Ever wondered how a seasoned teacher can pivot to entrepreneurship while still igniting the spark of learning in children's hearts? In this episode, discover how Liz Eckenrode, with over 36 years of teaching experience, transitioned from a dedicated classroom teacher to a passionate entrepreneur, inspired by her grandfather’s legacy. Learn how she uses wholistic coaching to transform children's lives and fulfill her lifelong mission in education and literacy. Teaching is not just her profession, it's her lifelong passion. Through wholistic coaching and entrepreneurship, Liz strives to honor her grandfather's legacy by nurturing a love for learning that will last a lifetime.

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Legacy Of Literacy: Liz Eckenrode’s Impact On Education Through Wholistic Coaching And Entrepreneurship

Elizabeth, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me, Kohila. It's an honor.

Elizabeth, you retired from school, and you wanted to work with students in more one-on-one as a holistic neuro-growth learning success coach.

Yes, I did.

Was the retirement early, or did you retire because you had to? How did the retirement come about?

I did reach my full retirement age. I'd served for several years. My husband was diagnosed with lung cancer. I had a pivotal decision. Do I want to do the entire school year, or would I retire? My heart was not ready to retire, but I felt like I needed to be home. I did. I retired on a Friday, and I was substituting the following Monday in my own position. I still have the heart to want to stay in the job.

The School System

When you were working in the classroom, what did you notice about the school system? Was there anything that was bothering you, or were you enjoying it? How was it for you?

Over the span of those years, things have completely changed. Some things are good in terms of some of the scientific knowledge that we have about how kids learn how to read and write. Some things have taken a nose dive. It's hard nowadays to get kids intrinsically motivated to learn and even have a passion for learning compared to how it was when I started my career.

Why do you think it's that shift?

There's more accountability for teachers to produce results. Results are being measured in a way that is captured with numbers that aren't reflecting true student growth, certainly not a measuring effect for learning and the things that truly matter to me. That's one of the reasons why it's easier to measure. Schools are being measured against a system that's not capturing what children are meant to learn.

Schools are being measured against a system that's not truly capturing what children are meant to learn.

Has the students' involvement changed because of the way we graded over the years? You've been in the industry for a long time.

A lot of it has to do with what the teachers expect and the standards that have been created over the years. When I began teaching, I came in. This was like a kid in a candy store. We had a list of objectives in each different course of study, but we weren't told how we had to do it. We weren't handed programs.

We had the luxury of using our creativity and our own personalities to create what we felt was right for the kids. The thing that I believed so much in is that hands-on learning was important. I believe in giving kids authentic experiences. One of my most successful projects was when we ran a fast-food restaurant in our classroom. Our science was health. They had to learn about nutrition. Social studies were manners. Math, we used that opportunity for money. Reading was a combination of fictional and nonfiction.

Every day, the kids came to school knowing that they were going to be in their little cooperative groups, coming to the task that they were given to do to get to that point where the restaurant would be open for business. They knew what they were ready to do. They were waiting for the lesson. They were ready. I had to coach them in the steps, but I was not doing a whole lot of instructing. They were learning on their own.

The pieces of writing that they made became place mats for the restaurant. We went on field trips to McDonald's to observe how an assembly line was done and a Chinese restaurant to learn to practice their manners. We even took a field trip to a grocery store to look at the labels and to understand the cost of the things that we needed to buy to run the restaurant. We made homemade apple sauce with the help of a parent volunteer. It was all authentic. At the end of the day, the kids ran their restaurant, and they were learning. It wasn't measurable, maybe by a test, and I'm sure it would be, but it wasn't measured what they enjoyed from that. The experience could not be measured in a test.

Isn't it true that if you start enjoying something, you'll remember it for the rest of your life?

Absolutely. Those experiences don't happen anymore because in an effort to grow scores, all these programs are being produced and sold to school districts. They're supposed to be the panacea for getting the scores up. There is no such thing as a program that does it all. It's all about the teacher and how they interpret it. It's not working to produce those gains.

In the school system, the markings and the testing have pushed out these creative ideas that teachers can come up with.

There's no time when you're expected to use the scripted manual for an hour a day. The integration is much more difficult because of the boxed programs for each subject area. There is no promotion of that creativity or doing things outside the box.

