5: Got an Anxious Standardized Test Taker? Paul France has some ideas to help. (Raising Resilient Kids Podcast)
If you have a child that battles with test anxiety or are searching for ideas on how to increase the independence and autonomy of the kids in your life, we have some great tips for you in this month’s podcast as we interview Paul France.
Paul is a National Board Certified Teacher, Literacy Specialist, adjunct professor, keynote speaker, and the author over 40 publications, including Make Teaching Sustainable and Reclaiming Personalized Learning. For more information on Paul, check out the Making Teaching Sustainable website - https://maketeachingsustainable.org/.
Thank you for listening to the Raising Resilient Kids Podcast where we provide parents, teachers and coaches with ideas and strategies to help kids and teens build their resilience and achieve their potential in a healthy, fulfilling way.
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Episode Transcript
Jeannie: We start out every podcast with a question of the month, and this one comes from David, who lives in La Canada, California. David asks, every time I sit down to take a test, I get nervous and anxious and I feel like I've forgotten everything that I've studied. Is there anything I can do to try and calm down?
So to answer this question is our guest today. He goes by the name of Paul France. Paul is a national board certified teacher with a decade of experience as an elementary school teacher. He's an author, he's a literacy specialist, an adjunct professor, and a keynote speaker, and As if that isn't even enough, Paul started a company called Making Teaching Sustainable, where the goal is to help teachers find balance and preserve their energy budgets.
Paul's goal, I love this so much, is to convey one central message. We must teach and learn in the pursuit of a deeper sense of collective humanity and for no other reason. Paul also happens to be an [00:01:00] incredible singer. He's truly one of the most. One of the most intelligent and deeply caring people I've ever known.
And, oh yeah, he's my friend. Hi, Paul!
Tom: Paul,
Jeannie: I, I love your, your goal, which this is written on his website, Tom. I think that goal so sums up who you are, Paul. How smart and passionate and compassionate you are. And so we're just. So excited to have you on this podcast today, and I'm so happy to see your face.
Paul: thank you so much for saying all those very nice things.
Jeannie: They're all
Paul: to crawl under my desk right now. Um, no, thank you so much. I appreciate that. I'm happy to be here and it's so great to see you and We'll keep all of the incriminating stories from our past, uh, off the podcast today.
Jeannie: Yeah, yeah, Paul, um, Paul, Paul and I met in college. , we do have a lot of things that we would not want to teach children. A lot of things that we did in college that we're not
Paul: We were pretty good actually. We were
Jeannie: we, we were good.
We were good. So Paul, so you are, you are a teacher, you have so much [00:02:00] experience, and I feel like this question perfectly suits you. What advice do you have for David? What can he do prior to that test when he's feeling like he forgot everything, just to kind of calm himself down?
Paul: Well the first thing I think is, he's not alone. Everyone's feeling that way, right? Everyone gets that anxiety before taking a test. , I mean, I personally struggle with anxiety in general. I think one thing first is to remember that feelings are really just feelings and they happen to us without us having any control over them.
So that worry you're feeling when you're sitting down to take the test, it's something one that happens to a lot of people, and it's something that you actually have no control over. Feelings just come, right? And , in my own, my own work with my own anxiety, I had a therapist one time who said, you know, feelings are like waves, , when you have a wave come over you, , you can't really control the wave coming over you, but you also know that the wave is eventually going to dissipate and go away.
So you sort of have to just ride the feeling, let it sort of go through [00:03:00] you. Don't try and stop it, right? I think when we try and stop our feelings and we try and push them down and we try to ignore them, they actually get worse. If you ignore anxiety, you ignore, ignore worry entirely.
I think it actually gets put in the box and it becomes like a pressure cooker and gets worse. , but then you, you find a strategy that helps you process the worry and think through it. And one thing that really helps me is, , some people call it box breathing.
There's all these different types of breathing exercises you can do. But when you get worried, your nervous system gets flooded, right, and you get all these physiological responses, you get like the heart racing, or , some people get their chest starts to tighten, or their hands shake, or they sweat, , and that's your nervous system needing to regulate, and so you have to consciously do something to help your nervous system regulate, and breathing is such a great way to do that, my favorite one to do is you take a deep breath in, um, from your belly, in through your nose, and you do one, two, three, four in, and you hold it for seven counts, and then you slowly breathe it out for eight [00:04:00] counts.
