What to Do When Your MTSS or PLC Framework Hits a Plateau

0:03 Welcome to the Catching up with Casey's show. If you are tired of chasing buy in, frustrated with teams who can't seem to get on the same page, or over the constant struggle of holding people accountable without micromanaging, this is the show for you. I'm Casey Watts, speaker, author and the creator of the Clarity Cycle Framework. I help leaders just like you take teams from frustration to alignment, so teams can work collectively toward a common purpose in a committed way instead of against each other as though they are functioning in different organizations. And we do it all through the craft of clarity. Whether you lead from the middle or you were the front facing leader of your organization.

0:46 On this show, we bring clarity to the seemingly small things in leadership that make the biggest difference because clarity precedes capacity. Now with all of that said, let's dive into today's episode. Well, hey everybody, welcome to another show, another episode. Tonight's going to be a really good conversation that connects extremely well with that introduction that you just heard. I am joined by Curtis Hewson and we are going to be talking about what to do when you're MTSS or PLC framework hits a plateau.

1:33 And I know for a fact that this probably resonates with a large portion of my listeners. So Curtis, welcome to the show. I'm glad you're here. Yeah, so great to be back on Casey. Love having any chance to connect with you. Yeah. So this. Yeah, we have. I've already had you on the show before, but it's been a good while. Well, it's been a hot minute. Absolutely. Yeah. But tonight, since it has been such a such a good long time since you've been on the podcast, share a little bit about who you are and the work that you do. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Curtis Houston. I'm located in Alberta, Canada and I work with educational leaders across our province, our country, across North America and beyond to really put robust collaborative structures in place so that nobody has to operate on an island in this profession. That we are leveraging the expertise that is in the room. And we do it through a framework we've developed over, boy, almost 20 years now that we refer to as collaborative response.

2:38 And I love the title of this because anytime we share this with schools that have strong PLC structures in place or have MTSS frameworks that they're following, when they hear this, they go, oh, my goodness, this was the piece that we've been missing for ourselves. So the great news is if you're listening to this and you hear collaborative response and go, oh, we have to stop doing this thing to do something else. No, no, no, no, no. We, I get very excited working with schools or with school districts that already have that foundation, because what we're going to talk about will be very easy shifts for you to make. I'm really excited. I'm already, I'm looking at a question that I that I've written down for us to discuss that I just want to dive into right this moment and I'm going to save it.

3:27 I also want us to talk about, just don't let me forget. I want to talk about resistance when it comes to PLC or maybe even MTSS. So plug that in your brain, OK? You guys live in Canada, but I know that that's not the only unique thing about you. So tell us something that just makes you guys just, you know, average human. The average Joe, if you will. Yeah, I have the great pleasure of getting to engage in the work that I do in schools and districts with my wife as well. And I often get the Oh my goodness, you guys work together, live, you're spending all this time together and yeah, love it.

4:08 It's for us. We well, maybe I shouldn't speak for my wife Lorna, but for myself, I love the time together. We yeah, we share all in coping work. So that's that's one thing that is unique. And 2nd is, yeah, we're living through the seasons of grown children that are in universities, married, all of these different places. So yeah, our what life looks like for us now has changed quite a bit, which has been awesome. Love. I love the little kid side of things, but I really love the grown up kid side of life. Yeah, I think that's kind of where my husband and I are getting to also, except we're in the the late teenage years, so there's still lots of angst and, you know, figuring.

4:54 Out that, yeah. What is what is an adult? I am an adult, but I'm not, you know, like it's just, it's kind of a tough season, but. I, my mom still still does the oh, you're traveling? Can you let me know when you get wherever I'm like? I'm in my 50s, but yes, I'd love to. Yeah, yeah. We get just little snippets of sweet moments that we're going to have as they get. Yeah, absolutely. About that. Yeah. OK, I'm gonna dive right into this with the resistance piece of this because one of the things like when I'm presenting to to at conferences during one of my workshop sessions, I post this image of these different comments that I have screenshotted from different Facebook groups where I just searched the term PLCS just to see like what?

