Homeroom Attendance w/ Edward DeShazer

A chair hits the floor. A student is yelling. Twenty five faces turn to look at one person, and that person is you.

Last episode we talked about how students copy the adults around them. This episode is about the moment they copy hardest. Edward DeShazer slows the first 10 seconds of a student blowup all the way down: what happens in your body, why your stress response can’t be trusted to make the call on its own, and why the first person you have to de-escalate is yourself.

Edward speaks from both sides of that moment. As a student, he was the kid adults braced for, and he remembers what made it worse every time: an adult who matched his energy. The adults who reached him got quieter and slower, and made it clear there was no battle to win.

You’ll walk away with practical moves for a real classroom. You’ll learn the cyclic sigh from a 2023 Stanford study, how to go lower and slower, how to angle your body so you don’t square up, and why “why did you do that?” backfires in the middle of a crisis. Edward walks through Dr. Dan Siegel’s “name it to tame it,” how to offer a small choice so a kid can step back without losing face, and how to keep the rest of the room feeling safe.

The episode also covers what a whole building can do: one shared calm phrase every adult uses, a clear plan for who comes and how fast, and the idea of practicing for blowups the way schools practice fire drills. It closes with the repair conversation the next day, a reminder that calm does not erase accountability, and a challenge to find your own reset ritual before you walk through your front door.

Lessyns, an app built to help educators regulate before they respond, is coming soon. Listeners will hear about the beta first.

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Your students will forget the vocabulary words. They will forget the anchor chart steps. What they will remember is how you looked at them when they walked in after getting in trouble somewhere else in the building.

Edward opens with the Bobo doll experiment from 1961 — preschoolers watched an adult go after an inflatable clown, then repeated it word for word without being asked or rewarded. Nobody taught them. They just watched. And 60 years later, most school buildings still operate as if kids learn from what adults say rather than what they do.

This episode covers what students absorb from every adult in the building, not just classroom teachers, what happens when you mess up in front of kids and actually own it, and two building norms you can set this week that cost nothing and change everything.

If your students copied exactly how you handled this past week, what would they have learned?

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Count how many times someone asked how you were doing this week. Now count how many times you actually meant it when you said fine.

RAND's 2026 survey found that 55% of teachers deal with frequent job-related stress, compared to 34% of similar adults outside education. Forty-six percent said teaching left them too tired for a personal life. The teacher who said fine in September is often the one whose resignation letter surprises everyone in March. It shouldn't be a surprise. We just never got the real answer when we asked.

In this episode, Edward breaks down why educators are so good at performing okay, what it costs the people around them, and what one honest minute from a leader at the front of a room can actually do to a building's culture. He also gives you a better question to ask than "how are you?" — because how are you stopped being a real question a long time ago.

If the people in your building told you the truth tomorrow, what do you think you'd hear?

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Before the relationship recession shows up in grades or attendance, it shows up in behavior.

The kid who stops asking for help. The one testing you a little further each day to see if you'll still show up for them. The student who goes completely quiet and never gets written up but has fully checked out. The class clown whose jokes are getting sharper because something underneath is getting heavier.

Edward knows these four patterns from the inside. He was that student — the one with the long referral file that described everything he did and nothing about what he needed. Acting out was the only language he had.

In this episode he connects the relationship recession to what you're actually seeing in your classroom right now, introduces the 2x10 rule for rebuilding connection with your hardest student, and walks through a whole-building relationship mapping exercise that makes the invisible kids visible. Because when a student's connection to school depends on one great teacher, they're one schedule change away from losing it entirely.

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Kevin McAllister didn't get left behind because his family didn't love him. He got left behind because everyone was moving too fast to notice he was still standing there.

That happens in schools too. The reliable teacher who handles the five hardest students every year because they can. The support staff member who's been there fifteen years and never gets thanked. The person who covers every shortage and never gets covered. Nobody decided to overlook them. The building was just moving fast.

