Today we’d like to introduce you to Melanie Battles.
Hi Melanie, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My story as an educational consultant and youth advocate began when I started teaching in 2008. I worked in Memphis, TN as a middle school English teacher, where the large majority of my students lived in poverty or experienced homelessness. We had many challenges, such as behavior, violent or neglectful home lives, gaps in student achievement in math and literacy, and teachers who needed more support on how to properly attend to the multitude of needs of our students.
When I moved back to Arkansas, I continued teaching in majority black and brown schools and even though the poverty level was not as high, there still remained a large disconnection between the teachers and staff and the students, families, and communities they served. Teachers and administration seemed to be ill-equipped with the tools to serve students in ways that we now call trauma responsive and culturally responsive. Social-emotional learning was not a tool that every teacher used systematically; however, I experienced great success with my students when I intentionally connected with them and humanized their learning experience.
Throughout my 10+ years in public and charter education, I have come to realize that the REALEST gaps are around teacher preparation and professional development. Yes, our kids need support with their mental health and community problems that are systemically exasperated by the agenda of oppression and othering, furthermore, our teachers needed support in building their toolbox and unpacking their identities and expectations for how they engage students in the learning process.
My last few years working for a school district as an instructional coach yielded me the insight into the deep need for teacher mentoring, coaching, and support. So many teachers have the desire to see their students succeed and overcome the many barriers they are unfortunately facing, but they do not see how their behaviors, biases, attitudes, and engagement style is halting that process. This insight led me to create my consulting firm, Scholars for the Soul: An Educational Solutions Firm, LLC.
We are a culturally responsive teaching firm that partners with district and school leaders, as well as educators, to build their self-efficacy in teaching and engaging with students of diverse cultural backgrounds. Our goal is to connect teachers with the science of learning, i.e., how the brain works, by building their own and student’s own confidence and competence as learners. The quote, “only the learner learns”, signifies our ambition to go into a deep dive with educators to unpack the ways they have been conditioned to see and engage in their role as educators and to align their practice with evidence-based ways of being and practices that truly help to illuminate the genius in every child.
We are also very proud of our podcast “Teaching Matters 101” that can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast channels. We upload new episodes each Wednesday about teaching matters that really matter. It’s like your own personal professional learning seminar with a whole lot of soul.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Starting a business as a black woman is never a smooth road. There are challenges with funding, accessibility, biases, prejudices, and gatekeeping that I continually have to overcome. In addition to external factors, there is also so much mindset work that has to be encountered and worked through to actually get back to dreaming with expectations and actualizing those dreams through connections, consistency, determination, storytelling, sharing power, and hard work.
As you know, we’re big fans of Scholars for the Soul: An Educational Solutions Firm, LLC. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
We specialize in helping educators and schools to align their practices and ways of being with cultural responsiveness. Being culturally responsive means that teachers unpack their identities, the conditioning of their identity as a human who teaches, seek out the strengths and value in their students, and to form alliances with students, families, caregivers, communities, and colleagues to engage in a holistic style of teaching that focuses on how the brain learns through motivation, relevance, encouragement, scaffolding, memories, experiences and emotions.
We offer specialized cohorts for small group coaching that takes educators through the journey of this work. We work together through an online course and weekly coaching for six weeks to expand their lens around the basics of culturally responsive teaching and social-emotional learning. Our program has received rave reviews. The course content has been likened to college-level material that provides a depth of knowledge necessary to bridge conceptual knowledge (our perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs) with procedural knowledge (our actions, reactions, and reflections). We are very proud that we are now entering into our fourth cohort this July 2023 and we plan to continue to launch a new cohort every quarter of the year.
We also provide customized professional development workshops and coaching to schools who are looking to commit to three or more workshops, coupled with coaching and guidance, to ensure the work is not simply reviewed and learned but actually implemented and provide feedback to see our educators truly shine as culturally responsive practitioners.
Our firm prides itself on creating space for educators to “be” without judgment, or ridicule while also taking them on a personal+professional journey of growth, more insight, and a plethora of opportunities to lead this work in their respective schools and communities. We are ready to partner with schools, educator groups, and individual teachers to make being culturally responsive the WAVE that dominates how teachers serve their students.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Our big dream is to open the Soul Scholar Academy within the next 5-10 years and espouse this work within the very fiber of our being. We are expanding now with a small team of consultants who help to spread the gospel of this work by being hands-on and on-site to provide this coaching expertise to get the job done.
I see the education field changing drastically with a huge exodus of teachers if support is not given in a way that is transformative and sustainable. Our framework works to serve educators through honoring and prioritizing adult soul+self care by listening with grace, responding from the soul, and sharing through various power structures. If this work does not happen, we will see more teachers and administrators leaving and schools turning to virtual options which we have witnessed not to work for a large majority of our students.
But I still hold on to the hope that a “change is gone come”.
Pricing:
- Cohort Pricing-$697 for teachers
- Cohort Pricing-$897 for leadership
- Free E-book is available: First Steps to Understanding and Implementing Culturally Responsive Teaching, available at our website: scholarsforthesoul.com
Contact Info:
- Website: scholarsforthesoul.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/drmel_soulscholar
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/scholars4thesoul
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/scholarsforthesoul.com
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/scholars4soul
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/teachingfromthesoul
