Most successful academics have been influenced by mentors who provided support, encouragement, and guidance. Maintaining effective mentoring relationships can be difficult, though, for academics facing increasing demands on their time. In this episode, Adaira Landry and Resa Lewiss join us to examine strategies that we can adopt to use our time more efficiently when mentoring students and colleagues. We also discuss strategies that we can use to help foster a more compassionate email culture in our workplaces.
Adaira is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical School student advisor, and an emergency physician, and co-chair of the Diversity Inclusion Committee within the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Resa is a professor of emergency medicine and radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She is also the creator and host of the Visible Voices podcast which covers topics on healthcare equity and a variety of interesting topics.
Shownotes
- Landry, Adaira and Resa E. Lewiss (2020). What Efficient Mentorship Looks Like. Harvard Business Review. August 25.
- Landry, Adaira and Resa E. Lewiss (2021). What a Compassionate Email Culture Looks Like. Harvard Business Review. March 16.
- Landry, Adaira and Resa E. Lewiss (2021). If a Speaking Gig Can’t Pay, Ask for Another Form of Compensation. Harvard Business Review. July 05.
- The Visible Voices Podcast by Resa Lewiss
Transcript
John: Most successful academics have been influenced by mentors who provided support, encouragement, and guidance. Maintaining effective mentoring relationships can be difficult, though, for academics facing increasing demands on their time. In this episode, we examine strategies that we can adopt to use our time more efficiently when mentoring and communicating with students and colleagues.
[MUSIC]
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
[MUSIC]
Rebecca: Our guests today are Adaira Landry and Resa Lewiss. Adaira is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical School student advisor, and an emergency physician, and co-chair of the Diversity Inclusion Committee within the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Resa is a professor of emergency medicine and radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She is also the creator and host of the Visible Voices podcast which covers topics on healthcare equity and a variety of interesting topics. Welcome Adaira and Resa.
Adaira: Thank you!
Resa: So great to be here.
John: Our teas today are…
Adaira: Black cherry by Jenwey Tea.
Rebecca: That sounds good.
Adaira: It’s really good.
Resa: I’m drinking herbal black licorice by Stash.
Rebecca: Wow, we got fancy-time teas today.
Adaira: These are fancy teas. [LAUGHTER]
Resa: We’re very serious people, including regarding our tea.
Rebecca: That’s very important. So you are in welcome company here. I have a HarSha, which is a black blend from a local privately owned Tea Company in the Finger Lakes in New
York.
John: And I’m drinking a commercial blend of ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.
Rebecca: A favorite.
John: It is one of my favorites.
Adaira: Yeah, I like their teas. I just bought their white peach, actually, and it’s really good.
John: The white ginger peach?
Adaira: White ginger peach. Yeah, I just bought the white one, it’s so good. Those are some really good teas.
John: We’ve invited you here to discuss what you referred to as “fuel-efficient mentoring” in an article you co-authored in the Harvard Business Review last year. Pretty much all faculty members can look back and think about mentors who are really influential on their path to higher ed. And we all play important roles as mentors to our students and to our colleagues. But that role can be challenging given all the other pressures we face, especially during the pandemic, which has been going on for a while now. So could you tell us a little bit about the origin of fuel-efficient mentoring?
Adaira: So fuel-efficient mentoring, that article came about probably during the height of the pandemic when Resa and I, we’re emergency medicine physicians, we’re busy, we’re in academia, so we have students and residents we’re training, we’re educators, so we’re teaching all the time, and we felt that we had to pick and choose our priorities in a different way than we were used to. We’re putting forward the shifts, we’re putting forward the protection of our health, and probably de-prioritizing the way we used to support and train others. And we came together to discuss, basically, this concept of: How do we efficiently mentor and support people during this pandemic? Because we felt that it was being pushed to the backseat. And I will say I was a little bit inspired by something that I was doing via Twitter, which was bringing together students who were asking me to mentor them individually and putting them all together onto one Zoom. Just because I was stretched thin, and I was stressed out from the pandemic, I thought, well, wouldn’t it be more efficient to mentor eight or nine students within one hour, than each of them as one-hour meetings separately? And that was probably the start of it. Resa branded the idea as fuel efficient, that’s one of her many talents, because, really, the idea is to preserve ourselves. I think all of us love to educate, all of us love to mentor. But we only have so much time in the day, and we only have so much energy. And so, by being protective of ourselves, we’re able to really mentor people and spread our knowledge in a much more efficient way.
