SEL in EDU
SELinEDU Podcast is stories and insights from outstanding teachers, administrators, leaders, and students on all things Social Emotional Learning in education. These 30-40-minute podcasts are perfect for a commute, a nice cup of coffee, or a self-care walk.
SEL in EDU
072: Navigating Rural Education: Building Resilient Leaders with Dr. Melissa Sadorf
Discover the transformative power of rural leadership in education in this engaging episode featuring Dr. Melissa Sadorf, the Executive Director of the Arizona Rural Schools Association. With over three decades of experience in education, Melissa sheds light on the unique challenges faced by rural schools, from resource accessibility to fostering community connections.
Through her rich anecdotes and insights, she emphasizes the importance of understanding rurality's diverse definitions, revealing how context shapes educational experiences for students. As our discussion unfolds, we touch upon critical issues such as broadband access—the disparities that dramatically affect learning—and innovative approaches like peer mentoring that can empower students and educators alike.
Melissa highlights how rural leaders play a pivotal role in managing resources and nurturing strong relationships within their communities. She shares practical strategies for incorporating social-emotional learning, ensuring all students feel valued and supported.
This episode is a must-listen for educators, policy-makers, and anyone seeking to understand the intricacies of rural education. Join us as we learn how strong leadership can lead to profound changes in rural schools and explore new ways to uplift underserved communities in education. Don't forget to subscribe, share your thoughts, and tell us how you navigate rural leadership!
EPISODE RESOURCES:
- Connect with Melissa via her website and LinkedIn.
- Purchase The Resilient Rural Leader: Rising to the Challenges of Rural Education.
Welcome to SEL in EDU, the podcast where we explore how educators bring social, emotional learning to life by sharing stories, strategies and sparks of inspiration. I'm your host, Dr Krista Lay, owner of Resonance Education. Thank you for joining us on this SEL journey.
Speaker 2:This is Brittany Blackwell, host of the Resilient Teacher Podcast, a proud member of the Education Podcast Network. Along with this podcast, Each show on the network is independently owned and the views expressed may not represent those of other podcasts. For the best education podcasts, visit edupodcastnetworkcom.
Speaker 1:Dr Melissa Seydorf is the Executive Director of the Arizona Rural Schools Association and the President of the National Rural Education Association. With over three decades in education, she specializes in leadership, teacher preparation and policy advocacy. She is an Associate Teaching professor at Northern Arizona University and director of the NAU Rural Resource Center, a nonprofit supporting rural educators. Melissa is a strong advocate for rural education and women in leadership and she co-founded the Lead Well W-E-L Summit and authored the Resilient Rural Leader. She also hosts the Rural Scoop podcast. Welcome, melissa. I am so glad you're able to join us today. How are you?
Speaker 3:Oh, I'm doing fantastic and it's so great to be able to be here with you and get a chance to talk all things rural. It's just a beautiful day to be able to spend some time with a dear friend and talk about the work that I really love to do that.
Speaker 1:I love being in your presence, in your company. We met two years ago at a work retreat and you just had such not only like positivity and just like a sunshine attitude and mentality, but you were so willing to share what you knew and your expertise with all of us who were staying together in the place but then also learning on your own and building some pieces for where you wanted to go in your educational journey. So I'm excited that we just got to see each other a month ago and now we get to be on and chat and catch up. I wanted to start off with this first question about how you define or how you perceive rural to be, and it makes me chuckle a little bit because I grew up for 47 years outside of Philadelphia.
Speaker 1:I would consider it a suburb. It was 30 miles, but like an hour and a half. My husband grew up and lived in South Philly and in Italy, so when he first came up he would joke and say, oh my gosh, you live in the boonies, and I'm like this is not the quote boonies, however you define this. He's like, yeah, but you have to get in your car and drive to the store because there's so many stores right on the corner streets, and so my perception when I think of rural is more of Lancaster PA. My perception when I think of rural is more of Lancaster PA, where there's a lot more green and pastors or pastures, not pastors.
