Reaching the hard to reach.

Reaching the hard to reach. Understanding disengagement.

I swore this time would be different. Another lunch time meeting with -let’s call her Anya. One of the hardest students to reach. Some colleagues referred to her as a selective mute.

Another failed assignment – but at least she’d had a go – which was unusual. She probably wrote more words in that brief ‘essay’ than she’d spoken all term. And I so wanted to be encouraging.

We had the standard allocation of about 10-15 minutes potential academic mentoring time squeezed in to a busy lunch period of queuing and wolfing sandwiches, and any other duties or required activities.

As ever, her posture was slumped, her eyes downcast. There was no discernable energy to meet me in the conversation which rapidly collapsed into versation.  My voice, my energy, my take on things.

She’d been on time, she’d turned work in…she’d come so far. But not far enough for the mark-scheme to provide much solace. The more I spoke, the more desolate it all felt.

Through every teaching career, long or short, the scene I describe will resonate to some extent. The experience of groundhog day conversations with those trapped in a cycle of behaviours that are not serving the child or the teacher-pupil relationship well. The challenge of working with disengaged students is universal.

We’re encouraged and sometimes required to give our time to these pupils. We try to make the extra time in class whilst group work takes place. We try and meet in increasingly difficult to find pockets of time at break, lunch, before or after school. But so often these well-meaning interventions either mis-fire or fail to get the traction needed with the student to make a meaningful change.

These precious points of contact can be frustrating when our urge to help is not met by the desire to be helped. Or when other people – parents, teachers, are the ones who want the change more than they do.

The solution to the child’s lack of engagement is often to cut it short, or divert into functional ‘telling’, fixing, solving. Except the many excellent suggestions we make can fail to get purchase against the Teflon coating of them fundamentally not wanting what we want. Or being somehow diverted or cut off from the higher path we want them to tread…

Many schools or departments set up mentoring support, so that a young person has a designated point of contact to discuss friction points either in their academics, or in the social and emotional side of their school life. But to what extent are these teachers, these mentors, equipped with methods that work?

Quite often, young people who are blocked in their motivation, stuck in their work, and low on morale, get passed on and passed around as being problematic. Referred on and up, pastorally, for learning difference assessments, for counselling.

In the meantime every academic or behavioural miss adds another brick in the great wall of ‘Can’t’. Another chapter in the story of ‘Not good enough’. Another barrier to hope, and dismantlement of the sense of belonging.

My episode with Anya whilst teaching part time and undertaking my academic post-graduate training to become a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, meant I was able to give a more intense reflective focus on the dynamics and the relationship. Later it evolved into the training I have developed to support teachers in being more equipped and empowered to work with students who are anxious, demotivated, or lagging in social and emotional skill so that they are either withdrawn or anti-social in their approach to peers.

Here’s what I learned.

1. For disengaged, read discouraged. That puts an entirely different frame on things and gives us a better cue on how to operate around a young person who shows up in this way.
2. Look closely at what feelings come up after you’ve had what you hoped would be an effective corrective or encouraging interaction. Do you feel helpless, hopeless, desolate, frustrated, infuriated, baffled…? Steer into this. It’s likely you’re feeling what they are feeling. Kids and teens often project feelings quite powerfully. They tend not to articulate their feelings and needs so successfully. Their actions or inactions and behavioural patterns in relationship with others evoke powerful feelings in the adults in their lives. This can be seen in psychodynamic terms as a form of transference. Being able to notice this and reflect on it with curiosity gives us insights into how to help. I notice this from time to time in my coaching practice.
3. Think about discouragement conceptually. It’s not a shallow thing – they don’t just need a bit of praise or a handful of merits. Underlying discouragement is an absence of courage. Fear. It’s often wrapped in disengagement, disconnection, which can easily look like complacency, disdain – even arrogance. So to truly encourage pupils like this, it means helping them get under the fear that is driving their disconnection – with their work, with you, with having a purposeful place in  your classroom. The journey that has led to them being in your class, and being like this, is an untold story of past failings, rejections, feelings of humiliation or shame at being caught out not knowing, not understanding, not focusing. If neurodiversity is at play, or significant stressors in their life outside the classroom, like parent conflict or parent mental health issues, then they are probably receiving corrective commentary left, right, and centre. And guess what…the meanings they are making of all those negative interactions, the stories they tell themselves about who this means they are…are way, way harsher then we could imagine.
4. We are only human ourselves, we can respond to their wrapper of disaffection in a territorial way. It feels rejecting. Their presence can be like having an open drain in the room. As teacher, we can’t help but see it and feel and fear the potential for ‘spoiling’ activities, groupwork, the lesson, and recruiting other pupils into disruption or dissidence. It can make us respond with more harshness which is more likely to fuel further disconnection, and less empathy, which is what is needed to help them fear less, trust more, and engage better.
5. When we try to have a mentoring conversation with them, or work on accountability with them, it’s really hard for them to engage with us on a human, vulnerable level. It’s not only about being time poor, it’s about the discomfort of the pauses, the hesitancy of them really telling us what we ask of them – for example how they might have felt about how they did in the lesson today, or their progress, or the situation with missing work. And so we intrude upon our own questions and save them and us from the silence when actually some work is being done. The discomfort is being held. Reflection is happening. We narrate what we saw going on, and our perspective on it, our solutions. Even if this is meant with good heart, and best intentions, it has got nowhere towards getting to what lies beneath the tip of the behavioural iceberg. And we’re back into groundhog day.

