Building Resilience So You can Take in and Act on Critical Feedback

When I was a first-year special education teacher, I remember that during my first session with my new teacher coach, she gave me some critical feedback, and I burst into tears. I don’t actually remember the feedback. I just remember the intense feelings that came with it. I felt shame, frustration, sadness, and fear. These feelings were less about the critical feedback and more about the meaning I ascribed to it. I was so proud to be a special education preschool teacher. Even though it was my first teaching job, so much of my identity was tied up in being a good teacher and being a “natural” with young children with disabilities. Any criticism of my teaching felt like a critique of my identity and tapped into all the insecurities I had about my skills. Now, twenty years later, I can welcome critical feedback without such a visceral reaction. Some of this has to do with my having twenty years of practice taking criticism about my work, some of it has to do with my commitment to better self-care, and some of it has to do with my reframing what it means to be a good person and good teacher.

As I shared above, when I first went into special education, any kind of criticism was emotionally fraught for me. I didn’t really have much practice with critical feedback up to that point. I had been a strong student and never participated in any kind of sports or other activities that required me to have a coach. Even my student teaching went relatively smoothly and lacked much constructive criticism (though I realize now that vague comments about how I was doing great or that I taught such a great lesson for a student teacher were not particularly helpful in strengthening my instructional practices). The lack of opportunity to practice continuous improvement meant I hadn’t developed the skills to stay emotionally regulated during coaching sessions. As Dewey said, we all learn by doing, and I have not done this enough times to have the skills to cope with it. If you are new to taking in critical feedback or engaging in reflective practice, it will likely be hard for you at first, too (you may even cry), and that’s okay. Just know that the more you do it, the easier it will become for you. You’ll develop a metaphorical callus similar to the real calluses that ballet dancers develop as they learn to dance on pointe shoes.

Another reason that I burst into tears getting my first feedback is that I was so overwhelmed not only by everything that came with being a new teacher but also because I had the positive stress of adjusting to being a newlywed and the intense emotional stress of having a parent undergoing cancer treatments. I wasn’t sleeping well, I wasn’t feeding myself well, and I was so strapped for time that I had stopped exercising and spending time with my friends. I had stopped making time for any of my hobbies because I never got to the end of my to-do list. When that new teacher coach observed my lesson and sat down with me to reflect on it, I just couldn’t handle anything else. Currently, there is so much talk in early intervention and on social media about self-care that it almost seems trite to focus on it. It’s a necessity for those of us in human services, especially if they are committed to doing the hard work of becoming culturally responsive practitioners. We have to take care of ourselves so that we have the capacity to face hard truths about the world, our field, and our own practices. For this reason, we have to prioritize getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising or moving our bodies or being outside, and taking time to do things that bring us joy. With full caseloads and full lives, this may seem impossible. I assure you that you will be able to do more and better work if you take the time to care for yourself. Long-time equity and social justice advocates acknowledge that our work to change systems (like early intervention) is a marathon we’ll be running our whole lives. The work is urgent, immense, and never-ending, and that is precisely why we must take the time for joy, connection, and rest–so that we can have the energy to do the work and not burn out and quit (Chatman, 2021).

The last way that I was able to build my resilience so that I could face harsh truths about my practice was by reframing what it meant to me to be a good person and a good early intervention provider. Both of these things are central to my identity and how I see myself. When I was first getting critical feedback about my ability skills as an early interventionist or when I was first having to face the harsh realities of being a White woman working in a structurally racist system, both those identities felt threatened, and I got defensive. My defensiveness shut down my ability to do the work of reflection practice. This defensiveness is a normal and well-documented way for people to feel when they first start doing equity work (see chapter three) and one I have seen over and over again when I facilitate communities of practice related to increasing equity in early intervention. People (including myself) can get so caught up in defending their conceptions of themselves as good people that it becomes a barrier to reflective practice.

The only way around defensiveness is to untangle your identity as a good person or as a person who does good work helping children and families to change how you conceptualize what that means. One of the ways that I was able to do this was to reshape what I think it means to be racist and have biases. I had internalized that good people aren’t racist. Now that I know more about the socio-historical context of the United States, I understand that racism is structural and pervasive. It’s impossible to grow up here and not have internalized racist ideas. What makes a person good, then, is not whether or not we have the thoughts. It’s what we do when we have them or are given the opportunity to face them when confronted with how our actions convey an implicit bias. I had to replace my belief that good people aren’t racist because we live in a racist society, and good people are exposed to racist ideals. This realization has helped me maintain my self-concept of being a good person while also confronting the times that my actions during home visits were in direct contrast to my stated values. In 2020, Ijeoma Oluo (personal communication) tweeted, “…Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And that’s the only way forward.” I start to feel defensive when confronted with something I’ve done that isn’t culturally responsive or is even culturally destructive. I take a step back, reread this quote, and remind myself of my new concept of what it means to be a good person.

As a member of the dominant American culture, I’ve taken on the belief that to be good at being an early interventionist; I always have to do everything perfectly. After all, early intervention is helping the profession, so none of us wants to have to reckon with knowing our past practices have likely harmed families. When I first interviewed my former clients, I felt so much regret and sadness when they shared the ways that I wasn’t able to meet their family’s cultural needs and the stress they experienced working with me. I have to sit with that knowledge and also know that, at the time, I did the best I could. To quote Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better.” I’m not letting myself off the hook but rather giving myself the grace to learn how to do better. While it’s never our EI clients’ job to comfort us as we learn from our missteps, I want to remind you that each of these families still has a fondness for me and sees our time together in early intervention as positive for them and their children. I wasn’t the perfect practitioner for any of these families, but there was still beauty in our relationships. I think that a lot of that beauty and success came from my ability to reflect on my interactions with them and constantly work to hone the knowledge that I needed to be a more skilled, culturally responsive practitioner.