Andrea Michelle is an English teacher from San Diego, California who has built a prominent social media following by positively voicing concerns about education while also sharing the fun stories that only a classroom teacher could tell.

This conversation was originally featured on our podcast The Flywheel Effect, which you can listen to here or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

Speaking Up For Educators

What was your career like before you were on Social Media? 

It's so interesting, because when I started posting stuff online, I honestly did not expect to have an audience, I didn't see anybody else talking about their experience in a way that I found very relatable. It was always these picture-perfect classrooms that were mostly elementary school teachers on social media posting about the sweet, wonderful moments they're creating in their classroom, and it's precious. 

But I just didn't see any secondary teachers that are a little dead inside👻, and honest about what we deal with on a day-to-day basis. So I started posting about the most honest things I possibly could. It's been really cool because I feel like it's helped a lot of people feel less alone in a time when education has been really hard. 

The discourse on social media, especially TikTok has been very negative and my goal is always to bring some light and positivity and satire and humor into the discussion. 

Not to say that problems don't exist. 

But the reason we're there is that it's actually really fun most days, and it's really cool to be able to have an impact on our community and on these kids.

It's both changed a lot and changed nothing weirdly. I feel there's a higher expectation on me because I've made my social media education-based and created an environment where people know me from social media. 

So I have students that are going to enter my classroom who have seen me on TikTok, and maybe have a preconceived notion of what that's going to mean for them. It's given me a lot of cool credits that probably are undeserved. 

They're like, Oh, well, she's got followers on social media, she's gonna be super fun. And I'm like, you still have to write essays! We will have fun, but we will also be writing essays.

How can we really grow teachers professionally?

So that's something I've thought a lot about because nothing drives me nuts more than people who complain without solutions, because that's not benefiting anybody. So I've been thinking a lot about that. One of the main things is to give teachers choices and actually differentiate. When your planning professional development:

• Give them some choice 
• Have a rotation where they can choose all the options that benefit them
• Don’t make the people who are elective or CTE teachers stick in with everybody else when it's not applicable

As an English teacher, I'm very spoiled. I feel like PD always has to do with English or math. But if I were sitting in a class that was trying to explain to me why I had to include math in my curriculum, I think I would cry, because math always makes me cry😂.

I can empathize with the teachers who are like this. So I think it's a matter of differentiation, and listening to the teachers to find the areas that they want some training on. 

Because giving choice and differentiation, it's the same thing as wanting our students to have choice and differentiation. 

You shouldn’t expect to please everyone. I have been sitting in some that I thought was great. But there were still teachers around me that were like:

“This is horrible.”

“I can't believe they're doing this, this is so patronizing.” 

There's always going to be that person. 

There also needs to be this understanding that you're not going to please everyone. But if you can give choices, maybe you'll provide real value to the majority of your staff.

How Can Teachers Impact School Culture?

Can you provide an example of how teachers could lead culture change?

As a teacher, it's a little bit harder to see your impact on a larger scale, we usually see an initiative that's going to be a little bit smaller in our classroom that then has ripples we don't find out about until a little bit later. 

One thing that I did at a small private school and you know, it's so hard because these are the kinds of things that you can get away with at a private school that's really small that you couldn't edit at a big school like where I am now. 

But we had a Gatsby unit. So you started out with like early American Revolution nonfiction texts, and it was so boring for them. It was so boring for me. 

We started with the scarlet letter, we were all dying like we were just so bored. So I wanted to find something that was going to eventually move into something that would wake them up and give them some enthusiasm. 

So to change the classroom culture of 11th grade and what it meant to be studying American literature. I threw a giant Gatsby party annually and we did it at my house and everyone dressed up and with like roaring 20s stuff. 

I had a little light out in the back of my backyard. We had like one of those Halloween inflatable character things that we like flipped and put some board shorts on and floated in the pool. And just tried to create some excitement and enthusiasm around something that would usually be really mundane. 

If we can make something fun and make it a little bit more exciting, why wouldn't we do that? 

Happier students are more likely to be able to learn, right? We know this is true.

So I think it's just a matter of trying to find ways to engage kids in a way that they can sink into and little things like working with the seniors on their senior prank so that no one's getting in trouble and nothing is getting destroyed. 

So that things can be fun when the opportunity arises. 

What advice would you give educators who are trying to find ways to improve culture?

I think that the first thing that we do is try and make sure that our little mini-community is healthy and doing what it should be, and is a positive space for the students.

I think that a big part of it as well is if you are upset about something, and it is not a rule that the admin created, then you need to talk to the people who created it, which is almost always the school board. 

You need to address it with the people who are actually in charge of making those changes and advocate respectfully, for the things that you think are important.

It's also kind of a shift of attitude to having empathy for the people that are leading us, as well as the people we're leading ourselves.

I really think as a teacher, I sometimes forget how incredibly challenging it would be to have a staff of 130, who are all mad at me for different reasons. I could not do it, I can tell you for sure, I could not do it. 

Because sometimes the job of an admin is to be the bad guy, to the kids, to the teachers to do all of that. And a lot of times you're just being hated for things that you didn't decide.So I think that focus on your classroom and trying to make sure that environment is healthy. 

And if you see things are unhealthy on the outside, then speak to the people making those choices, and come up with solutions. 

Part of my dissertation focuses on the way that stress impacts first-year teachers' relationships with our students. 

One of the things I've been looking at is, some studies basically came out and looked at that first year, and said, if you have a negative first year, you're more likely to view your whole teaching career as just negative, even if you had the exact same experiences as somebody else who framed it in a more positive light. 

I know it's a slippery slope to toxic positivity. That's not what I'm saying we should do. 

But it's framing it in a way that is healthy and honest, and like a true assessment of what's going on, and trying to be more solution-oriented. 

We should seek those solutions. 

That's something I've seen with a lot of the emails I'm getting from new teachers that are panicked.

They want so badly for it to be good. And the least we could do is try and support that and try and make it a little bit easier for them.