372: You Can’t Have a Yes Without a Why With Carla Ward

But with that, one of the things that I love is that All of the directors and owners who are listening to today's podcast, you all have one thing in common, and that is that you have staff probably who are passionate about the industry.

And we have an expert guest to help you today kind of figure out how to talk to your teachers on how to continue to be their best.

Is that a good way to kind of summarize our today's topic?

I'm going to go with yes, because that is my favorite word, is yes.

I always like to joke that yes is such a powerful word, and partially because if you think about, you know, books like Getting to Yes, Yes Man, like the entire premise, or Yes Day with Jennifer Garner, like those entire movies are basically... mocks of just saying yes all the time because we say no so much.

So we're going to talk about yes spaces.

But before we do that, I want to talk about why.

And partially because it's something I discovered when I was director and supervisor of a center was we were trying to control the children so much that we were getting unnecessary behaviors.

And part of it was it wasn't even necessarily trying to control the human beings themselves.

We were trying to control how they played within their environment.

So one of the first things I did when I started out as director was and my staff lost their minds, but bless them, they trusted me, was I went and took all pre-designed materials out of their classrooms.

So plastic farmhouses came out, plastic castles came out.

And my rule of thumb is two weeks.

If we're going to try something, we have to try it for two weeks because it goes two ways.

Either one, it goes beautifully week one because it's new and it's fancy and then it absolutely falls apart the second week.

Or it's an absolute nightmare the first week and you want to throw in the towel really easily.

But then the second week it works out really well.

And then the third option is, you know, it's beautiful and it all works out tickety-boo.

So the rule of thumb was we're going to take all the pre-designed things out of our programs and we're going to put in blocks.

We're going to put in, you know, Amazon boxes.

We're going to put in blocks.

We're going to do all of that.

And we're just going to let children play.

Those pre-designed things never made it back into their classrooms.

And they were welcome to after two weeks if they could give me a good reason as to why.