Rebecca: It also seems like then you’re also modeling good ways of finding balance and protecting yourself and things to your mentees as well.
Adaira: Yeah, I mean, I think what I would say about mentorship is that it’s historically been undervalued, under-recognized, but something that is really, really expected of a lot of educators to do. And we wanted to write about it, we wanted to make this a scholarly mission for ourselves to help normalize like, hey, this is something that we can be strategic with, this is something that we can be recognized for, this is something that we can scale. And really bring it up to the standards of, let’s say, someone who does research or gets large grants. Mentorship is a really important part of career development but we have found, personally, that it’s not necessarily recognized in the same way as others.
Resa: And I’ll add that I think people think mentoring is almost binary, this or that. Whereas one of the aspects of mentoring that we worked on is redefining and broadening the definition. Mentoring can take all different shapes and forms, all different styles, all different ages and stages. I think one of the biggest mistakes regarding mentoring is that you’re trying to mentor people like you or look for someone as a mentor who’s like yourself. And, I mean, we think that that’s very limiting, and it may not work out well for you or the mentee. And in fact, those people who seek to do that are usually looking for solely self-fulfilling prophecy. And I’ll say that’s what I saw. When I was finishing my residency training, I had attendings, teachers, pull me aside, and their advice to me was very much self-fulfilling prophecies: follow their path, do what I’ve done. And it almost seemed more to serve them than it did to serve me. And Adaira and I, when we start riffing on mentoring, she knows I really love the concept of peer mentoring. And some of my first peer mentors were my college classmates. They’re not physicians, they’re not in academics, but, wow, can they provide me some of the most useful pearls and pieces of guidance. And one of the highlights of the mentoring process that Adaira just described is those students, those mentees, get to know each other. And so, a psychological safety is created, they get comfortable asking questions in front of each other. And then when Adaira leaves the Zoom room, they have now developed a relationship with each other, and can take some of their own skills, their own questions, their own processes, and their own paths, they can walk on those together.
Rebecca: Such a great point. I know from my own experience that some of my best mentors have been people who are incredibly different from me, and are even in different fields that I am. [LAUGHTER]
Resa: Yep, 100%.
Adaira: Totally, mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s really important to think about who can offer you a different perspective that you hadn’t yet considered. And so I definitely think stretching yourself beyond the field you practice and beyond the institution in which you work is a great start.
John: On our campus we have a formal mentoring program for faculty where everyone is assigned a mentor. And often that will evolve and people will develop their own mentoring networks. But during the pandemic, a lot of those mentoring relationships were perhaps a little bit less strong than they might normally have been, and there was a lack of those hallway conversations in the drop-in to chat about problems. So we put together a group mentoring process where we had a mix of relatively recent younger faculty and some older faculty who met with all the new faculty in a group. And that peer mentoring component of that worked really well because people are going through the same experience and sharing their experiences among themselves can be really helpful. And doing that with students as well strikes me as being a really good idea that, probably, is underused.
Resa: If I could dovetail off of what you just shared, the concept of the structured mentoring programs. I think sometimes those work, and sometimes they don’t work, and we’ve all had those experiences. And when people ask us, “How do you create these relationships and what works, what doesn’t work?” What we found is a few things. So, number one, you try it out, if it’s not working, you don’t have to stay in that mentor-mentee relationship, it’s okay. And in fact, by clearing out a relationship that isn’t really organically growing and going, you’re opening yourself to other new relationships. Adaira has a really good recipe and formula. It’s not 100% foolproof, but it’s a really good recipe for a mentor- mentee relationship to work.
Adaira: Yes, I like it when a pairing has three different things that synergize nicely. And the first is that there are similar energies between the two people, meaning their personalities are complementary of each other. And there’s a similarity, there’s a familiarity that allows people to feel comfortable, naturally, around that other person. The second is when their schedules align, meaning if someone is very, very busy, and the other person is super open and wide, and expects their mentor, for instance, to be just as available, that can sometimes cause a collision. The third is that there’s an overlap or a nice complement to the knowledge gap that one person has and the knowledge that the other person can provide. And so, to me, I think a successful relationship can align along the energies between the parties, the schedule, and the knowledge. And it’s nice when you have all three there. I don’t think it’s absolutely critical, but that’s the ideal.
