In this episode, Jennifer is joined by guest Alicia Tripp to discuss the frequently overlooked but prevalent issue of comparison in special education. Alicia recounts her personal journey, starting from the inspiration she received from her brother with Down syndrome, to her own development as an educator who confronted and triumphed over the challenges of comparison. Together, they discuss strategies for educators to overcome feelings of inadequacy and fully embrace their distinct paths in the profession.
Key Points Discussed:
Connect with Alicia:
Facebook
www.delightfullydedicated.com
Instagram
It is important for us, as teachers, to celebrate the small victories of our students throughout each instructional day. This is especially true in the special education classroom. Alicia has this banner on the wall behind her desk as a reminder for her and her staff to celebrate small victories and successes. You can also use it as a reminder to celebrate YOUR small victories throughout the day and to not compare yourself to anyone else.
Get your FREE copy of Impact Statement Mastery: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Personalized IEPs.
A must-have for every special education teacher and related service provider.
In this episode, Jennifer is joined by guest Alicia Tripp to discuss the frequently overlooked but prevalent issue of comparison in special education. Alicia recounts her personal journey, starting from the inspiration she received from her brother with Down syndrome, to her own development as an educator who confronted and triumphed over the challenges of comparison. Together, they discuss strategies for educators to overcome feelings of inadequacy and fully embrace their distinct paths in the profession.
Key Points Discussed:
Connect with Alicia:
Facebook
www.delightfullydedicated.com
Instagram
It is important for us, as teachers, to celebrate the small victories of our students throughout each instructional day. This is especially true in the special education classroom. Alicia has this banner on the wall behind her desk as a reminder for her and her staff to celebrate small victories and successes. You can also use it as a reminder to celebrate YOUR small victories throughout the day and to not compare yourself to anyone else.
Get your FREE copy of Impact Statement Mastery: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Personalized IEPs.
A must-have for every special education teacher and related service provider.
You're listening to the Sped Prep Academy podcast. Your host, jennifer Hoferberg, is an award-winning veteran special educator who shares her experience, knowledge and passion to help other special educators survive and thrive in this profession. Join her and other guests as they share tips and tricks of the trade for the ever-crazy, completely overwhelming, laugh-so-you-don don't cry profession of being a special education teacher.
Speaker 2:Well, welcome back.
Speaker 2:Today I have a guest who was the inspiration for this episode, but before we get to the interview, I want to share a quote that is the cornerstone of what we're going to discuss today.
Speaker 2:Theodore Roosevelt once said comparison is the thief of joy, and in the world of education, I feel like it's all too easy to fall into that comparison trap, whether it's the beautifully organized classroom next door or the innovative teaching methods of a colleague across the district. Comparing ourselves to others can often leave us feeling very inadequate and insecure about ourselves. So, to dig into this a little bit deeper and give you some tools to help you, I'm joined today by Alicia Tripp, a former teacher, who recently shared a powerful message on Instagram that really resonated with me about the pitfalls of comparison and teaching, and it sparked a much-needed conversation. So, alicia, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today to shed light on this topic. Thank you, jennifer, for having me. Before we jump into all of the questions, I would like for you to share a little bit about your journey within the world of special education and, specifically, your experience with comparison.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I have a younger brother who has Down syndrome, and today's actually World Down Syndrome Day.
Speaker 3:Right, so a little shout out for that the day that we're filming it. And so I obviously have been in kind of the world of disability and special education since a young, young age and I remember going to my brother's like open houses or attending field trips, different things, and he's why I became a special education teacher. He was blessed to have some amazing special ed teachers along his path and they inspired me and I wanted to be like them. So I got my credential and I taught third through fifth grade for one year special education and then I taught fourth through sixth grade for two years and then I went ahead and went back and got my early childhood education special education authorization and I taught early childhood for three years and I taught specifically moderate to severe special education students with the most severe needs.
Speaker 3:And now I'm a stay-at-home mom but I still like to, you know I still like to stay active in this community as much as possible. And I would say I've always kind of struggled with comparison in the different areas of my life. So when I became a special education teacher a lot of things surfaced and created like a struggle with me, like comparing myself to the teacher next door or to the veteran teacher who had 20 years more experience than me. I'm very much a perfectionist, so that was that play, too, of wanting to be the very best I could be and not really looking at necessarily what my strengths were or what their strengths were, but just looking at I want to be like them.
