Gwyneth Fastnacht: [00:00:00] I really am so humbled by the amazing educators that I get to work with, and I just like to go in with my ears open, listen for understanding, and learn from what they are doing. 

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’m Mandi Morris, your host. Today’s guest is Gwyneth Fastnacht. She has an incredible career in education.

She spent 13 years as an international teacher traveling all over the world with her family and kids. She has been 10 years in South Dakota working with 114 school districts and making incredible impact. I don’t know that I’ve ever talked with an educator who is so curious and willing to try new things with incredible humility.

This conversation is really special today. I hope you enjoy it. Let’s go. Gwyneth Fastnacht is the statewide Title three consortium Coordinator for South Dakota at the Black Hills Special Services Cooperative with more than 30 years in education. She’s taught in reservation schools, [00:01:00] international schools, and sparsely populated parts of South Dakota.

And as a high school ESL newcomer teacher. Today, Gwyneth supports 114 districts across the state helping build strong, multilingual learner programs through professional development. Technical assistance and access to ENL endorsement. Gwyneth, welcome to the ML Chat podcast. We are really looking forward to this conversation today.

Gwyneth Fastnacht: Thanks for having me. It’s an honor. 

Mandi Morris: So let’s dive in 114 schools. That is a lot of 114 districts, excuse me, more schools than that. That is a lot of breadth to be supporting. Lots of different needs I would imagine. Talk through a little bit, what is it like working at a consortium and how do you support so many districts?

Gwyneth Fastnacht: We have an amazing team. There are two more full-time people and another halftime person, so we divide the work and each of us. Brings a different specialty to our team, so we [00:02:00] really can cover a lot of different challenges and questions that come up in our school district or in our school districts, our member districts, but also we have an amazing organization that supports us.

Black Hills Special Services Cooperative really has just trusted us to do what our districts need and while. All the districts have some similarities, scheduling challenges, finding experienced or endorsed. ESL teachers. Every one of those districts is also unique with personality and the population of the students and the need and the grade level and the language.

You know, everything. They might be small, rural districts, but we see those same issues across the country, I’m sure. 

Mandi Morris: So talk with us a little bit about the population of students you serve and how does that vary across the state? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: In South Dakota we are, we have two or three main population [00:03:00] centers, and they are quite diverse in their multilingual learner population.

The schools that we tend to work with have much smaller programs, and for the most part, most of our member schools serve. Spanish speaking students, and we have a population of German or Huish speaking students who are an Anabaptist group of communally living. People that have a colloquial form of German called Huish as their main language.

Mandi Morris: Oh, that’s a really interesting population divide that you have and you’re supporting. And for the students in the state that are predominantly Spanish speaking, your ESL students, are those families like really spread throughout the state and you’ve got 114 districts that you’re supporting. Do the population pockets, are they spread across or some have more densely populated needs?

Gwyneth Fastnacht: That is a great [00:04:00] question and. The population of Spanish speaking students really is spread a across the state. But we do have, I don’t even wanna say localized, but we have a lot of school districts in the northeast corner of South Dakota where there are a lot of agriculture, food processing companies, milk, cheese, eggs, that kind of thing, dairies, and so there are a lot of agriculture operations that are quite large.

That are in the northeast part of the state, but outside of that, there are also different farms and ag operations and other various reasons why we have one to 10 to 20 Spanish speakers in a really small, rural school district, but mostly agriculture. 

Mandi Morris: So you’re spread out all over the place and you have a small team, but you said you’re not doing it alone.

How do you manage support across such a large area? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: We [00:05:00] divide and conquer. As I said, we each bring a specialty, if you will, to the table. So we really work well together. We meet monthly, but. We meet regularly, monthly, but we talk all the time. We don’t live near each other, so we are on online meetings a lot, but we divide regionally so that when we do need to travel, we are doing the best we can at being conservative with our funds for traveling to school districts.

But we can do so much with online meetings, just popping in to answer a question or. Meeting with an EL team to do a data dig with their WIDA access scores each year. It just really depends, but we, the best part of this job is the relationships that we have with our school districts. I’ve been working with.

The majority of my schools for over 10 years, so I’ve seen administration change, teacher change [00:06:00] development of the program. The questions and the technical support that school districts have now are completely different than they were 10 years ago. It’s just so rewarding and every time I work with one of my schools, I leave a better person because I’m.

So impressed and humble about the work that they do. I’m gonna get choked up. They’re amazing, amazing people. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. It sounds like your bucket is filled by the incredible educators that you’re working with in South Dakota. What is that like finding teachers? Is that something where you’re like, it is such a need, we constantly have open positions, or are you well sourced when it comes to finding teachers for these ENL positions?

