The Unteachables Podcast

#52: I had a strong why, but I was still a weak teacher. What it really took to develop my classroom management practice.

• Claire English • Season 4 • Episode 52

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We are often told to go back to our 'why' as teachers when things get tough.  
My goodness is it important for us to have a strong purpose in a job like teaching, yet it certainly is no classroom management magic bullet.

Why, oh why, is a why not enough?

Because it takes FAR more to have a strong, compassionate, and calm approach to teaching. 

In this episode of The Unteachables Podcast, I take you through my own journey to demonstrate how even with the strongest why, without the proper support and strategy we can be left drowning in classroom behaviours and becoming the teacher we never envisioned being. 

I hope this episode serves as a comfort to new teachers and experienced teachers alike, and is validation that if you are finding classroom management hard, that is because it really is that hard. No matter who you are, and why you chose to be a teacher.

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

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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 with behavior, 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. Well, hello everybody.

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to another week of the Unteachables podcast. This week, I'm going to be doing something a little bit different. Usually, I'm sitting at my desk. I am, you know, set up with my microphone and all the rest of it, but I am actually reclined in bed, I've got a coffee in my hand and these little tiny microphones that I've got are just an absolute game changer. Because I moved country to country. My big microphone is still in the shipping container, which could take up to three, four months. So I've got this tiny little microphone attached to my chest and I don't know if I'll go back to my big microphone, because this means that I can just chill and relax and lay back and do my thing with the podcast in a little bit more of an organic kind of chitchaty way, like I'm just sending a voice. It really does sound like, feel like I'm laying in bed and sending a voice note to a friend. So that's really nice, a really nice change for the podcast.

Speaker 1:

And the reason it's kind of a different vibe today is I wanted to talk about something a little bit different and I wanted to go right back to the start before being a teacher was even something that I could comprehend in my mind. I didn't want to be a teacher to begin with, and a lot of you probably are sitting there with these stories about how, when you were in primary school, you were looking at your teachers in amazement and or, and you wanted to do that, or your parents might have been teachers, and teaching really is one of those professions. If you ask you know, why did you get into the profession? You know you've always wanted to do it. There's something about teaching that you're always kind of drawn to, and I know that's not the case for everybody. I know plenty of teachers who actually have retrained from other professions are going into the profession. But I wanted to tell my story today and I don't think I've actually. I think little bits and pieces here and there in like maybe like an Instagram capture and or a little bit of a story here and there, but I've never told it in its entirety.

Speaker 1:

And I think it's really important to do this for a couple of reasons. The first reason is I struggled immensely with classroom management Immensely. It was incredibly difficult for me. It's very easy to look at what I do as a whole now and say, oh well, she's got it all covered. You know she's really confident and it must have been easy for her or she must have had easy students. No, it was not the case at all and I just wanted to have an opportunity to come on here and be really vulnerable and open about that, because I know for a fact that so many of you out there are feeling the exact same way. I know that because you tell me. You come into my DMs, you come into my email and you tell me that it's feeling really hard for you and you don't want to do it anymore and you're sitting in your car and not wanting to walk through those gates. If it feels hard, it's because it is hard and I have been there and it was very, very hard for me as well. So I wanted to tell that story, this story.

Speaker 1:

For that reason and the second reason I wanted to tell this story it will kind of deepen your understanding around behavior as well, as you're buying into a different classroom management approach, because I'm not sitting here saying we should do X, y and Z because of you know little Johnny in class at the moment he's struggling having someone to talk about their experiences and say it from a place of absolute truth. I'm not assuming somebody else's experience, I'm talking about my own experience. I hope that that will help you kind of deepen your understanding around the approach that I take and this is actually a two-part episode. This is the first episode where I'm talking through kind of like why I have the approach that I have and where I've kind of been and what's led me to this, and the second part, which will be next week. It will lead into the actual classroom management approach that I do take, my holistic approach to classroom management. This is kind of like the foundations of the building, so the building itself, the house itself. Where am I going to go with this metaphor? Just think of the house itself. That is the classroom management approach that I take. And you go under those foundations, you look at all of the. I'm not a builder, I'm not even going to go there, but I'm assuming there's some kind of wood, there's some kind of concrete, there's some kind of thing happening on the grounds that the house doesn't just sink straight into the soil. That's what I'm talking about today. That's anti-sink material.