5:45 How do people really? Feel about this. And it's a whole list of very negative things. And I'm curious about what kind of resistance you've heard when it comes to PLC specifically, but maybe even MTSS and what how you would challenge people to see it in a different way, specifically with collaborative response? Yeah. So I think where I'll start with is what I typically see as the resistance and experience this because I made this mistake as a leader and it was trying to micromanage the collaboration that people were doing. When I learned that. And and it was a mentor, Jay Mctie that was in a session with him and he said, you know, great leaders, they set the banks of the river and then let the water flow. Don't try and micromanage the flow of the water. Just put people into predictable, clear situations and then let good people do good work within it. And I think when I learned I do not need to dictate the agenda when teams come together, I need teams to create and I need to create banks as as a leadership team. And we're going to get feedback on it consistently. But one of the things that we did was, all right, we have a core goal that we're trying to achieve as a school, getting really clear on this one thing we're trying to really move the needle on.

7:12 And then said for each of our teams, all right, you're going to set a goal that is meaningful to you. When you take a look at your data, what are you seeing? And then you establish the goal so that when you come together, you're working towards that goal as a leader. I'm not going to tell you how to work towards your goal, but I am going to hold you accountable to the goal and we're going to create structures or situations where teams can be responding to each other around what progress have you made towards your goal? What are you seeing? What challenges? That was one of the questions I love to ask teams was what challenges do you anticipate in achieving your goal and what do you, what can I do to help support you?

7:54 I think when we move to that, it helped tremendously. I do see schools where they come into their PLCS and there's this doc that they have to fill in that's massive with questions that have been predetermined, where somebody has seen this in a, in another school, a presentation or book and said, ah, this I'll bring in. And yeah, those are the situations where you have PLCS become that dirty word. This is interesting. Within my own school, when we started to really build these structures in place and we talked about the PLC layer, we call it collaborative planning as an overarching term, as one of the layers of collaboration.

8:37 When we started, we didn't use the word PLC because it had baggage in this school. We said we have grade level teams coming together and even though Richard Dufour could have looked at it and said I know exactly what you're doing, we didn't use the term because it it had baggage with it. Yeah. OK. There's a lot to unpack there. You talked about layers. Well, first of all, highly commend you on being the leader who recognized we don't have to call it APLC. We don't have to use that terminology, especially if people have these negative narratives that they're bringing with them. We can reset this and just call it something different, but still put in, like you said, those. I I say, I would say guardrails or just those, you know what is the word?

9:32 I'm looking protocols, models, the things that are going to help us to stay within some lanes and not veer too far left or right. And Casey, those protocols are so important because if they're done well, they give clarity. And I know that you, you are the master when it comes to clarity. When we can create things that are predictable and consistent, man, it frees up people's cognitive load to really focus on innovative and creative thinking. Yeah, and I hear about too. So there are a lot of people who I think have these negative perceptions of PLCS for a variety of reasons. But I hear people approaching the PLC work in so many different ways for, for some organizations, it's we're meeting every day for 30 minutes. And then for some people it's we're meeting 45 minutes once a week.

10:24 And then for some people, no, we're, we have PLC once every four weeks. So it's just all of these different ways people are approaching the work. But you mentioned layers of collaboration. And I know in our title, we have MTSS in this as well. So I, I'd love to start to get into hashing a little bit of that out. What do you mean by layers of collaboration? You bet. OK. So I'm going to connect this and think about schools that you've been in, see where there's PLC like structures in place and MTSS. What we found over 20 years, and I did not understand this at the time of as a leader. It wasn't until upon reflection, we had been establishing something that we called a collaborative team meeting. And I'd love to talk to you a little bit more about this here in a bit.

11:10 It's the focus of an upcoming book that we have coming out. For anyone listening, go to collaborativeteammeeting.com. You're going to find everything there anyway. We are putting this in place. We are seeing success. And then we would show it to other schools and they would start implementing and then not see the same impact that was happening. And we kept trying to figure out why, like what's happening that's different in their situation than it was in ours. And then we started to see where schools where this was all coming together and went, Oh my goodness, in every situation. And upon reflection, our school as well, there were 4 layers of collaboration happening.

11:51 So I'm, I'm going to go from either end of these spectrums. And then in time, these layers start to connect to tears in our continuum. But that's, we might not even get to that here today. So Casey, every school you've ever been in has what we call our fourth layer of case concept. And again, don't get hung up on the terms. Think more about these as broad categories. Case consult is anytime we come together with one student on the agenda, typically it's in relation to crisis or complexity. Lots of times it's a reactive conversation, not always, but many times. And essentially, it's whoever is in attendance is determined by the situation.