And you just sort of do that repeatedly until you can, until you can calm yourself down. , so that's what I would do in that situation. This is what I say to all my students who are worried about standardized tests is that it's nearly impossible to get a perfect score on those because they're specifically designed for you to get certain things wrong.
Like they're designed for that. That is the purpose, right? Like they want to see how much you know. And so they're going to put questions in there that are too hard for you. So when you come to a question that's too hard for you, don't feel ashamed because you don't know the answer to a handful of questions.
They're put there because they know they're going to be too hard for you. They want to create a ceiling for you. So I think you just show up, you do your best, and , you're going to end up in the place that you, that you should be in.
Whether this is a test for school or whether this is a test for, you know, admissions, you are going to end up in the place that you're meant to be in.
Jeannie: Absolutely.
Tom: I think that's a great point because it is different. My daughter's a junior, so she took the PSAT this year and they've changed it now so that if you keep getting a bunch of questions right, they [00:05:00] keep giving you harder and harder questions. Or if you get them wrong, they actually give you easier and easier questions.
Paul: Yeah. They're trying to find your level, essentially.
Jeannie: sure.
Paul: And it's, it's good for them to know actually what your level is because then they're going to know what you need to learn next. And that's the whole point of a test, right? It's to figure out what you need to learn next. So, it's actually good to get some questions wrong because it tells the teacher or the teachers what you need to learn next.
. Okay, Paul. So I kind of gave these, bullet points about you, but tell us a little bit, you know, about your background, share with us about your journey after our wonderful years in college.
Jeannie: so much.
Paul: Well, actually, I mean, Jeannie, you were like there when I was switching majors and you were an elementary ed major for a while. And so part of the reason I switched was because I talked with Jeannie about it and I was really interested in it and I just decided to take the leap. And at first I think I was interested in teaching because I just really enjoyed connecting with kids as a camp counselor.
I just enjoyed being around kids. , but after I started studying, learning, I just became fascinated by the learning process. And I think that's what's kept me [00:06:00] in teaching for the last, carry the one, like 15 years now. It's it's kind of wild. Like I'm still very engaged by it and still very interested in it.
I started teaching in the Chicago suburbs, , in a very like tech technology driven district, , I left there after four years and I ended up in San Francisco and I was working for an education technology startup company. A network of micro schools dedicated to what we call personalized learning.
Paul: I was still teaching there, but I was teaching and building technology for the classroom at the same time. Our hypothesis was. that if we make these playlists of activities for kids, kind of like a Spotify playlist, right, that that would personalize learning for kids and give them what they need.
, and then that would solve a lot of the problems teachers face with regard to addressing different levels in the classroom and what we call differentiating. , what I learned was that That theory, it didn't pan out. You know, our [00:07:00] hypothesis was wrong that by individualizing learning like that, it was unsustainable for me as the educator to create all of that.
that content for kids. But more importantly, it wasn't good for kids because they were working in silos, they were all working on their own things. That is how I came to that final part of my bio that you read that I believe we should be teaching and learning in the pursuit of a deeper sense of collective humanity because I saw the detrimental effects of kids working in silos and learning through screens.
So what I do now is I I work with teachers on humanizing our teaching so that it is more personal for kids and so personalization to me is not about the individualization of curriculum anymore. It's about, making learning meaningful and relevant to kids so they can use what they've learned as tools in their real lives
We want to help teachers work smarter without reducing the quality of education that kids are getting,
Paul: it's really important that kids are still getting high quality experiences in schools. [00:08:00] And I think one of the biggest drivers of that to sustainability in schools is building agency within kids. If we partner with kids, if we partner with learners, to sustain learning in our classrooms and we give them responsibility, it makes my job as the teacher a little bit easier.
I'm sharing the load, the cognitive load, the physical load, the emotional load, the spiritual load of learning with my kids. And then it's also building independence, it's building autonomy, it's building resilience in them.
This idea of building agency is also very resonant with parents because I have, I have yet to meet a parent out there that's like, yeah, my kid's independent enough. I don't need them to be any more independent. Every parent wants their kids to be independent in part because they want help at home.
