Lana Penley was a former Principal, and now stands at the forefront of Social and Emotional Learning. She is an author and CEO of Unlocking SEL. We discuss her time in administration and her new book Unlocking SEL: The 5 Keys to Transform Your School Through Social and Emotional Learning.
Lana shares her journey from education to consulting, driven by her passion for social and emotional learning (SEL). They discuss the importance of mindfulness and self-care for educators, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
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Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth: Hi, and welcome back to our next episode. Today, I’m so excited for you to meet Lana Penley. Lana is a former principal, and she stands at the forefront of social and emotional learning. She recently wrote a new book, And is the CEO and co founder of Unlocking SEL. Today we learn about her experience in education, her passion for SEL and how she supports schools today with her methods on focusing on this social and emotional learning on students and adults first and foremost.
Hope you enjoy this episode.
Well, welcome everyone. We’re so excited to have Lana with us today. Welcome, Lana.
Lana: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to chat with you today.
Elizabeth: Well, we are looking forward to hearing your story and we love to start these off by hearing a little bit about your experience in education.
Lana: Well, like you said, my name is Lana Penley. I’m a former principal turned CEO of my company, Unlocking SEL. And basically, I help schools and classrooms around the country implement social and emotional learning to Really increase positive student outcomes and also decrease teacher burnout. That’s very important.
So i’m an an author keynote speaker teacher learner. I like to say i’m an avid pickleball player There’s probably some other people out there a Wife daughter sister friend and mom to two poodle mixes and i’m if we’re talking to you from sunny charlotte, north carolina So thank you for having me
Elizabeth: Oh, well, we love to hear that. And my sister has gotten into pickleball and I have not started or attempted this sport yet, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I think I’ve been hearing things. I’m going to have to get into it.
Lana: Oh, it’s so fun. And it’s fun to remember all the sides of us educators, right? That we can do other things too. And, uh, so I’ve really enjoyed it.
Elizabeth: Well, would you be able to walk us through your journey about a little bit about how long you were an administration and kind of that turning point where you decided to start your own company and kind of branch out from there.
Lana: Yeah. Well, I was in education for 20 some years, you know, when you get to so much, you’re like 20 some years, a long time. I was a teacher coach and, uh, became an administrator and I didn’t really plan on it, but just, you know, fell into my lap. I was coaching administrative position and, um, started working on my degree, got into it and, uh, it was much harder than I thought.
Um, and was not really very prepared to be a principal, to be honest. And we had a school crisis during the school day. It was actually mainly myself. Second year on the job and we had a fire in 2009, literally our school burned down during the school day and everyone escaped. But as you can imagine, to say we were impacted is really an understatement.
But from that moment, we really turned to something to kind of help us heal. And for us, it was social and emotional learning. And we were removed from our school for three years. But over that time, we really started thinking about like reimagining what is possible for schooling and what would happen if we focused on the heart first and really cared for our community.
So to really give you the short, condensed version, we had pretty astounding results from that. Probably not surprising to a lot of the educators out there. What happens when you do focus on things like that and end up test scores went down referrals went down Teachers stayed at their job. I loved what I was doing so much more and Just realized I was ready to have a greater impact.
And so someone said you should do some consulting I had no idea what What that even meant but sort of just jumped into imperfect action, um, right before COVID and opened up my consulting company. And so that’s what I’m doing now.
Elizabeth: Thank you for sharing that. And what a wild, you know, first or second year being an administrator and then having that tragedy in your school. I mean that you’ve really got to rebuild from there. so now that you left teaching and you went to consulting, you mentioned, you know, you didn’t, you weren’t that familiar with it.
So how did you start learning the ropes? from, you know, being a full time administrator, having the paycheck to going off on your own. Because I think that’s something a lot of teachers are interested in that aspect, you know, consulting and opening up their own business and still being involved in education like you are.
So, can you walk us through that learning process and what that looked like?
Lana: Well, what was happening is we were having some success as a school and I was being asked to go and share these results with other folks. So people were coming to our school and I was going out and. Presenting, and it’s a funny story actually, we had paid to, we had hired someone to come and speak at our school.
And a friend of mine said, your speaker was terrible, why didn’t you just speak at your school? And
Elizabeth: Sure.
