Today I am joined on the podcast with Em Gentle, a graduate teacher mentor, fellow edu-podcaster, and founder of the grad guide where she supports new teachers adopt a trauma informed approach to teaching.
In today’s episode we go on all the rants including:
Although new teachers are definitely the focus for this episode, it is just as valuable for all teachers.
After all, it is simply about great teaching.
Find more of Em's work on instagram: @thegradguide_
Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!
Other ways I can support you in your teaching practice:
Today I am joined on the podcast with Em Gentle, a graduate teacher mentor, fellow edu-podcaster, and founder of the grad guide where she supports new teachers adopt a trauma informed approach to teaching.
In today’s episode we go on all the rants including:
Although new teachers are definitely the focus for this episode, it is just as valuable for all teachers.
After all, it is simply about great teaching.
Find more of Em's work on instagram: @thegradguide_
Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!
Other ways I can support you in your teaching practice:
Hello, wonderful teachers, welcome to another week of the Unteachables podcast. I hope you've had a nice week and I know some of you have gone back to school this week, so I hope it's been as smooth as it possibly can be. On today's episode I could talk to M Gentle, who is not just a friend but a graduate teacher mentor, a fellow edu-podcaster I don't know if I've just coined that term and found of the grad guide, where she supports new teachers, adopt a trauma-informed approach to teaching, and in today's episode we go on many a rants about what teachers should be taught before they step into the classroom, in terms of both classroom management and teaching and learning, because we know that both of those are linked together in a multitude of ways. M is able to give you some really great advice coming from her primary experience, and I'm able to offer all of you secondary teachers my best insights and advice as well. This episode isn't just for new teachers. This episode is just about great teaching in general. So grab yourself a cuppa and let's get into it.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Unteachables podcast. I'm Claire English, a passionate secondary teacher and leader, turned teacher mentor and author, and I'm on a mission to transform classroom management and teacher support in schools. It doesn't feel that long ago that I was completely overwhelmed and out of my depth of behaviour, trying to swim rather than sink. It took me spending thousands of hours in the classroom, with all of the inevitable ups and downs, to make me the teacher that I am today Confident, capable and empowered in my ability to teach all students yes, even the ones who are the toughest to reach and now I'm dedicated to supporting teachers like yourself to do the same. I created the Unteachables podcast to give you the simple and actionable classroom management strategies and support that you need to run your room with confidence and calm. So if you're a teacher or one in the making, and you're wanting to feel happy and empowered and actually enjoy being in the classroom, whilst also making a massive impact with every single one of your students, then you're definitely in the right place. Let's get started.
Speaker 2:Good morning Emma. Hello Claire, how are you?
Speaker 1:I'm going. Well, love, we have been talking for the last half an hour, so let's not pretend. And we were just talking about for everyone who's listening was talking about how awkward it is to actually start, because you have a podcast too. It's called let's Get Schools and I absolutely love it, and I always get like massive imposter syndrome listening to other people's podcast because I'm like how do you start so smoothly? I just can't. When I'm interviewing someone, even just by myself, it's always super awkward.
Speaker 2:I remember doing my first few and it was so just embarrassing and gross doing the introduction, but I think it just gets easier.
Speaker 1:Have you ever listened back to your first couple of episodes of your podcast and gone, oh my.
Speaker 2:God no, god no.
Speaker 1:I did recently, just as like an exercise in I don't know, just reflection, and it's really hard not to delete them because, like you know, they go really well and people love them. But then you're so critical on yourself and you want to go back and change it, and I think it's really important for people to know that, even though we're in this space, we still feel that way, and everybody does in, whatever they're trying to do when they're starting out. And that is a really good segue into what we're going to be talking about today, because we're going to be talking about new teachers.
Speaker 2:Did you plan this?
Speaker 1:I promise I really didn't plan this and I'm really impressed with myself, especially because I got very little sleep last night with Ava. But new teachers this one is for you and for anybody really who's interested in listening to kind of what we're about to talk about. We both work with new teachers in some capacity. You explicitly work with new teachers, don't you?
Speaker 2:Yes, I have a membership, an online membership for new teachers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just work with new teachers.
Speaker 1:I'm not really into specific niche, whereas mine is woven in, but I'm super passionate about supporting new teachers.