12:34 We may have parents as part of that conversation. We may say we want the teachers. Sometimes teachers will say, no, just keep me updated. But it's one student. Of course, every school has had these meetings since the beginning of time, and they're critical. But without these other layers, everything becomes a one student at a time, which is insanely inefficient. It is not a way to run an effective school. Yeah. OK. Let me pause you real quick. Pausing. What you just mentioned there is my experience with MTSS meetings, one student at a time, and we start with our sometimes it's just we're going to go in alphabetical order and then we get to the end of our time. Well, we've run out of time to talk about all of the students, so we rush through it, or there are some students we choose not to talk about at all because of the time crunch. And then, you know, like, so it just kind of loses its steam and we don't actually follow through with some of the things that are really a necessity for.

13:33 Students, This is why these layers that I will describe become so important because of course, we always need a meeting where we're going to talk about a student that through this layering less and less get to that. In fact, we often say we're going to reduce the number of meetings in your school by adding one more, which is this collaborative team meeting I'll get to eventually. OK, so I'm going to skip to the other side when go down to what we would call our Tier 1. So that was Tier 4. And again, usually there's a three tier model that we see in most MTSS structures. We talk about taking tier one and breaking it apart to get really intentional. Describe what I mean. I we do not add another tier on top. It's about making universal tier one really, really focus. OK, so I'm going to come down to what we call collaborative planning.

14:26 And anytime I hear school say, well, we have PLCS, awesome. It probably fits in this layer. The intention of this layer is that we are engaging in conversations that will impact all students. And we're not necessarily talking about individual students in these conversations. We might be looking at our data and saying, hey, we're seeing a gap in this. It may be at a high school, a department team that is meeting together and saying, all right, when we look at our results, we have lots of students that have difficulty with connecting fractions to decimals. We need to do some work on that. Within my own school, I had five different types of teams that were going on at this collaborative planning layer with, again, the idea that what's happening in these conversations are impacting all students. OK, makes sense.

15:16 Yeah, absolutely. OK. So this is where I'm just going to reiterate, this is where for most schools when they say my PLC meeting, really what we're calling it is that fits under the umbrella of a collaborative planning meeting. Yeah, you bet. Now we were hesitant to call this PLCS because we would see schools that were doing work that wasn't fitting DU fours for question PLC model, but still was really highly effective. But again, the the defining characteristic was they weren't talking about individual kids. They were talking about cohorts or whole student sets. Or when we had grade level teams come together, the grade level was working on, you know, what could be some common small group instruction practices that we could be doing. Maybe we're learning how do in one team they were really focusing on enhancing their vocabulary instruction, instructional practices.

16:12 OK, yes, impacts all schools. OK, now I'm going to skip back up to our third layer and in we called it the school support team. And what this was was every Thursday, myself, the assistant principal, our learning support teacher. So think special Ed coordinator or MTSS coordinator and a family school liaison that was working with with families. The four of us would meet and say, all right, who are the kids that need support beyond the classroom or in addition to the classroom? In time, there was a referral system put into place for how a kid got on our agenda. Sometimes a student or a family might be on there for multiple weeks at a time, but this was intended to be the layer of who are the kids who need extra beyond the classroom. For us, lots of times this was a key structure where we would determine, OK, what do we need to do to support the kid? Sometimes it was what do we need to do to support the teacher? Do we need some additional coaching to be put into place? Do we need to somehow model some strategies for them as well? And again, any school that has MTSS framework or structure, they have this meeting.

17:27 It's usually the the decision making that is determining is this kid moving from a general educational focus to a specialized. Now, the problem that we saw is sometimes it felt like a handoff. Sometimes teachers would say, I've done everything and it felt almost like here you take them as well. I hear often times in schools that sometimes it becomes, well, this student is no longer my responsibility because they're, they're on a special Ed caseload or whatever the terminology. We don't use that terminology here in our home province anymore, but the themes are still consistent.

18:13 We found that by introducing a very intentional meeting structure that we called a collaborative team meeting became the bridge between the PLC work and the MTSS individual student focus work. And it really became the place where we would identify key issues for students that the conversation actually wasn't about the student, it was about what could we do instructionally to respond to that issue. It's about building people's tool boxes. Because sometimes a student would get referred to that school support team and we'd go, oh man, if this person could have 10 minutes with someone 3 Doors Down, I think they would know some strategies to be able to handle this a little bit better. But this might not be someone who's in a similar PLC grouping as them.

19:04 So sometimes we have school states. So should we stop doing PLCS and do this collaborative team meeting? And we say no, actually try and find a way to introduce this one more meeting. And the idea is we're going to reduce the number of meetings at the Tier 3 and Tier 4 levels of school support in the case consult. Less and less kids are going to get there because of how much attention we're paying on classroom instruction. Yes, OK, I and I hear it. I just heard it the other day and I think I mentioned this on another podcast episode that I did. A former colleague said that she was listening to some conversations about, you know, hire.

