Episode Details

Formerly a high school English teacher and a new teacher coach in Palo Alto Unified School District (Palo Alto, CA), Jennifer Abrams is currently a communications consultant and author who works with educators and others on new teacher and employee support, being generationally savvy, effective collaboration skills, having hard conversations and creating identity safe workplaces.   Jennifer’s publications include Having Hard Conversations, The Multigenerational Workplace: Communicate, Collaborate & Create Community, Hard Conversations Unpacked - the Whos, Whens and What Ifs, and Swimming in the Deep End: Four Foundational Skills for Leading Successful School Initiatives.  Her upcoming book on being our best selves in our workplaces will be out in 2021.   Jennifer has been invited to keynote, facilitate and coach at schools and conferences worldwide and is honored to have been named one of the “18 Women All K–12 Educators Should Know,” by Education Week’s ‘Finding Common Ground’’ blog.  More about Jennifer’s work can be found at her website, www.jenniferabrams.com, and on Twitter @jenniferabrams.

• Writing books so you can learn something.
• There wasn’t a book out there to help me find how to say something.
• Robert Keegan Author & Psychologist
• Eliie Drago Severson
• If your way of meaning-making suits where you’re at, there is no reason to move forward.
• As a responsible educator, we need to stretch ourselves.
• We have to know our identities and where we might see bias
• How our upbringing affects how we perceive work
• Suspend our certainty
• Take more responsibility, not just for work product but also how we speak
• Engage with reciprocity.
• Build our own resiliency.
• Recognize how to deal with ambiguity.
• How to deal with our own emotional issues.
• How to reconcile how our upbringing affects what we do now?
• There are limitations to what you are seeing as you wake up in the world.
• Growthedgecoaching.com
• It’s like a fish in water.
• Externalizes the issues.
• If you mess it up, you clean it up.
• Framework: I did ____. Here’s why it was wrong: and here’s how I would like to make it right:
• Peter Bregman “13 Ways We Justify, Rationalize, or Ignore Negative Feedback”
• Humility and vulnerability of apology and responsibility.
• The thing that gets in the way is that we are the expert.
• How to provide accountability when you didn’t know that things were happening?
• You apologize for the impact.
• It’s about the shame and the guilt.
• Suspend certainty.
• Can we be humane and growth-producing?
• How to be a transformative principal? Slow down and say “say more”.

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