Gwyneth Fastnacht: That is such a good question, and that is a topic that has really changed over the past 10 years as well. When I first started this position, I was the only one. I got it running off the ground. The state wanted to go from localized consortiums to a [00:07:00] statewide. They liked the model that we had with visiting schools and providing professional development.

So when we went to a statewide consortium, I traveled around to those schools that I had been working with and picked their brains about what would be the best first big project we could do. And it definitely was evident that they were really looking for teachers with an ESL, or we call it. English has a new language in South Dakota, ENL endorsement, and they really wanted an affordable, solid program that they could send their already employed teachers to so that they had that expertise in-house without having to hire.

Hire a new person because they generally didn’t need a full-time ESL teacher, but they wanted to add that capacity to their district expertise. And so for about eight [00:08:00] years, we had 20 to 30 people from districts all across the state in our ENL endorsement cohort program. And it’s a good thing. But that has changed because we.

Typically have endorsed teachers into every district we work with now. So the need for that is changing a little bit. We’ve gone to an every other year cohort approach, and we’re gonna evaluate and see how that goes. Teachers. There’s teacher turnover, so I think that’s still a viable program, but it’s probably gonna look a little bit different moving forward.

Mandi Morris: How did you go about building an in-house ENL endorsement program? That sounds like a huge lift. 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: It’s one of those things where, this is my project. It’s one day at a time, and I will get there when I get there. But we worked with a one, a local university, a local private university, actually was willing to take a chance.

I sent an email to the provost at [00:09:00] that time trying to explain what I was interested in doing, and. She was the only one of about 10 colleges or universities that wrote me back and said, why don’t you drive down here and have a meeting? Let me see what you’re talking about. So I had to explain the whole thing face-to-face.

And so Dakota Wesley and in Mitchell, South Dakota. I don’t wanna say took pity on us, but have really took a chance with us and allowed us to teach the coursework, use their online platform, and they’ve really supported us along the way. We’ve added one class at a time as we were getting going, and they.

We’re just really trusting that we knew what we were doing and what teachers needed to know to effectively support multilingual learners in the classroom. And so we’re forever thankful for that partnership that’s still going strong today. 

Mandi Morris: Wow, that is so incredible. What an amazing opportunity for in-house teachers to be able to [00:10:00] expand their.

Expertise and their ability to meet changing needs within their own school building. And also, as you noted, taking a lot of pressure off of individual buildings to try to fill positions that can be challenging to fill, especially when you’re looking for those like 0.3 FTE or 0.6 FDE. 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: Those people are not out there.

Mandi Morris: It’s so much easier to make that work when you’ve already, you have someone in-house and they just need that additional training. Kudos to you, Gwyneth, and your team for having the vision and going out there and farming people to help you like you needed a university or a college. And I love, educators are so tenacious.

It’s like we are used to trying to solve problems and I love that you are doing that for your teachers. Gwyneth, you’ve got years of experience as an international teacher. I am so excited to talk to you about your experience overseas. I also taught internationally [00:11:00] what an incredible opportunity to be able to live in a different place.

And experience new food and language and culture and people, and it’s very different trying to figure out how to get a, your cell phone bill paid in a different country versus being on vacation and you get to do those things when you’re teaching internationally. So I am just really excited to hear your story.

How did you make the jump? What was the, that instigator that that got you to move? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: I think that I have always been someone that says. Jumps in with both feet without really thinking about things very well. So far that’s been good, but I think this was one of those instances where I just, I heard about it from actually.

One of my high school friends that had gone to a different university and he and his wife were teachers and his wife heard about teaching internationally at a teacher’s and they ended up going to Rome for the first year. And he came back in the summer and told me all about it. He says, Gwen, you have to do this.

This is [00:12:00] amazing. And my friend and I are from a high school graduating class of 31 people, and so he and I are pretty close and he just knew this was. Something I needed to do. And he was absolutely right. And so my husband and I, he was finishing up grad school and he didn’t really wanna go at first. And I said, I’ll do all the paperwork if you’ll go and we’ll just go two years and then we can come home.

And he was like, okay, if you do the paperwork. And then once we got overseas, of course we were gone for 13 years. Hard to come home. 

Mandi Morris: Oh my goodness. And how did your friend land Rome as his first international teaching experience? That is quite lucky. Like you usually have, you’ve gotta build up some connections before you land.