Lana: said, do you mean? They’re like, did you pay them to do that? And I said, yeah. It’s like, you need to totally do that. And I remember thinking, what? Like, educators can go out and get paid to do this? It was kind of beyond my scope of thinking, really.
but that was kind of what got me thinking of, wow, I can really bring some value to people, and I really care about this, and I’ve been on the ground, I know what I’m talking about. So, I’m just going to dive in. So what I did is just start speaking everywhere that I could. And sometimes I had to do it for free for at the beginning.
And then I got to where I could offer something and then figure it out how to offer a series of course, a series of classes for folks. And it started taking off and doing pretty well.
Elizabeth: Well, it’s so great to hear that moment, that light bulb moment where you, where you found out kind of like, Oh, this is a strength of mine. And I feel like sometimes it takes that objective person outside of yourself to, to compliment you or share, you know, Oh, wow, you’re really good at this. Cause teaching and administration, we do things it’s second nature.
And so it’s, it’s kind of, that’s, you know, I like hearing that, that someone else kind of saw that strength and then you went out and explored it on your own. And we’re like, you know, Hey, what another avenue that’s accessible.
Lana: It does seem like sometimes for myself personally, I had some small thinking like I’m really good at education, but that is what I can do. And that’s all I can offer without thinking about how transferable these skills are. and I’ve done some of my trainings in the business world now, uh, where you’re like, this is like about.
Being a good human. These are strategies to how to help us in life in general. So I do think as education, we probably have a lot more to offer the world than we think we do.
Elizabeth: And did you have a mentor or anyone through this process that would, or just support during the transition?
Lana: I definitely did a lot of research and I’m, I want to find out who’s good at what they do and then call them up and say, Hey, will you jump on a call with me for about an hour? So I did that with a lot of different people. So I would just recommend find someone who’s doing what you want and then say, will you jump on a call with me and be bold and, make it happen.
Cause I did that for many people, both in educational space, online space and business space. And, and I, and I, I may sound like I have it all together. I, Absolutely don’t. I’m a work in progress. Get some things right, some things wrong, but I’m, I’m moving forward.
Elizabeth: So can you tell us a bit about your company unlocking SEL, for example, um, do you have employees kind of what’s the state of it now, what’s your mission? And then tell us about some of your clients that you have.
Lana: Yes. So right now we are a company of three. It is the co founder and myself and then we have recently with, I forgot to say, I don’t know if I mentioned this. I had a book that just came out. My first book just launched on September 23rd. So a few months ago we’re like, we got to get serious about our marketing and our socials and all of that.
Beforehand, I had done it all, and so we currently do have a marketing person who’s helping us now with, with all of that. So it’s really the three of us, but the overwhelming majority of the, the lift is, is my own, and uh, that’s both good and bad. But I will say hiring someone else to help me was a great move for us, and has definitely, um, been a value.
Elizabeth: So you do consulting, right? And you go into these different schools. can you tell us a little bit about just like a day in the life of if you’re at a school, what you’d be doing there to support the district or the school?
Lana: so currently I work in two separate ways. One is like a one time keynote seminar training where I might go in at a staff meeting or in a district meeting with a larger group of folks and it’s just one time. Here’s some inspiration and here’s some real strategies that you can Use after this training and then the other is what I call the core series.
So it’s a five session series where I take educators all the way through, starting with adult SEL all the way through to school transformation. And right now I’ve got clients. A lot of my clients are on the West coast in California and Washington and Oregon area, mainly because that’s where my school was.
And I’m hoping with the book, we can branch more nationwide.
Elizabeth: That’s great to hear. And congratulations on the book as well. Well, well, I’m excited to hear a bit more about that. I’m curious to know, you know, while you’re you’ve started this business, you have these schools as clients. How do you, Get into them. You know, you’ve, you’ve built the trust and the credibility.
So then how do you go to the schools and say, I’d like to offer this training.
Lana: Well, the majority of trainings that have done are people that I know in some way or know of me through someone else. Um, as you can imagine, it, it can be challenging to get into schools and we know resources, time and money is, is, is limited. So I really. Work with people that I know or have reached out to me.
I haven’t done a lot of cold calling. Um, I’m imagining maybe I’m ready for that now. I’m not but that has worked really well. And then I bring them in, talk to me about how it’s going. In regards to social and emotional learning, what’s going well? What are some of the strategies? So just building the relationship with us folks and then talk about what I can offer In that seminar and can really address some of their needs and some of their pain points And literally help educators with burnout when they leave in a in a couple of hours
Elizabeth: Ah, that’s perfect. I feel I’m looking back into my experience and I’m thinking like what a nice treat it would have been to have, have something like this in place.