Speaker 1:So I thought it would be really good and yourself as well, obviously that it would be really good to do an episode specifically for new teachers from because you teach primary or you were a primary teacher and I am a secondary teacher. So, coming at it from both of those lenses because on this podcast and in the work I do, I have both primary and secondary teachers that I do support and sometimes and I've said it multiple times even though a lot of the stuff that I teach is really applicable to both primary and secondary, mainly upper primary, because those lower primary kids we were talking about the other day, weren't we? Like, is this a different ball game when you're talking about a seven year old and then you're talking about a 17 year old, like it's very different Not so much 11 year old sometimes, to be honest with you, but there's a massive gap between those two kind of ages. So, so nice to have you on to give your primary perspective and, yeah, just kind of talk about what we can do to better support new teachers.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I absolutely agree with everything you've just said and I think that that segue was brilliant, because I remember my first year of teaching and, although I had had been in the classroom for three years already as a teacher's aid, I still think back to some of the things that I did or the ways that I approached behavior and I think, oh my goodness, you know, compared to now, 13 years later, it's a stark difference. But it's just like anything that you start the first time, that you do something in the first year or first few years, it's going to be completely different. You know, when you're comparing it to years down the track, and I don't think that you ever get to a point where you don't reflect on how you're going, and I think that's a really, you know, beautiful part of the process and a sign of someone who wants to really do well, in whatever field they're in, in terms of going back and reflecting. So I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you were saying just before about taking messy action and I loved that and I thought it was really applicable and you just kind of got to get in there and get your hands dirty a little bit, don't you?
Speaker 1:But there are so many things that we could be doing in a society, as a you know, schools as teacher preparation programs, universities, all the rest of it to be able to support in the system, all of those things, to better support new teachers, to not, you know, you kind of get chucked into sync.
Speaker 1:You really do. And in that first year, the amount of times I still remember being told you know it's like sync or swim, you know you'll be fine, you just you'll tread water, you'll learn the ropes, and then you know, or you'll cut your teeth, and that's just what kind of new teachers are expected to do. But surely there's more we can like, there is more that we can be doing to prepare them so they don't have to go in there feeling like this. And so, from a primary perspective and you have worked a lot with new teachers and you talk to a lot of new teachers in your membership new programs, all the rest of it what is one thing you say you would say they struggle with the most when it comes to being a new teacher.
Speaker 2:Before I answer that, I wanted to circle back to. I think that it's a cop out that a lot of people say, you know, just learn on the job. We did because I just don't think that that's acceptable enough for the profession that we're in. Education is such an important part of our society and we work with children especially in my context, when we're working in early years with little kids. It's really not a job we can just learn on the job and expect to be efficient or exceptional. I just think that that's a bit of a cop out and hence why I'm doing what I'm doing, because there is so much that has been left out and hopefully there's been a lot of chatter in Australia about, you know, initial teacher education reforms and changing degrees, and there are some universities here leading the way in that, which is great. But I think that when people do say, you know, we learn on the job and that's just part of it yeah, that is a small part of it, but you're not going to say that to a surgeon, are you? Because I would say that our job is just as important, if not more important, because we are helping raise children. So I think that we need to shift that mindset in terms of just going well, you'll be right, you'll just learn on the job.
Speaker 2:So this is going to be very ranted because I could talk about this all day, but I think that the biggest thing that I experienced when I'm supporting grads is their feeling of overwhelm, and it's directly linked to the lack of preparation and the lack of confidence they feel going into their chosen profession, because I suppose and this is where I don't know if you see this, Claire the imposter syndrome sets in a lot for new grads.
Speaker 2:They often experience that because they are fully qualified teachers now, whether they've done four years bachelor or they've done a postgrad and I totally understand the postgrad, but we can talk about that later they just feel like they're not qualified and they don't know what they're doing because at university you don't learn what to do in the first week or how to create a timetable or what to do on playground duty or all of these really simple things. And yes, I know playground duty is an example of something you can learn on the job, but we shouldn't be learning how to teach reading and writing on the job. I think that that is ridiculous. We shouldn't be learning classroom management and effective classroom management on the job. We should know how to set our classroom up for success from the beginning. So no wonder these grads feel overwhelmed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I completely agree, and I guess my answer to the same question is kind of similar, isn't it? It's all kind of leads to a sense of overwhelm. All of the things that they struggle with will then lead to a sense of overwhelm. But I find that when I'm working with because I used to be a headteacher mentor, so I worked with new teachers specifically in a secondary mainstream context but the one thing that I saw that they really really struggled with was establishing themselves in a classroom in terms of their kind of teacher persona, like going in and you've, especially as a secondary teacher, I remember I started teaching when I was 21 years old and I was in front of 30, 30 year, 12 students who were then 18 years old. So 30, 18 year olds I was a 21 year old.
Speaker 1:How do you then establish a persona where you feel credible, you feel like the authority, you feel like you can teach them without crossing that barrier and that boundary into being a friend? How can you be, you know, like an authority in that space? It is so challenging and it's so nuanced and it's so hard to navigate. But even with 15 year olds, 13 year olds, it's so hard being a new teacher standing in front of a classroom and but I want the age of the student and actually kind of establishing yourself as a credible leader in your, because we all, we all just are leaders in classrooms. And that all comes down to how do we, you know, how do we create our own teacher persona? How do we craft our teacher persona? And we definitely can craft it, no matter what kind of human being we are, naturally, whether we're outgoing introverts because I'm definitely, even though I don't seem that I am quite an introverted person. I'm really struggled with that.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I can't even imagine how I felt intimidated, how many years ago now I've lost track. I don't know if that your brain has done this since you've had Ava, but since having Rafi the years all just blend together over maternity leave and all the things. But as part of my assistant principal position, I oversaw well being for our central school and I taught secondary well being and that was my first experiencing actually teaching secondary and I was 30. And I still felt, you know, intimidated or overwhelmed with the older kids definitely, and I remember feeling that way as a new teacher when I started in grade four, because you have all of these thoughts of like what if they find out I don't know what I'm doing? Or what if they question me and I don't know the answer? Or what if something goes wrong or this lesson flops? What are they going to think a minute.