John: And you also suggest when there’s a formal mentoring relationship, that you share a document in which you talk about the expectations. Could you talk a little bit about that, and why that might be important?
Adaira: I think it’s important to just be clear and direct upfront. And the document doesn’t have to be a formal document that gets notarized, we’re not sort of saying those sorts of things. [LAUGHTER] But we’re saying to write it out, to say it, to make it concrete, as far as what are your expectations. And when I talked a little bit earlier about the three things that are there—energy, scheduling, and knowledge—honestly, the scheduling part, the time, is probably one of the biggest reasons why a relationship could fall apart. Is that someone’s expecting, perhaps, to extract more time from the other or less, or there could be some sort of a malalignment there. And so it’s really important to express upfront, “These are things I can help you with, so I can help you with finance, but only about maybe a few hours over the course of the year, I’m happy to contribute that.” And it seems uncomfortable to express that, but we’re used to, sort of, doing this in other relationships in the world. Let’s say I’m working with a real estate agent. I know offhand how much time he’s willing to devote to that relationship because he’s expressed that from the beginning. And I think in the world of mentorship we feel uncomfortable making it feel like a transaction or giving it that formal nature. But I will tell you, it feels good to just set that expectation up because it feels really bad saying no to someone, it feels really bad saying no. And so if you tell someone, “I’m happy to meet with you once a quarter,” and you say that from the beginning, then it’s out there, it’s out there. And they know that that’s the rules of the relationship. But it’s really tough when you’re expecting that once-a-quarter meeting, and then they start emailing you every month, or every other week, and now you have to say no, now you have to add them into your calendar. And now you start to resent, maybe not the person, but you might resent signing up for the relationship or signing up for the opportunity, or resent the fact that you didn’t say something earlier. You just start to have these negative feelings, and I think that’s not great. So, to me, expressing things upfront: How you’re going to meet, how often you’re going to meet, what are you meeting about? Who’s setting up the emails? All these sorts of things, I think it’s really important to say that upfront.
Rebecca: Are there other strategies or other key pieces of information that we should make sure are in documents or agreements in these relationships to help make sure that they’re nice and healthy?
Resa: One of the points that we emphasize, that I think is an “aha” for mentees, is that they have to play a role in this relationship. It’s not one sided, it’s a back and forth. And, in general, once you state roles, responsibilities, and expectations, people can either deliver and rise or they don’t. What I’ve seen when people have spoken with Adaira, spoken with myself, and read this article, they’re like, “Oh!” like there’s a light bulb that goes off on the mentee side that, “I have a role in this.” And I’ve been surprised, gladly so, that I have mentees say, “You know, I know I’m responsible for reaching out to you, I will follow up with you, I will offer dates.” I’ve recently been reading a book about habits of highly successful people, the classic, and proactivity is rule number one. And so this proactivity, that people need to be the ones to play the role, to outreach to the mentor, it’s been nice to see and it works.
Adaira: And the other thing is really normalizing that not every meeting has to be an hour long or even 30 minutes long. Some meetings can be 20, 10 minutes, 40 minutes long, I mean, you can change it and you can sort of titrate to their needs and what the topic is. But this idea of just because you’re going to meet with the person, you have to block off an hour of your calendar, I think can cause people who are already very, very, very busy to say, “I don’t have time, I don’t have time to do this.” And so what helps us to figure out the purpose of the meeting, the content that will be discussed, and think about: What are the venues? Or what are the media that I can use to meet with this person? And what is the necessary timeframe for us to meet? Every once in a while someone will send me a calendar invite, and that’s speaking to what Resa said earlier, the mentee, I have them send me the calendar invite with the Zoom link or the location in which we’re going to meet. And they’ll put it for an hour and I’ll say, “I don’t think we actually need an hour to discuss your schedule for the next two weeks and how to prioritize your schedule for two weeks. We can do that much faster.” And so, it might require you to sort of train them to be efficient with how they present themselves for a meeting and come up with an agenda. But the goal is to really try to titrate the length of the meetings so that it’s appropriate for the content to be discussed.
Rebecca: Seems like a good rule in many contexts, not just mentorship. [LAUGHTER]
Adaira: Correct, that’s true.
