Before we get started today, I want to talk briefly about my book. Invisible Excellence is a book about something I have believed for a long time:
Teachers are carrying extraordinary skills, expertise, and value that too often go unseen.
And I want to change that.
This book is part of a larger mission to bring that excellence into the light—to help teachers recognize what they bring to the table and to help the world see it, too.
But books don’t make their way into the world on belief alone.
That’s where I’m asking you to be part of this with me.
The only way this book moves from draft to Actual Factual Published Book is with the help of people who believe in what it can do. I’ve created several ways to support the publication of Invisible Excellence, starting at $50. I’m sharing the link in the show notes and on my social media, so you can check out the options and see what works best for you
But this campaign is on a deadline. The push to raise the funds for publishing closes September 18 at midnight Eastern, so if you want to be part of bringing this book into the world, time is very limited.
This isn’t just about helping me publish a book. It’s about a mission to help make the value of teachers visible.
Opening:
If you’re a teacher who’s thinking about leaving—but the unknown feels overwhelming—you’re not alone. Leaving the classroom can feel like walking into unfamiliar territory… and it’s hard to move forward when you can’t see the path—or worse, when you feel like you’re stuck in a hole.
I’ve been there.
That uncertainty? That hesitation? That’s normal. but you don’t have to navigate it alone. I’m Vanessa Jackson. I spent 25 years in the classroom, and I’ve also worked inside the hiring world—helping people get jobs and understanding how those systems really work. Now I help teachers just like you navigate that in-between space—so you can move out of burnout and into a career outside the classroom that actually fits.
This is Teachers in Transition.
Let’s get you out—and into what’s next.
Hi! Welcome back to Teachers in Transition, the podcast for educators who are burned out, thinking about leaving the classroom, already making the leap, or trying to figure out what comes next. I’m Vanessa Jackson, and today we’re starting a mini-series on the Four Horsemen of Education. First up: we’re talking about what happens when Capacity leaves the chat. In our Teacher Hack, I’ll share a simple Google Docs trick to save you a little time and a lot of stress, and then we’ll revisit informational interviewing and why curiosity can be one of your best tools in a career transition.
Perspective Pivot: The First Horseman — Capacity (3:00)
I've had a concept bouncing around in my head for a little while now. At first, I thought this was going to be one Perspective Pivot, but the more I played with it, the more I realized there were four separate pieces to it. So, over the next few episodes, we're going to meet the Four Horsemen.
If you follow Christianity - or you've watched enough movies and television - you probably know about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Death, and either Conquest or Pestilence, depending on which version we're talking about. We'll figure that part out later. The important thing for our purposes is that when the Four Horsemen show up, things are going very, very badly. They make a great plot device.
But I want to turn that image around a little bit. Imagine that education once had four different Horsemen, and instead of galloping toward us bringing destruction, these four were riding alongside us as a sort of guard. They helped keep the work of teaching sustainable. And one by one, those Horsemen have disappeared.
For a while, maybe the other three compensated for the missing one. Then there were two, and they adapted. Then there was one. And I might argue that today we're down to none. So over these four episodes of the podcast, we're going to look at what those Horsemen were, what happened when we lost them, and (because this is the Perspective Pivot) what it might take to bring them back.
Our first Horseman is Capacity, although you might also use this one's nickname: Realistic Expectations. The idea behind it is incredibly simple: human beings have finite capacity. Teachers have finite time, attention, cognitive bandwidth, emotional bandwidth, energy, and working hours. There are still only 24 hours in a day, no matter how many things somebody would like you to accomplish during them. My mom used to comment that if someone gave me 25 hours in a day, I'd figure out a way to schedule 27 hours worth of stuff.
Even back in my first few years of teaching waaaaay back, I remember hearing, "We're just going to have to do more with less." More with less. More with less. Eventually my response became, "At some point, you get less with less." That's just how this works. Teachers and teaching cannot break the laws of math and physics just because we love our students.
At some point, there is no more blood to get from that stone, but that's where we are. We've pushed teachers beyond any reasonable concept of capacity, and then we've treated the predictable consequences of that as though they're individual failures. We're told that if you can't somehow make an impossible workload work, the problem must be you. (Spoiler alert—it's not you.)
There are bad administrators - and I want to be very clear that there are also very good administrators - but there are bad administrators who will hear a teacher say, "I am working 60-plus hours a week and I cannot keep doing this," and they will respond to that drowning teacher with some version of, "Well, that's the job. That's what you signed up for."
No. It isn't.
Teachers signed up to teach children. They signed up because they wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids, or because they loved science or music or reading or kindergarteners or teenagers or whatever particular flavor of chaos spoke to them. They knew teaching would require hard work. They did not sign up for an unlimited number of working hours.
