The Unteachables Podcast

#71: Kids don’t learn off people they don’t like… but getting them to like you is sometimes easier said than done! How to reach and teach students with big behaviours.

July 16, 2024 • Claire English • Season 5 • Episode 71

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Welcome back to another episode of The Unteachables Podcast, teacher friends! Today I delve into the final chapter of my book, It's Never Just About the Behaviour. If you want to listen to this series from the start, head back to episode 65!

Yes, building relationships is important... but dang is it hard with some students! On today's episode I give you practical tips for building connections and establishing felt safety in the classroom, particularly with students who present with challenging behaviours. 

This episode highlights the crucial role that relationships play in effective classroom management and offers insights for creating a supportive and engaging learning environment.

I discuss:

  • The huge barriers that we can face when it comes to developing rapport with some students.
  • The concept of "felt safety" and its importance in building trust with students.
  • Strategies for establishing connections, including the two by ten strategy and catching the positive.
  • The importance of teacher wellbeing and creating supportive work environments for educators.

Watch Rita Pearson's TED Talk: "Every Child Needs a Champion"

Learn more about Alan Mendler's Two by Ten Strategy here.

Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!

TAKE THE QUIZ! What is your teacher type, and what does this reveal about your classroom management?

Join The Behaviour Club -The essential training, advice, and community to confidently and calmly tackle all things classroom management.

The Low-Level Behaviour Bootcamp! - Strengthen your teaching presence and tackle low-level behaviours!

Purchase my book - ‘It’s Never Just About the Behaviour: A holistic approach to classroom behaviour management


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Speaker 1:

There really is no more powerful relationship booster with these kids than them realizing that, oh my gosh, miss English sees me like for more than my behaviors, for who I am as a person. Oh, hi, teachers, welcome to Unteachables podcast. Congratulations. You have just stumbled across the best free professional development and support you could ask for. I'm Claire English, a passionate secondary teacher, author, teacher mentor and generally just a big behavior nerd, and I created the Unteachables podcast to demystify and simplify classroom management. I want this podcast to be the tangible support, community validation, mentorship, all those pretty important things that we need as teachers to be able to walk into our classrooms feeling empowered and, dare I say it, happy and thrive, especially in the face of these really tough behaviors. So ready for some no-nonsense, judgement-free and realistic classroom management support. I've got your teacher friend, let's do this. Hi, wonderful teachers, welcome back to another episode of the Unteachables podcast. I just had this, really this big urge to say gentle listeners, because I have just watched I don't know if anyone's watched Bridgerton, but I was very late to the party and I watched all three seasons when Ava went to bed over the last two weeks, so I've caught up in a very short space of time and it's infiltrated every part of my brain. So, yeah, I'm late to that party. So if you have just come into listening to Foundation Rules podcast, you are tuning into the very last episode of a series where I dig into each of the chapters of my book the pillars of holistic classroom management that I delve into in the book. And if you would like to, you don't have to you can listen to them kind of separate. But if you want to listen to them in order, head back to episode 65 and you can listen to them kind of separate. But if you want to listen to them in order, head back to episode 65 and then you can listen to them all from start to finish. That might make a little bit more sense. You can come on the journey with me from the pre-order phase and then listening to me get so excited when the book was actually released.

Speaker 1:

I haven't received my copies of the book yet, which is very funny, I think it's just in New Zealand everything's a lot slower than it was in the UK, which has been a big adjustment, might I add. But yeah, here we are. Hopefully, if you have received a copy of the book, you have absolutely loved it. The reviews have been just so brilliant and I'm so happy to be reading all of the wonderful things you're saying about the book, because it is just the exact way that I intended for it to be read and I said that in the last episode, so I'm not going to go on about it for too long, but every time I hear from someone it just blows me away and it just makes me feel so glad that I'm able to bring this into the teaching world. If you have received a copy of the book and you've read it but you haven't yet reviewed, please go and do that and send a screenshot to me. And if you send a screenshot to me of your review, I will send you a gift to say thank you 13 of the most beautiful posters of the illustrations from the book and you can pop them up in your staff room, in your office. But yeah, my illustrator, Susie Hacker. I'm so happy to find her. She did such a brilliant job and I would absolutely love you to have those posters. So if you have left me a review, please head over to Amazon or wherever you purchase the book and leave me a review, because the book is in its infancy of being released. It does make such a huge world of difference to the algorithm on Amazon, to being able to then reach more teachers, so I would endlessly appreciate your review.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so onto this episode. Have you heard of Rita Pearson? Most of you are like, yes, I've heard of Rita Pearson. Maybe some of you know Rita Pearson. You don't even know. You know her.

Speaker 1:

She famously did that TED talk which is probably the most popular TED talk amongst teachers ever. I think I've watched that TED talk probably about 150 times. It is the TED talk where she famously says kids don't learn off people they don't like. It is so true, my gosh, it's so true, but it can leave us feeling really rubbish, not saying anything against Rita Pearson and that quote because I believe it to my core, but it is so hard.