Speaker 3:Pastures. It could be pastors too. It could be pastors too. Yes.
Speaker 1:Space and for me, I love that. I love seeing green and space and open air and I really thrive on that, and it's actually something he's so used to being in the city that that makes him anxious a little bit, like he's used to hearing noises all the time. And so when I think about you writing a book called the Resilient Rural Leader, rising to the Challenges of Rural Education, what does that mean for you?
Speaker 3:So that's such a great place to start, because I really appreciate that perspective. I don't understand rurality. I've got an idea of what it is but I haven't lived it and I think that that's really a good starting place for a lot of policy conversations that happen, which we can talk about later. But rural is a lot of different things. But there's one thing that we talk about when we talk about the definition of rural. There's not one definition. There just isn't.
Speaker 3:The federal government, when they do grant programs, uses a variety of different definitions. Many of them are based on NCES locale code. So it's how big is the nearest city that you're nearby? Is it five miles, 15 miles? Are you remote? And it's over 25 miles to a city of more than 25,000 people. And so there's the geography and then there's the population size.
Speaker 3:But I think that what's also important to understand is that there's an access issue as well. So you might have a very large community, and I'll give you an example from Arizona. That's Lake Havasu, which is up in the northwest corner of our state, and it's a very touristy destination in the winter because we get a lot of snowbirds that come and stay there for the cold months and then they go back to their home state. The population swells in the wintertime by 50,000 people, but they're not permanent residents. They're not really part of that number in the community. They're not really part of that number in the community. So they have a larger population from various points in the year, but they are very isolated. There is not anything around them for hundreds of miles, and so there is an access issue. They're considered rural even though they have a larger population at any given point in the year than a typical rural community would have.
Speaker 3:The other thing that I think is important to note about rurality is that you talk about openness and green pastures and that bucolic idea of sitting on your back patio watching deer frolic in the grass, but that's not rural for everybody, and so my rural is yeah, it's wide open spaces, but it's mountain vistas and desert, and so rural is different from place to place. So context is something that really matters when you're talking about rural and what it is and what it isn't, because people's experiences are very much based on their place. Their rurality is based on where they're located. So rural in Pennsylvania, because you do have it, is very different than rural in Arizona, where I am, but it's also very different than Alaska or Florida or the Midwest, the prairie lands. It just depends on your context and your experiences, the lens that you bring to that question of what's the definition of rurality. I'm the executive director for the Arizona Rural Schools Association and I get this question a lot and we just end up saying if you think you're rural, you probably are. That's a good definition.
Speaker 1:I know it's open, but if it's something that you feel that you are, then you are. Yeah, and we take all comers. Well, and I appreciate your perspective on that, because the first thing that comes to my head is expansive lands. Like you have to go far to connect people. But I didn't always think about changing landscape until I started traveling farther for work in the last 10 years and actually got to experience some of that and coming from a more urban area and now I live really close to Philly. There's access issues in Philly, too that people don't really think about, but it does look different from rural areas. Would you mind talking a little bit more about that and what access looks like for you and how that might look different, maybe, than an urban setting?
Speaker 3:That's such a good point. As far as resources, there's a variety of things that are harder to access in a rural community. Broadband is one of them that comes to mind, and we've been struggling with that since the pandemic. That's been pretty publicized that rural broadband is an issue. Human capital is also a concern. It's harder to get people to come to your community and want to live and work in a place that might not have the Friday night social life that a young teacher might want to participate in, and so the human capital issues are certainly a concern. When it comes to goods and services, it's often harder to get people that want to drive out to a rural area to provide those different opportunities for that district. So if we're doing professional development, I have a smaller pool of people that are going to come my way. Or if I'm building new construction in my district, it's going to be harder to find somebody that's going to put in my RFP for me so that I'm able to select the best qualified builder for that construction project, because for them it's going to cost more, they're going to have to pay their people time to get out and get back to home base, and it's more expensive to operate a construction project in a more remote place. So that's certainly a concern around access and resources.