Speaker 2:Of course we feel like that when we're in our early 20s because we haven't really built that sense of self Like I feel like my 20s was really about finding yourself and I guess that's just bittersweet and part of the journey, right, and why we continue to reflect and just do the best we can and not make it mean at all that we don't know what we're doing, but just see it as a beautiful stepping stone in our experience and the wisdom. But as a beginning teacher I suppose when you know a mentor or someone says, just trust the process, sometimes that can be really hard and if you're not self assured or you don't have that self trust it can be really difficult to just trust the process and and feel okay with just doing your best. But I think that that still does have a lot to do with the way that we're setting teachers up. I think that we are setting them up to fail essentially.
Speaker 1:And it's very hard to do. All of those things that you would usually do in every, every single job is like that. Every single job you have a process of establishing yourself and learning the ropes and all the rest of it. But the difference is that in other jobs you don't have to do that in front of 30 young people who are going to give you immediate feedback about whether you're doing a good enough job. They'll go in there and they will disengage, they'll walk out of the room, they'll tell you to f off, they'll chuck something around the room, they won't do their work. You won't be able to get them to like.
Speaker 1:It's a completely different ball game when that immediate feedback and then you can't help but make that really personal to yourself, like, okay, I'm not doing the job, they don't care, they don't want to learn. And of course, like as experienced teachers, we can now pick it apart and see what's not working and be really reflective about that and put some more things in place or or understand that that is just a normal part of you know the child's development or them needs meeting. You can kind of look back now. You know and understand all of those things, but as a new teacher. You don't have the capacity to do that because all of those things take a lot of time to kind of get your head around. So without even the foundations, you know like you'll really you've got no safety net underneath you if you don't have any skills you've developed in your teacher preparation programs and then you're just feeling like crap about yourself. You know 100%.
Speaker 2:And because we are, you know, human beings, our meaning makers, we do try and make it mean something. So we make it mean that we're not cut out for teaching, or that we're not good enough or that we can't do it, and then that just plays into our negativity bias, and so then we look for all the evidence to reinforce those beliefs, and I think that's why a lot of teachers quit, because they start looking for all those reasons to quit and to go. This is too hard and not cut out for this, and so that's a lot of the work that I do with new grads is noticing what went well and reflecting on the day every day. Finding a win and looking at a part of your first few years of teaching is having someone beside you, and you know that can be anyone who is helping you see the glimmers and see the positive things that you're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I don't think like I mean, when I was writing the dedication in my book, like I was thinking back to those first few years and like I was a leader, like I was a head teacher of teaching and learning in my second year of teaching, so I was a leader very quickly and there's no way I would have been able to succeed because it was a tough school as well without certain people that were supporting me. I had the most incredible support net I had. I was so lucky. But it shouldn't be based on luck.
Speaker 2:It shouldn't be that you just go.
Speaker 1:I've lucked out because I've gotten into a school, I've got these incredible mentors. That shouldn't be a you know a blessing. It should be, you know, it shouldn't be the rule.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly right. I totally resonate with that. And yeah, it shouldn't be luck Like some grads get into schools where they do have great support, but I think that that's the minority, to be honest, and that's just not good enough. Like you said, it's really not good enough.
Speaker 1:There is funding in Australian schools for beginning teachers. I don't know where that funding is necessarily being spent. But in the school, in the school that I was at, we had the head teacher mentor and that was a brilliant role and I think a lot of schools need to focus more energy on that. Anyway, we could talk about that for so long, but very specifically, I feel like it's going to be me kind of going okay, let's just, let's just move it along here, because I'll just get caught up.
Speaker 1:Emma, no, shut up myself, because I don't. I'm glad that you kept talking a couple of like minutes ago you were talking about something and then you moved on the conversation. I'm like, okay, thank God I don't have to spend five minutes ranting and raving about something that you've just said, so let's go on to something a bit practical, right? If there was one thing that you could choose for teachers to know before going into the profession about classroom management, to set them up a little bit better, there are a million things that we could be teaching them right to give them that really solid foundation and, based on what you're talking about, like them struggling, what is one thing that would alleviate a bit of that overwhelm that they could learn in their teacher preparation programs before heading in with classroom management?