I think one of the ways we got here is through one of the most dangerous phrases in education: "It'll only take five minutes." No single five-minute thing sounds unreasonable. We need you to document this. We need you to enter this over here, too. We need this uploaded into the new system, or we need you to send this additional communication. It's only five minutes.
The problem is that the old five-minute task doesn't disappear when the new five-minute task arrives. We just keep adding them. We've been doing that for decades, and eventually all those tiny, perfectly reasonable requests consume an enormous amount of time. Nobody ever seems to stop and total them up.
I can give you a really simple example from my own experience. When I was a student, part of math class sometimes involved grading papers. You passed your paper to somebody else, the teacher went through the answers, and you marked them. Was it a perfect system? Of course not. None of these systems are perfect.
But grading the paper was actually part of the learning process. If you were paying attention, you saw how somebody else approached the problem, or you saw where somebody made a mistake. And, importantly for this conversation, the teacher didn't take 30 papers home and do exactly the same thing that night.
In fact, my 7th grade pre-algebra teacher was also the cheerleader sponsor and drove DEMOLITION DERBY on the weekends! I thought she was the coolest human imaginable.
At some point, that practice largely disappeared, in part because of concerns about student privacy. I'm not arguing that we need to bring back peer grading exactly as it existed 40 years ago. What I want you to notice is what happened to the work. It didn't disappear; it moved back onto a teacher’s plate. The students stopped doing it during instructional time, and the teacher absorbed it.
That's capacity. We make a decision for a perfectly defensible reason, but we don't always account for where the work created by that decision is going to land. Again and again, it lands on the teacher. Five minutes here, ten minutes there, another half hour somewhere else.
Technology was supposed to help with this, and sometimes it absolutely has. I remember having a paper grade book, and putting a grade into that thing was incredibly fast. Calculating averages? Not so much. So during my first few years of teaching, when I had a desktop computer, I built myself an Excel spreadsheet. I entered the grades, Excel did the math, everybody was happy.
Then EdTech companies decided that they could merge a lot of administrative sorts of things into one place, and we moved into increasingly complicated digital systems - PowerSchool, Schoology, Canvas, learning management systems, student information systems, all of it. One stop shopping. These systems did some amazing things for schools and districts. They automated processes, collected data, and made information available to parents and administrators in ways that hadn't been possible before. Often, what was purchased wasn't stress-tested to see if it was, in fact, easier for teachers to use. And no one was really in the habit of asking: Did they REALLY reduce the teacher's workload?
Because often my homemade Excel grade book from more than 20 years ago was faster than the shiny system my district had purchased. Now I had to click into this screen, wait for it to load, click into the next screen, wait again, enter the information, save it, go back, click somewhere else, and wait again. Suddenly, the technology that's supposed to be making everything more efficient has created another series of tiny tasks in a little task cascade and every one of those tasks consumes a little piece of capacity.
And when everyone was doing it at the same time, it ran slower on district Wi-Fi. I know I often got so fed up that I decided to take it home and run it on my Wi-Fi so that OVERALL it would take less time. It just ate up pieces of my evenings and weekends. I'm not really sure that was a win.
The same thing happened with putting lesson plans online, digital resources, scripted lessons, documentation requirements, new platforms, and new initiatives. Very few of these things, examined individually, are outrageous. That's exactly why they accumulate. Every individual request can be defended with, "It'll only take five minutes."
But nobody is guarding the total. Nobody is standing at the door of the teacher's workday saying, "Okay, if this goes in, what comes out because we’re at capacity?" And that's what the Horseman of Capacity was supposed to do. Capacity isn't about whether an individual request is reasonable; it's about whether all of the requests are reasonable when they're stacked on top of each other.
Acknowledging capacity doesn't mean teachers aren't willing to work hard. It doesn't mean we don't innovate, learn new technology, or change how we do things. It means acknowledging the extremely uncontroversial fact that human beings have limits. When an organization continually adds responsibilities without removing responsibilities, eventually something has to give.
Maybe the lesson isn't as good. Maybe the feedback isn't as detailed. Maybe the teacher stops volunteering for things or stops answering emails at night. Maybe, eventually, the teacher leaves the profession entirely. At some point, ya get less with less, and we've spent a very long time acting surprised by that.
There are some genuinely interesting AI tools appearing now that may give teachers back pieces of this capacity, and I'm excited about that potential. But I'm also watching the same pattern happen again. If the primary question behind educational technology is, "What will convince a district to purchase this?" instead of, "What will give a teacher meaningful time back?" then we haven't actually restored the Horseman of Capacity. We've just given him another app to log into.