John: Does all the mentoring have to take place in meetings, either in person or remotely?
Resa: Absolutely not, and I really am glad you posed that question. I was thinking as Adaira was sharing, that we have fallen into this virtual Zoom world. A lot can get accomplished back and forth via email, and what I was thinking as you’re setting up the meeting and saying, “Hey, we probably can meet in 20 minutes rather than 60 minutes,” there are a few items that you can actually clarify. And I have a meeting upcoming today and it’s with four people, we’re talking about authoring a paper. And the goal of the meeting is for it to be a working meeting on the document, but we were able to clarify ahead of time, by email, authorship and sort of goal publication location. So there’s certain things that you can do quick, the quick back and forth, or the quick items that you can accomplish in one email, then allows you to clear it off, so when you actually have the meeting, you can focus on what you need to focus on. And one of the things that we like a lot is walking meetings, like, everybody reads about walking meetings, but not a lot of people actually do them. And the beauty of a walking meeting is you’re walking side by side, and there’s a comfort and a psychological safety that develops. And what I found after having a walking meeting is there’s almost a connection with a colleague, a connection with a mentee that wasn’t there before. Because you’re in nature, you’re walking, you’re breathing, and you’re sort of bringing in good energy and allowing yourself and your mind to open in creative ways.
Adaira: Even if you’re not side by side, like, sometimes I just have my meetings while I’m walking by myself outside. And it’s just good to be out there breathing clean air and outside of the computer region of my life and just separating myself. I will do that even if I’m meeting with someone over the phone.
John: You also suggest in that article that it may be useful sometimes to invite the people you’re mentoring to professional development activities or professional activities that you would have been attending anyway so that you can use the time a little bit more efficiently for the purpose of mentoring, as well as for whatever purposes you were using that time for anyway.
Resa: I really like that one. So it’s so much fun, as we’re slowly returning to in-person or other professional events, and even virtual professional events, to invite someone in. Number one, yes, you’re accomplishing the mentor-mentee meeting. Number two, you’re modeling, you’re modeling conversations, you’re modeling behaviors, you’re also networking and helping your mentee network and meet other potential mentors, sponsors, coaches. So it’s very efficient, very effective, and I think I’ve been on the receiving end of such invitations when I’m the mentee. It opens up your world, and it allows you to sort of watch how someone else is doing it, someone who you admire and respect. And you can pick up a lot of information in those ways.
John: And one other thing you discussed in that article is using email when possible, which actually ties into another article you wrote in March 2021, on what a compassionate email culture looks like. Could you tell us a little bit about how a compassionate email culture works and how it can play a useful role in mentoring?
Resa: So the concept of compassionate email, I think, is really important now. Bob Walker, who’s the Chair of Internal Medicine at UCSF, has been placing messages on Twitter about burnout and physician burnout, and actually how much email and the email culture is contributing to that. So we all know we’ve been home, we’ve been virtual, and people are much more in front of their computers or laptops. So you could argue that the inbox has exploded. And Adaira is the one that came up with this idea of writing an article about compassionate email. And the concept is, we don’t have to email as often and as much as we have been, and in fact, we can be pretty efficient about it. And the emphasis in the articles we read were always about protecting yourself, protecting your own inbox. And in this article, we flipped the switch. We said, “No, we want to protect other people’s inboxes.” And I’ll let Adaira start elaborating a bit.