Speaker 2:But this is the most impossible question because one thing is just it's really not possible, but I'm going to do my best to answer. I think that we and this is something that I'm really passionate about and I'm sure anyone that follows the grad guide already will know is understanding a non-punitive, trauma, informed approach, and that is because it all hinges on, like far too far into my degree. I think back and I realized that, wow, how did I not know that for half of my degree, like no one really ever sat me down and explicitly taught me how to create felt and relational safety in classrooms and what that actually means and what it looks like and what my role was in that and this is something I speak about often is that we play so much of a role. We have such a huge role in our classroom. Emotions are contagious. We set the scene for the classroom and yet more often than not, when you see classroom management programs, it's all about the kids, it's never about the educator.
Speaker 2:And the main element in the classroom, and what differs or what sets exceptional teachers apart from good ones, is that they understand that and they work on themselves. And so with the non-punitive approach, obviously we look at connection over compliance, and because we've grown up in that behaviorist paradigm. We all want to be good girls and good boys and we go into the classroom thinking that we have to. In order to be a good teacher, we have to control the class and it's all up to us. There can't be any mistakes, or it can't be noisy, or you know, it has to all look put together and that is not how we create felt safety in the classroom. And so I think going into the classroom or an education setting an educational setting, sorry it's really important to understand that you create the climate in the classroom and that it's. You don't have to have it all together, you don't have to know everything, you don't have to control the kids. You can't control kids. I wish that someone had have said that to me, but that is just the setting that we're in, unfortunately, and hence why I have started my business. So you know it all hinges on connection and safety and that we're not there to just get kids to comply, because that's not how they learn best. And so, yeah, I think that really understanding you know what a punitive classroom management style does to children and how it impacts them, and adopting a trauma-informed approach which really just hinges on safety and regulation and feeling, you know, anchored and grounded in the classroom. I think that that completely shifts the lens that you look at children through, and I think that that's what we need to be. Shifting is the lens in which we children I don't know about you, but I think back to even some of my early days in year one, two.
Speaker 2:I predominantly taught in the earlier years the expectations that I had for them.
Speaker 2:I look back now, the first year ridiculous.
Speaker 2:I was like an Army Sergeant and I expected to do all these things really quickly and all have it together, and at the time I was praised for having, you know, control over my classroom and they were so well behaved.
Speaker 2:But when I reflect and like this took took me a long time to really be able to process the guilt, because I think that I focused more on compliance than connection, and although I have always been good at building relationships and supporting your divergent learner that's where my passion is there were still plenty of moments where I expected far too much from children, and so that just plays into that lens though of, like you know, compliance, and we've got to get this done and rather than connecting and helping the child feel safe. It was more about how could I get them to do what I want them to do? And so any grads listening like that is not your job. Yes, we still have boundaries, but it's not your job to control children. It's your job to become one of their attachment figures and help them feel safe, and that is where everything else will blossom. So I feel that was like a round of that way.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, no. I love it. So I love that you said that, because one of the narratives I tell in my book is exactly that I talk about inherited classroom management how what we do is we fall back on the things that, because we've got nothing else, we've got no other kind of like paradigm to work with, what we do is we fall back on the things that we have experienced ourselves. So in school ourselves we've experienced that punitive approach. We've experienced all of these things. We've even absorbed it through the media. We watched the movies, we watched through all of those things. And so we go into the classroom and we fall back on that because it's the only thing we have to fall back on. And when people talk about guilt for that, when they learn a different way to be able to kind of work in a classroom with our young people that's more effective and actually supports them to be more accountable and actually sports change, they go. Oh my God, I feel so guilty for like sending them out and screaming at them and all the rest of it. But don't feel guilty, because that is your inherited classroom management, and I have a narrative in the book where I talk about my inherited classroom management.
Speaker 1:There was a time where I thought I had nailed classroom management. I had all of them sitting quietly, I was smashing it, like I felt so in control, I felt so empowered, and it's because I was running back and forth to the board and putting crosses on the board and all the rest of it. But what was happening is the students who were the most vulnerable were voting with their feet and they just wouldn't come in. So I had a really great environment in my classroom but I actually wasn't doing my job and it took a lot of kind of discovery in myself to go, ok, crap.
Speaker 1:Well, I didn't get into the profession to just teach this, like I literally got into the profession to teach the students who were the most vulnerable, because I actually went into social work first and I was working at a youth homelessness service and I thought actually crap, I need to be working with these young people where it's going to be preventative and where it's going to matter and where I can get them reengaging education, because that's the key to all of this. And then I got into the profession. I was doing the opposite and it's don't feel guilty around that, because it's just what we rely on because we're in survival mode most of the time and we need to do what we can do to get through that lesson and do the best job we can, and unfortunately we don't get taught another way in university.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and it's because, too, that it's to do with our imprints.
Speaker 2:That is all of our default mechanisms, because that's how we've been parented as well.
Speaker 2:So as soon as we feel powerless in the classroom, we go to power over, because that's our natural instinct to do that, and we do that in our relationships, and that's why I teach emotional intelligence, because we have not learned how to become self-aware or how to emotionally regulate and how to communicate our needs.
