“It’s not the hearing that improves life but the listening”
Mihaly Csikzentmihaly
In 15 years of teaching my classroom management has improved significantly because I have learned to gain control by giving it up. Building a classroom ethos that optimises learning requires complex interventions. Here are things that work for me.
I’ve been reflecting this week on the aspects of the teaching job that I might claim to be genuinely good at whilst battling my own set of imposter syndrome demons. We are all on this journey from Novice to master, from unconscious incompetence towards unconscious competence - its one of the many facets of the job that unite and sometimes divide us. Just when the bubble of your own school tricks you into thinking you are an ‘expert’, Twitter shoots you down, back into place. At least that’s how it feels to me sometimes.
How often do you look back at your early career years and cringe? One of my most embarrassing traits was to position myself as knowing everything - the sage absolute. Oops. Now I have the emotional literacy to see that that was my ego talking and that my unconscious goal was to control the class into learning and behaving the way I wanted them to: I had a fundamental script that ‘students must utterly respect me because I am a teacher’. I was also scared of losing control. The result of this was that any infringement on that respect was something personal: how dare you talk over me? I see that script all the time now in other teachers’ communication. Is this a problem? I think it is because it promotes conflict and failure: if someone must do something, there is no room for nuance and autonomy. In Karpman’s drama triangle, you have positioned yourself as the persecutor/rescuer and the student as the victim. As I see it, this is a dysfunctional relationship and leaves no room for the type of connection between teacher and student that breeds good learning.
So over the last decade I have (mostly) rewritten my script to become good at building connection and rapport with students. I have borrowed a hundred things from a thousand places so it’s a little tricky to put my finger on the how, but here goes. Just to be clear though; I’m not advocating the lowering of standards or expectations. It’s just a new framing - ‘I have a strong preference that students don’t talk over me and I will support them to get there’. This is in line with what Bill Rogers calls Relaxed vigilance which is a mantra I live by. I’m also a big believer that explicitly teaching students good behaviour is essential to any good classroom and school.
People, generally, just want to be heard, to feel like they have a say in their own journey. It’s up there with our strongest drives and our plainest needs. Few things preserve so readily another human’s dignity and self-esteem. Crucially, when self esteem and perceived competency increases, students are in a more optimised state to learn. I try really hard to make students feel heard, to feel like they are a significant stakeholder in their learning journey. I’m sure that’s true of all teachers, but the net result is that I am very good at building rapport with students. I’ve had a good think about what I do to achieve this as it's a complex intervention - a few different tactics that add up to be more than the sum of their parts. Here are some of them, In no particular order…
Curate autonomy - we all want to be in charge of our own destiny and this drive is particularly strong in teenagers. However, autonomy is not a binary choice and teachers can skilfully set up learning and behaviour moments to give students safe space for making their own decisions and failures.
Tell stories - create relatable conflict and a call to adventure. Learn story telling techniques and structures such as Joseph Cambell’s or as simple as set up - conflict - resolution. Also, invent characters who are previous students who have done the right thing despite facing hardships.
Use empathetic language to show that you’re listening. Sentence starters like ‘I can see that you’re feeling…’ or ‘it seems that you’re…’ work wonders. Once students feel heard, conflict often dissolves and then you can offer curated autonomy as to what they do next.
Use the power of yet. Language is thinking, is learning - the words you choose create worlds and if we say they will or we say they won’t, we will probably be right. In an average lesson, about 50% of my micro-interactions end in ‘yet’.
Reflect back what students say so that they feel heard. You will be amazed at how quickly a student who feels heard will fall back into line in a classroom. ‘On the one hand you feel x, but on the other hand I need you to work in silence so we can all learn more’ is another great way to do this.
Make kids laugh. It’s such a powerful way to build a sense of belonging and they will love you for it. Just a bit of self-defecation will do the trick - this will relax them, build connection and model authentic failure. Generally speaking, teenagers are in absolute awe of anyone who is not self-conscious.
Choose your lietenants carefully. They are the ones that will cement the social norms you construct. Elevate their status and diminish yours as this will create belonging and your own ‘tribe’. Give the extrovert kid a minute to make people laugh and then the whole class will work hard for 10 after that.
Spontaneous rewards are much better than systematic ones. Giving one kid one shot to throw paper into the bin is more motivating for 30 students than an achievement point.
There’s quite a few more that I’ve written and deleted until I can write about them in more detail - things like ‘psychological safety’ and some tricks from neuroscience and business facilitation that maybe should be given a bit more than a sentence or two.
If any of this is helpful, please message me and share. If you want to work together, please get in touch.
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