Welcome to The Cocoon
A newsletter about transformation in learning, literature, and life
Hi there! I'm Rebekah Shoaf.
I’m an author, educational consultant and coach, social entrepreneur, and founder of Boogie Down Books.
What’s this?
I’ve been writing a version of this newsletter since 2017 when I launched Boogie Down Books, a bookstore-without-walls® for kids, teens, families, and educators. Back then I was mostly writing about children’s books and the community literary events I was hosting in and around the Bronx.
Later, when I co-wrote a book about preventing and addressing educator burnout, I started sharing tips, inspiration, and news for teachers and leaders.
This new iteration, The Cocoon, represents where I am now as:
an educational consultant and coach working for a more just and joyful approach to teaching and learning
a human making sense of profound personal, professional, and social change
a writer cultivating the community I needed during my hardest and most traumatic moments of transformation
For now, new issues of The Cocoon will be released on the last Tuesday of the month, and will include thoughts about transformation as I’m currently witnessing and experiencing it, links and resources to support and inspire transformations of all sizes, field trips and other real-life strategies I use to make space for transformation, and book recommendations that conjure transformative reading experiences (consider yourself warned!).
Why The Cocoon?
A cocoon is not a coffin, but sometimes it feels that way. As far as it knows, the caterpillar is dying in there. It has no way of knowing what’s on the other side or that it’s going through unrecognizable transformation.
Challenging periods can feel that way to us too, as if something is dying or breaking or being destroyed, and we can’t see the transformation that’s happening yet.
I think a lot about transformation–what it looks like in a classroom, what it feels like at the end of a book, how I’ve survived it in my personal and professional lives and witnessed others doing it too–and I’m sharing those ruminations here to create a sense of community for educators and anyone else trying to make sense of cocoon time.
I also think that education as a whole is in a state of existential transformation, and the demands on teachers and leaders right now are herculean. My work as a coach and a consultant focuses on the intersection of effectiveness and sustainability: How can we transform classrooms, schools, and systems to align with what students and families want and need while supporting sustainability for the educators on the front lines of that transformation?
Why here?
For the past seven years, I’ve used MailChimp as the platform for my newsletter. It’s been a great framework for selling books and promoting literary events, but The Cocoon is more about incubating ideas and cultivating community, so I’ve moved to Substack, which better aligns with my purpose now.
Why you?
You’re receiving The Cocoon because you previously subscribed to my Boogie Down Books or educator mailing lists. If you’d prefer not to receive The Cocoon, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of this page. If you’d rather stay in contact with me elsewhere, you can find me on Instagram and LinkedIn or contact me through my website. If you know a teacher, leader, or other lifelong learner who might like to join The Cocoon community, please invite them to subscribe.
The Cocoon is for lifelong learners, including but not limited to professional educators. If you’re actively engaged in the messy, dynamic, sometimes painful, usually uncomfortable, often involuntary process of transformational growth, this is for you.
The training is the point
Are you more of an auditory learner? Click here for the video version of this message.
A day or two before I ran the 2022 New York City marathon my friend Irbania (who has run multiple marathons herself) left me a voice message in which she said, among other words of wisdom and encouragement, “You did it already, girl.”
And of course in training I had run something like 20 marathons already, but her words reinforced that the training is the point, the journey is the point, not what happens on race day. What matters most is everything I did to get to race day.
In other words I’d already done the hardest part in training. Running 26.2 miles through New York City with 2 million people cheering me on was way easier than any (shorter) training run I ever did. Compared to the hundreds of miles I ran at dawn or in the rain or alone or on hotel treadmills or when I was exhausted, in pain, or just flat-out over it already, race day was the easy part. Race day was when I got to celebrate how far I’d come.
It’s been 16 months, and I still think about Irbania’s words a lot, especially in terms of education. The transformation doesn’t happen at the end with the project or test or exhibition of learning. It’s happening every day in small moments because that’s how learning happens. And that means that if you’re an educator, you’re invoking transformation every single day. You’re getting your students one step closer to race day with every lesson.
Field Trip Fabulousness
As I shared recently on the Empowering Educators podcast, I think one of the most important things educators can do to build resilience is to carve out regular time for nourishing their inner lifelong learner.
Since the fall of 2020, I've done this by taking a field trip (almost) every week. The only rules are that I have to do it by myself and I have to approach it as a learner. And while I call it a field trip, sometimes the journey is intellectual, not geographical. It’s less about what I do or where I go than showing up as a lifelong learner.
In the future I'll share more about why these field trips are so important to me and tips for how to adapt this practice on your own, no matter how little time you have for yourself.
Here are the weekly field trips I took in February 2024:
I read the travel memoir Call You When I Land by Nikki Vargas while flying from NYC to Denver.
I watched the film The Holdovers while flying from Denver to Atlanta.
I saw The Conceptualists, a stupendous altar of transformation and imagination by my high school classmate Hernan Bas.
Rebekah's Reading Recs
I’ve read 11 books so far in 2024.
Here’s my favorite:
I’d never heard of Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle before this 50th anniversary tribute. Molly Bolt is now my all-time favorite narrator. I love her boldness, her irreverence, and her refusal to be anything other than who she is. Although life attempts to beat her down, she’s indomitable.
It’s probably not a coincidence that I finished reading Rubyfruit Jungle the day I realized I needed to make a change in my personal life so I could be myself and fully embrace what I want without trying to fit myself within someone else’s limitations. Like Molly Bolt, I don’t have to settle, apologize, or conform.
In case you missed it…
What’s next?
As a coach and consultant, I help educators stay connected to their passion and purpose so they can provide all students with joyful, enchanting, empowering learning experiences–without burning out.
I work with teachers, leaders, teams, schools, districts, and other organizations to find the intersection of effectiveness and sustainability.
Thank you for reading the inaugural issue of The Cocoon! I’ll see you next month.
I live and work in New York City and Miami on the historical and current homelands of the Wappinger and Munsee Lenape, and the Seminole and Miccosukee people, respectively. They called these regions home for many years before Dutch, British, Spanish, and American colonizers arrived and stole from them, desecrated their sacred lands, and attempted to eradicate their existence. And still they endure.
Would gladly follow you into battle. I still think “what would Rebekah say?” When I’m struggling with teaching.
You are suck a rockstar and inspiration. Thank you for sending this to me! Missing you!