Speaker 3:What's interesting, krista, is how much more alike those kinds of concerns are between rural and urban than people really understand. Because there are resource issues. Maybe the proximity to the resources might be closer, but the resources might be very scarce, just like they are in a rural community for urban schools, and so many of the same types of solutions that work in urban communities we've taken as a blueprint and put them into a rural context, obviously with some tweaking, and I think vice versa. I think there's a lot to be learned from each other from those two locales when it comes to problem solving around. How do we get kids what they need At the end of the day? How do we ensure that kids have what they need to operate within our buildings and get their education, do it in a safe, healthy, welcoming environment, and that the teachers that are giving them that educational environment have what they need to operate that efficiently? Yeah, that's a really great question.
Speaker 1:I think you explained it so well there and that there are similar themes but it's manifested differently. So there's still scarcity or lack of access to Wi-Fi, but it might be because of pricing. The more I learned in the last couple of years and I still have so much more to learn but the more I've learned, the more I realized that there's more similarities than what I even imagined, and I say that to also say that in reading your book. I would recommend this book for any leader, especially rural leaders. Just if you're not in a rural area, then this wouldn't be for you because there were so many pieces. I'm like, oh, this is such a great resource and so important. What are you hearing that people are finding really valuable?
Speaker 3:I appreciate that. Krista, thank you, because I think that if it's good leadership, there's a lot of the same things that are true and need to be considered no matter where you're working, and so I think the accessibility was one of the things, and the reach that it has was one of the things that heard from people that have given me feedback. It's very practical, so there are toolkits and guideposts and step-by-step instructions and a lot of the things that leadership would need to know, like how do you set up a student mentoring program? How do you ensure that you are giving space to student voice? What are the things that an instructional leader, who also has to be the manager of the building? There are certain reports and tasks that need to be done. How do you prioritize your time and make sure that everything that needs to get done gets? How do you prioritize your time and make sure that everything that needs to get done gets done while you can still be out and be visible on your campus? So those are the kinds of things that I wanted to make sure that were very explicit and easy to access for anybody.
Speaker 3:Obviously, I'm coming from it from a rural perspective, because these are things that I mean, I wrote the book I wish I would have had when I started as a role superintendent and there was nothing out there like this to help me get started.
Speaker 3:Knowing that I have 12 years of experience as a role superintendent. Before that, 10 years of being a site level administrator and assistant principal and then a principal, I knew that there was something that I had to offer. As far as, hey, even if it might not be the way you're going to do it, at least start thinking about how would you address this issue or this task or this activity or concern. So that's really the feedback that I've gotten. Is that everything that you put in this book this is what I do and you got me. So it's been pretty well received by the rural leaders that I've talked to and I haven't talked to a whole lot of urban about whether or not it was helpful, but certainly the the rural principals and superintendents that I've spoken to have said, yeah, everything that you're talking about are things that I'm dealing with.
Speaker 1:And so I'm going to jump to something that I was going to wait for at the end. But whenever I read a book and I'm like, oh my gosh, this was so practical and applicable, how can I get more? I'm fairly certain, just because of being in the same space last month, that you're available to coach and to mentor leaders who are in rural areas who are like, yes, this is good and I need a thought partner. I need you to continue ongoing dialogue with me as I navigate these pieces.
Speaker 3:And the reason that I am offering that service is because there are a lot of new leadership, especially in rural, that are coming in and they are not prepared. They haven't been in the classroom as long as maybe they feel comfortable and they're stepping into a principal's role and so they don't know all the things they don't know and trying to ensure that they've got somebody to turn to when the superintendent is to filing federal grant reports or worrying about you know the things out. We're doing an evacuation on another campus or whatever the case may be. So helping them think strategically around the principalship, especially in a rural context. Same thing with the superintendency.
Speaker 3:Executive coaching is something that you're an island anyway, but in a rural area you're exacerbated because you don't have colleagues that are close by, so you can't do communities of practice in real time like you can if you're in a suburban or an urban area, having somebody that can be that guide on the side, and when there's a problem that I just can't problem solve this, I don't even know where to go first or where to go next.