Speaker 2:Well, that's really inspiring about how your experience with your brother's teachers led you into special education. I always love hearing our stories of how we end up in this field, because I truly feel that God leads us to this. No matter how we get here, it's God telling us. You know, this is the way, and so it's just. That's a really neat story, but I totally get how comparison can be tough.
Speaker 2:It's like you're always trying to match up to someone else's standards. You know, trying to keep up with the Joneses, as they say but the thing is we all bring something unique to the table because of our backgrounds and because of our journeys, and our individuality is really what makes our work special, and it's not how it stacks up against someone else. So I feel your pain with that, and you know I do have a lot of experience. I have 28 years in this field and so I know when I'm working with teachers, I can't expect them to be where I am now. So I feel like this is a very not necessarily a timely topic, but I feel like it's a very. It's something that's going to touch all of us in our careers at some point. So can you share a personal experience where you found yourself comparing your teaching style or your classroom environment to others.
Speaker 3:Well, the first thing that pops into my mind is I was so blessed to be able to go through student teaching and I got to be a student teacher in a wonderful teacher's classroom. She, to me, was just like phenomenal. She had wonderful organization, her classroom was decorated so pretty, she had a background in behavior management, so she like had very good behavior management, and then she also worked super well with her paraprofessionals and had a great relationship with them. So when I got my first teaching job right after student teaching, I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to have a classroom that was very similar, I organized it the same way and I even decorated it somewhat the same way, and guess what? None of that worked.
Speaker 3:It really turned into a disaster within my first like week or two, and it's because my students were not the same Like.
Speaker 3:I had a very different type of student that I student taught with versus the students that I had in my first class, and so I like actually had to take down my classroom decorations because it was overstimulating to my students and they were taking things off the walls and playing with them, and I had to restructure my classroom schedule because my students needed more time for things like toileting and for those life skills things, whereas the students that I student taught with didn't need that, and centers needed to be shorter instead of 15 minutes for work, they needed to be five minutes.
Speaker 3:So it just really I felt like after that, comparing myself to my master teacher, I thought I was a failure because I was doing the same things but nothing was working, and I thought it was me and I. It took a while for me to realize that it wasn't me, that it was the fact that I was just comparing myself, trying to be like another teacher, and I wasn't putting my students first, and I also wasn't looking at my skill set and what I'm good at. I was just kind of going through the motions and striving to be like someone else.
Speaker 2:I feel like that's a tough realization to come to. So that's really great that you were able to kind of step out and see that it wasn't your fault that your classroom wasn't like hers. And I worry sometimes that my daughter she's a first-year special education teacher and I sometimes worry that she compares herself to me or to other teachers who've been in the field, and so I try to make sure and remind her constantly that your situation is different than mine. Plus, I have all of these years of experience. You're not going to be great right off the bat and you just have to learn. There's a lot of things that you just have to learn on the job.
Speaker 2:The other day she came and observed my former co-teacher and she's like Mindy has a really she has it a lot easier than I do and I'm like well, first of all, she's been doing it for 28 years and second of all, her setup. She has LD students, where you have high needs, autistic students. So now you know you have to just figure out your own way and your own path. So once you realized that that was an issue for you, how did you overcome that challenge?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I just realized that.
Speaker 3:Well, actually there was a big moment for me because my professor who had been overseeing my student teaching experience, he was on campus at the school that I was working my first year and he just decided to pop in my classroom and this was during a moment when everything was going wrong, and so I was very much humbled by that and I was so embarrassed and thankfully, things kind of settled and I was able to just talk to him briefly and he was the one that actually pointed it out to me that, like you're not doing anything wrong, it's just you're dealing with a very different population, just like you said, you pointed out to your daughter, and I think that was the moment I realized I needed to be more student centered, and so I realized that I can, you know, really look at my strengths, for example and I think that was a big thing Like I have done some strengths tests and things in the past, and so looking at what are my strengths and using those to my advantage, for example, like I'm a pretty organized person, like I love organizing and I, but I struggle with the more, like managing my paraprofessionals or dealing with conflict, which I think is a common thing with first teacher, first year teachers, but I realized that I need to utilize those teachers that I'm comparing myself to and learn from their experiences, but also realize that they have that experience, and so I need to learn from them, but not compare myself to them things to the table.
