Dean Durrance discusses empathy, the pain of changing, and how stories could unlock lasting institutional change. Are you hungry? It's time for some bite-sized!
References
Goodman, D. J. (2011). Promoting diversity and social justice. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203829738
Novak, K. (2024, November 13). 4 ways to increase teacher buy-in towards inclusive Practices & UDL. novakeducation.com. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.novakeducation.com/blog/4-ways-to-increase-teacher-buy-in-towards-inclusive-practices-udl
TEDx Talks. (2017, March 29). Managing Change in Education | JT Rehill | TEDxYouth@KIS [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkTNFqYO-z8
Transcript:
Stories could be the key to unlocking organizational change in our schools, and I'm going to tell you why.
So what's on today's menu? Well, we start with a discussion of Barclay's school change model, where we're going to apply that through the lens of universal design for learning. We'll discuss empathy and how we can use student stories to build empathy as a skill amongst our teams and how that can trickle down into student achievement.
And lastly, we're ending on a new segment that I'm calling Something to Chew On, where I give you a thought-provoking topic and you, the listener, sound off in the comments. So are you ready for some Bite-Sized? I think you're ready for some Bite-Sized.
Change. You know what they say, you can't live with it, but many sure will die trying.
Change is something that's notoriously easy for people, you know? People have their routines and their habits and their skill sets and they love to deviate from those things. Right? Right? Unfortunately, not. Change is something that's hard. It's hard for a lot of us. And as much as I rag on folks bucking at change, the truth is, change is hard for me.
In the day-to-day life that we live, many of us establish routines that give us a sense of comfort. We wake up, we make coffee, we get ready, we go to work, and there's little nuances that change, but largely our days are pretty similar. We like the routine and disruptions to our routine are upsetting. How many days do people in your office spend talking about how the one-hour change from daylight saving has affected them all week?
In truth, many of us lose an hour of sleep on any given night just from having to get up in the middle of the night and being unable to fall back asleep, but it's something that disrupts our normal operation, and as a result, we find it slightly upsetting.
There's a great Ted Talk that talks about creating change in schools, and the Ted Talks by J.T. Rehill. And there's a good chance you've probably already heard it if you're in the education space. But just in case you haven't, he talks about the idea that creating change deals a little bit with thresholds of pain. Think about the pain of creating a change versus the pain of experiencing the situation as it is.
One of those two has to outweigh the other. And he says if the perceived pain of the change is the greater pain than the perceived pain of the present, we don't change. But if the perceived pain of the change is less than the perceived pain of the present, change happens. So what do we have to do? We must reduce the perceived pain while also clearly communicating what the current, the present state is.
What's the challenge that necessitates this change? And furthermore, we want to be very clear-eyed about how we arrived at this being a source of change needing to occur. I'm reminded of a statement that was made in a meeting where a colleague posed a question, is this a solution in search of a problem? And I thought that was such a poignant question that I think about so often and...
We want to be sure that the changes that we're implementing and that we're proposing, that these changes really do seek to address the actual issues in our students' lives. And I think that as we look at that through Universal Design for Learning, let's think about some of the accommodations that students are registered with disability service offices all across the nation receive. Some of those students receive extended test time and readers, and some of those are a bit trickier to implement. kind of a manpower requirement. Someone has to read the exam or someone has to be there to watch the clock. But what are some of the accommodations that might be easier to implement? Maybe even across the board. What about something as controversial as say, recording lectures? Now, as I mentioned this as an example, I want to be mindful of the fact that one, I'm not a professor.