Adaira: You know, I think it comes from our perspective as physicians. So physicians love to care for patients, that’s what we do for a living, but we’re really bad at caring for ourselves. And so, I think for many of us, that’s where we fail when it comes to our in-basket, our inbox, is that it’s hard for us to protect our own inbox, because we would write things and get all sorts of newsletters and emails that just come in, you just feel so overwhelmed. We thought, well, maybe we should think about how we can protect other people. So that was sort of the impetus for that article, was thinking more about creating a culture and being responsible for creating a culture or helping to create that culture, where email isn’t something that you just do whenever you want, you’re thinking about the other person. And so there are different ways in which you can do that, we discuss many of those in the article. I will say one thing that I think is really the secret sauce, is considering the BCC. The BCC has a bad rap, it’s a “blind carbon copy,” it has a bad rap of being something that can be used maliciously, and if you read a lot of articles about it, you will see that. But the BCC is actually a really nice strategy, especially when you’re sending out an email to 100 people, or 200 people, or even, honestly, anything greater than, like, 15, 10 people, you can BCC them. And, in your subject line you write, “Attention: teachers,” “Attention: principals,” whoever it is that you’re addressing, you make it very clear in that subject line who’s all included into that email. But everyone’s BCC’d so that you can avoid that reply all and I’m sure you’ve all been on those threads where everyone’s replying to the potluck, “Oh, I’m bringing macaroni and cheese. Oh, I’m bringing…” Not everyone needs to know that. And so, it’s important to sort of minimize the back and forth, and by having a BCC, if someone needs to reply, they reply directly to you. If you need to send out a summary statement, you can send out a summary statement of all of the replies you got. And that’s it, now you have two emails that were sent out to the large group, the initial one, and maybe the follow up, but that’s it. And so, that’s a small step of considering someone. The other thing is the time of the email. I would say even a year ago, I wasn’t great at this. This is something I’m working on myself where I would reply to someone at, like, midnight, because I was awake, I would send an email at midnight, I would send an email on Saturday that would have a task for that person to do, such as, “Oh, I’m sending you this. Do you mind just when you get a chance editing this?” And someone will say, “Oh, I have a chance. I mean, I can do it now instead of spending time with my kids, I’ll just quickly do this.” And so, by protecting other people by being conscientious of the time of the day, the time of the week, you can, again, just sort of respect the fact that everyone deserves to distance themselves from work. And if we think about how every time we send an email, we bring them back into work, we bring them back into the workplace and all the tasks that they have to do. Then again, we can start to move more towards being compassionate and respecting others’ time. And the goal of that article is really to try to encourage a better culture. And obviously this needs to be a conversation that occurs between some of the key stakeholders, but to really try to understand that we can all contribute to the problem by sending out a ton of emails, by emailing people at any hour, but it’s important to think about ways to mitigate someone else’s burden.
John: And you also suggest that if you’re going to send out those emails, you could use either features of your email program or some type of a plug-in in email, so that you schedule it to arrive during work hours. Could you just suggest some tools that might work for that?
Resa: Thanks so much for that highlight. That’s one of my faves, is the schedule option. Sometimes you don’t even know where these plug-ins and where these preferences are in your email software, but they’re there. And our hospital uses Outlook. And I found in Microsoft Outlook, that I can send my email, I can schedule them to be sent. So we’re not arguing that you need to put off things so that then it’s going to weigh on you and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need to add that to my to-do list”, you can write the response or you can write the content of the email. However, you don’t have to press send, and in fact, you can schedule that send. And one of the things I also have been working on is my send days and times. Many messages can wait till after the weekend or they can certainly wait until eight o’clock the next morning. And it not only is thoughtful and intentional for the receivers, it also actually has helped me structure when I’m doing my emails, and when I even seek to receive emails. And there are formulas, and there are ways of decreasing your email inbox. As section leader for my group, what I’ve seen is, as I’ve decreased the quantity and increased the quality of my emails, I think it’s been brought back to me. In other words, I’m not receiving any quick, superfluous emails, what I’m receiving is much more intentional and much more quality and much more necessary. Because we’re not saying don’t communicate, in fact, we’re all about communication. Moreover, in the article we talk about speaking with your group, speaking with your sections, speaking with your team, how do they want to structure communication surrounding email? Because, actually, not everybody wants this type of communication. So it’s important to get your group to agree upon the kind of culture they want surrounding email.
Rebecca: Really appreciate that a lot of the work that both of you have been doing is really about protecting self and others through communication, relationships, etc. And I know that you have another article that came out too, about requesting compensation when you’ve been asked to speak. So I was wondering if you could give us a little glimpse of that article as well? I know that often people in academia are asked to give talks, but often just as a favor. [LAUGHTER] So can you provide some tips on how to protect yourself in that space as well?