Speaker 1:

The truth is, it is so hard establishing these relationships with students. Being a likable person to them is not always in your control. You don't get to choose whether or not they feel safe with you. You don't get to choose whether or not they like you. You can do everything in your power. You can be the most incredible, kind, compassionate person in the world and you will still have battles with students who struggle to establish that trust, students who have an insecure attachment, students who display the biggest behaviors, those students who Rita Pearson is talking about, who won't learn off people they don't like, the students who will push back, the students who need a champion. So the TED Talk is Every Child Needs a Champion, I believe and I'll link you to the TED Talk in the show notes if you want to watch that, and I highly suggest, if you have not watched this TED Talk, please go and watch it and let me know that you've watched it for the first time. So this is what the pillar is all about Not about Rita Pearson's TED Talk, but about the importance of connection in our classrooms and all the rest of it, about building the relationship, building the rapport, all of those things that are really really crucial and foundational for actually engaging with our young people in the classroom.

Speaker 1:

But onto those really sticky relationships, how do you get those students to like you, the ones that I explained before that have really big difficulties trusting, that might have an insecure attachment with these kids I mean, with all kids. But you don't need to be the funny one, you don't need to be the one that's down with the TikTok trends or the cool one. You don't need to know the score to the latest football match. Luckily for me, with all those things because I'm none of those things. I'm that dorky teacher that might make people laugh at her a little bit, but I'm none of those things you can really benefit from those things. Sometimes you can leverage those things and they can offer a bit of a window into relating with students, which can be beneficial.

Speaker 1:

But those students I'm talking about, like, even if they might have a chat to you about those things, it's not going to necessarily make them feel safe enough to open up and learn. Instead, we need to be focusing on establishing that felt safety. This is how we break down the barriers and gain trust and get those students to like us eventually and learn from us. Maybe eventually, because, remember, we don't get to choose whether these human beings and their brains are able to recognize us as something that is safe or something that is a threat, and a lot of these students do view teachers as a threat, like in their brains. Remember the amygdala which is in charge of the fight, flight or freeze response. It sits directly near the hippocampus, which is a memory center, and if they've got all of these memories of teachers isolating them and punishing them and yelling at them and, you know, authority figures in general doing those things. They are going to recognize us as a threat and us just cracking a few jokes and being funny and being relatable is not going to change that.

Speaker 1:

We need to work a lot harder to establish that felt safety before they can open up and trust us to be in our classroom and learn. So before we even think about the individual rapport with our students, we need to be thinking about the environment that we're creating for them. Are we creating a classroom environment that fosters that sense of safety? And I don't want to say that definitely creates a safety for them, because they get to choose again whether or not they feel safe in that space. Their brains are choosing that for them. We're not controlling that, but how we do that, how we create that felt safety, is through every single other thing that is discussed in the pillars in my book, from chapters one to six, everything else in the book as to this felt safety, which is why I put it right at the end.

Speaker 1:

I put this connection chapter right at the end of the book because everything that comes before that is so crucial to then lead into the relationship. Relationship building isn't just us being face-to-face with a student saying what's your name, what's your brother and sister Like you know, all of those kind of icebreakers that people talk about doing at the start of the year. It is so much more than that, which is why end of the book connections right at the end rather than the start, because I wanted to really emphasize the fact that we need to create felt safety before everything else. And once we've done that, we can begin to establish trust with those hard nuts to crack by following the golden rule of this particular pillar, which is that the small things are the big things.

Speaker 1:

When it comes to connection, small points of connection every single day add up to something huge and something magical for these students. How we do that with students who are very challenging to engage, because maybe they're running in and out of the room, they're telling us to F off, they're not engaging with the lesson. It's very hard to do this with those particular students, because when do you have the opportunity to have those small points of connection? Well, I like to think about it as investing in the student's emotional piggy bank and catching the positive every single day. The emotional piggy bank is a concept by Stephen Convey and it's been adapted to a wide variety of different contexts and I think I've used this on the podcast before.

Speaker 1:

But catching the positive every single day, it can be anything. Nothing is too small. In fact, it probably will be a really small thing every day. To begin with, because when we're talking about students who struggle, it's so hard to find things to say when they are absconding, when they are displaying behaviors that are really challenging and challenging us. Remember, the challenging behaviors are just something that challenge us when they're not completing their work, for us to say anything nice about their work. So it is very hard to find things to catch in the positive unless it is small, little things that we can do in the day to day.