Gwyneth Fastnacht: At the time, I’m not sure how it is now, but a lot of people wanted to go to Europe and they, so they didn’t. Those weren’t the most lucrative, if you will. I think so. A lot of people, [00:13:00] that was not necessarily their first choice, but I will say my friend and his wife are amazing teachers, so everywhere they went, they, the schools were very lucky to get them, but I don’t know.

That was what was open. They needed PE and high school math, and they fit the bill and off to Rome. They went and they stayed two years and then they were onto another place. I’ve never taught in Europe, always South America and Asia. So it was really a cool experience for them. 

Mandi Morris: So where did you land first?

So what was your first country you went to? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: We, we went to La Paz, Bolivia and it was, it is an amazing, a gorgeous country, very high in the Andes of very thin air, but you get used to it. We got these jobs initially and we went to a job fair in Iowa and we. Interviewed with a wonderful superintendent from who had been in La Paz for a long time, and we got the jobs.

And I [00:14:00] remember celebrating by going to a restaurant fancy for us. At the time, I think we had about $200 to our name, literally $200 to our name. And I remember calling my dad, my mom and dad on a payphone. Which we don’t have anymore. And we said we got jobs in Bolivia and my dad said, you’re gonna have to remind me where Bolivia is.

And I said, I dunno. But we’re really excited and we were. It was amazing. It was a beautiful country. 

Mandi Morris: Quit it. That is such a great story. How long were you in Bolivia for? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: Four years. My first, our first son was born in Bolivia, so he had a Bolivian passport and everything and it was just wonderful people.

Gorgeous mountains. It’s just lovely. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah. Ironically, COHA Baba, Olivia is home for my husband. 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: Oh, wow. I’ve been to Coach Baba. 

Mandi Morris: Yes. And La Paz is an incredible city. It is really special. Did you have your baby in La Paz [00:15:00] at that high altitude? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: Yes, I did. And he was. He was very long and very thin. It was very hard to eat being eight months pregnant.

At that thin air, I had zero appetite, so I had to make myself eat. And I said that would probably the only baby I’d be having in LA P. But everything was wonderful. Yeah. I think my mom and I were the only ones who spoke English in the delivery room. I, oh, the doctor did, but nobody else did. 

Mandi Morris: Wow, what an incredible experience from Bolivia.

Where did you go next? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: We just made a complete change and we went to Saudi Arabia. We worked for the Aramco Oil Company schools, so we were there for three years, and from high in the Andes to the desert was a complete 180, but also an amazing school. Really big and year-round school system. It was really different.

But I was in Bolivia. I [00:16:00] taught fifth grade and then in LA P third grade, so it wasn’t that different. But new cultures, new language, different clientele of students, like it’s a whole new adventure all over again. It just. It keeps you so humble and learning. Just wonderful. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. So when we were international there, it seemed to be like people that just hopped two years, two years, two years.

Their goal was to live around the world, see the world, go to as many places as they could. And then there were other people at the stage where like they found their place and they’re like, I, I came here for a year or two years and I’ve been here for 15. And it was such an interesting work environment in the sense that it is so transient.

So building relationships and building community feels very different from teaching at a public school in the home state where you grew up and maybe you even went to that school as a kid. And we’ve had a lot of people like that on our podcast. And I love. I love talking with educators that are just [00:17:00] so rooted and grounded in their communities.

It’s so different from the international community that is really transient. I wonder, just on a personal level, how did it feel as a mother being in country to country for, did you say 13 or 14 years? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: 14, yeah. As a mom. Yeah. It was, I, I really liked being back in South Dakota when my kids were a little older.

School age. My, my parents live. Just a block away and my husband’s parents are just a couple hours away and it’s wonderful having family around. But I also really valued as a mom, the international feel, the culture, having my children had friends of all different colors and languages and we did lots of different adventures on the weekends and different food.

My kids are really worldly. Even though we came back to the states when they were in middle in elementary school, upper, upper elementary school, they [00:18:00] just, I think their eyes are open. They can appreciate small town life, but they can also understand that there’s a big world out there in lots of adventures to be had, and they’re not afraid of taking risks and challenges themselves.

So I think it was good. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. So after Saudi Arabia, where did you go? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: We went to another Muslim country. We went to daca, Bangladesh, and that was Saudi Arabia is flat desert, sparsely populated, and DACA is one of the most populated cities in the world. Very densely populated country, very humid and hot and lush.