Speaker 2:And I think that that has been a huge downfall in education in terms of again placing all the emphasis on the kids and not on the educator first. In doing all of this inner work and I think that you know, I think the guilt is part of the process in terms of when you're moving from one paradigm to another you know you're going to reflect and feel that, but at the end of the day, we are both here because we've experienced that. That's been part of our journey and that's why we're both so passionate about it, because we've taught both ways. And I would not have started a business I never thought I would start a business, but I wouldn't start one if I was not 100% certain that this was the new shift that we need in education and parenting.
Speaker 1:It's very closely linked, as you know, oh yeah, like I get contacted by parents all the time on Instagram saying, oh my God, like I follow your content.
Speaker 1:Oh, because I'm a teacher. But because I'm a parent and I need this in terms of a secondary like what I would choose for teachers to take into the classroom, one thing that would set them better up for success. And it kind of links in with a trauma-informed approach, because it's a trauma-informed approach approach in action, and I've kind of started to shift my teaching away from being just a trauma-informed approach, because not all behaviours link to trauma. Behaviour is also just developmental. It's all about needs, meaning and all the rest of it. But one thing that and you know, teachers always come to me saying, oh, but they're not, they haven't had a hard life, all right, and they're still being difficult because everyone just behaves, don't they? And one thing that I would choose links very heavily into that, because it's all about our teacher presence and how to establish that. And establishing our teacher presence is all about the nonverbals. Every single thing we do in a classroom is sending messages to the young people that we're either credible or approachable, whether we're frantic, whether we're calm, and our energy is so infectious, and it is the one tool that we have, the most powerful tool that we have to reduce low level behaviours and to kind of establish a calm climate in the classroom and establish ourselves as the teacher, as the leader. So when we're talking about a trauma-informed approach, when we're talking about it being in action, that's how we live a trauma-informed approach in the everyday, and it's not just supporting students who have experienced trauma, who have experienced adverse childhood experiences. It is supporting every single young person, because every single young person needs emotional regulation and our energy is so contagious it is the most contagious thing that we can possibly imagine. So I would.
Speaker 1:And also, mind you, in primary you get a whole week with your young people, you get every single day with them. So when they talk about establishing a relationship, when you talk about, you know, you just need to, you know, establish a relationship with the young people. You need to connect with them and all the rest of it. That's all well and good for primary teachers, who spend a lot of time with young people. Secondary teachers could have 10 classes.
Speaker 1:I have hundreds of students that I teach and, of course, I do my very best and secondary teachers do their very best to establish really meaningful relationships with their young people and they succeed at that. Very often, however, it takes a very long time and you don't want to wait until halfway through the year to go. Actually, I've got a good rapport with that student. Now you don't have the time in the day for the touch points that a primary teacher might have. So, because of this, if you're able to establish a really strong teacher presence by Because I teach like a toolbox to do that but if you're able to implement a toolbox that can help you establish a really strong teacher presence, this is transferable no matter what you are doing, no matter what you are teaching.
Speaker 1:If you're a casual teacher, if you've got your first day in teaching, if you're teaching 10 different classes in secondary, or if you're in primary, of course, and you've got longer with your young people, it works in every single context and I think that that is and when I talk about a teacher presence and teach about a teacher presence, people see immediate shifts in low level behavior, which is the toughest thing. That is one of the biggest things that people talk about as being a struggle in the classroom. It is so disempowering. It's the thing that leaves you just feeling deflated, like being spoken over, not being able to get the class's attention, all of those little spotfires, and that was my rant. That was me going on for ages.
Speaker 1:But I am so passionate about this because it's something that is. There are no quick fixes in education. But if I could pick one thing that was literally a light switch for low level behaviors and for, say, to mitigate more challenging behaviors, it would be establishing a strong teacher presence, because everything flows on from that.
Speaker 2:So if you were speaking directly to secondary teachers, what is one tip that they could take away and implement tomorrow to improve their teacher presence?
Speaker 1:Just say you've got a class of 30 in front of you and things are chaotic and you're trying to get their attention. What I often see is teachers trying to put those spotfires out, trying to raise the volume, trying to get their attention, trying to do all of those things and they wait for ages. If you're going to go into your classroom tomorrow, stand centre, stand front, stand in an attention position. Every single time you're going for attention, take a deep breath and drop your shoulders and become very conscious of how you're standing and how you're breathing. Just breathe, really, really slowly. Drop your shoulders, try to feel very calm. Self-regulation is the first thing that you need to be really in control of and making sure that you feel calm in that space and just wait, like do your call to attention, put your hand up, do your non-verbal, do the things you'd usually do, but do it in a way that is really centred and really calm. That breath and that pause is one of the most powerful things that you can do in a classroom and even before the students come in. How quickly are you speaking? How loud are you speaking? How are you moving around the room If you're giving students a task to complete and you're expecting the students to complete that quietly and individually and you're running around the classroom and trying to talk to students loudly. That is the energy that you are giving to the students. So always model what you want from the young people.