I'm not in the classroom, so I'm not teaching day in and day out. I am a practitioner on the staff side of things, and I am a dean of students, which means I primarily serve as an advocate for students. Their vantage point is really my North Star. So as I think about that, and I think about the idea of proposing something like recording in all classrooms so that any student, not just one with a learning disability, but
Perhaps a student who just got sick or a student who is registered with Title IX services because they're pregnant or parenting. What about a student who just has a really off day and needs to take a mental health day? If we recorded all of our lectures, for example, could there be a repository that students could access? Now,
Think about that as an example because as we move through some of the information that JT shares with us, I want us to think about recording and this proposing a policy of recording all classroom lectures as something that we can feed through this model, something that could support universal design for learning, but something that we know is going to face some objection on its face. So let's think about this and let's think about this through what JT describes in Steve Barclay's school change model. This model says that for us to change student achievement, there have to be changes in behavior along the way. So in order to get to student achievement, we first have to start with leadership behavior. What's happening at the top? Not just what leaders are saying, but what are they doing? How are they supporting their teams? How are they supporting students? How are they supporting the institution?
That then feeds into changes in learning communities and peer coaching. That then leads to changes in teaching behavior, changes in student behavior, and ultimately student achievement.
That's a lot of steps and it's important to mention that three of those speak to behavior. Not data, not new initiatives, not technology, behavior.
To that end, our behavior as leaders makes a huge impact. Think about the day to day. We set the tone and the tempo and the trajectory of our teams. It's really our responsibility to sell the message. Now, I know the word sell in higher education is controversial. I really just mean thinking about presenting an idea, a change. Offering
Let's offer recordings of our classes as an option for our students. I need to present that with enthusiasm. I need to show my team I'm excited about this thing. I want them to be energized about it because I think it's worthwhile. I think it will make a difference. Beyond that, I need to be able to communicate the idea itself. I can be excited all day long, but if I don't know what the thing is that I'm discussing,
it's not going to be super helpful, I need to be able to describe some of the mechanics. What would this look like? It would mean implementing some new technology. It would mean some additional training. I need to spell those things out. And I also need to be able to overcome objections, both proactively as I think about presenting and reactively as questions in real time appear. Now,
It's been since college, since I worked retail, but there are a couple of key components I remember in my retail training days and many of those things, things like enthusiasm, knowing what you're talking about, overcoming objections, those are sales techniques. But the cool thing here is that we're not talking about a new laptop. What we're talking about is selling a vision, a vision of doing things a little bit differently.
in order to support all of our students, regardless of the types of needs they have or their capacities as they shift even throughout the course of a day or a week. So when I say selling, I want us to think about it more as connecting. Connecting the work we do to people and their motivations. to do that, I think we need to think about why it is that people do the work they do in the first place. So why do higher ed practitioners enter the college or university setting?
I know many of us stumble by way of being an admissions counselor right out of college and maybe that's my own story. But why do we stick with it? Many of us, whether in the college or university setting or the K-12 setting or somewhere else, heart is a big part of the story. I often describe the work that I and my team do as heart work. It's that kind of work that takes a lot of passion and a lot of commitment and can also carry a lot of weight.
But where heart is involved, then comes the power of stories. Stories are the lifeblood of so many of our experiences, and we remember our experiences through stories. Stories that we share with our friends and our families and our colleagues, and they give us the power to relive memories and feelings over and over and over again, to teach, to share.
Stories have filled libraries and they've birthed religions. They're powerful things. So to connect folks to the type of change necessary for UDL reform to make people entertain the idea of opening up their classrooms to recording, our students' stories need to be a powerful force. Yeah, we need data and we need evidence. So showing another institution who has done this type of work.
showing what the utilization looks like, showing whether or not there seems to be a correlation between attendance and this new policy, or whether it seems to be more of an boon to accessibility. We can collect data in support with evidence, but when we go to present the story that we share, that's powerful and that's often what sticks with people. The stories that we choose to share, can generate understanding and make meaning of experiences with which were unfamiliar. Many of us love books or movies or television shows for that reason. They introduce us to new worlds, to new places and times and people and experiences that we probably would not know otherwise. But more powerfully in our professional lives, stories can help us build empathy. And according to Goodman, that helps us connect with and subsequently care about others who seem different.
In my opinion, if we can create this care, we can tap into that part of all education practitioners that just wants to make life better for our students, that started this and still does this because of its heart work.