Amazing. Another amazing country. There are amazing people all over the world. It just is so humbling. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah, it’s amazing. Such an amazing experience. And I think international teaching, I’m not sure how it’s shifted in the past years, but if anybody’s listening and it’s something that you’ve been interested in exploring.[00:19:00] 

It is such an incredible opportunity. Even if you go for a couple of years, you don’t make it as long as you did Gwyneth, but I think it’s just for so many reasons. Even with kids, our son was two when we moved to the Middle East and it was quite an adventure. As a mother. The school had told us that he would go to preschool with us.

They had a preschool on site. When we got to the Middle East, they said, oh, we thought he was a year older. He’s not old enough to be in our preschool program. We arrived on like a Sunday and we had to report to like pre-service on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and I just like young mom, first kid, wait, what did you had his passport?

How did this miscommunication happen? And just scrambling like in a new country, like who’s watching our son? We’re supposed to be at work full time in two days. It was so wild. But in hindsight. Those experiences just stretch you and form you as a human, and they build empathy and awareness. So [00:20:00] even though in the moment there can be a lot of challenges being internationally, being a mom internationally, but so worth it just really builds a lot in you.

Gwyneth Fastnacht: And I would say I had some of that as well. We downplay that in our memories. But definitely everything under your feet is not solid yet. You really are at the mercy. And, and I think everyone tries so hard to make the teachers that they’ve invited into their school and their country feel welcome and have things set up for them and help them and support them.

But as you said, as a young mom, it’s, I need to control the situation. I need to make sure my child is okay. And so there, it’s a huge transition and you just do the best you can. And we actually. In in one of the schools. I just took my kids to school with me that day because I didn’t feel comfortable about where they were gonna stay.

And I said, you brought me here with these children and here they are today. And they’re like, okay, if that’s what you need today, that’s what we’ll [00:21:00] do. And it was fine and it all evens out in the wash. But yes, there are some tense moments, some worry, worrying moments, but as you said, you grow and become better for it.

Mandi Morris: Yeah, absolutely. So after you know all this international experience, you decide to move back to South Dakota, which is home for you, right? Yeah. And is this job you’re in, where you landed when you came back? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: No, it isn’t. We went from Bangladesh to Beijing, China for two years, and at the end of that two years we came back to the United States and this is my hometown where I am living.

My husband got a job here in my hometown as the superintendent of schools, and so we, that was a good fit. He had wanted to make that step. I needed to go to grad school. My kids loved coming here in the summer, so it all seemed like the perfect. The perfect move back, and I went to grad school for a year, and then [00:22:00] I actually took my first teaching job back in the States at a Hutterite colony school that I had mentioned earlier.

And when I took that job, I was really nervous. It was so funny how nervous I was because they were all English learners. It was a multi-grade classroom. I was one of just, I guess we had three teachers at that time, and it was out away from the town. It’s out where the colony of HU writes live, so it was 20 miles outside of town, like a rural, multi-grade school.

And I taught all over the world with many languages in my classroom. I felt like I had done it all. To go into that multi-grade classroom where it was language, culture, multi-grade, it really made me, I thought I was a good teacher and having to do multiple content standards at different grade levels.

That really, really honed my skills for [00:23:00] differentiation. Knowing your standards, knowing your families year after year when you’re overseas or in a traditional classroom. You wrap up the year those kids move on, you get new students at the Colony School. I had the same students for years in a row and I knew their families and it was just such a, an interesting and challenging, but wonderful.

Just another adventure. 

Mandi Morris: Absolutely. And it’s probably worth pointing out that people sometimes. Confused that working at an international school, it’s very different from being an E-S-L-E-N-L-E-L-D teacher in the states. I was a sixth grade humanities teacher. Every single student in my classroom spoke English fluently, even if it was their second, third, fourth language.

There were language needs that were often not fully addressed. Because this is an international school and we have a criteria for entrance. You have to be a fluent English speaker. Very [00:24:00] different from even teaching English EFL as a foreign language. Totally different experience from what you’re talking about.

Like walking in, you’re like. Every single student needs to learn English on top of content standards and what you’re describing, multiple grades worth of content standards across various content. I think that is probably the hardest teaching environment I’ve heard of Gwyneth. I tell us more about, wow, you had reason to be nervous.

Like how did you start to tackle that? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: I, I am really glad you pointed that out about international schools. And I would say at all of the schools I taught in, students spoke at least some English, they did have an entrance level of English, but that didn’t always, I wouldn’t have said all of my students were always fluent, but for the most part, yes, but the majority of them needed support in learning English and content.

But at. The, I was at Spring Valley hu to write Colony [00:25:00] school. The kindergartners all come speaking Huish. The first graders have a little bit more English. The second graders have a little bit more English, so they’re learning the content and the language as we go each year. And I had not actually seen our standards at that time for 13 years.