Lana: and that’s the way most people receive it. Like, thank you for taking care. They’re even thinking about me. Because we can’t do our, as we know, we can’t do our best work for students if we’re not in the best place ourselves. And that, that is a key point and what I believe in. I believe education is catching on, just a little bit slow to that idea.
Elizabeth: Well, we’re glad to have you in the space and I’m excited to hear a bit about the book. So tell us a little bit about what your book is about. And then also I feel like this would be a whole nother podcast episode, but you know, the writing process in
Lana: Oh, that is, that is, can see my emotion around that one. for the book, really what happened was is, after the fire and we wanted to implement social and emotional learning, There was no guidebook. So we just sort of dove into a student curriculum, which is helpful in some ways, but it’s not near enough.
And to really talk about school transformation, which is what we really wanted to do, kind of reinvent or reimagine what was possible. We needed to follow certain steps. And, and so I realized when we got on the other side, you know, years later, we did, this was a five year process that there is a path to follow and we were kind of creating it.
And so I wanted to capture that in a book to help others be able to do that. Okay. We want to transform our school instead of like, I’m going to pick from here and here and here and here. How can I put it all together as a path forward? So I call it a SEL blueprint. But really a guide for transforming schools through social and emotional learning.
And there are what I call five keys to that. And so each key has certain strategies underneath it, beginning with foundational work. And then you’ll love this, the second key is adults. Focusing on the adults, even before the students. And then we go classroom and then how do we scale school wide? And then how do we do a cycle of success?
And each chapter has teacher tips and principal points and it has stories and and narrative and actually a few jokes or two. I wanted it to be engaging. So that’s kind of a, what my thinking was on that.
Elizabeth: thank you for sharing that. And you know, I, When I was teaching, I remember having many helpful books and just using them as a resource, whether it was, you know, with behaviors or building classroom community. So I’m excited for people to, to read that. And, and I think it is important too, because, you know, in different states, even public versus private, there’s just so many mixed messages, so many different curriculums.
So it’s, in a way, it’s nice to be on the same page with your school and have, have one system in place to be able to work from.
Lana: Absolutely. And you know, one of the misconceptions with social emotional learning is, okay. And I thought the same thing. I thought a student curriculum was social and emotional learning rather than that being one component of much more, much, many more things that we’re trying to do to create these conditions where students and staff can thrive.
Elizabeth: And so you mentioned, I believe it was the second point was focusing on the adults. And so I’d love to dive that, dive into that, because we do have teachers, principals in the, in the community that are, you know, some of them are still thinking about staying in education, but they are, they’re on the point of being very stressed out.
So I’d love to hear a bit about, you know, either some tips or tricks that, that you’ve worked with teachers or success stories.
Lana: Yeah. Well, for most folks, when you talk about SEL, social emotional learning, you, like we had mentioned, most people think of the students, but there is an inference there that the adults are just fine and they are ready to do this. And we all know that that is not true, that our educators are struggling.
Many, many of us are really struggling right now. And especially in our emotional well being. So from to burnout, to lack of resources, to managing behavior, all of that comes at a toll and a real cost for us. And so what we did is how do we surround our adults in a system or an ecosystem of care? And for us, that began with, Stating that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Like we are co centering our adults and our students. What? I know people get kind of worried. I mean, so what’s going to happen? Teachers are going to take advantage of the system. Absolutely not. What happened was people felt cared for. showed up different for themselves, for their colleagues and wanted to stay.
We all want to work at a place that honors our humanity and cares for us. And that’s what I think schools need to spend some time trying to create those kinds of conditions. Now we use mindfulness as our way to do it. We literally taught a mindfulness strategies. We literally taught stress reduction. We had free yoga, we had mindful movements.
We had spa days, we did the gamut, just to really create this really special place. And from there, then our teachers were able to show up much, much different. So I guess if, if I had to say one thing to kind of take away is for us as educators to really take our power back, like we have to show up and care for ourselves. could wait for the system to change, but we would still be waiting at my other school for that. So we can’t wait till we retire. We’ve got to take back our best life now. And what I found is I became a better educator anyway. There’s an irony that when I, when I started caring for myself differently.