Speaker 2:And you're right, we all do struggle with paraprofessionals at some point in our careers, that's. That's just a given. I had a guest on a few weeks ago on episode 157. Her name was Lydia and she was talking about that exact same thing. You know, starting out she was managing her very first year. She was managing 13 or 14 paras, and so it was. It was a huge struggle for her. So, yeah, kudos for you for just realizing that we all have our strengths, we all have our weaknesses and you have to learn from people who are going before you. Today. It's funny. I was listening to two teachers talking about bulletin boards and they were comparing their lack of creativity to another teacher's bulletin board that had a little weenie dog. You know it was moving. They would change the weenie dog every couple of weeks to move closer into the bulletin board to say that we're almost to the end of the school year. So they were talking about that and I thought that was funny, because bulletin boards and organization and systems often become a point of comparison.
Speaker 3:Yes, very much so. Now I'm someone who I do love decorating bulletin boards and I think it's so fun to be creative and have that outlet and it's kind of almost like a de-stressor for me. My paraprofessionals always knew when I had an IEP, that I was stressed out about and that I needed to be writing because I would be decorating a bulletin board they're like yeah, iep coming up and I'm like, yeah, how'd you know?
Speaker 3:they're like, well, you're decorating a bulletin board.
Speaker 3:Um, you're avoiding, yeah. But when I became a teacher, it was like 2014, and that's right when the teacher instagrams were coming out and becoming really popular and they kind of started out as like a way for teachers to share their blogs and their teachers pay teachers resources. But I think they quickly became this big like comparison thing and who can have the most extravagant bulletin board or decorated classroom, and it quickly became not at all about what's being taught, but like what your classroom looks like. And so I that was my first year teaching and I definitely fell into that of just wanting to have a beautiful classroom and one that was like picture perfect and I think to sometimes, depending on the school you're at, like you might be also wanting to impress the parents of your students with your classroom and how pretty it is, and my classroom was really pretty, but it took me not very long to realize that it was not functional for my kids and that things were too bright, like the bulletin boards were too bright, there was too much going on, they couldn't learn.
Speaker 3:And I know so many wonderful, wonderful special ed teachers and I've been in their classrooms that are very plain, very simple. You would walk in and think what's going on. They don't have anything on the walls but they're like the best some of the best teachers, because they know that's not what their kids need, that's not what their students need. And if you know your students do want bulletin boards or they can handle that and you're not good with bulletin boards, then have your paraprofessional who loves doing that, have them hone in on that skill. Maybe that's not your skill set to do decorating, but maybe they would love to do that. So I think, too, we just need to utilize the people that are given to us and in our lives and use their skills as well to us and in our lives and use their skills as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, I totally agree with that. I have an interest inventory that I give to my paras at the beginning of the year, and that's one of the questions Are you creative, do you like to create bulletin boards? I feel like I am creative, but I don't like to do that part. So my bulletin boards were always just the same throughout the year and I don't know. I kind of felt like it was kind of a sense of stability for my kids. You know, things were always going to be the same and I felt like they needed that, and so I never fell into that trap, but I fell into many other different comparison traps. But I feel like you have done a really good job of self-reflecting and I think that is so important as educators that we make sure that we are consistently self-reflecting, and so how do you feel like teachers can use self-reflection to focus on their own strengths and their own growth?
Speaker 3:I'm a big journaler, like in my morning, like quiet time, my prayer time, I like journal a lot and I feel like during that time a lot of those emotions or feelings can come out and just, you know, checking my heart and seeing where I'm at and realizing I was created to be who I am and God created me in a certain way and with certain skill sets and I can't force myself to be someone I'm not and that's like probably the biggest thing and I'm still on that journey. And so, like this carries over not just to teaching but as a mom and as a wife and you know I create resources on Teachers, pay Teachers, and it carries over into all areas. I think there's a fine line between pushing yourself to learn and be the best you can be and then also just embracing who you are and I think you need to be excellent as much as you can, but also just embrace that God created you a certain way and that's okay if you're just who you are. So I think that's one big way that I self-reflect and then also just setting realistic boundaries for myself, like some Instagram accounts I just don't follow because I know how they made me feel and on those days when you're stressed, you're tired, you had, like a behavior issue that you had to handle, a parent's mad at you, you have to write an IEP and then you're scrolling on Instagram and you see this perfect classroom I could just do you in for the day and you just start crying.