19:44 We're in the hire, we're in the thinking about hiring season, you know, like who's leaving, who's coming? What do we need? And they were saying we really need another interventionist. They need to hire another interventionist. Well, my former colleague was like, you have 5 already. And but they were saying, yeah, but our, the number of students that keep coming into these tiers 2 and three are just, it's more and more. We need more people to serve them. So of course my colleague and I were like, if we if we're noticing that many students there, we obviously need to prioritize not hiring someone, but but.

20:26 Thinking about our Tier 1 instruction and thinking about what's happening happening in our classrooms and to our point of this topic tonight, are we giving people time and attention they need to collaborate effectively in order to provide that quality instruction? Yeah. So imagine this, Casey. Think about what it would look like at a high school where you have a science department that's meeting in again, let's use the term PLCS. You have a mathematics, you have a humanities team. But what if once a month for 60 minutes, we could mix people. So now I'm coming into a room as a as a math specialist with someone who teaches sciences, someone who teaches humanity, someone who's teaching phys Ed or cosmetology.

21:13 And now the conversation, it flips just a little bit. Can I describe what this collaborative team meeting focus looks like? Yes, absolutely. Now pause, because this is what your newest book is about, right? 100%, yeah. OK. So our the work that we talked about collaborative response is all of these layers put in place and then how do they connect to a tiered continuum of supports and how do we infuse data and evidence? It's bigger, but we always get questions about this one meeting structure, which is really critical. It, it's the engine that drives it all. It's not the whole model, but we got so many questions on it that we went OK, this is we need to write all these things down that we keep sharing. Yeah.

21:55 Can you tell me why you think you kept getting questions about it? Like why is that the one that people are hyper focused on? Because when we say we're going to come together to talk about kids, all of us have in our mind exactly the meeting that you discussed earlier where we say, all right, let's talk about Charlie. Everyone goes around who's gotten something about Charlie. And I taught his sister, I taught his mother. And it goes off on tangents. And then we say, OK, good. I think we got a plan. Now let's talk about Jackson and we go and then we go, Oh my goodness, our 40 minutes is up and we got through four. Watch how this meeting is going to look different. So there's a facilitator. This doesn't just happen just because let's plunk 6 people in a room and hope the conversation is is useful.

22:40 A facilitator will say, Casey, who's a student that you've brought and what is a celebration that you're seeing for them as success? 30 seconds and you share this and then we intentionally ask and in time, you know the questions coming. So you're going to say it, we're going to say, what do you think you did that led to that success? What we're doing is we're reinforcing over and over again, what are the practices that we're doing that are leading to success? Name them, articulate them because someone in the room is going to go interesting. When you say I make sure that I greet this student every morning and I say, OK, how do you do that? What does that look like? And when you say, well, I, I do it in this way and another person in the room goes, hmm, hadn't thought of doing it like that. So we always say take a, a portion, a small portion, maybe 10 minutes to celebrate.

23:31 And people come ready with these. They have pre meeting organizers all set out. And then we say, all right, let's set 10 minutes. And Casey, we know you've brought a student and in time we start color coding our data so that when we say bring a student, we're not going to the students that the data says are red are most at risk. We're focusing on yellow. If you were to use a simple traffic light of red, yellow, green with yellow being these are students who are not quite where we want them yet, but they're close. They're approaching. Let's focus on that. And we say, all right, Casey, we know you have a student. Don't say their name, please. What is a key issue that you're seeing getting in the way? And when you say, all right, right now I'm really struggling with a kiddo and the key issue is limited stamina when working in in independently.

24:22 The kid cannot stay on task. Now in time we get really succinct and concise with that key issue. It takes practice. But when we say, all right, so key issue is on task behavior for extended periods of time when working independently, OK, great. Everyone else in the room write down the name of a student where you're also seeing this happen. Just take a moment because I guarantee someone else is also experiencing that. And even for the person that goes, no, I don't have that yet or anyone like that, Then we're gonna turn to and say, all right, everyone open your tool boxes. What do you do? Person who doesn't have this, I know you've had it in the past. What are some strategies that you've used? And Casey says, well, in my classroom, I have a visual timer and someone goes, oh, I've, I've done that, but I've also done sand timers right at the person's desk. And somebody else jumps in and says, I actually get the kids to track how long they're on task.