Wholistic Coaching

You decided that you would become a holistic neuro-growth learning success coach. Why did you choose that? Why did you want it to become that?

I am substituting alongside this, but the problem with substituting is I don't know the children well. I'm carrying out these activities without any ability to know how to scaffold the kids and help them with their needs. I'm getting through the day. My passion is to help change the trajectory of a kid's life. I had that opportunity as a classroom teacher to a point, but the idea of one-on-one and getting to know that whole student and impacting them where they are and not feeding them things they don't need, but giving them what they do need is extremely appealing.

You're also moving them forward when you look at it as holistic because, a lot of the time, kids mask their real problems.

In working with a student now, it seems that with each session, something new comes to the surface. I have to think about how I am going to help him get beyond that issue.

In the classroom, we know that our students need more. We can see through it. It's like a glass door. You can see through what's going on, but we can't slow it down, or we don't have the time.

When I walk through the doors, I get bombarded with hugs. You wonder why they need that hug desperately. What is it underneath that? I do think about that. I accept the love I'm getting from them. I know that, in some way, I've done something that keeps them wanting that attachment. What is it that they need?

What do you think they need? What's missing?

It’s being noticed, recognized, and encouraged.

They love being seen. In the real world, we're not connected. At home, everybody is busy. These kids may be on devices that take attention away a lot of the time. Parents are busy. We are living a busy life. That's why they're looking for that connection and the meaningful touch. You're substituting. You are there for a day or two. Is that correct? How do you leave these attachments? The next day you have to leave them.

That's hard. Fortunately, the students that I have been substituting are the kids that were still in the building before I left. I do know them to a point, and I've been substituting the unfamiliar for them multiple times, but it's not the same.

As a holistic neuro-growth learning success coach, what do you do differently than a teacher that you couldn't have done as a teacher?

The time is there for me to dig deep, find out what is under the surface, find out what they need, expose who they are, and design the things I will do with them based on their interests. Not only their gaps in their learning but also who they are as a person or even try to expose things that they may not have tried before. Pull them out of that shell of theirs.

Intrinsic learning is what it's all about. I want to help them understand that learning is fun for its own sake, rewarding for its own sake, and powerful for their future. That's something that I didn't have the time to do as a classroom teacher. Even when I was a reading specialist working in a small group, it still wasn't enough. That one-on-one makes the difference.

You quit about how many years ago? The actual full-time job retired.

It's been several years now.

Why Teaching

You had a husband who needed your help at home. You decided that you have some time. I'll do some subbing. In the midst of it, you found a holistic neuro-growth learning success coach. You're like, “I want to deliver some meaningful connection and results and create some intrinsically motivated kids.” Where did your educational roots start from? Why did you become a teacher? Why teaching?

My grandfather was an educator for many years. He was born way back in 1895. He was born in a farm family. He was a little gentleman farm in Virginia. He stuck out in his family. He wanted an education. Against his parent's wishes, he got himself a tutor and managed to do his high school years in eight months. He got a college degree. By the age of 27, he was hired on to be the Superintendent of the Caroline Public Schools in Virginia. He stayed in that job for many years. He was well-loved in that little neck of the woods. That was inspirational to me.

My grandmother his wife, were unusual at the time. She was college-educated. She opened a kindergarten in the basement of their home. She ran a school. I've connected on Facebook with people who were in her kindergarten class back in the day. My mother became a teacher and taught fifth grade. It was in my blood.

My grandfather, when he did his master's thesis, I was reading through. He wrote something. If you don't mind, I read it. It’s about teachers. He wrote this back in 1927 or ‘28. He said, “Teaching represents a unique service. Unlike any other group of workers, the school is home to the child and the teacher, a second mother and father to the child. The teacher's concern is not only with development in childhood but also with essential knowledge, habits, and skills, molding character, developing tastes, ideals, appreciations, and loyalties that are essential to the welfare of the child and the interests of social order. Unfortunately, these latter products of education are intangible, and they can't be measured with precision.”

The school is a kind of home to the child and the teacher, a second mother and father to the child.

It’s what I was saying myself. He’s like, “There is no accurate check on the teacher and her functioning in this respect. Therefore, the best assurance that these concomitants or secondary learning products will be provided for properly is had by placing in the schools the highest type of teachers, teachers who are well-prepared, intellectually alive, professionally ambitious, and well paid.” That was 1927. My grandfather represented a little bit of an outside-of-the-box mentality. He was instrumental in the desegregation of the schools back in the ‘60s.