Speaker 1:

It's actually really funny having a podcast, because I had a recent shoot for the Untiege Bulls, like a branding shoot, and I worked with this amazing woman, vicki Knight, and I was talking about my daughter, ava, and she said oh yeah, you recently stopped breastfeeding. She's made a comment like oh, you're still breastfeeding. Oh no, you recently stopped breastfeeding. And I was really taken aback and I was like how do you know that? She's like oh yeah, listen to your. Before you came here to do your shoot, I listened to your podcast to make sure I knew about you and about the business and about what you do. And I was amazed because obviously I sit here, I'm in my bed right now, I've got a coffee and I have thousands of you that download this podcast every week and it's like my brain can't connect the fact that what I'm doing right now in this little tiny room in this patch of the world in New Zealand is going to be going out to thousands of people around the world. You're going to be listening to that and that's a very vulnerable thing and it's really easy to forget that sometimes. I got A message from my uncle a couple of weeks back to when it was like I'll take that listen to recent podcast episode. I wanted to say I'm really proud of what you're doing. I'm like, oh my gosh, I just I can't believe it sometimes that when I talk into this little microphone I'm actually talking to you, the thousands of people that listen to this. And yeah, as I said, this episode I'm going to be showing some things that take a lot of vulnerability to share, so Please be kind, and I'm also letting you know that I'll be talking about some mental illness challenges, so please take care of yourself and feel free to tune out if that's something that might be challenging for you. Okay, six minutes of an intro onto my story.

Speaker 1:

When I was at school I was a really good kid and I'm going to put good in air quotes. You know I was in the gifted and talented classes. I was always that kid wanting to chat to my teachers. I was a big dork. Now I'm from a low socioeconomic area of Sydney. We didn't grow up with a lot and I remember like any night we had meat to eat, like my mom would obviously cook dinner and every night that's, we had meat. I just recall really vividly that there only be three pieces and she would always go without, and you know that always been up for me, my brother, my father, and then she just said I wasn't hungry. Like I'm not hungry, it's okay, just to mask the fact that we didn't have enough money to put food on everybody's plate. Why I'm telling you that is because, before I go into what's about to happen.

Speaker 1:

I was loved. Despite what we had or didn't have, I do remember feeling very loved and very connected, and that's also really important to say because I was a kid that turned up at school. I was really engaged in my education. I was, I was the kid that was a good kid, and it wasn't because I had money, it wasn't because I had anything, I just had. I remember sitting on the counter with my mom and we'd be singing songs together and like they're the experiences that I remember having as a child. So I remember I felt loved, I felt connected and I went to school with the feelings of love and connection.

Speaker 1:

But then things changed when I got to secondary school because my mom, despite her doing her very best and she is such a warrior and she's been a warrior her whole life that kind of became too much for her and she became very unwell and she started to battle severe mental health issues in a time where all of the stuff around mental health was still very, very taboo. And she was married to my father, who I'm not going to say too much about my father here, but he wasn't exactly a very helpful character in my story and is no longer a character in my story because of that. But I went from being very studious and coming home, you know, and watching cartoons and eating cake and having the experience of childhood that you know it's not. It's not a bad childhood like I was really happy it's changed to me being a 12 year old girl, who was then a psychologist, and I'd come home and need to be a sounding board for some really big and scary things that were happening in my house. I was scared every time I walked in my door that something would have happened to my mom, that she would have done something, and things definitely changed at that point and I went to school every day confused and lost and disconnected, and all of my behaviors then naturally changed to reflect this and what I did was I started to wear this mask to actually hide what was happening to me at home, and this went on for years. Maybe it was like a little smart ass comment at one point and maybe it was me pushing back and not wanting to do my work one day, but all of these years this went on. My mum was unwell for pretty much my entire high school experience and it went on for years and it was compounding things. At home we're getting worse, things. At school we're getting worse.