25:19 And I have a couple that are setting goals for where they want to be able to get to. And someone goes, oh, that's a great, I'd love to see a copy of that goal setting sheet that you have. Now when someone says, I use sand timers right at the child's workspace, no one in the room is allowed to go, oh, I've tried sand timers, They don't work for me. We're not evaluating, we're just sharing. And then when the time keeper says we've got a minute left, we come back and say, all right, Casey, who's the student you're thinking of? Just the name, no story. And what's one thing that you're willing to try from this? We write it down. We set that as a as an action. And then we turn and say, all right, Mr. M, who's a student, you brought just the name.

26:03 And what's one thing you're willing to try? And when he says, I really want to try Casey's idea, but I think I need some help. Sometimes people won't even say that out loud. But as a leader, if I'm facilitating, I might even ask intentionally. Do you think you'll need some help with that? Or I might even say, knowing the student that that you've got in mind, I really think Casey's idea is going to work as well. Can I help you get that set up? Or do you need some time to go in and spend time with Casey? So what we're doing in this is we're not focusing on individual students, even though we've got them ready with names and issues. What we're trying to do is open up tool boxes so everybody leaves with their toolbox just a little bit deeper than it was before. And Casey, I'm I'm nearing 30 years in this profession. I sit in dozens, if not hundreds of these CTMS or watch recordings.

27:00 I walk out of every one of them with a website I've never heard of before, a resource I hadn't thought of, an approach that is novel, like hundreds of meetings and decades of teaching experience. And I still walk out of them going, there's an idea I hadn't heard before. Or sometimes we have the vets go, I used to do that, why did I stop? And what we're doing here is getting really intentional about building up our classroom instruction. And we find this over and over and over again. In time, less students start surfacing into the other more intensive layers are the need for five interventionists starts to go down because of the capacity getting built at the classroom level over and over and in a way that is empowering people.

27:49 This is empowering teachers to say we have decades of teaching experience in this building, let's leverage them. Yeah, you are. This is a perfect example of embedded professional development, Embedded professional learning that teachers want. I can't tell you the number of times that I've heard teachers say, why are they bringing these people in? We could be teaching this to each other. I also team. What we also see from this is our the facilitator when someone has an idea and the others in the room go oh that's a great idea, hadn't thought of that. Awesome. At the next staff meeting, can we give you 3 minutes? Show us what this looks like?

28:34 Yeah. And imagine you talked about it already, but the empowerment that comes with that, the confidence that you're building in your teachers to take risks and to apply to implement things that maybe like you said, they've already implemented. I've let go of it. I'm going to bring it back. Yeah, I and and feeling as though I am a contributor and I serve an essential purpose as part of this team and as part of this campus. Casey, we say every adult in this conversation is an expert and a learner because all of us have expertise, strategies, ideas, resources that are valuable. But none of us have this all figured out. We're all a learner. We can all walk away with something added to our toolbox from this.

29:19 Yeah. And I think when I read your book, because I've already read it, I'm one of those people that got the chance to do that. That was one of the things that I highlighted was everyone is an expert and a learner. Yeah. Yeah, we can live in both those worlds, absolutely. And I think we forget that. I think it's easy, easy to forget that. There was something else that I started to write down. I've got all of these notes here and they're a jumbled mess, but embedded professional learning. It was on that thread. I I think too, what we often see is that these PLCS or collaborative team meetings of people aren't, aren't using that time effectively. We're not focused on instruction. Well, this is a way to truly focus on instruction. That's going to move the needle.

30:15 Absolutely. And we then see people that start to create if key issue is X, here's strategies that we could try that are not being generated from an outside expert. This is these are things in our building that people are trying and utilizing. We start making masterless. This in time starts to inform the development of our continuum of supports within our school where we start articulating what will we try before things get escalated to next level. So it's getting super clear. Yeah. For this. When you're rolling this out to a school because one of the things that we, you know, there was some people are hesitant to shift to a new framework. When you are helping people to take this on, how do you help them to get past that hesitation? What do you say to them?

31:09 Usually I don't say anything. Usually it's let's either watch a clip and again, if you go to thatcollaborativeteammeeting.com, you're going to find a starter kit that has resources and everything that you could have around this meeting. I usually say, let me model a snippet or let's watch a video because almost instantly once people see it, they go, This would help us so much because every one of us can remember being in the meeting where we got hung up on Curtis and it just went in circles, tangents, Yep, went off. And and then the problem with that is it directs all our attention off to something external and lots of times out of our locus of control. What we do in this collaborative team meeting is it turns everything back around to say what's the challenge and what would we do to respond it?