Speaker 3:That's important, but even just beyond the daily how do I do this thing is being strategic and so setting yourself up for success for the short term and the long term of the life, of your relationship with your school district and your community, because you sit in a different kind of space as a rural leader than you would in an urban or suburban area.
Speaker 3:You're very visible, you're very approachable. People don't mind telling you exactly what they think when you're in the post office or the grocery store. It's a very different connection with the community. Having somebody to help guide you through that process. That's something that I've experienced myself. I had a mentor that was actually my governing board president when I first came on was very intentional about making sure I had that support. I was lucky this is 12, 13 years ago that she was giving me this support when mentoring wasn't really a thing, giving me this support when mentoring wasn't really a thing, and I know how valuable it was and how much of an impact it made for my leadership and developed really what I was able to do moving forward.
Speaker 1:Two of the things that you've helped make me more aware of just in this conversation is how strong rural leaders need to be in their own SEL skills, because you were talking about planning and organization and prioritizing, so we're hitting self-management and responsible decision-making. But you also talked a lot about the relationship piece with staff, with students, with community members and the fact that you might be doing the role of several different positions and so thinking about the relationship piece there and in the book. You talk about these stay interviews. Could you explain what they are and their purpose, Because I saw a lot of ahas in reading them and how they could be valuable in a lot of different contexts.
Speaker 3:Most people are very familiar with an exit interview. In a lot of different contexts. Most people are very familiar with an exit interview. So when people leave your system, okay, why are you leaving? What could we have done differently If you could go back and change something about the system, or about the environment or whatever it was? What would have enticed you to stay with us rather than walking out the door? And that is valuable information. But it's after the fact, and so you can't put that genie back in the bottle, especially for that particular person. Stay interviews are a more valuable tool to ensure that the processes and the procedures and the relationships that you have in place are nurtured.
Speaker 3:And you're talking to your high flyers. You want to talk to the people that are big in your system. You want to make sure that you have their perspective on. Why do you like working here? Why is it that you're choosing to come back for another year? Why did you just sign your contract? What are the things that enjoy that? And there's still space in there to say what would you change? That would make it even more important that you continue to be a member of this faculty and making decisions based on the people that are in service of you.
Speaker 3:At that time, as a community of educators, that is just gold to be able to say, okay, these are the things we want to keep doing, and actually spend more time, effort, resources, energy and making sure that these things are in place and that we are growing them. And this wasn't as important. We thought this was going to be a big deal. The people that are staying really it's not moving the needle. For them, it's fine, but it's not really something that resonates with them. So that gives me some direction on. Well, if it's costing me budget or it's costing me energy, I'm going to cut it because I can put it then into things that really make a difference to those teachers and really are enticing them to be a part of our learning community.
Speaker 1:So I'm seeing that as tapping into giving the staff voice, but then it also helps you prioritize with what's important, and I think it would really reinforce the relationship there.
Speaker 1:Like, oh my gosh, the superintendent or principal is sitting down and asking me my thoughts, it's what's going on and what they'd like to see differently, and so you're getting clarity as a leader on what your next steps could be and what deserves to have your attention. I was talking to a friend of mine and she was talking about doing the exit interviews with students who were in high school and who were leaving the educational system to go to work for the families, and so we were talking about these exit surveys and I love this idea of the stay survey. Before it gets to that point, there are students who are struggling who mentioned this in passing and you can find out what they need more of so that we can support them to get to their goals, because we know that when we're thinking about access or different types of poverty that people have across the United States, that having a high school diploma or a GED is critical for our students.
Speaker 3:Yeah, krista, what that makes me think of is tying that to your early warning systems work. So if you are looking for opportunities to elevate student voice, door to planning as a staff and I just I hadn't thought about a state interview with students, and so you know you're giving me, you're giving me a golden nugget there, incorporating that kind of process into a different stakeholder group, and I just, the more that we can incorporate that voice of the student into the equation, the better off we're gonna be.