But also because they know it's best for their kids to learn how to stand on their own two feet. . It meets the adult need of needing some things to taken off our plates sometimes, but it also meets that need of building independent and resilient kids.
And so that's really [00:09:00] what I focus on now in my work.
Jeannie: You talk about the importance of building autonomy and authority in students and building agency in these kids, like you just mentioned.
So for the teachers that are listening, how can teachers do this in their classroom?
Paul: It all starts with knowing your students, right? With getting, with having a clear picture of like the current reality of what students can do. And from there, what we need to do is identify what tools and strategies will gradually release autonomy onto kids.
And I think this is, This is best illustrated through, through examples. My last full time teaching position was a third grade teaching position. Um, and I had one year class that I absolutely adored. And they were one of the most challenging classes behaviorally I've ever had in my teaching career. And actually, a lot of teachers, I hear this from a lot of teachers now, that kids are coming into the classroom it's partially because of school disruption from COVID, but that they are lacking some of those social and emotional skills, and like, self regulation skills, executive functioning skills.
that helped them be [00:10:00] independent in the classroom. Well, my class that year, this was actually pre pandemic, but my class that year, they were so dysregulated that
they couldn't do a lot of the things I needed them to do just to maintain some structure in the classroom. And one of the things I noticed they couldn't do is they couldn't transition from their desks. to the carpet and just sit in a circle. They just couldn't do it. And, you know, a lot of, a lot of folks might think, Oh, by third grade, like they should be able to do that.
Right. And that's what a lot of us adults fall into. We get so frustrated because we're like, they're eight years old. They can't sit on the carpet. What, what's wrong with them? , but what we have to do is we have to ask ourselves, well, why aren't the kids doing this, right?
They're not actually trying to just make us angry.
And in this case, I was like, they must just not know how to stand up from their seat, walk over to the carpet, find their circle spot. And so what we did, what I did, and this is I think something you can do to start building routines and building independence, is I actually modeled it for them.
I literally sat in a seat, and I said, this is what you're gonna do. You're gonna stand up. [00:11:00] You're going to push your chair in, you're going to use your walking tiptoe feet to get over to the carpet, you're going to find your circle spot, and you are going to sit down in your circle spot, and you're going to wait patiently for the rest of the class to come over.
Can I have one student try that, please? One student tries it, then another student tries it,, and you're just gradually releasing that responsibility onto them to build some autonomy with that one routine.
Now that's a really extreme case, right? Like, if your kids don't need that level of scaffolding to be independent then obviously don't do it. But if they, if they're showing you that they can't, then that's your signal as a teacher. And I will say this applies to parents too.
That's your signal as a teacher or a parent that there's something they need to learn and you need to teach it to them. You need to model it to them and then gradually release that responsibility onto them. That's what I'd recommend as a place to start.
Tom: I think it's a great reminder for us as parents and teachers, because sometimes we're just so overwhelmed. We're so stressed out that we don't think about that. Hey, did I ever stop [00:12:00] and actually explain exactly what to do to my child? I just expected them to kind of follow along with do what I've been doing.
Um, so I think that's such a great, great point.
One part of this, of a building agency and, and giving kids the authority, the, the ability to be able to do things for themselves, in both the classroom and as a parent, I imagine it does make life more sustainable. In order for us to be able to teach the children in our lives to have resiliency, we have to have that ourselves, and we can only do that when our lives are, sustainable and are maintaining some balance, and so for some of the teachers that you work with, What do you talk to them about in order to try and figure out what's sustainable for them?
Jeannie: Is it about them? Is it about the classroom? Is it perhaps maybe a blend of both?
Paul: Yeah. I mean, it is a blend of both because I do think teachers matter as human beings, we want them to be well cared for and healthy and whole coming into their classrooms. [00:13:00] Because if you have unhealthy and, broken teachers coming into classrooms, you're not going to have very pleasant classroom environments, so, so it is partially about taking care of the teacher. And , teachers should be showing up and trying their best every day. There's no room. to wiggle there with that part of the argument, but it also does very literally take a village to raise kids. And it's not all on teachers to do that. And so it is up to, I think us as a collective society to have policies in place, to have proper funding in schools so that teachers have the support and the resources they need,
So it is about taking care of the teacher as a human being, but it's also about being effective and efficient in schools, right? There's a lot of things we do in schools that are, carried over from very traditional ways of thinking about teaching and learning that actually weren't that effective in the, in the first place.