Resa: I want to start by just saying that, Rebecca, you totally called us out. Adaira and I have felt that there is a playbook. There’s a playbook about how to navigate the workplace. And no one gave us a copy of that book to read. So one of our intentions, one of our missions, is to write articles and to share information that is going to help people. Help people take care of themselves, take care of their team, take care of their work, and take care of their overall culture. So Adaira and I talk about a lot of things in academic medicine. And a lot of what we talk about is not pure academics, and certainly not pure medicine, which is why we found an audience at Harvard Business Review. And the concept of moving from speaking for free, to speaking for a fee, which of course is very catchy, it’s a coming of age, and it’s a rite of passage. And part of how we came to this, what to do, when to do it, is by having a lot of conversations, actually, with mentors and with sponsors. And quite honestly, going back to the playbook and the sports reference, sometimes men seem to get some of the tips and tricks that we didn’t get. So, a lot of my mentors and a lot of people with whom I speak are men. Men friends, men colleagues, men that can tell me how they did it, or how they do it. So in terms of if there are 10 specific things that we recommend, when you’re in a situation that you’re asked to speak and there’s no monetary compensation, there’s no honorarium. And Adaira, do you want to start with some of them?
Adaira: Yeah, and it gets more comfortable asking over time. In the beginning you feel like you might be putting yourself at risk by asking, like, maybe they’ll take back the opportunity or maybe you’ll be judged. But to just be clear, many other people are doing this in various arenas of the professional world. It’s commonplace to get compensated for your time, it’s common to get compensated for your expertise. So as a teacher, or as an educator, or a mentor who’s speaking about your perspective, about your area of expertise, why wouldn’t that apply to you? And so you do have to gain that confidence. And in the beginning, it can be a little bit uncomfortable, so asking upfront is very key. So you wouldn’t want to ask for any sort of compensation at the end of your presentation or after it’s done. This is something, like the terms and conditions, that you’d ask upfront. And it can be very polite, like, “Is there any way that you would be able to provide a professional photograph of me as I’m speaking, that can go onto my website, that can go into a flyer for my next talk?” But that’s a form of compensation, because a nice high-quality photo or a headshot can be used by you later. Or even reduced or completely covered membership fees if you’re speaking for large national organizations, and they can’t offer you money, but perhaps they can reduce your membership fee for the next year, or give you a free trial, right? You can negotiate with them, and this is all in the practice of negotiation and developing comfort with negotiation. So in the article, we go through all 10 of these topics, and some of them, I feel like, I have used very, very, very successfully and now they’re just sort of standard practice. And some of them have taken some time to get used to. And it’s just a personal choice that you would make, but I don’t think you should feel obligated to walk away from any talk without any form of compensation.
Resa: I can add a few more. So a good one is a letter, a letter to your boss, a letter to your supervisor, a letter to your CEO, where the intention is that you get a positive letter, but either with, perhaps, quotes from audience members about how your talk was received, what it did for the group. Another is, say it’s an invitation to speak at a local group, you can ask that if it’s a positive reception, and it’s well received, and they liked you and the content you provided, could they recommend you for a national conference or an international conference? It could be the stepping stone for something that’s larger, that’s more impactful. A final one I’ll share, and this one I thought was obvious, but I think it only becomes obvious once you’ve done a lot of these, is sometimes there’s just no money and they cannot pay you an honorarium. However, they can pay your travel, your airline flight, your hotel, meals, and transfers. And, if it’s a place you’ve never visited, if it happens to be where your college best friend lives, like, why not? There are many ways to think about this, and it should not be an absolute yes-no.
Rebecca: Lots of great tips today. All kinds of ways to be better communicators, advocate for ourselves, and advocate for others. We always wrap up by asking, what’s next?
Adaira: For me, as we write, we start to realize what else we can learn about the craft. And so, for me, I’m going to be taking more writing classes, reading more writing books, trying to just learn how to become a better communicator on paper. And that will be my goal for the next six months to a year. I mean, it’s a lifelong goal, but, like, I really want to dive into it.
Resa: And for me, I would characterize it as working on my storytelling. Writing and a lot of what we write comes from personal and professional stories. So working on storytelling through the podcast. I launched the podcast during COVID for the reasons of sharing and amplifying people that are doing things that are subject matter experts, perhaps they’re not being heard, perhaps they’re not being seen. So working on the creativity and the growth of the podcast.
Rebecca: Sounds like some really exciting adventures.
John: We really appreciate you sharing your time with us and we’re very much looking forward to sharing this with our listeners. Thank you.
Adaira: Thank you for having us.
Resa: Thank you so much.
[MUSIC]
John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.
[MUSIC]