Speaker 1:I read the books and I'm like, oh, this is fantastic. And then the parts that hit me really involve what is done with the staff or the students. And so even some of the rural schools that I've worked in will meet with 120 students and they're like, yep, this is it A to 12. And I'm like, oh, my goodness, I graduated with a class of 250 to 300 and that was considered small, and so imagining that you might have 10, 12, 15 people in a whole class. The student rapport and relationship is really critical because they're together all the time, and then the staff too, because I suspect that they might be looping or teaching different content areas with kids. And so you also talk about student assets and peer mentoring as a way of really being able to support the student community in rural areas. Would you mind talking more about what led you to include those pieces in your experience there?
Speaker 3:Sure, really. I have a chapter on rural poverty and we know that the relationships that students are able to build with the educators and adults in their life really have an impact on helping them to overcome. The peer mentoring came through some work that I'd seen being done in rural communities across the country, where we do set up counseling services and we do have a lot of supports that adults are offering. But what really can impact a student that might not be as open to adults taking on that side-by-side support is their peers. They respond differently to their peers than they do to adults in the system, and so to systematize that with a strong peer mentoring program is something that really can move the needle for a lot of our students. And that's not just in rural, that's in any school.
Speaker 3:I've seen it very often where you have the older students mentoring the younger students and they're reading together or they're writing letters, they're doing whatever they're doing together and that's a very traditional and a very effective way to do it. But even more, they're same age peers and providing them opportunities to really benefit from a relationship with somebody that they admire, that they respect and are able to connect with. It's just a very different experience for that student to get the supports that they need positive supports around choices that they're making or around things that they're thinking about for their future or do I want to go to college or do I want to drop out and those kinds of conversations that they can have with a trusted peer who's been also. They've been given support too so that they're able to have those conversations in a. I've seen it be a very effective way to engage students with each other toward the benefit of both, actually, because the student mentor actually gets something out of it too. They're helping a peer, so that's been pretty successful.
Speaker 1:You remind me that the person who is mentoring also gained so much because they are having a sense of responsibility, a sense that they're being trusted to care for someone else.
Speaker 1:And we had a student leadership organization when I was teaching at the high school. I helped co-create it and we did ask them and train them to be peer mentors and trained them to be peer mentors, and some of the students who were selected were not like your straight A student captain of this or president of that. They were kids who were leaders, who were not necessarily leading people in the right direction all the time, but giving them when you're acknowledging that they have this capability and these skills and you see the influence that they have, allowing them to connect with other students whether it's younger students or maybe students who are still learning social skills and they're having that sense of responsibility. Like you said, it works for both people involved in that mentoring relationship. And that had slipped to the back of my mind until you had mentioned that and I'm like, oh yeah, so it's not just the people who are being mentored, but the people who are getting a chance to rise to the top and show the best version of themselves.
Speaker 3:One of the things that I wanted to make sure that I provided in the book was a framework. So what do you need to be thinking about when you're setting up that program? How do you match students together? How often are they meeting? Where are they meeting? What kinds of things are you doing to refer students to a peer mentor program? Can they self-select? Those things are just things that need to be thought about if you're going to stand up a solid program, and I wanted to make sure that I provided something again for somebody that might not have done this kind of work things to think about. They're not the only things, but they're certainly a place to get started.
Speaker 1:That's the part that I really appreciated, because when we did this 15 years ago, we brought in somebody who trained us, and so it's oh, we need this proper training, and I don't necessarily think that's the case anymore. I know there's a lot of online frameworks that you can use, but I appreciated that the framework is in the book, that I do think, like you said, you're not going to hit it out of the park right away. It is a journey and, because you're working with students, getting feedback from students, it's an iterative process. The framework that you have in the book sets a really solid foundation, an iterative process. The framework that you have in the book sets a really solid foundation where people can launch from, and then they can call you and say, hey, here's where I'm at, I need some help with this. Yeah, so keep walking me through this. But it's not that you necessarily need to have this certified program in order to help foster connections meaningful connections among students.