And so that's part of the work that I do too, as I say, well, tell me about why you're doing, you're saying this thing is causing you a lot of stress. And you're saying this thing is taking up a lot of your time. Let's talk about why you're doing that. Like, why are you doing that? [00:14:00] And a lot of times through that questioning, teachers, will come to the realization on their own that they're just doing it because it's something they were told to do or because they've always been doing it.
And. Not because it's grounded in authentic purpose. And one of those things, and I'm gonna be really mindful of how much I talk about this because this is like my soapbox that I get. One
Jeannie: Get on that soapbox, Paul.
Paul: One of the things in school with grades. You know, a lot of people don't stop to think about where grades came from, why we use them, and the detrimental effect they have on so many kids.
I mean, to, to, to bring it back to the beginning, I mean, David, , why is he feeling so worried and anxious? It's not because David's a worried and anxious person. It's because we have a whole system that is set up to punish you if you don't know everything on the test.
There's this whole system of consequences set up. that make kids afraid to make [00:15:00] mistakes in school. And in order to learn, you have to make mistakes.
We don't realize that something like grading is making so much of what we do unsustainable. And if you really start to think about it and you really start to think about, well, why am I grading? It's like, well, I need to hold them accountable. Well, are there other ways to hold them accountable that don't require Putting a letter on them.
Tom: Paul, do you have any examples of how you held kids accountable in your classrooms without the grades?
Paul: I'm a big believer in creating classroom agreements with kids. So I like to start the year by saying, and you parents could do this at home too, this is like all these things I'm like, parents, like if you're really feeling ambitious and you want to be like teacher dad or teacher mom, like You could do all of these things, especially if you have several kids, right?
Like you could totally do this stuff. , so we generate this, like a list of, or every kid generates rules they think we should have in our classroom, right? And so we generate all these rules and then we start to group them and we end up taking all of those and basically synthesizing them into classroom agreements.[00:16:00]
And so the reason behind doing that is. Is one that you kind of get a, get a read on what kids think is acceptable and unacceptable in a classroom. , then also they've had a hand in actually creating those agreements. So when it comes, when it comes time to offer a consequence, you can say, hey, we had a class meeting about this and you all signed this thing and you all said that this is what you wanted your classroom to be like.
And so that's a way like creating something together and having sort of an external agreement. Yeah. It's not, it's not because I said so, right? It's because we said so, and you're violating that now.
Jeannie: It allows kids to really take ownership of their behavior because they have ownership of the rules that are made.
.
. And there's, it's interesting too, cause there's this really, , I feel like there's this really big movement now to give kids more agency and to give them more autonomy and all that sort of thing, which is great. I'm totally on board. Obviously I write about this stuff, right? I'm totally on board with that.
Paul: The problem is, is that it gets so misinterpreted, right? And people think, people hear student agency or [00:17:00] child agency or autonomy, or , kids should be able to make choices. And they think that they immediately go to this other end of the spectrum. That is no boundaries, no structure, like kind of a free for all sort of situation.
And I see this now, teachers are worried to like be mean or be strict or establish boundaries or hold kids to boundaries. And that actually ends up having adverse effects, kids actually really crave structure. There's this phrase I just absolutely love. And it's chaos is trauma.
Structure is healing
and kids crave structure because it makes them feel psychologically safe Like they know what to expect they know what's coming it gives them a framework within which to work. And then suddenly they're settled and going, Oh, I know what to expect. I know what's next. I know what to do. And then when unexpected things come up, their nervous systems don't get out of whack because they go Oh, I know where I am.
I know it's coming. That was unexpected, but I know it's, I know what's happening around me.
Can I be like a real nerd for a second?
Jeannie: Yes,[00:18:00]
Paul: I'm like, I'm like a self proclaimed word nerd. And I think our words matter so much and understanding what our words mean and where they come from matters so much. And so I really quickly looked up the etymology of the word resilience.
Cause I was like, this word, like we're using this word a lot. What does this word actually mean? And, and it comes from, the Latin salire. Which means to jump or to leap. And the prefix, R E, means
back.
Jeannie: hmm.
Paul: the word literally means jump back, right? In the context of, , working with kids and helping them be more resilient, it made me think, like, oh wow, resilience isn't about, , necessarily being super strong.