Every school kind of had their own, maybe one school had Common Core, another one went with the New York standard. That was just a little bit different in. International teaching and so I really had to have a crash course in common core standards and how to align them and look for really efficient ways to teach whole group.

A common standard and then break into small groups for grade level specific, and then come back and close out the day or the class period with a, okay, what did we learn today? Tying it all together and that was how my brain worked. Find a common standard, have [00:26:00] something to introduce the lesson that mattered to everybody.

And then a lot of station teaching in math and ELA. Small groups and rotating through stations, and it was a lot of planning, right? I would say every other Friday I stayed till about seven or eight o’clock and did most, did like all my copying, had everything color coded, had everything ready to just.

Grab all my lesson plans, and that way if I could do two weeks at a time, I could really focus on the teaching. It wasn’t anything I could do in the 30 minutes after school before we had to drive back to town. It really took a more holistic planning chunk of time, and so that ended up being Friday nights and sometimes Saturday mornings.

But it made my teaching more effective because I felt much more prepared. I knew my standards. I had the things ready. Yeah, I learned a lot. 

Mandi Morris: Were you alone in the classroom or did you have, because I’m [00:27:00] just imagining the stations that you’re describing and how to support stations with various grade levels.

I’d love for you to unpack that more. 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: We had at that time. The school is a little bit different now, and all of these rural schools that I’m talking about, they kind of change and morph according to the numbers of students that they have. So at that time, we had a very healthy population of kids in the school and we had, I think we had about 40 students K through eight.

And so there were, at that time, three teachers. Then we had a paraprofessional who kind of floated as needed. So for the most part, I was alone in the classroom. Sometimes we had, we, our paraprofessional would support different it, it depended on where we would get together and we would collaborate on how we could best divide and conquer with the resources that we had this week or this month.[00:28:00] 

But for the most part, yeah, I was alone in the classroom. Very well-oiled machine. 

Mandi Morris: It would have to be able to accomplish what you were accomplishing. So small student to teacher ratio. The numbers there, smaller classes, but juggling a lot and station rotations that really built you for all of the work that you do now.

And we know that’s such a powerful way for English learners to get the scaffolds, the differentiation that they need, even within the content classroom. So after you were in that teaching environment, where did that take you next? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: After that, I finally was able to finish my ESL endorsement. That was the grad school I had gone to.

When we came back from overseas, I had to have a 40 hour practicum, and I finally found a placement for that in the summer. And then that school here on South Dakota hired me to be their newcomer teacher at the end of that. And I had been at the Colony school for four years and so. [00:29:00] Over the course of my career, I’ve never taught anywhere longer than four years, so I’m really an advocate.

Even if you stay in the same school, it’s such an amazing learning opportunity to change grades. And do something different. And I have only learned that from experience just because we always move schools after three or four years. And so I was at the Colony School for four years and then I went to Huron and was at their newcomer ESL teacher in high school.

So that was a whole. From third grade to non-English speaking speakers in high school, it was another new adventure. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. You are willing to take on new challenges. You’re not afraid, and I love something you said there. When you move from either between grades or schools or between districts, it does give you an opportunity to see it, that things can be done different from what you [00:30:00] know and have done, and it’s okay and can be better.

It’s such a great opportunity to just stretch yourself, to remain flexible when not to become too rigid. I’ve always taught it this way. It has to be this way, or I’ve always seen it done this way. It can’t be done in a different way. I’d love if you would speak to that specifically a little bit, like what are some moments in your career where you went to a new place or had a new admin and you just thought, wow, like this is a light bulb moment for me, where I am seeing something completely different from how I saw it before, or my thinking has changed.

Gwyneth Fastnacht: I think one of the. Things that, two things came to mind. The first one was, I think one of the biggest light bulb moments for me was, and it was gradual. It was over time, so I don’t know if it was a light bulb moment, but just seeing things done differently. A different approach was working with Australian and New Zealand, new Zealander teachers.

They have a different approach and much more [00:31:00] holistic, I think. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but they have a different approach than we do in the United States in general. And so I really learned from them just new ways to look at children’s learning and approaches to thematic units and also just, uh.

Deeper look into academic language that goes along with content, whether or not you’re working with English learners or multilingual learners. Just more focus on language and the language of the content that you’re teaching. That really impacted me and that I started that journey in Bangladesh and it expanded in China and after that, but I was really lucky to take.

A, a week long train the trainer in functional grammar and systemic functional linguistics approach in education. And so that has really stemmed from my international teaching [00:32:00] and has really impacted me long term. And I would say the other sort of light bulb moment is that I’m usual I, if you are the smartest person in the room, you need to change rooms.