What was his name?

William Andrew Vaughn.

He talked about teachers being paid more. In 1927, he was thinking about that. That's interesting. If he were to be here now, he would know that teachers are still not getting paid enough.

When I was going through the coursework to become a holistic neuro-growth learning success coach, the fact that I put that whole string of things to terms felt like I succeeded. When I was going through that, I often thought about my grandfather and thought, “I hope he's looking down, seeing that I'm trying to impact children in a different way that's meeting the needs of society because it's a different animal than it was even when I started my career several years ago.”

If you think about it, we create all the people in the world. As teachers, we are the foundation for their beginning, elementary foundation. Teachers are not happy. Many of them are underpaid. The economy is doing poorly, but teachers are being underpaid. Many teachers hold 3 to 4 four jobs. In the summertime, they don't even take a break because they're looking for summer jobs.

They are taking coursework to maintain their certification.

Power Of The Pencil

You have to do continuing education. You pay for it. Sometimes, the school doesn't pay for that either. Some teachers are paying from their pockets. There's a lot that your grandfather envisioned back then, but it's still not there yet. In terms of your business, what do you offer students in this program as a holistic neuro-growth learning success coach?

My background is, I wouldn't say primarily, but strongly in literacy skills. I'm offering reading and writing to elementary-age students.

Why do you believe that there's a power of pencil? What is the power of the pencil? What does that mean?

It has two completely different meanings, but all tied to this job. When we're measuring kids' literacy skills, it seems that we focus on the reading because it's measurable. You can get a nice number and report it to the admin or the state. The pencil is where the power comes from for 1,000 reasons. If you want to measure whether a child's truly getting a phonic skill, if they can write it, they're applying it. We don't take it to that level so much. In some ways, I feel like we're missing the boat. I believe it's because writing skills are not as easily measured. We don't do it.

In addition to the phonic element and getting kids to spell or construct sentences, the power of the pencil is also what can be an intrinsic motivator for kids. It's the opportunity for the kids to have a voice. One of my favorite things to teach was writing because we used a writing process. I was not telling the students that they had to write about this or that. They got to choose what they wrote about. That was extremely powerful. If it was worth being written down, it was going to be something for someone else to read.

I would take the kids through the writing process. They would draft 3 or 4 pieces. After that, they would select one to take to publication. In my classroom, most of my time was spent on a quick little teaching point that kids would try to apply if it went along with their piece. Most of my time was spent having little conferences, one-on-one with students to advance the particular piece they were working on, or help them get unstuck with something.

Every 3 or 4 pieces of writing would get published. When I say published, we created these little, I call them wallpaper books, but they were contact paper books that got stapled in. They wound up becoming part of our school or our classroom reading library. At the independent time, the kids are off reading each other's work. They got to see themselves as authors.

There was this intrinsic motivation to write because it gave them a voice. We're missing the power of the pencil in our classrooms from the analytical part of being able to see what skills the kids have, but also from developing the person, helping them see who they are. That's what I mean when I say the power of the pencil.

Do you think most of them are now typing? They're not writing by pencil.

There's a combination of both. I don't think there are enough teachers who are confident enough in teaching writing to let the kids have free rein There's too much. This is your topic. Here's what you write about.

The curriculum dictates a little bit too much.

You can accomplish that by still giving kids as long as you teach the genre. You can teach grammar, punctuation, and how to write a narrative or opinion, but with choice.

Why Students Struggle To Read

Intrinsic motivation is not something you get in a couple of days. It takes time. It's a holistic process. It has to come organically. It will happen for every child, but it takes time. If a parent is reading this, what would you say? Why are more students struggling to read now? What's going on?

I honestly think what you were saying earlier about the busyness of life is interfering. Kids are not getting the lap time book read to them like they used to. They're in front of the television or gadgets. They're missing out on some of the organic experience of literature. That's where it all began. You get that sense of how cool a story is. You get that bonding time with an adult and the conversation that comes through the book sharing. From the beginning, we're missing that.

Go back to the basics. Read with your kids.

