What if the way teachers talk to themselves is the thing that drives them out of the profession?
Dr. Dave Barry spent ten years teaching kindergarten in Boston Public Schools before earning his PhD at UT Austin, where he studied under Kristen Neff — the researcher who brought self-compassion into Western social science. Now an associate professor of early childhood education at West Chester University, Dave has built his academic career around a question most teacher preparation programs skip: what happens when we teach teachers to be kind to themselves?
His answer is a letter-writing intervention. Over three semesters of student teaching, pre-service teachers wrote letters to themselves the way they would write to someone they love — about the hardest moments in their classrooms. Self-compassion scores went up, burnout went down, job satisfaction increased. The work is becoming a book with Teachers College Press.
In this episode, Dave walks hosts Sean Legnini and Matthew Kruger-Ross through the same two-list exercise he uses with his students. Both hosts feel the gap between how they talk to themselves and how they would talk to someone they love about the same experience. The conversation moves from research to lived practice to a pointed question: what would it mean for a university to measure not how many teachers it graduates, but how many stay in the field five years later?
Dave also shares his podcast I Still Believe in School and his research on podcasts as wellbeing resources for pre-service teachers.
You can find Dave @istillbelieveinschool and at www.llbelieveinschool.com
Find Sean & Matthew:
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