Speaker 1:If you want a class of 30 to be listening to you and you want them to be quiet and you want them to be, you know, like responding to you, what do you need to do to model that back to them? Because, just as your energy is contagious to them, their energy is very contagious to you. And the amount of like lessons I've walked out of as an early career teacher being so sweaty I had patches all over my underarms and my back and I'd feel so anxious and so stressed I have to go lay on the staff room floor because of the 30 students throwing things around and causing chaos and me not being able to manage myself. It's just wild. So, yeah, all of those nonverbals that you're sending, just become really tuned in and really aware of what those nonverbal like messages you're sending are and just everything you do. What do I want from them? And let me do that back.
Speaker 2:I love that. I totally resonate with that and I think that's a really good message to share with grads in terms of you walking out with sweat patches and feeling overwhelmed, because we all feel like that in the beginning and that is why we are doing what we're doing, to one normalize it that when we probably don't have the skills and we don't have the confidence yet, that's going to happen. But it's just about reflection and, you know, looking at what you've done well and then reflecting on one thing that you could change next time and, like you said, those little shifts that you can make. If you just focus on that one thing and don't worry about the rest, and then you know that becomes a habit, then you just continue to build on it. I know that's something that I was told in my first year.
Speaker 2:That was a really great piece of advice and it was just in terms of focusing on KLA's and just focusing on one thing, because I know we mentioned earlier that we rarely get taught Well in primary degrees. We don't get taught really how to teach reading and writing and maths, which is pretty scary considering that's a lot of our job, but just focusing on one key learning area at a time. So you know, focusing on literacy and obviously teaching maths, but not really honing in on it yet, focusing on one and getting really good at that and feeling really confident and then moving to the next one Because, like we said earlier, it's just so overwhelming. You don't know enough when you start and then there's so much to focus on in terms of teaching and learning and classroom management and assessment and teacher practice and just all the things parent communication it can be really overwhelming. It is just a puzzle piece.
Speaker 1:It's like a puzzle that keeps growing as you kind of get into teaching and you learn more.
Speaker 1:Now I've got to like kind of run an assembly and I've got a like it just getting bigger and bigger, oh crap. Okay, I've got a 10 calls today and like it's just it's immense. And remember that you know we've been doing it for a long time and it's easy to sit here and kind of impart this knowledge, but it does take a lot of support and as much as I can give like advice on a podcast or you know, I think having somebody there to guide you through that and not expecting to go in and implement one piece of the process and it to go perfectly, You're not failing if you go in there and try some nonverbal strategies and things kind of. You know, like we've been doing it for a long time. So giving yourself grace in that process as well, Because you know I'm 14 years deep, so it's a lot easier for me now to it's a part of my. I like to talk about the what's it called Like a conscious and unconscious skill, like the conscious and unconscious, the competence the competency?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I probably should have if I was going to talk about that too. I even did a podcast episode about it actually, and it's obviously not become a part of my unconscious skills repertoire. Like you know, we've become unconsciously skilled at certain things and when you're a new teacher, you are unconsciously unskilled and you know now you're learning, you're in that process of learning that crap. I actually am very unskilled.
Speaker 1:I'm consciously unskilled now, and what do I need to do to adopt the skills?
Speaker 1:I need to then become more competent, and that is a really hard process and you never reach complete unskilled competency at teaching because it's constantly oh my God like, of course, you gain mastery over certain things, but it is a constant kind of cycle of that in teaching and it has to be. But be very kind to yourself, because you are at the very start of that process and it's a long journey and it's a tough journey and you need people by your side to be able to do that. And I could just talk about it forever. But let's quickly go on to the next thing, which was if we could choose one thing in university to set teachers up and you said it before, didn't you with the teaching, reading and writing, but you can elaborate if you want. One thing with teaching and learning, because we talk a lot about classroom management in terms of behavior and really explicit behavior management, but what's something that teachers aren't prepared for with their teaching and learning when they go into the profession?
Speaker 2:I think, especially in primary, the literacy aspect and a lot of that is changing at the moment, with more research and neuroscience coming out around the science of reading and look. This has brought up a lot of stuff for me because I have spent my time in schools where we used L3 programs and reading recovery, and I'm so thankful for L3 in New South Wales because when I started it was my third year and I started in year one, two I actually had no idea where to start to teach them how to read or write, like literally nothing. I'd come from teaching grade five, six, where it was more like you were intervening and trying to help them but not starting from scratch, and so, thankfully, my school signed me up to L3 and it was a two year program, really intensive program, and I was able to go over to another school and collaborate with 10 other educators. I think it was like three times a term or something. It was huge, but it was amazing. And after I'd completed that I just thought why do we not do this at university, like, why isn't this part of our four year bachelor degree?