We're noticing in schools that kids are coming with much more speech difficulties than before. That's the direct correlation for children not having conversations. Even though they may be hearing voices on their computer or screen, it's not the same. You're not acquiring that vocabulary. You're not acquiring it the same way as you do when it's face-to-face. That's been a tragedy for kids. Their speeches are being affected by that. If their speeches are, their ability to hear sounds and words and decode and encode are going to be affected.

Kids are coming with much more speech difficulties than before. That's the direct correlation for children not having conversations.

As parents, we do have to be mindful. Read to our kids is what you said first. Reading is the beginning stage. Does it have to be long? Sometimes, parents think it has to be long. It doesn't have to be even ten minutes.

For some ages, that's appropriate. Even up to a first-grader, a ten-minute book is adequate. Kids love the elephant and piggies in their quick reads.

Even if you want to read a longer book, you can chunk them into five. Put the book up into five parts and ten minutes, five times.

When I was working with a student that I had, he came across the word sub, and it didn't connect to him that the author met a submarine. Having that conversation clarified that for him. I've always said to kids that anytime you have a book read to you, or you read a book, you are changed. In some way, you are changed. You can have made a decision that you didn't like the book, and you evaluated it, but you were critically thinking. You're changed. If you love the book, you'll justify it, or you'll learn some vocabulary. Every single book that you put in your hands has the capacity to change you in some way. That's incredible.

It's like listening to another person. It’s almost going into the other person or that story. You enter and exit. You live it almost. That's where the imagination comes in. How did they solve this? What happened there? I never got to read to myself when I was young, but I read a lot by myself. When I was bored, that's all I could do. I draw or doodle. My parents weren't that good at reading.

Even if you don't have time, encourage your kids to read right by themselves. Take one of the iPad or TV time away, give them some books, and leave books around. I heard from a couple of people that parents leave books around. Even in the homeschooling world, parents always have books accessible to their kids. When they are bored, they can pick it up.

As a grandparent, I have four grandchildren, and books are always scattered in the backseat of our car.

When they're bored, they pick it up. Do they pick up?

Can you hand me that nanny? They can.

Kids are curious. We need to foster that curiosity by doing these things. With my son, we read truck books. I knew all the trucks. I knew all the truck names. I knew a lot about cars when he was growing up. We would sing in the car. At that time, we had CDs. We would put that. It was great. They love it. Yeah.

I was the same way. I still do that. I make up songs for the dogs. It's a habit of creating rhymes. Age-appropriate songs are something that we don't get to experience as much. Parents often throw on the radio, but there's such learning capacity when you get those old-fashioned rhyming songs for kids to listen to.

Make something silly. I don't know if you did it. I used to read all the signs. If I was in the car, that was the game we would play. Let's see if you can read the next sign. Those road trips, even shorter to the grocery store, if they could read 5 to 6 signs that way and back home, they'd learned all those words because that was experiential learning.

When I began teaching kids the concept of sight words, that was what I did. I snapshotted local places and put them in a book. They would recognize McDonald's. I said, “What is this?” McDonald's or M&Ms are things that I knew kids would be familiar with. It’s to drive him the idea that you know what this word is because you recognize it by sight. You've seen it. That was an introduction to help kids understand sight words. Every child knew the word stop because of the signs.

You seem like a teacher who was invested in the classroom, creating experiential learning. That's what you want to bring out in your coaching.

Reflecting on how powerful the authentic hands-on learning was almost makes me wonder. If down the road in my coaching, I might try to replicate something like that again.

Even during a small group coaching session where you explained things, I started imagining being in your class when you were explaining earlier about the restaurant. We went to the grocery store. We looked at the ingredients. We made place mats. We taught them how to set up the table. How many kids know where to put the glass, fork, and knife?

We had the news crew come to view that, and everybody was on restaurant day. The parents and administration were invited. This one little guy happened to be the person who swept up any of the dirt. He went on camera saying to the news crew that his job was to clean up in case somebody threw up. I thought, “Thanks for marketing.”

I hope that the food wasn't that horrible. He was the cleaner of the restaurant.

That was his role. He took it seriously.

You're still subbing. You don't miss the kids, but you want to create more meaningful connections. That's why you became a learning success coach. It's more important for you. How are you feeling in your business? Where are you in the business?