Speaker 3:And in a rural community, you might not have the capacity in your budget, you might not have the availability of a trainer, and so you tend to have to think within the constraints of this is what I have available to me right now. Here are my assets. I need to stand up X, y and Z programming. How am I going to do it? And a lot of it is the bail and wire and duct tape approach, where you're going to slap things together and make sure that they're as tight as you can make them and you're going to launch and you can really get some innovative programming that way, at least having a foundation to operate from so that you're not going sideways as you get started.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and any step forward is a good step, even if it's a slower step as you keep moving, absolutely. I showed you my book and it's all tagged up. I do want to just make a comment that one of my other favorite parts in here that I mentioned was you have a whole section on decision-making tools, and whether it's for leaders or for educators and staff, or for students themselves, I'm like, oh, thank you, because I'm working with students right now. I know we need to talk about decision-making because not everybody thinks of it as a process. You know our students are like here's the issue, here's what I'm going to do, and you gave pages of different ways of approaching decision-making that I'm planning on using with the middle school students I'm working with next month, so I'll come back and I'll let you know how that.
Speaker 3:I'm anxious to hear which tool did you use and how did it go.
Speaker 1:When you think about the time you spent writing the book, what was your favorite part to really dig into and why?
Speaker 3:I think that the best thing about doing this book for me was really being able to reflect on my own learnings, my practically experienced learnings, and being able to put them down in a way that makes sense for somebody else, that might assist somebody else in their own leadership journey, especially new coming into a rural community or even have been in a rural community and trying things differently.
Speaker 3:For that matter, I stand on the shoulder of giants because I have had so many wonderful mentors myself who have really spent time and effort in making sure that I was the leader that I ended up being, and so to be able to memorialize that in this book and infuse it with my anecdotal stories and my experiences and what I did wrong, what I did right, what was the outcome, what are some things that I've seen done that were just amazingly innovative, that other people could try to replicate or even scale in their own communities. But for me it was really a reflective journey of my own leadership and being able to give back to the profession that I love so much, which is rural education.
Speaker 1:What would be the best way for people who are listening to get ahold of you? To either talk about the book, to talk to you more about being a rural leader and getting the support, the coaching, the mentorship that you have to offer.
Speaker 3:So there's a couple of different ways. I have two emails that I operate from. The first is my consulting business, which is Vela Educational Consultantscom, and that's V-E-A consultantscom. And then my day job is working with the Arizona Rural Schools Association, and so it's melissa at azruralschoolsorg. Either one of those emails will get me, and I also have a LinkedIn page, and so you can find me there, and I am very happy to connect with anybody that, even if you have questions about the book, if you'd like to have a conversation around something that you read that sparked an idea and you just want to talk it through, I'm very happy to do that, and if you're interested in having me help your leadership journey, to get in touch with me about how I might be able to assist you.
Speaker 1:That is fantastic, Thank you. And so my final question. I'm really focusing on music and what is on people's playlists. What have you been listening to?
Speaker 3:Okay. So I have to explain it because there's not one thing. I am so eclectic when it comes to music. I've got Enya and Annie's song and a little bit of ACDC, and I've got some classical and I've got some bluegrass. When people listen to music with me, they're like what in the world is going on with your playlist? Because it's just all over the place. So there's not any one thing. So if you've got a recommendation, I'll probably take it.
Speaker 1:The newest group that I've been listening to. My older son and I share music quite a lot back and forth. I've been listening to just a couple songs from them, the Gasoline Gypsies. Just a couple songs from them, the Gasoline Gypsies. Oh okay, I'm very eclectic. From Broadway tunes to classical music to soundtracks from movies to Pink Floyd. I love Pink Floyd. You mentioned East and the Wall, yep, everything. So I'm glad to hear I have another friend who's eclectic.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:So thank you so much for your time, Melissa. It has been great to connect with you again. Thank you, You're welcome. Very happy to Thank you again for tuning in to this episode of SEL. In EDU, At Residence Education, we equip educators with knowledge, skills and resources to design learning experiences that foster students' academic, social and emotional growth. We believe that every small action to foster connections and growth creates ripples shaping the future.