Speaker 2:Yes, we learn a lot about the theory and overviews, I suppose, of teaching literacy, but not really the nitty gritty of how, what it looks like in context, and then when you get into a school, like obviously at university, we do all these huge plans, but it doesn't look like that in school. So that's what frustrates me is that you start at a school. There's so much inconsistency in the education system, so what one school does in terms of teaching literacy could be completely opposite to the next school, and I think that's why we have such a huge variation in literacy results and that is changing here. We have great people doing a lot of work with the science of reading, which is fabulous, and getting a lot more consistency across Australia. But, yeah, I think having a really clear plan on how to teach children how to read and write like it just sounds so silly, doesn't it? You are becoming a teacher and then you get into the classroom and you think I actually don't know how to teach these kids. How do we do it at this school? It shouldn't be. How do we do it at this school? It should be. Well, this is how everyone does it in every year, one classroom. This is what we all follow and I don't know.
Speaker 2:The prescripted stuff I think is great, but also I'm hearing a lot of feedback in terms of teachers losing their spark because it is so prescriptive and I'm not sure if you talk about this often clear. But I get frustrated with the pendulum in education. It always seems to swing one way or the other. There's never any balance, and so a lot of the talk about the science of reading is that we haven't explicitly taught phonics and phonemic awareness and all these other things where really it's just dependent, I think, on the school that you were in and whether that school had adopted a wide range of programs, I suppose, to meet the curriculum and meet the student needs. But I just don't think that we should have this variation in schools. It should be the same everywhere, where we have to explicitly teach them the skills and then, once they have the skills, they can do problem solving, they can participate in inquiry, learning and that sort of thing. I don't think it needs to be one or the other.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, reading is the gateway to everything and in terms of our society, reading is the building blocks for a successful society. And you see the statistics, the links between students who are literate or don't have those literacy skills, and incarceration rates or an inability to access services and life expectancy, and there are so many things that link with reading. And in secondary it's the same thing. Right, because I teach 13 year olds and have the reading age of a six year old. How the hell is a secondary teacher who has an English literature? I'm an English teacher, I have an English literature degree.
Speaker 1:I could talk about philosophy, I could talk about you know, bloody 16th century text to the cows come home. But can I teach that 13 year old boy in my class, who has a reading age of six, how to access a text? And it's so crucial, it's so important for all teachers to be able to do that. And secondary teachers often get thrown in the deep end as well because they don't get taught teaching, like to teach reading and writing Exactly, exactly, in that very explicit way. You know, I think there's more push in the UK, to be honest with you, like Ofsted really pushes phonics programs even in secondary, and I think that I've I ran reading programs in my whole school in the last couple of terms, so I feel much more equipped now, but because I had to upskill myself very quickly to be able to teach the entire school about how to teach reading and writing to young people. So, yeah, there's definitely a gap there that we need to address.
Speaker 2:So inconsistent. That's what's yeah, it's so frustrating, so inconsistent. It's one of the most important skills. Academically, it is the most important skill and yet you know, we have schools struggling to do that and teachers that don't know how to do that, and I was one of those when I started my career. Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it kind of shocked me when you said that you didn't get taught how to explicitly teach reading, because I thought that primary teachers would get a lot of that. Anyway, with secondary and setting teachers up to support young people with teaching and learning, one thing again it's the practical stuff, isn't it? I said that I did an English literature degree and then I did a master's. I did do a master's in secondary teaching after that, but still, this stuff wasn't what I learned and it was like one thing that I would definitely do like implements before teachers get into the classroom is just how to quickly and effectively scaffold and model for young people, because that is the key to getting them to access their learning. So, thinking about modeling like me, we and you. So I do it, we do it together and then you go and do it.
Speaker 1:It's like such a basic principle of teaching that I did not get taught when I went into teaching and I had to learn it along the way and I had to learn how to joint, construct things up on the board and model things on the board and ask those really strategic questions to get students to think, and then I had to learn how to kind of scaffold things for them.
Speaker 1:So when they're independently doing things, they will be able to do that successfully, and not only does that set them up for academic success, but my book's called us never just about the behavior, because the way this transforms behavior in the classroom, because all those trauma reform things you were talking about with establishing felt safety, this is what it looks like in practice. Establishing felt safety in the classroom isn't about taking a deep breath. It is about providing students with the environment that they can safely learn, that they feel like they can achieve, that they don't know they know they're not going to walk into a classroom and be expected to do things that make them feel dumb and expose them and they can connect to that as all of those things that actually that is trauma reform practice and just good practice and action.
Speaker 2:One thing it's. There's not one thing like everything is obviously, it's all linked Exactly. So it's hard and I think that's one of the frustrations about initial teacher education is that there is so much that you need to learn because it all does link. So it's like where do we start in terms of patching all this up? Like it's really difficult.
Speaker 1:I felt. Safety is about every single thing you do in the classroom. It's not just about taking a deep breath. It's not just about regulation. It's not about co regulation is about everything. It's about the routines and structures you have when they walk into the room, is about how you set your boundaries and expectations and that and how you live that through every single little thing that you do. It's about teaching them how to read. It's about everything. Everything feeds into an approach that is more effective than a punitive approach.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that's why it stems on embodiment. The teacher has to embody all of these practices first and that's what I talk a lot about in terms of social emotional learning. We see a lot of the programs coming to light where you know it's again for the students. But if the teacher doesn't adopt it or the teacher doesn't embody it and actually follow through and it becomes a routine in itself and this is just our classroom culture, this is our classroom climate and this is how we operate in this classroom Then it doesn't stick and you don't have that consistency which, again, the consistency stems and links into the felt safety, like it all just does connect.