What we can do:

1. Think of the situation as an unsolved problem that involves helping the young person reconnect with their discouraged self with more compassion and understanding.
2. DO get in dialogue with other teachers – Form Tutor and Head of Year about stuck pupils. Sometimes there’s a reluctance to log problems in terms of behaviour in procedural ways according to behaviour policies – but it is important that the overview is being held if a child is struggling in more areas of school life. It’s important not to slide into permissiveness – perhaps with the aim of not alienating a young person further. But this can have numerous unforeseen consequences – including fuelling the child’s inner critic, and stories of being unseen and not understood.
3. Know that even if you’re entering into this time investment with a warm heart and see it as ‘giving’ time to them – many kids and virtually all teens with see this attention from and authority figure as a punishment and a confirmation of their ‘otherness’.  It’s not a level playing field emotionally or in terms of power dynamics.
4. Even if it’s a one-off conversation, or the beginning of a series of mentoring conversations, design an alliance for the conversation with them.
   • Acknowledging that this is taking up their free time, your free time. How they might see it being purposeful. How much time there is…5 minutes, 10 minutes?
   • Their sense of why you are meeting, what’s in it for them. What they want to change.
   • Your focus – to get to know them beyond the performative space of the classroom and understand how to help them. This means you will be listening more and saying less. Think about the 80/20 rule 80% them reflecting and responding and generating ideas while you listen. 20% you asking the short and dynamic questions that will help scaffold this, and responding for clarification, validating, affirming, championing.
   • You want to support them in generating ideas about what they can do next, what you can do next to support them. You’re not going to join the queue of people who are just going to tell them what to do. It’s their life. Their chance. Their choice.
5. You cannot make them want what you want. But if you want to bring them to a place of greater self-drive, then you need to work on the following elements:
   • Their autonomy. What do they want. Around the non-negotiables of being taught by you throughout this timetable – in the time allocated, what at best would they like to be the outcomes? In overview, and week by week, lesson by lesson, what could that look like, feel like.
   • Their capability – the things that they can do – the parts that work well and they can build on. What sort of activities, topics within the curriculum do they find more approachable? What are their strengths in your subject?
   • Disengaged, discouraged pupils follow relationship and connection first, tasks next. Developing a positive working relationship is vital to improving their self-motivation, drive, and engagement. Even though you are focusing on this pupil in order to get them to improve on weaknesses, lead with strengths – they will be key to them feeling better and doing better. Successful adults build lives and careers that are shaped by their strengths not their weaknesses. Develop safety, trust, and hope by placing this to the fore in your approach to supporting them.

Don’t get me wrong, with disaffected, difficult, disengaged pupils, it’s not going to be a one and done conversation. This is a basic framework, to which there are lots of feedback, accountability and coaching skills to add in and build in.

But think about that concept of discouragement, and think with curiosity about what the story of that is for your pupil. Courage is like trust. As the African proverb goes, trust arrives by foot, and leaves on horseback. When someone is disaffected in school, at home, or at work, it means their trust, their hope in who they are, how they are received, their capabilities, their ability to belong is compromised.

Encouraging them to step back into being a receptive learner, a receptive person requires a certain dismantlement of negative scripts, their wall of can’t and it’s cement of avoidance / won’t…and creating an openness to vulnerability, growth, learning, and integration.

As Gabor Mate writes in The Myth of Normal, and has spoken often about…the world we live in is one where a third of us struggle to thrive in terms of our mental health. If we compared this to setting up an environment in a lab to study cells, the petri-dish environment that caused that sort of level of mutation would be considered toxic.

Life has become progressively more fast paced, more stressful, more information drenched, more sensorily stimulating, more competitive, more ‘always on’ socially. Hells teeth – these kids have several snap streaks to manage – let alone time for work, rest, and play. Our breath rate per minute has nearly trebled since the 1940s. We are in a state of unprecedented nervous system activation.

As a governor of an inner-London Primary School looking at rising numbers of pupils in need in terms of their social and emotional learning, mental health issues, family hardship, neurodiversity, and falling funding and access to an Educational Psychologist, we had to make changes. To enable the Ed Psych to focus on diagnosis, and upskill teachers, teaching assistants, the SENCO team to become more effective, and more confident, equipped and empowered to connect with hard to reach kids, and those who were having a hard time and giving others a hard time.

The better we are able to co-regulate, and have a more therapeutic approach to conversation with each other is not to extend pathologizing the young. It’s about healthy human adaptation to human challenge. It’s about empowering adults, parents, teachers to be able to self-regulate, co-regulate young people so that they can have greater access to connection, learning and growth.

That’s the essence of my work as a speaker, trainer and coach. To empower individuals at all stages to relate better. One teacher, one parent, one child at a time.

What conversations do you need to have with colleagues about ground-hog day scenarios with pupils?

What are your training needs? Mentoring skills? Coaching skills? Listening skills? Questioning skills?

Contact me for 1:1 sessions, consultation work on pastoral strategy, small group INSET or whole staff INSET.

Linked articles and resources:

https://emmagleadhill.com/articles/crucial-conversations-skills-for-teachers/

https://emmagleadhill.com/articles/dealing-with-harsh-inner-critics-and-core-beliefs-of-not-good-enough/

Gabor Mate: The Myth of Normal

Paul Dix: When the Adults Change, Everything Changes: seismic shifts in school behaviour.

Ross Greene: The Explosive Child.

Ross Greene – assessment tool: https://livesinthebalance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ALSUP-2020.pdf – proforma for Assessment of lagging skills and unsolved problems.