student we do what is called Teacher Assistance Teams where teachers meet to discuss how they might better be able to assist a student. ENVoY and the concepts that go with that — the using the nonverbals, the using visuals--are a common part of the discussion whether it’s a formal T. A. T., Teacher Assistance Team, or whether it’s an informal conversation in the staff room. We had the, uh, I’ll say opportunity this week to — we have painters in the building. We are having the whole building redone.
Our learning support room has been also partly a book room, unfortunately. We decided we needed to reconfigure that so we spent two days dismantling the room and putting it back together and it was funny because the people that were in there helping me — we started to put bulletin boards back up — and we redid the bulletin boards, and we did them all in yellow. And somebody had said "Yellow’s a good color for brain stimulation," and matching borders. And a person walked in and said, "Oh, you did all the boards the same color. That must be a Grinder thing." But the thing is that while people say it laughingly, it is also very lovingly, that there are so many shared experiences in our building around ENVoY and that the tools are very concrete. They are very simple. They are very easy to practice and see immediate response.
One of my teachers who is a coach has been working with some teachers in training through the ESD-the Educational Service District is what we call that in our area — and the ESD person called me to book the coach to come again and do some training and he said, "We get so many people in who talk so much philosophy of classroom management." And he said, "When this person from your building came out and did the training, when she left, although they very much liked her, they looked puzzled like, ‘It can’t really be that simple: do A and you’ll see B, or the teacher does this, the students do this.’ And they went out and did and came back and came back to the next seminar and, you know, scratch your head — it actually works! We are not teachers yet and we don’t have a lot of training and there is a direct effect. Go figure! What the teacher does and the children do."
We also have talked a lot as we place students in classrooms from year to year. We have a very complex process and what we focus on is trying to match the teacher’s skills to the student needs and part of what comes into the discussion every year is the extent to which teachers use nonverbals for some students in particular. Students that have auditory processing issues need a high degree of nonverbals in the classroom. Teacher nonverbals, from the physiology of it as well as the prompts around the room, or "Exit Directions" if you want to call them that, visual reminders on the students’ desks, that type of thing. So we found that in so many different places.
I: Have you noticed any effect on turnover in your staff, on attendance among your students, things like that?
MY: We’ve had a very high attendance rate for our students. This is my 7th year at this school. Very supportive parent community. 96-97% attendance on a consistent basis. So that hasn’t been an issue, but it hasn’t changed for us. Staff turnover? I would say that teachers, even though it is a very large building, feel very connected. And they feel that they have a support network. There’s a potential that it could actually negatively affect our building because we have such a core of teachers that have leadership skills that they move on to other positions and actually one has gone on to be sort of a corporate trainer in a private industry in an HR capacity and a couple of my other people who are candidates for mentoring positions at a different level as well as one who’s gone into administration. And that’s only for the betterment of the profession, so I can’t complain about that.
I: But you don’t see teachers giving up in discouragement and…
MY: No, no. Because there is a lot of support and I would say that we have so many new teachers in our district, just the demographic curve. We do have a lot of new teachers in our district because we have had a lot of retirements and in our building, while I would say we experience the same seasons that the other buildings do, we anticipate them and we have people on the staff that have the skills to provide support that I wouldn’t say that we had or that I had five years ago. We didn’t see things coming. And that makes a huge difference. Being able to be proactive is very important.
I: Well, we could talk all night and you have children that need to sleep. Thank you so very much, Dr. Yonek, for talking with us.