31:59 It becomes way more from a position of hope where I know you've been in the meetings where it felt really negative, almost hopeless when it's the same names coming up again and again and people don't know what to do. The the interesting thing is we say the collaborative team meeting is not the space where you bring up your most at risk students. That's why we have these other layers. But what you are discussing and talking about probably helps them the most. Yep. Me hearing you say that you use a visual schedule in your classroom, but you've designed it this one little way and I go, that's genius. I'm going to try that. That's and I'm I'm going to try it for Darcy because Darcy's close and I think just having a visual reminder would help them. Well, that's not just going to help Darcy in the room. It's going to help everybody.

32:49 And it's through all of these small little steps that we see incredible impact being made school wide. Yeah, absolutely. OK, so let's talk about if when someone reads your book, it's easy to read the book and say this is great, what's their very next step? Very next step is to find a small pilot group who's interested in doing some learning alongside them and then say, all right, let's try one of these collaborative team meetings for lots of times we have on our website. Some overview works workshops are like on demand workshops that they can take to get the big picture.

33:34 But I'll often say, don't worry about introducing to your whole staff yet. Get a critical mass built. And, and again, this is whenever I hear someone ask, how do I get my staff to buy in, my response is I don't focus on buy in, focus on building critical mass till you get to a tipping point. Find two or three, two or three people you know that will champion and let's start there. Yes, OK, we could because I could spin off on another conversation with that. We're going to close though. This has been so good. I am curious to know when is the book? Is the book available? It is coming out May May 19th.

34:19 Is. When? May 19th. So we've got a little bit of time, but you have some other things that people can look into as where they are awaiting the arrival of the book. Yeah, that would be good show notes. So sure about that. Yeah, and that's collaborative team meeting, singular collaborative teammeeting.com. Right now we've got a starter kit that'll be found on that page, and then in time it'll have links to the book. We're going to make a companion website that has all the resources and templates that are available for free. Even if you don't get the book, it'll still be there. The book will help put it all together, but those resources will be available. People could also go to jigsawlearning.ca/free and we have a free webinar or kind of a free online training that talks about these 4 layers of team to understand a little bit more clearly than what I rambled off in just a few minutes here. OK.

35:16 Well with that said, I'm going to say to listeners, if you are finding that you need a reset for PLCS and they are not what you know they could and should be, Curtis is available to come and work with your staff. Yes, Curtis. Oh, absolutely. We work. Actually, a lot of our work now is with cohorts of districts where they're they're envisioning a common language for all schools, but we also work with some individual schools as well. So absolutely reach out. Love to. Help. OK, great. So they can come and provide some training on that and support you throughout the year as you're starting to implement some of these collaborative layers of meetings. OK, this has been awesome.

36:05 Curtis, you've kind of already shared where people can find you. That's going to be in the show notes. What are your last thoughts? What do you want to leave the audience remembering? I think coming back down to what has become a driving mantra for us in this work, and it's that every child deserves A-Team. I love the Ted talk that Rita Pearson, doctor Rita Pearson did a number of years ago, I think it was 2013, where she talks about every child deserves a champion. That is a really, really inspiring and hopeful message. But I think we have to go a little bit further. I think trying to be a champion for every student can be a recipe for burnout if not done well.

36:51 However, I think if we can envision teams, I think our kids deserve us working in teams where it's not left to individual responses, but rather collective or collaborative responses. Every child deserves A-Team. To me, I think that's that should be critical work that we are envisioning within our our schools. Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show, guys. Check out the show notes because it's all going to be there. You're going to want to dive into it. And if you want to be made aware of, hey, this book is available, you need to get on Curtis's e-mail list. So you guys are aware of that. OK, Curtis. Thanks.

37:33 Casey, always a pleasure. Thanks my friend, and thanks for the great work that you're doing. Absolutely. OK, we'll check you guys in the next episode. Bye, everybody. Hey listener, I am so honored that you listen to today's episode and I hope you gained something valuable from it. I'd also be honored if you did ME3 solid favors. First, subscribe to this show. I've got a lot of great content coming up and I don't want you to miss any of it. Second, be sure you're following me on social media platforms. You can find me at. Catch up with Casey on LinkedIn or Instagram. And finally, if you were looking to book a dynamic and relatable speaker for your next event, conference, or retreat, I would. I'd love to bring a message about how the craft of clarity makes a significant impact on both leadership and life. Until next time, always remember clarity precedes capacity.