So I really. Try to go into every situation where I am the one that’s going to learn here. I I, like I said earlier, I learn more from all the schools I visit than any knowledge I am taking to them. I really am so humbled by the amazing educators that I get to work with, and I just like to go in with my ears open, listen for understanding.

And learn from what they are doing. And then just through collaboration we can talk about how we might tweak things to do, I don’t even wanna say do better, but me be more adaptive to what the student need. They do have an extensive background with English learners and that is something most of the teachers that I work with don’t have.

So I do [00:33:00] bring that to the conversation, but I completely respect. Their content knowledge and their experience with those families and the students that they’re working with. So I think that’s the other thing, international education really impacted, impacted on me, for me, but made an impact in my life is, and in my profession, is just listening for understanding and just respecting the knowledge in the room.

That is not mine. Uh, the knowledge of others. 

Mandi Morris: I would love to think about that same thing from a different perspective. When you move from school to school, you work under a lot of different admin and every school vibe is its own thing and. An admin, from my experience anyway, they have a lot of power in setting the tone of a school and setting teachers up for success or setting a climate up that can feel toxic even in its worst.

I would love to hear you talk a little bit about, you’ve been in so many different teaching environments. When you [00:34:00] think about a strong admin. Effective admin. What are the qualities that you’ve seen, you’ve experienced, or even give us an example of seeing an admin just like really shine through? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: I think that I have been really blessed with all of the administration that I have worked for, especially overseas, but even in the United States that.

I really respect their position and what a difficult job that is. And I’ve also seen other educators give admin a really hard time, and I think it is, can be a really difficult job. So I think that’s a tough one. I, I think I have felt very empowered by some and some are just, let’s keep the good status quo going.

I think in general, I can’t think of anything specific, but in general, I know that. I would say the best experience I probably had overall was in Bangladesh. I think that was a, an [00:35:00] amazing team of administrators that worked really well together and respected the teams of teachers that they had brought together, and I think that overall climate was probably really the most conducive to happiness by everyone.

Professional happiness, and just. Enjoying being in the country and being there with each other. But that’s not to say that there were not amazing administrators in all the other schools as well. I would say the best piece of advice I got from an administrator was in Bolivia and she’s, I asked her about.

It was, she was new, and I asked her about why she had become an administrator. I thought she’d make such. She was probably such an amazing teacher. And she said she felt that she could make a broader impact on education by being in a leadership role. So we were talking about that and she said, she had said to me, I think you’d make an amazing principle, but my [00:36:00] piece of advice to you is that.

Wherever I go and start a new position, I don’t rock the boat for a whole year. I don’t say anything controversial. I don’t try to change anything. I wanna see what is the climate here? Who are these people? What is important to them, what matters to them, and then how can we make subtle changes that will make it even better?

And I think that is something that I took with me. I think about that every day, every situation I’m in. Every challenging conversation is just, what’s the ultimate motivation here? How can we work together to. Find a path forward, 

Mandi Morris: what great advice 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: it was. 

Mandi Morris: And I love that approach. She wants to sit back and be a listener and an observer.

I think in education we are often so solution oriented because many people go into education ’cause they wanna help and fix and do good and make a [00:37:00] difference and. All of those things are very solution driven, and there’s also a lot of pressure of, I have this student for a single year, and it is my responsibility for them to meet, whether your content or language, but you’ve got standards and objectives, you’ve got state language assessments and EOCs, and the list goes on and on.

It’s a lot of pressure to accomplish something meaningful in a single year. It’s hard for teachers to take that approach, but I am thinking about that advice from a classroom perspective. I’m wondering, you said that advice meant a lot to you moving forward, even in the classroom. What did that look like for you in the classroom to take things in?

Gwyneth Fastnacht: I think that one of the things I know, and I talk a lot about this and the endorsement classes that I teach. Is to stop listening as a teacher for the right answer when you ask a question. But to listen for understanding, you’re going to, [00:38:00] teachers generally ask a question and they expect a specific answer, even if it’s an open ended higher order thinking question, we already have this idea of what kind of answer we wanna hear, and if it’s not related to that, something’s wrong.

So I think that was probably the best. Way that I used that advice on the teaching level in my classroom was stop listening for the right answer and listen for understanding. Because kids have amazing brains. They are really good thinkers and they’re really creative, and if you are only listening for a little tiny piece of what they’re saying, you’re missing the boat.