Next week, we'll talk about the second Horseman that has long since fallen off: Resources.
Teacher Hack: Build a Response Bank
And in today's Teacher Hack, remember that our hacks are designed to save you one of the three coins we use to pay for things in life: time, money, or stress. This week's hack is designed to save you both time and stress. To be fair, it may take you a little bit of time to set up, but it's going to save you so much more time on the back end.
Today's hack is: Build a bank. Specifically, build yourself a response bank. There are things you say over and over and over again during a school year, and every time you sit down and type one of those things from scratch, you're spending a little more of that capacity we were just talking about.
I learned a version of this lesson a long time ago, back in the days of answering machines. On concert days, I used to get 1000 phone calls, so I would change my answering machine message so that it included all of the pertinent concert information: where to be, when to be there, what you needed, all of that stuff. And I eventually realized that most of the people calling me on concert day didn't actually want to talk to me. They had lost the reminder note and just needed the information again. Putting it on the answering machine saved everybody time, and it saved me a whole lot of stress.
You can do more or less the same thing now with the written responses you use all the time. And here's my new rule for you: If you find yourself typing essentially the same thing for a second time, it goes in the bank. You've already figured out what you want to say once. There is no reason to spend the time and mental energy figuring out how to say it again.
And these don't have to be complete, perfectly crafted emails. In fact, I think this works better if you create mix-and-match chunks. You might have a chunk explaining your late-work policy, another one about makeup work, another explaining where students can find missing assignments, and maybe a standard opening or closing you use all the time. Grab the pieces you need, put them together, personalize whatever needs to be personalized, and you're done.
Don't make the response bank itself complicated, either, because then we've just invented another thing for you to manage. Google Docs and Word both have that little navigation area off to the left that basically creates a mini outline using your headings. Make the name of each chunk under a Heading 2, and it will show up over that left side When you need your makeup-work policy, you can click directly on it instead of scrolling through a giant document trying to remember where you put it.
And if creating the bank feels like one more thing you don't have time to do, use the tools you already have. You can use AI to make a first pass and eliminate the white-page problem, then go back through it and make sure it actually says what you want it to say and sounds like you instead of a perfectly polished bot. Or do what I do all the time: talk into your phone. Let voice-to-text capture what you want to say, and then tell AI, "Don't change my words or my voice. Just fix the grammar and formatting." Ta-da. Into the bank it goes.
The goal here is not to spend your weekend creating the world's most magnificent Response Bank Management System. Please don't do that. Just start noticing when you're repeating yourself. The second time you type it, bank it, and little by little you'll build a resource that gives you some of those five minutes back.
Because, as we just talked about with the Horseman of Capacity, nobody is handing those minutes back to teachers. So wherever we can find a reasonable way to reclaim a little time and a little stress for ourselves, let's take it.
Career Transition & Job Search: Be Curious — Informational Interviewing (16:59)
And moving on to our Career Transition and Job Search segment, this is where I give you practical tips and advice for getting out of the classroom and into whatever comes next. Sometimes we're going to introduce something new, and sometimes we're going to revisit something that is important enough that it's worth talking about more than once. Today, we're going back to networking, and specifically to one of my favorite ways to network: informational interviewing.
Now, I know y'all think I am always beating the networking drum, but I also know networking makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It can feel fake and transactional, especially if what you're picturing here is sending random strangers messages on LinkedIn and asking them to help you get a job. That's not what I want you to do. In fact, I don't really want you to think about networking as "trying to get people to do something for me" at all.
Instead, I want you to borrow a little wisdom from Ted Lasso: Be curious, not judgmental. I love the dartboard scene, and I'll link to it again in the show notes. Curiosity is really the heart of a good informational interview. You're not trying to impress somebody, you're not asking them to hire you, and you're certainly not asking a stranger to refer you for a job five minutes after meeting you. You're simply interested in what they do, and you're asking them to tell you about it.
Your network is also probably much bigger than you think it is. Think about all the people you've worked with over the years, their spouses and partners, the parents of your students, people you know through church or hobbies or volunteer work, your own partner's network, and all the people those people know. Your network isn't just the people you personally know who happen to work in corporate America. It's all the people you know, plus all the people they know.
And the wonderful thing about this part of a career transition is that you can start doing it long before you're ready to apply for jobs. In fact, that's probably the best time to do it, because there's no pressure attached. You're not calling somebody because you desperately need them to help you get an interview by Friday. You're just learning about possibilities and building relationships with interesting humans.