But here's the part of Home Alone that most people miss: Kevin doesn't spend the movie waiting to be remembered. He decides the house is his to protect and starts preparing like it's going to be tested — because he knows nobody else is coming to help him build it.

This is the second episode in Edward's movie series, where he pulls real lessons for educators out of films that have nothing to do with school on the surface. This one is about boundaries, preparation, and what it actually means to defend something worth keeping.

What is your version of that house? And when the pressure shows up at the door, will you hold the line?

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Before anything bad happens to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, he says the truest thing about himself out loud. And then the story never gives him a way back to it.

Educators make a version of that same statement when they start this work. I will never become that teacher. I will always believe in this kid. I will never stop caring the way I care right now. And the slide away from that person is not dramatic. It's a parent who never showed up, an initiative that got scrapped the year after you put everything into it, a kid who lied to your face after you fought hard for them. None of those moments turn you into someone different on their own. Enough of them stacked together quietly? That's a different story.

This is the first episode in a new series pulling real lessons from movies that have nothing to do with school on the surface. It starts with the most educational movie Edward has ever seen.

The question he's leaving you with: what did you swear you'd never become when you started? And if you're honest today, are you becoming that?

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There's a teacher listening right now who drove to work with the radio off just to get the only silence they'd have all day. Who got home exhausted and immediately started grading papers. Who has a boundary they believe in and a list of reasons why today was the exception.

This episode isn't about what your district should be doing for you. It's about what you can actually do for yourself — starting now, inside a profession that is genuinely hard and structurally demanding and not going to fix itself before Monday.

Edward gives you three things: a boundary you can actually stand on, one person in your building who gets the unfiltered version of your day, and the basics of taking care of a body that has to show up again tomorrow. None of it is complicated. All of it requires a decision that you matter enough to protect — the same way you'd protect one of your students.

The fastest way to make a healthy and happy student is a healthy and happy teacher.

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It happens every year in every school. The August energy fades, the novelty wears off, and somewhere around week five or six, the culture that felt alive starts running on backup power.

Edward calls it the relationship recession. And most educators experience it like something went wrong with them, their class, or their building — when really it's a predictable pattern that nobody thought to name.

In this episode, he breaks down what's actually happening underneath the surface when the recession hits, what it looks like in classrooms, in hallways, and in leadership, and three concrete things you can do right now to interrupt it before it takes over. Whether you're two weeks in or two months deep, this one is worth your next 15 minutes.

The recession is not the end of the year. It's the test of the year.

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When does your school year actually begin?

Before you say the first day of school — think harder. Because the first 30 days aren't a warm-up. They're the window where norms get established, relationships get formed, and the unwritten rules of your building get written in permanent ink. Everything you build for the rest of the year sits on top of what happens right now.

In this episode, Edward breaks down the three questions every person walking into your building is trying to answer — students, staff, and families alike — and why a building that can't answer them is fighting itself all year. He gets into what intentional relationship-building actually looks like in the first week, why rules without relationships produce compliance at best, and what your hardest-to-reach students are watching for from day one.

Culture doesn't become real until it gets named. This episode is about naming it.

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Every behavior a student shows you serves one of four functions: escape, attention, tangible, or sensory. That's it. And when you can identify which one is driving what you're seeing, you stop asking what's wrong with this kid and start asking what does this kid need right now.

In part two of this series, Edward breaks down each function — what it looks like, why the typical educator response makes it worse, and what to do instead. The escape kid isn't defiant, they're overwhelmed. The attention-seeking student isn't bad, they're running on empty. The sensory kid isn't being difficult — you're fighting biology, and that's a fight nobody wins.

This framework works for every adult in the building. Send it to your co-teacher, your paraprofessional, your department lead, your principal. If you touch the student experience, this one is for you.

If you haven't heard part one yet, start there first.

⭐ Rate and subscribe. New episodes every Sunday.

www.homeroomattendance.com