So my recommendation for me, it was mindfulness, but to figure out what it is for you that can really help you manage your stress and increase your joy. And it can make all the difference.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. And the foundation, you, you have to take care of yourself before it’s like the oxygen mask metaphor. And for those teachers and principals who are listening, is there something now that you could share about mindfulness or stress reduction? Something that they could, like a tip or a strategy and maybe, maybe implement it tomorrow in the
Lana: Okay. I love these. I always two. Let me, let me think. Uh, okay. I’ll, I’ll pull this one out cause this is my favorite one. It’s a strategy you might’ve heard of before called put the glass down. Have you ever heard of this So,
Elizabeth: I haven’t.
Lana: so let’s just say, I’m asking you to hold this glass of water.
Okay. And I say, hold this glass of water. And you’re like, Oh, okay. I can hold this glass of water. And now I say, hold it for 10 minutes. Okay. And then it gets a little heavier. What if I said, hold it an hour, or maybe I said, hold it all night. Over time what’s going to happen, of course, you’re going to like drop the glass and it’s going to break, right. It’s kind of like being an educator for me. What many of us do is we hold the glass all the time. All the time. We never set it down. I know as a principal, I would be on my email, I’d come home, I’d eat dinner as fast as I could, and then I’m back on my email again, and then in the morning I’m getting up and checking my email.
The pace is crazy. Plus the teachers didn’t want me to be emailing them late at night. None of that was good for anybody. Um, and when I opened my email, it was never, you’re such a great principal, Lana, just want to let you know, you know, it was a problem. And so when, when I started practicing, put the glass down, basically when you’re done for the day, be done for the day. So it might mean that I had to work to six or whatever I was okay with. And then when I shut my computer, unless it was like something specific report was due, I would literally try to take off the principal hat and step into the rest of my world till the next morning. Now for some people that seems like, oh, that’s such a small thing.
It’s life changing because the percentage of us educators who stay plugged in all the time is pretty high. And so just giving us some hours back at night to step into the other things of us, um, can be life giving for us. So that, that would be it. Put the glass down.
Elizabeth: I love that metaphor and that idea because And it sounds hard too, because I know you have your email sometimes on your phone, on your iPad, and you, you want, you care about your students, you want to check in, see what the parents are saying, but I think that’s a great tip, and it’ll be very difficult to implement, but like you said, just, just try it, and then try it again the next day, and the next day, because we’re moving at such a fast pace, I’m even thinking back, you know, checking your email first thing when you wake up, you know, at 5 a.
m., and it’s just not the way to wake up.
Lana: It’s not the way to live our lives. And, and, and I get what you’re saying. It is hard. So perhaps if six o’clock felt so much, you could even say, you know, I’m going to try a week at eight and then I’m going to move it down. And then I’m going to move it down because probably what you’re going to find out as well, there’s all these other things I’m interested in.
And that just helps us feel alive again and not kind of numb or deadened of, Of thinking this incredible lift that education is taking it, taking it and kind of taking the soul out of us. And, uh, life’s too short for that. I want us all to live our best lives now.
Elizabeth: Yes. Oh, that’s a great tip. I noticed that you left in 2019. Was that about the time, time frame? So, have you noticed any differences? I know, you know, The pandemic and COVID brought a lot of, you know, different thoughts and views towards things. With, with social emotional learning and students and adults, do you, has that impacted it?
Is, is it kind of changing now or, or what have you seen since the impacts of the pandemic?
Lana: Yeah. I mean, the pandemic, it’s sort of like every school has been through their own fire, so to speak. And that is really what happened. I mean, the schools was stressful before, but now it’s a whole nother level of stress on, on folks. And so really, how do we, how do we take that, know that and meet the moment in a different way?
This time is requiring a different type of schooling. I mean, what, where we have, I’m sure you’ve, we all know about student anxiety through the roof and how all of that is coming into classrooms. And so we can’t just pretend that that’s not there. And I believe teaching stress reduction, teaching regulation, teaching connection, gratitude, relationship building, from kindergarten on up, can really make a significant shift.
Just a quick little story, I was teaching, uh, These lessons in an elementary school on zoom and someone said afterwards, and they said, Oh my gosh, my high school needs this so much. My kid is in high school and he has so much anxiety. He can hardly even go to school right now. And I just thought, you know, that that’s, we’ve got these, these students that are in high school that are so stressed out.