It's not necessarily about never feeling nervous or never feeling worried. It's about having that safe place to jump back to,
I think it's such a powerful framing of , we want to create resilient kids, right? So it's not really actually about us doing things to kids.
To make them resilient. It's about us creating spaces that have [00:19:00] structure that feel safe for kids so that when they fall or when they feel worried or when they feel sad or when they just feel like the world is so overwhelming that they have that safe place to come back to that they have that place to jump back to right and that can be your classroom it can be your home it can be so many different places.
Jeannie: What a gift you are to your students and to the people that you work with and what a gift you are to have on this podcast.
So I just, I cannot, I cannot thank you enough. So I'm going to go ahead and go into our final three questions.
Number one, a certain level of stress and anxiety is inevitable, what is something that causes Paul France or used to cause you a lot of stress and how do you work through it?
Paul: I think I used to worry so much about pleasing other people. And I still am. I don't, I don't think it's something you ever, that ever really leaves you when you're kind of a people
Jeannie: of course.
Paul: Through a number of experiences in just adulthood, [00:20:00] I, I, and through going through those times where I knew I wasn't pleasing people and I was really anxious about the fact that I wasn't pleasing people, but then getting on the other side of it and going, Oh, all the people that still matter to me really.
are here, and that the people that really love me are still here, and that proves to me that the people I was trying to please that left when I was no longer pleasing them, I actually don't want them around anyway so I It doesn't cause me as much stress anymore because I also just feel better when I'm standing in my own When I'm standing in my own shoes, and I feel like I'm walking through the world with a sense of integrity, I just feel more settled.
And I didn't realize I was gonna feel that way until I tried it,
Jeannie: Totally. Totally agree. Okay. Question number two. We like to remind kids that failure is a necessary part of life, and even people as highly accomplished as yourself,, you have had failures that you've had to work through. So, can you share [00:21:00] with us a failure you've had in life, and what it taught you, or what good came out of it?
Paul: Well, I mean, being a writer, it's about 95 percent failure. I think what it comes back to is like your failures. I think teach you what's really important to you,, because if writing wasn't that important to me and if teaching wasn't that important to me, I would have quit a long time ago because I mean, even just being a teacher, you just fall on your face all the time.
. And I think that. Those moments teach you what really matters to you, right? With writing, it's like, you know, what matters to me is that what I'm saying is making at least some impact, right?
And so even if it's one person that it makes an impact on, it's like, that's, that's great.
Tom: Love that
Jeannie: Me too. Me too. Alright, and our last question. So let's say a parent is, you know, tucking their kiddo in at night or a teacher or a coach. They have a couple minutes at the end of class or the end of practice and they want to share just a quick clip, from this podcast with their kids.
For [00:22:00] you, what is the main lesson, this is whether you said it already or not, that you want to leave with us that they could play for their kids?
The one that pops into my head first is the feelings are waves
Jeannie: Yeah.
Paul: I wish, I wish someone would have said that to me when I was a kid, you know, I think those little analogies like that, that are really concrete and give, it's a metaphor in a way, right? Like, but it's really concrete for kids.
I think those things are so important and I think they're important because we need to teach kids that, like, these things are just going to happen and that, like, yeah. Hey, I'm here to sit with you while you're, I can't take the sad away.
But I can be here with you while you're sad. And I think, I think kids need to hear that over and over and over again.
Always.
Tom: Paul, if people want to take a look at the stuff that you're writing or, you know, , learn more about the stuff that you're doing, where would they go? What should they do?
Paul: So if you're a teacher and you want to learn more about the, um, the work I'm doing in classrooms, you can go to make teaching sustainable. org and that [00:23:00] has just information on. What I do, information about me, that also has links to just all of my other work. Um, any, any articles I've published externally or any of my books. And also I'm on social media. I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Sustained Teaching. Um, that's S U S T A I N Then teaching. And, um, yeah, those are the two best places to, to learn more about me.
Tom: Great. We can link that all in the show
Jeannie: Yes, we absolutely will. Paul, I appreciate you. You are just such a wonderful human, and thank you so much for your time today, and thank you for being you.
Paul: Oh,
Tom: Thank you, Paul.
Paul: having me. I really appreciate it