Speaker 1:

So when we're thinking about catching the positive, we can think about things like oh, I'm so glad to see you here today, you know. Like, oh, your handwriting is really nice. Or I saw what you did on the football pitch today. That was brilliant. Anything, it can be absolutely anything. Oh, the fact that you were here today makes me so happy. Or the fact that you were able to put pen to paper today and you felt confident to do that. That is brilliant. Anything that you notice. I can't tell you what to say because only you know your students and you know what they like, where they're coming from, and what I really want to emphasize is the fact that it might be something that's insignificant to one student, but it is absolutely significant to another. One student, just showing up and having a pen is the most significant thing to that student. To another student, that might be them falling through the cracks and you know, having a really tough time is something that will signify that we need to support them more, but for another student, that could be a massive amount of progress. So think about progress, think about achievement, think about the positive things, student to student, on a student to student basis, because it's not going to be the same for every single young person that we teach.

Speaker 1:

Another strategy that I absolutely love is the two by 10 strategy, which was popularized by Alan Mendler. It is just about having short, consistent, authentic conversations with our students, not things that take up too much time. It's just a two minute chat for every day for 10 days and really really beneficial for students who are really struggling to develop that relationship with you or feel safe with you. What happens, like when you do this over time? Not only do students start to see us differently because, remember, we have no control over that, we can just offer it there on a platter but as teachers, we start to see them differently as well, which we do have control over.

Speaker 1:

At the end of these 10 days, it just sends all of these messages of wow, this teacher is really trying to invest in me. They're not trying to manipulate me into doing something. They're not trying to coerce me into behaving. They just want to get to know me as a person and, even if they're not coming on board initially, just persist with it. Go have a chat with them, ask them a question that has nothing to do with their behavior, pose like a funny riddle or do a. What would you rather question? Whatever it might be. Just every day, two minutes, 10 days in a row. Set a time where you know you can be consistent with it.

Speaker 1:

I love to do it before the first lesson of the day, if I know that they're getting there on the bus and I can go out and have a chat with them in the yard and just pretend I'm doing my morning walking playground. There really is no more powerful relationship booster with these kids than them realizing that, oh my gosh, miss English sees me like for more than my behaviors, for who I am as a person, like. They're really trying to understand me and include me. And remember that if this student is on your radar as a student whose behaviors are incredibly challenging, a student who has social, emotional and mental health needs, a student who has social, emotional and mental health needs, a student who has an insecure attachment, it is very, very likely that you are the only teacher who has taken that amount of time out of their day to invest in that relationship, to see them as more than their behaviours. So if you do this, then it can just reap such an immense reward for you and your students.

Speaker 1:

So that was the final pillar of the book, the final chapter of the book and the final episode of this series, and I'm so happy that I've been able to do this. It's been such a joy to be able to take you through the pillars and to kind of give you just a tiny little insight into each of them, like this pillar today connection. There is so much more in there. There's so many more strategies. In the relationship toolbox. I talk about relationships with parents and carers. I talk about the community that we build in our classroom. So there's obviously so much more in the book that I haven't been able to cover here, and I can't wait for you to delve into that Before we finish up, though, for this series on it's never just about the behavior.

Speaker 1:

I think it's really crucial that and this really needs a place on the podcast in this series. I want to read from the conclusion, because it sums everything up so nicely and it's something that is so important for us to remember as educators. Yes, these seven pillars are crucial for you to foster an environment where your students can learn, connect and thrive. However, it would be remiss of me to write a book about classroom management without addressing something that is arguably more pivotal to the success of a teacher and their students than any other individual thing.

Speaker 1:

For teachers to be successful and thrive, they, too, require a culture that embodies the seven pillars. Teachers need work environments to support them to remain regulated and calm, where they're provided with as much consistency and predictability as possible to mitigate the immense uncertainty of the day-to-day, where they are part of the decision-making process and are heard, consulted and feel safe to share, where they feel a sense of belonging, respect and safety, where they are seen as human, first, and teachers, second, where they know that we met with compassion and support when they make decisions and, naturally, mistakes. So here is one final golden rule championing all students starts by championing all teachers and teachers. I believe that like every fiber of my being. I believe that, and I really wanted to end this podcast series with that quote from the book, that section from the book, because everything has to feed on from that.

Speaker 1:

True teacher wellbeing doesn't look like a few cakes in the staff room. It looks like a genuine commitment to placing the needs of you, the teacher, the educator, the heart of our system and, let's be honest, society, in the center of what we do. We all deserve to be met with these seven values with curiosity, with connection, compassion and calm. You, too, deserve an environment where you will have the consistency, clarity and challenge that you need to thrive Like. It's just so crucial for us as educators as well, and I needed that to have a place in the book and I needed that to have a place here on the podcast.

Speaker 1:

Okay, wonderful teacher, take care and remember if you want a copy of the book, then you can head to the show notes and find some links, or you can go to the dash on teachablescom forward slash book, or you can just Google it. Google is's Never Just About the Behaviour by Claire English, and especially if you're in a country where I've not linked you to. In the show notes it'll pop up the best way for you to source that book. And please, please, leave a lovely review on Amazon. Send me that screenshot. I'll send you your gift. It really would mean the absolute world to me. Okay, teachers, big love for the week ahead. Take care and I'll see you next time.

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Claire English

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