They haven’t been taught any of these stress reduction strategies. And so just imagine if we could move upstream and we’re teaching the littlest little kiddos about their brain and how they can manage it, how their whole life could show up differently. I mean, I think of myself, I didn’t learn these things.
So I was in my forties. If you imagine learning it at four, you know,
Elizabeth: that’s important, having those coping skills, especially from an early age. And, you know, and that should be every day in the classroom. I remember. Just, just a quick story about uh, when I went to this conference and I learned about schema and teaching that and metacognition and when I would teach the students, like almost like a light bulb went off, they’re like, Oh, I can think about my thinking, or I have these connections in my brain.
And so that was, that was some of the most fun parts that I remember from teaching was when kids would recognize that and like build those relationships. And so you’re right. It’s the human element of it.
Lana: We would teach mindful breathing to all of our students. My school was a K 8. Every day, twice a day, we did intentional mindful breathing. And it was funny. The littles loved it. The middle school kids thought they were kind of too cool, you know. interestingly enough, if they had a sub who did not do their mindful breathing, they did not like that.
They would say, don’t forget at 815, we do our mindful breathing. They knew on some level that this is really them. And I am proud to say that all the high schools in Portland public are now implementing mindfulness. And, uh, I believe our school had something to do with that really showing that it can make a big difference for students.
Elizabeth: Oh, I love I’m excited for those schools and teachers and families. And since this big shift how has your work life balance been after this transition?
Lana: well, that’s a really good question. I, I would say it’s a work in progress. Here’s what I would also say it is always top of mind for me. I don’t just ignore it and pretend like it doesn’t matter, which I was really good at beforehand. It is part of the equation. Um, that I pay close attention to, but there are seasons to it.
And so certainly with the book, it’s a work off balance was a little skewed, getting it all ready to make sure that the edits and everything are in place and it goes out on time. But now that that’s happened, um, I’m trying to bring things a little bit better in perspective. So I would say, I think about it a lot.
And I realize that for me to be my best version of myself, uh, I can’t wait for somebody else to pay attention to that, I have to pay attention to that for myself.
Elizabeth: That’s a great message. And, and we have about two more questions for you. And this, second last question, I just want to ask, you know, what, what thoughts or any last words you would give to those teachers out there who are in the classroom, but they’re on the fence. They want to stay in education with the kids.
But they are noticing changes and are very stressed out. Any, any words for them to, to help them with their, Okay. their year ahead.
Lana: I would say to pay attention to how they’re feeling, to not ignore that, to tune in to how they’re feeling, and then kind of see what comes from paying attention to that. So, by paying attention to that, it may mean that, hey, I need to put some better strategies in place. Or it may be, I’m paying attention that I need to do something else, but I think just that tuning into that can make a big difference, not ignoring it, which when we’re overachievers, we’re type A, we’re problem solvers, we contend to serve outward.
and help others without really being, um, clear on how we’re doing and how we’re feeling. So that’s what I would say is just tune into yourself a little bit more, sort of like a guitar that’s maybe a little bit out of tune, tune it up and then see how you want to play it out.
Elizabeth: I love it. Take the time for that self reflection and observe notice patterns. And then we love to wrap this up by hearing what you’ve learned about yourself from, you know, being in education 20 plus years and now being a speaker, owning your own business, being an author.
Lana: I would say that I’m really a doer, a hustler, just trying to make the world a little bit of a better place, regardless of what that looks like, that I like to, to work hard and plan thoroughly, but you have to stay open and be flexible. And, then I, I just kind of close with, I am a hopeless optimist. I always have been, I believe the world is going to be in my favor if I’m trying to do better by the world.
And that’s the way I try to live my life. Um, it’s not always perfect. It’s been hard. There’s been some bumps, but I’m very grateful for where I am and grateful that I can try to help others.
Elizabeth: Thank you so much for sharing your journey and story. And I’m excited to take away some of these tips for myself and also just looking forward for everyone to listen. And I think there’s a lot of great strategies around SEL and just, you know, about your journey that I’m excited for everyone to hear.
Lana: Thank you so much. Yeah, please get our book. Wait, let me show it. I’m very proud cover
It’s like a little unlocking the little heart there.
Elizabeth: cute.
Lana: It went through a lot of iterations to get to that So thank you so much. And thank you for having me and thank for your thank you for what you’re doing for the world, too