I have this one, and I'll be completely honest. Until I get a little further in, that's good for me. I want to honor the process for him and make sure that I'm doing it to the best of my ability before I take in more. I do have several other tutoring opportunities, but they're not students. It's to keep them reading over the summer. They're not students with tremendous deficits. I am anxious to continue to develop a portfolio of students. By 2025, we have upward of no more than six students. That would put me over the edge to do more because this little guy is on my mind 24/7.

When you add another one, it all spreads out. It isn't usually that one person cannot take that much time because you get more ideas from the other kids.

I trust your process. It hasn't failed me yet.

Reading And Writing At Home

If a parent is reading this during the summer for reading and writing, what can they do at home?

Repeated readings of things that kids enjoy are fantastic. Our goal during the summer is to not let that slide happen. This is a great time for fluency building. What I mean by that is when kids are reading at their independent level, meaning that it's not a difficult read, they're going to have the ability now to not have to think about what the words are. They get to work on their porosity and change their voices with the characters. Repeated readings of books that they love, not to say that they are not going to tackle new books, but include some of the independent ones.

Summer is a great time for fluency building

Writing is a no-brainer. When we would travel with my own children, I didn't have to spend a lot of money on souvenirs. I would always allow them a postcard. They would have to write something on the back of that to capture their feelings, facts, or whatever they wanted to on the back. To this day, the kids have a huge ring of the places that they've gone. It's a simple, quick thing to do.

They kept it all. It means they went there.

We went across the United States six summers in a row. We were traveling in a motor home. They got to see a lot of national parks. You can only imagine. With that traveling, we would be stopping everywhere. I would've gone broke. Postcards satisfied them.

That's a good idea. I never thought of it. I have had my son write about where we went. Why not get a little postcard for $0.50 or $0.25 and write it and keep a picture with it because it always comes with a nice place or something of that place that he chose? When he grows up, they go through it all, and they might have a collection of it.

I did the same for myself to share it with my students as we went. Journaling helped moms make grocery lists. In the house, have a whiteboard where. If you notice that something has been consumed out of the refrigerator, write that item on the little board so that you're participating in that writing.

These are small things, but they are powerful. We have to be mindful in our daily lives not to say, “I'm busy.” It's easy to say I'm busy and forget about these small moments. If the child writes it 5 to 6 times in their life, they know how to spell it.

Letters to grandparents and relatives that are not local have floored me, looking at the number of letters that my parents and their generation would write and those of my grandparents, which I am blessed to have. I still have all of these letters that were written back and forth, even at the time when my grandparents were dating and when my parents were dating. Letters of communication, because we didn't have email, but it is a perfect time for kids to write.

My mother-in-law, who passed away, had a cool gift card she would send back and forth between her friends. It was a Christmas card. She started this tradition. They passed back and forth. They would write it on a sticky note and place it inside the card. They did it for 62 Christmas. This is a small card, but inside of it, there are lots of sticky notes from back and forth between the two friends.

My husband is going to get it into the Guinness World because I don't think anyone has done that. I'm not sure, but maybe not that many years. They kept it, both of them. Several years ago, she lost it. They've been mailing back and forth. She would mail it, and her friend would mail it back. She was disappointed that she lost the card. After Christmas was done in April, the post office found it and gave it to her again. It was never to be lost. It's cool that she brought it back.

It didn't skip a year. That's great. I love that.

She passed away. They did it all that year. That was a beautiful habit that they created. It was passed. Can you imagine we could start something like that with our kids? Send back and forth something between their friends or someone in the family. It’s something to look back. More importantly, it helps them write meaningful messages. When my son left, my mother-in-law told him, “Take a little book. Every day, write one thing you did that is amazing, wherever you are.” Not a lot of things, but one thing. She said, “Keep writing it. By the time you come back, you're going to have many memories to talk about.”

I'm a little bit old school, and I'll be honest, I don't write handwritten letters because the technology to communicate is easier, but capturing a little journal of the emotions. Even taking that time to write somebody, it's a different dynamic. It's special.

Parable Of The Pencil

When kids get something in the mail, we all get excited. If there's one addressed to you in your name, you get excited. That's a good tradition, even if it's old school or not. That's what I'm saying. Going back to the basics. There's something about those little things that we did. We are not different. We have come to this place, and we're in the world, but it's important to go back to that. It's an easy thing to do because it takes you off of the gadgets. Anything else you want to share with the parents?