Speaker 2:I love that you talk about scaffolding and I think that, from in my experience working with grads just over the past 12 months, a lot of them are learning the gradual release of responsibility and I think there are a lot of new teachers who are understanding the I do, we do, you do approach, which is great, and that's something that we focus on in TGM and I think that that's one thing I do love about teach a gram.
Speaker 2:There's quite a lot of pages that I do recommend in teachers modeling this, what it looks like in context and in someone's classroom. Because if you don't have the opportunity, if you're in a small school especially here in Australia, a rural school and you don't get to watch other teachers, often you don't see what it looks like in practice. And often when we read something or look at something, it can look completely different when it's in practice, or it just clicks. When you see it you go, oh, that's what that sounds like or that's what that looks like, and so I think if new teachers can get into classrooms and really watch that explicit teaching, that's going to help so much.
Speaker 1:Well, that's ironic, isn't it? Because that is modeling, like teachers need to be modeled practice from other teachers as well, just as students need to be modeled what things look like from teachers. Where human beings, we need to know what something looks like to be able to do it effectively. So it just works, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:It does.
Speaker 1:Em. Where can people find more about you? What do you do? Tell people about your work and where they can find you and work with you.
Speaker 2:I thought we were going to chat for another hour because I thought we were just going to be rolling off the topic. Well, I started a business last year called the grad guide and started my membership for new teachers. So there's three tiers at the moment. Actually, one is about to be pulled away and renamed, which is my leader membership. That's currently called TGM lead, but it's about to be called the embodied leader, which is pretty much encompasses everything we're talking about today in terms of leadership and creating leaders who are embodying their practice. So they're not just talking the talk but walking the walk as well, and that is a theme across TGM. So TGM learn is for pre-service teachers.
Speaker 2:I really am passionate about supporting teachers whilst they're at uni because they have the time to learn a lot of this theory in terms of the non-punitive trauma, informed approach, and I do a lot of work around supporting neurodivergent learners as well, and so many of my pre-service teachers have said to me that I haven't. I'm in my third year of university. I haven't ever heard the term neurodivergent, and so that is why I'm doing what I'm doing. And then TGM grow is for new teachers in their first three years, so our membership is currently open, I think whilst this episode is airing. So go and have a look at the grad guide.
Speaker 2:We currently are supporting early childhood, primary and secondary teachers, so we have an early childhood mentor and a secondary teacher mentor. I'm primary trained, so a lot of the content is primary, but it is adaptable to early childhood and secondary, so I'm very transparent about that. But if you do join, you have access to the mentors all the time. Every week you can ask them specific questions. We have our first in-person event coming up in February in Melbourne, which is really exciting, but I also, like I said, have a membership for leaders.
Speaker 2:I'm a school consultant, so I'm going around supporting teams and schools in adopting a non-punitive, trauma-informed approach, and a lot of the work is also centered around supporting neurodivergent learners and building emotional intelligence. That's something that I'm really passionate about and I think that we have not focused on it enough as a society. I know there's a lot around that happening in the parenting space, and so bringing it into education is only going to help teach. On Instagram, at the grad guide underscore, and also I have another page called just mgentle, so you can find me there. All LinkedIn, on Facebook, on all the platforms.
Speaker 1:You know how it is and if you're listening on M's podcast and you'd like to know a little bit more about how you can get support from me. I run the Unteachables Academy and you can follow me on Instagram over at the dot on teacherables, and I have the podcast, obviously, that you can listen along to weekly. A couple of really exciting things. The first is that my book is never just about the behavior is officially available to pre-order on Amazon. For those of you in different parts of the world it will be in Drips and Drabbs elsewhere, but in the UK it's on Amazon at the moment and I'm opening doors to my signature program that'll teach them in April.
Speaker 1:And this program is something that is so comprehensive, it's so holistic. It gives you the exact roadmaps and resources that you need to be able to reduce behaviors, respond to behaviors and then resolve behaviors that are just standing in your way of doing what you got into the profession to do, which is teach. So you can join the waitlist for that by link everything in the show notes. I'll link everything from M, I'll link everything from myself and you can follow both of us. And yeah, it's been wonderful to talk to you today, m. Thank you so much because it's so nice. Obviously, we do similar work in this space and we have a lot of shared values in this space, and it's so wonderful to be able to talk to fellow educators who, yeah, who are doing incredible work to support new teachers and ultimately, that is supporting our young people and that's the main goal, isn't it? So it's really wonderful to be able to speak to you and thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:It's been so nice chatting clear and I'm sure we'll have plenty more chats after this one. Absolutely Bye.