We can learn so much more about the kids thinking by listening for their imagination and their, but also it can help you understand where perhaps comprehension is breaking down as well. Right. So that’s where the thinking is going off the rails. But then without, without telling them they’re wrong, bring them back [00:39:00] to the goal of the lesson or the goal of the content, the most important meat of the content they need to take away from that lesson.

And it’s also at the end of the day, okay, how did that lesson go? What am I gonna do better next time? Why did that go off the rails? What did I do wrong as a teacher? Where can I fix that and make it even better? So by the third time you teach the topic or the content. It’s way better. I feel sorry for the kids who were in my first and second years of teaching.

Mandi Morris: Oh, it’s so true. And even the first period of the day, I’m not a morning person first period. I was always like, I taught sixth grade ELA for a handful of years. And so you teach the same class. Six periods in a day and like by the end of the day you’re like, oh, I’ve got this down. I know what worked and what didn’t work.

And that’s also really challenging when you’re have a lot of preps, a lot of different things you’re teaching in a day or in your experience where you’ve got multiple grade levels and all of the content. Wow. What. A teaching load, a prep load. [00:40:00] That was, yeah. I love this advice that you shared and listening just to understand, listening to make a connection, listening to build relationship.

I love that you called out, like even when it is technically an open-ended question, we are looking for a certain response. I love that. I think it’s so gracious the way that you are talking about conversation and back and forth happening in a classroom. It’s a lot of give and take. It feels very kind.

And I wonder, you mentioned earlier that teachers you had worked with from. Australia and New Zealand had a very different approach to teaching. Could you give us a specific example of what did that mean to you in practicality? Is this connected in any way? I would love to hear you just talk about that a little bit more.

Gwyneth Fastnacht: I think what really opened my eyes was the day that I really remember my thinking shifted about ticking off standards [00:41:00] and. Making sure I got through my lesson plans. And I think that comes with maturity and confidence as well, that you know what you’re doing in the classroom and you can veer off the track a little bit.

But the day that really sticks out in my mind, there were seven in Beijing. We were in a class, we were in a school where there were seven sections of fourth grade. I was one of the fourth grade teachers and the teacher right across the hall, and I talked a lot. We collaborated a lot and. I walked into her classroom one morning and we were each gonna do this one lesson of a unit we had co-planned.

And I walked in at the beginning of, I think, recess or something. The kids had gone out to recess and I walked into her classroom and she still had her students in there. And I was gonna ask her, how did the lesson go for you? This is what happened with me. What can I do differently tomorrow? And she had all the kids on the carpet.

That was when document, document cameras were a cool thing and she had a [00:42:00] turtle under a document camera and it was projected up on the wall and they were talking about the turtle and they had their notebooks and they were diagramming and labeling the turtle and that had absolutely nothing to do with that ELA lesson she was supposed to be teaching right then.

And it, we talked about it after the kids went out and she said it was a teachable moment. This girl brought in a turtle. They were fascinated. We have drawn, we have labeled after lunch. We’re gonna do a re mini research project. They’re gonna, but it was like just what the students were interested in was really driving and she was actually, what we realized was she was hitting all the same content standards, but with the turtle and reading and writing about the turtle and what the kids were so.

Engaged in engaged and it was meaningful to them. And that’s what makes amazing learning is when we listen to our students, we can get those standards pretty much anyway. If we can grab the kids’ attention and [00:43:00] just what’s meaningful to them when it’s gotta be with some activity, they gotta be connected to it.

Then if it’s meaningful, they can, they wanna read about it, they wanna write about it, they wanna talk about it. We can work the standards in that way. Right? They don’t need to conform to me. I need to figure out who they are and what, who, what they want to learn about, and then I’ll sneak in the standards.

Mandi Morris: Wow. I’m just so impressed by a teacher with that level of flexibility and awareness. It’s really inspiring and I think about a lot of friends, people my age, we’ve got kids in school and there are so many families I talk to that’re like. We’re gonna homeschool or we’re looking for an alternative school, or they’re doing co-ops.

And so many of those conversations are grounded in, I just don’t want my kids sitting at a desk all day. And it’s just, it’s not fun, it’s not enjoyable. And the other side of that argument is, okay. You [00:44:00] kids learning structure has benefit, right? There is benefit to learning how to do the structure that exists in school, but there’s also balance.

And when we have systems that are so standards oriented and so scripted, minute by minute. Teachers report not feeling autonomy or joy in the work that they’re doing. And I think, and on the other side of that, families are feeling that burnout as well. This isn’t fun. Kids aren’t enjoying school. They don’t have a passion or love for learning.