As I was trying to think of how to help my one little student, I came across, and I don't know if you've ever heard of the Parable of the Pencil.

No.

It's a story about a guy who was a pencil maker. Before he put the newly made pencil into the box, he said, “There are five things that you need to know.” He always wanted the pencil to remember this. The first thing was you're going to be able to do many great things, but only if you allow yourself to be held in someone's hand. Number two, you'll experience a painful sharpening from time to time, but you'll need it to become a better pencil. Three, you'll be able to correct any mistakes you might make. Four, the most important part of you will always be what's inside. Five, on every surface you are used to, you must leave your mark. No matter what the condition, you must continue to write.

It's beautiful. The insight matters, and you'll leave a mark. That was written by the pencil maker.

It’s the pencil maker to his pencil. We have to take those applications and see ourselves. Is that a pencil?

There's a comparison. That is who we are. Each of us has the opportunity to write.

I hope to help my little guy recognize those truths through the use of the pencil.

I'm lucky that you came into our program. He is lucky because you're thinking about him 24/7. I don't even know if his parents think him this much.

I don't think he likes that too much.

You're going to see a shift. The beauty of our program is that the children come in, and they see that this is different because it's not tutoring and teaching. It's more than that. They realize that this person cares because they want to be heard, seen, and feel connected. This is what we do. Right. As a holistic neuro-growth learning success coach. Thank you for coming into our world. You've been amazing.

Thank you for coming to mine. You've made a huge transformation in the coach life. If that didn't happen, I don't think your program would be powerful. You do it by example. You're incredible.

What's one thing that you learned in the program?

You constantly say, “You can do this.” You set goals for us. You stood right there with us and said, “Yes, you can do it.” I would've never believed that in the short time that I would have this much belief in myself, I would be able to help a student, especially when dealing with things like their mindset. I'm a positive person, but to transfer that to somebody else, I would've never thought I could do that. You encourage us to be who we are, but being who we are is enough to make that difference. It's given us a belief in ourselves.

Being who we are is enough to make that difference.

What do you look forward to in the near future?

Seeing the transformation in this little guy I'm working with. Seeing him have that a-ha moment and be willing to shoot for the stars for himself to put the work in. I've never been afraid of hard work. I love working. That part has never bothered me. I'm hoping he'll see that the work that he's going to do is different from what he has been doing.

It's fun because you're in control.

I get to create the narrative of what I believe is right for a kid and do it.

There's no box. You are living what your grandfather wrote.

I hope so. He would be impressed with what you have created these programs.

He was on the right path to that. If he had been here, he would have been disappointed with where the system is after all these years. That's why we're making a change. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. Thank you for being here today. You came in. You finished it on time, as the program intended. You had your student. You have to take another four more students, and you'll be set. That's your portfolio. That would be amazing.

That would be fantastic, and I can do it.

I know you can. Was there anything you want to share with teachers, something that they're thinking of starting this program? Is there anything you want to add to them?

I would encourage anyone who's feeling the classroom setting isn't meeting their needs that it's worthwhile. I've already shared that message with my close colleagues because they're incredible educators who are being stifled by ridiculous requirements and things. Go for it. It's changing my life, and I'm almost a senior. It's not too late.

You don't look like it, and nothing stopped you. You can do it. Any age, it doesn't matter. It's not about the age. It's all about what we believe we can do. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Kohila. It’s such a pleasure.

You're welcome.

Important Links

• Elizabeth Eckenrode – LinkedIn

• https://www.Facebook.com/Liz.R.Eckenrode

About Elizabeth Eckenrode

36 years of teaching K-5 as both a classroom teacher, reading specialist and literacy coach for teachers in a small rural title 1 school in Lancaster County , PA has not yet scratched my educational itch! I retired on a Friday and on Monday was substituting! As a substitute it’s hard to feel like you’re really impacting students because you don’t know the children well enough to give them what they need. Success Codes has given me the tools to live out my passion for children, for literacy, and has awakened a desire I didn’t know I had…to be an entrepreneur. The best part is being able to dig deep into the whole of a child and instill of way of thinking and learning that will serve them a lifetime.