An informational interview sounds more intimidating than it actually is. You're having a short conversation with someone who does something you're curious about. Maybe you know them already, or maybe you've found them through somebody else. You want to know what they do, how they got into it, what they like about it, what surprised them about the work, and what advice they might give somebody who was interested in moving into that field.
And teachers, you already know how to do this. Think about Meet the Teacher Night, when you're talking to parents you've never met before,trying to put them at ease. Think about getting a new group of students comfortable enough to talk to you. Or, honestly, think about those classroom mysteries where something has happened, nobody is admitting to anything, and now you're piecing together six different versions of the story to figure out who did what. Put those skills together, maybe with slightly less interrogation, and you've basically got yourself an informational interview.
The invitation doesn't have to be complicated, either. Please don't send somebody a LinkedIn message that says, "Hello. I would like to schedule an informational interview with you." Nobody wants to do that. Just be a person talking to another person.
You can say something like, "Hi, I'm Vanessa. I see that you're a widget magician, and that's a field I'm really interested in learning more about. Would you have 10 or 15 minutes sometime in the next couple of weeks to tell me a little bit about what you do and how you got into it?" That's it. You're not hiding some secret request for a job behind it. You genuinely want to learn about being a widget magician.
Then when you have the conversation, be curious. How did you get into this? What do you like most about it? What do you wish you'd known when you started? If someone wanted to move into this field, what would you suggest they learn first? Are there particular skills, courses, or certifications that actually matter? And one of my favorite kinds of questions: What's the weirdest or most unexpected part of your job?
You don't need to ask all of those questions. This isn't a deposition, and you don't need a clipboard with 27 questions on it. Pick a few things you're genuinely curious about and listen to the answers. One answer will probably lead naturally to another question, because that's what happens when two humans have a conversation. And to be fair people love to give other people advice.
There is one rule I want you to take seriously, though. If someone gives you 15 minutes, take 15 minutes. Don't take 30. They have graciously given you a piece of their day, so respect the time they gave you. If you get to the end and they're still talking because they're enjoying the conversation, that's different, but you should be the person keeping an eye on the clock and giving them the opportunity to leave.
And as you're wrapping up, there's one really useful question you can ask: "Is there anyone else you think I should talk to?" Maybe there's another widget magician who came into the field through a completely different path, or somebody who does a related job you didn't even know existed. Now one conversation has potentially turned into two, and your network has grown without you ever asking anybody for a job.
Afterward, thank them, stay connected, and from time-to-time nurture that relationship. You don't have to become best friends. You don't have to send them a message every Tuesday morning for the rest of your life. You're simply building genuine relationships with people in and around the kind of work you're interested in doing.
And this is why I want you spending some of your job-search time here instead of pouring every available hour into application after application after application. Blind applications absolutely have a place in a job search strategy, but they shouldn't be the entire strategy. If you've sent hundreds of applications and nothing is happening, sending another hundred exactly the same way may not be the highest-value use of your very limited time and energy.
So go be curious. Find one person who is doing something that makes you think, "Huh. I'd like to know more about that." Ask them for 10 or 15 minutes, listen to their story, and see where the conversation takes you.
You might learn about a job you didn't know existed. You might learn that the job you thought you wanted is absolutely not for you. You might discover a skill gap you can start closing now. Or you might simply make a new friend who happens to know something about the world you're trying to enter.
All of those are wins. And none of them required you to ask a stranger for a job.
Before we wrap up, I want to circle back to Invisible Excellence. If the mission behind this book speaks to you: if you believe that teachers are carrying extraordinary skills and value that deserve to be seen, I would love to have you be part of helping me bring it into the world. I call it the Visibility Project. And The Visibility Project crowdfunding campaign is open through September 18 at midnight Eastern, and you'll find the link in the show notes along with all the different ways you can participate.
And if you're listening because you're trying to figure out what comes next for you, remember that Teachers in Transition has resources designed to meet you wherever you are in that process. Maybe you're still trying to decide whether you actually want to leave or not. Maybe you know you're leaving but have absolutely no idea what you want to do instead. Or maybe you've figured that part out and now you're wrestling with resumes, networking, job searching, interviews, and actually getting yourself across that bridge.
There are tools and resources at Teachers in Transition for all of those places along the journey, from things you can work through on your own to more hands-on support. You don't have to buy more help than you need, and you also don't have to figure the whole thing out by yourself. You can find all of those options through the links in the show notes or check out my webpage at teachersintransition.com
And if you've reached the point where you know you'd like someone working alongside you through the transition, I am taking on a few coaching clients for the fall. You can find information about that there, too, and see whether working together might be the right fit.
Until next time, remember: you can do this. Your skills are real, your experience matters, and there is life beyond teaching.
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That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques. And I want to hear from you! Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099.
I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!