Speaker 3:So I honestly like there's still accounts that I don't follow um for like for all different areas of my life, because they because I know the way they made me feel and I didn't want to feel that way. They're beautiful accounts and they're beautiful people and they're doing a great job at what they do, but I just couldn't handle it. And same with Pinterest. Like when you're in one of those moods, maybe not going on Pinterest is the best thing, because you think you see, like what everyone else is doing and you feel like you're not doing any of that or you're not doing anything right, and so sometimes it's good just to sit down and write down the things you feel like you're doing right in your classroom and the things that are working well, and even get your paraprofessionals and your team to say, like what's working well in our classroom right now and look at those and then go from there to slowly work on those weaknesses and areas that you wanna grow in.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think those are such good tips to definitely follow. I'm not a journaler. I love to write, but I'm not a journaler, but I'm a talker. Like I'll talk to myself in my car about how the things that went wrong during my day and the things that went well during my day, and then I try to just make a plan for the next day because I can't keep it in, and so you're getting it out through journaling, I'm getting it out through talking, but that's so important, just to get it out and to give it. You know, give it a name, give it, give it words. So and then, yeah, setting those boundaries and keeping yourself off of social media so that you're not comparing yourself there. I think those are great tips. So, just to wrap it all up, do you have a message that you would like to share with new teachers who are just, you know, just starting in special education or education in general, who might feel overwhelmed by the perceived successes of more experienced?
Speaker 3:teachers.
Speaker 3:I think you already touched on it a little bit with your daughter.
Speaker 3:But just, everyone has to start somewhere and I'm sure those veteran teachers have some stories for you and so if you build relationships with them, hopefully you know they can kind of give you some wisdom and some help you kind of along the path and they might be able to help you not make some mistakes. But at the same time, just remember that they're not the standard of what you should be. You're your own person and your classroom is going to look different than theirs. There's practices that are, you know, obviously research based and those you know obviously research-based and those you know are great to implement. But those little things you know about your classroom, you want it to be unique, just like our students are unique and we are embracing them for who they are every single day and we're teaching them individually. Our class is going to be different, just based on who we are and who they are. So just remember that and show yourself grace, because we got to show others grace and we need to show ourselves grace.
Speaker 2:I love that. That's a very valuable point. Every special education teacher was once a beginner. We were all there, we're all in those shoes, we all faced our own struggles and we all had our own learning curves. So it's important to remember that.
Speaker 2:Like you said, everybody's journey is unique and, totally agree, building relationships with those teachers is a fantastic way to learn and to grow. To avoid using them as a benchmark for your own success. You know, don't compare and say I want to be them when I grow up. You're going to have your own path and you're going to use these interactions and these as opportunities to gather wisdom and just find your own path. Well, thank you so much, alicia, for joining me and for sharing these important reminders to the listeners. I feel like. Just keep embracing your own journey and remember that your unique approach and perspective are what make you an incredible educator. So, alicia, where can we find you if we want to learn more from you? I know that you're not in the classroom anymore, but you said you're still active on Instagram and you sell on.
Speaker 3:TPT yes, I sell on TPT and I have two boys, one seven months old and one's three years old, so I don't have a lot of time on my hands. So I go through like big periods of not posting anything and not posting any resources. But when I have time I am on Facebook Delightfully Dedicated Special Education. I'm on Instagram and I have a blog, but it's delightfullydedicatedcom, but I do not post a lot on that on there, but best place is Instagram, for sure. Delightfully dedicated.
Speaker 2:And then the name of your TPT store is delightfully dedicated as well. All right, well, I will link all of those in the show notes so that we can find you out there. In social media land. We're not going to, not going to compare ourselves to you, but we're going to.
Speaker 3:Please don't.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you again. So much for joining me. All right, thank you so much, jennifer.