I’d love to hear you speak to that some. And what are your thoughts around. Public education, that’s a big question, but what you are describing in that classroom across the hall from you compared to some of the work that you’re doing now, and is there a shift coming in education where maybe we have more flexibility to make learning feel more targeted to student interest?

Gwyneth Fastnacht: Yeah, that’s a great question and it definitely. Education really has shifted, of course, since I started teaching. [00:45:00] But I think that I understand the standards. I get the standards. I think that is really important that we have national standards and that schools are held accountable, teachers are held accountable.

We, the point of education is to. And I’m trying not to get too full philosophical. I’ll probably misspeak, but I just, we want our kids to leave school ready for their best life, and we wanna give them the tools and the skills and knowledge that is going to benefit them and make them happy in the future and successful in the future, but get the standards are needed.

That is, it’s researched, it’s developed by experts. I completely respect it. But then in the classroom level, we can use, we can leverage those standards through things the students are interested in learning about. And I don’t mean 20 kids, 20 different topics individualized, but I just mean feeling the passion for kids and [00:46:00] finding out what is gonna engage them.

Someone very wise, once told me, A, B, c activity or action before concept or content, like how can we, that old phrase, hook the students, the anticipatory set, right? But how can we peak their interest? By reading a recipe and baking before we study fractions, we can always come back to that shared experience or another.

When I was teaching at the Hutterite Colony, we had a wagon train, horses and horse-drawn wagons and horse riders come through our colony, and the kids were fascinated. And of course I had in my planning frenzy had the next two weeks planned out. But when I saw the passion for the horses and wanting to find out why were the saddles like that, where did they get the horses?

Why are they. Why are those big and those horses are small. And we threw that out and I spent the [00:47:00] weekend finding resources and we studied, they researched horses for two weeks and then made a formal presentation. And we did research standards. We read non, we wrote nonfiction, we organized notes, all the things.

I just did it in a different way and I had to be flexible to engage those students. And so I think there, there is a huge shift that needs to happen before we lose. The kids before, they really aren’t interested anymore in, in learning and being inspired and leaving us as lifelong learners. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. I, I love your approach to teaching and I, it makes me feel so just excited for all of the teachers that get to work with you and be inspired by you.

I, I think it’s, you’re just, you’re doing such great work, and I love your approach to education, your pedagogy, your methodology, the way that I just, I love how you talk about it and you think about it. You’re such a learner, [00:48:00] and it’s a reminder to all of us to stay curious. To be open, to change, to be flexible.

As we wrap, I would love just to hear what’s next for you, Gwyneth, what’s on your horizon? What are things that you feel really excited about right now? 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: That is a, that’s a great question too, because as I said earlier, I had never taught or done the same job for more than four years. We always move schools or change grades or whatever, but.

I have been in this job for 10 years and I every year is different and I am so thankful for the opportunity that this job provides me to stay young and fresh in education because every year the needs of the schools change, the needs of the teachers change based on the students that they have, and so.

We just keep looking for ways to reach the teachers and provide professional development that fits [00:49:00] what they need. I would say we have, over the past 10 years, we have changed. We used to do a lot more regional. Workshops where they all came, and that was wonderful, that collaborative spirit and getting everybody together for a workshop on a timely topic was good.

But teachers are even, we’ve noticed in these 10 years, teachers are even more stressed and can leave the classroom even less than they used to because there’s just not as many hands to go around. And so we’ve really shifted a lot of our professional development to online self-paced Zoom. Sessions. So that has really seen a shift in the kind of professional development that we are, that we can offer and are offering.

The other thing is, 10 years ago we were like entry level, what do I do with my English learner in my high school biology class? And now our professional development is really answering much deeper questions, much more specific questions. As teacher knowledge [00:50:00] grows in the districts that we work with, we have to adjust that pd.

Professional learning that we offer. So that keeps us young and new and searching. Every year we’re working on some new graduate level courses with that cooperating university, and that’s exciting. And my sons will have their second child in a month and a half, so I’ll get a second grandchild. So that’s pretty exciting.

And my other son is moving to DC so that’s an excuse to travel and. My daughter is still in university and just living her best life. So lots of changes in my family and lots of changes in my career as well. So pretty fun. 

Mandi Morris: Gwyneth, thank you for the energy that you bring to this work and the passion that you bring.

I have so enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you for joining us. 

Gwyneth Fastnacht: Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure. I watch your podcast many times. We use some of them in our endorsement classes, and I really [00:51:00] appreciate the work you do. This has been an honor. 

Mandi Morris: Thank you. Thank you. That means a lot.