Tapping into Trust, Voice, and Courage to Treat the Burn

Since the start of summer, I’ve been pretty busy building out initiatives for Braving Education’s mission, gaining experience in new roles and tasks. I’ve started consulting in other school districts, I’m planning a new PLC for this upcoming school year for my home district, and I’m co-developing digital-spatial products for a local non-profit organization.

It’s probably the busiest summer I’ve had in a while, but it’s refreshing and completely necessary. Why? It helps cultivate my sense of purpose as an educator, which, for me, has been very effective in keeping teacher burnout at bay.

Is teacher burnout completely unavoidable? I don’t think so. Every teacher suffers from it at one point or another in their career. In my nearly 20 years of teaching, I’ve experienced it a few times. What’s more important than avoiding burnout is trying to figure out the best ways to treat it before it turns into something that’s much harder to get rid of and that spreads much farther than one unfortunate classroom. I’m talking about cynicism.

While this is the topic of today’s episode, it certainly isn’t the tone.

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Talking the Read

Episode 8: “Confronting Cynicism in Education”

Show Notes

Today’s episode is based on the Claude-generated article “The Cynical Classroom: Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust Between Administrators and Teachers” (Anthropic, 15 July 2025)

Two Things I Learned in Producing This Episode

• Eleven v3: Impressive, but Glitchy. There’s a next-level intuitive nature in this new version. At times, the shift between Chris and Liam naturally overlapped, allowing a more organic exchange in dialogue between the two chatbots. But, more often than not, glitches surfaced whenever I made an edit. When I played back newly revised and re-generated content, I often heard short bits from the previous iteration before it jumped into the new iteration. I was able to cut these “leftovers” out in my other editing software after exporting from ElevenLabs. However, for creators not using additional software in their workflow who are still wanting to make some pre-export edits in ElevenLabs, this will be frustrating.
• More Prompt Power in Configuration Settings. I’m not sure how long this feature has been in ElevenLabs, but I stumbled across it when generating the initial script for this episode. Basically, in addition to the text (your uploaded article or whatever document you’re inputting) and selected length of your intended script, you can also prompt with a specific emphasis in mind (like tone or angle, etc.). In my case, I prompted it to avoid using specific quantitative statistics from Claude’s article. I really appreciate this feature because it gives the creator that much more control in what kind of discussion they want ElevenLabs to generate beyond the basics of language, voice, and length.