Empathy is powerful, but let's go back to Barclay's model. Change in leadership behavior is the first step to advancing student achievement. So if we're going to build empathy, we have to demonstrate empathy ourselves. So as leaders, I think the challenge there is being further and further and further removed from the work you did that once greatly motivated you and gave you a ton of purpose. When you're in meetings talking about the work,or strategizing or writing reports about the work. Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the work itself and what it felt like.
We as leaders can't lose sight of that empathy that we feel for students, and we can't fail to demonstrate it for our teams.
At an institution I once worked at, a comment was left by an employee that said, I wish we cared as much for our team as we did for our students. And I think about that all the time because we are asking our faculty, our staff to do a ton of empathy work, to think about our students, to meet them where they are. We're asking them to do a lot of that. And if we're not demonstrating that to them, how is that going to trickle down into students?
And how is that going to change their behavior toward one another and toward themselves?
So we need to think about how we as leaders, we can foster empathy in our leadership teams and how we can embed it in our institution so that it flows throughout the full institution.
Goodman states that increasing empathy requires engaging both the intellectual and emotional needs of the audience. You gotta talk to the head and the heart for this. And I think about my friend who's a great data guru, and as soon as I get excited and energized and I talk to her about an idea, she wants to know about the numbers. And we laugh about it now, and I'm getting so much better about wanting to be proactive and have that in advance because I know the question is coming. But we have to do both pieces.
Remember what I said earlier, we don't want to create a solution that's in search of a problem. So we want to effectively speak to the intellectual component, talk about why this is a challenge, talk about what's going on, and then match that to the emotional component of the story.
So what types of stories am I talking about? I'm not talking about necessarily a book that you would choose from your Kindle or your local library. I'm talking about stories that speak to specific experiences, histories and case studies, stories that are depersonalized of student experiences that teach about what others, specifically those who might be most vulnerable are experiencing so that we can.
think about their lives for just a little bit so that we can walk a mile in their shoes. It's that type of broadening perspective that can be challenging for some folks, particularly those folks who may not be as in tune with their own emotions and what's going on with them. So remember, empathy is a skill, and we're building it. And by sharing stories, we're continuing to share experiences and to broaden those for folks. And we're cultivating a genuine curiosity about what life is like if it's not your life. And I think if we cultivate that empathy and that curiosity, people will naturally want to do things differently. So for example, let me in the case of again, one small example of a universal design for learning concept, implementing campus-wide recording of lectures.
Think for example of a story I could share. What type of story might move the needle here for folks? What might help generate buy-in, something that Katie Novak says is so important for our teachers, our front-end workers? What story could I tell? Well, for me, I work with a lot of students and I supervise the function of disability services. And as a result, I hear a lot of types of stories.
I could perhaps depersonalize a story or think of a story of a student from years past who might not be as recognizable and I could share it. I could pull an example of history or tell a bit about the history of the field and help people to understand why people with specific disabilities benefit from recording. Once I do that, I can also tell some very real stories about students who have no disabilities, for very real circumstances, circumstances that our instructors and staff may have encountered on their own may have totally legitimate reason for wanting a recording and why on the whole many of us don't want to miss out on experiences and this is a tool that's supportive and not designed to replace.
So as we think about this and we think about stories and how we can build empathy through stories and how we can then lead through change with empathy, I wanna leave you with something to chew on. So this is a segment where I want a little bit of audience feedback. So tell me what you think about it. When we share stories with students, how do we go about that in a way that's ethical?
That doesn't ask them to speak to a room full of other students about their own experiences, or that doesn't make us tell a student's story in a way that identifies them. How do we communicate what another experience is like without looking like we're taking a field trip into someone's life? Think about it for a little bit. Let me know, what are some strategies that you use to share different types of stories so that you can broaden understanding and increase buy-in for things that you're hoping to do to support a particular population.
That's all the time we have for today, but I want to thank you for taking a little time to pull up to the table and have a little chat with me today. And until next time, thank you so much and have the best day you can.