Speaker 1:

The way teachers viewed me changed a little by little over time. And then that label that was placed upon me of being a smart young girl, a bright young girl, a girl that I speak about in my book, my teacher said to me one day like you're going to do anything you want to do, what do you want to do with your life? You could be anything you want to be. That change to being the kid that was troubled and disengaged and difficult to manage. And I was a bad kid. I was too lazy to do my work. I was the kid who never bought a book in. I was the kid who couldn't give a crap about anything to do with my learning. I was the one that's tried to get everybody off track. I was just too worried about going home and finding my mum dead and when I desperately needed a compassion, I got isolation and disconnection. I didn't need.

Speaker 1:

I just want to say I didn't need my teachers to let my behavior slide. I needed teachers to just see there was an issue and sit with me and say, hey, are you okay? Like something's going on here what's going on, and I think it says it all the fact that one day I was sitting at school at 4 pm so everyone had gone home. I'd missed my bus on purpose. I didn't want to go home and my year advisor saw me and said go home, like what are you doing here? Get out of here in the harshest way and the fact that that was somebody who was supposed to be a bit clueless about well-being and to see a child sitting there crying, not wanting to go home, and think let's get her out of here, that just says says a lot about kind of the way well-being was viewed back in. What was it like 2000 and I'm talking like 2003, 456, so the early 2000s and things have changed a lot since then, but back then well-being was not seen in the same way.

Speaker 1:

But what I want to say about this is that school traumatized me. I mean my whole. I was very traumatized from the whole experience of my life at that time and I couldn't think of anything worse than heading back into a school. But I knew that I wanted to work with. I was very lucky that I had a good head on my shoulders and I had remembered that I had all of those skills that I'd built. I had a really good, really good attachment before everything happened in year six. So I still had the skills that I needed to make like. I had the emotional intelligence. I had all of the things that I needed to kind of be a little bit more critical about my life and and still be okay.

Speaker 1:

You know, I was okay and what I did to think when I got to year 12 and I left school and I didn't want to go back to uni, I just said I want to do something with young people. I want to help young people who have really struggled, whose family are breaking apart, who don't have anything, and I became at that point a youth homelessness case worker. So I went to uni and I did three years of a bachelor and I became a youth homelessness case worker and it was in this job I just saw so much that I was just shocked by these. Kids had nothing. They were already addicted to drugs and and going out and some of them were already pregnant and there was so much going on for these young people and I thought to myself like listening to their stories, I just thought you know what, like I feel like. I am best placed in the classroom with these young people, giving them somebody who can support them, to see the best in them and to see like, to give them a key to get out of this mess and to give them the education they need to make something better for themselves. So I knew they desperately needed a champion in the classroom.

Speaker 1:

So, despite never wanting to go back in the classroom again, despite never, ever wanting to be a teacher, I went back to uni to do my master's in education. So it's very clear that I had a very strong why. The why I went into teaching was for the vulnerable young people and that didn't matter, like that's why I'm telling you this, because I don't care how strong my why is. That didn't matter when it came to actually facing the challenging behaviors that I faced in the classroom. Because, despite my best intentions, I got into the classroom and was faced with these immense, this torrent of unmanageable behaviors and I quickly fell back onto being the exact teacher that I did not want to be, because when you are sitting there and you are trying to teach a class of 30 and you are drowning in these behaviors and you have no skills to manage that in an effective way, in a way that is helpful or compassionate or calm. You've got no skills. You haven't been taught this in your teacher training. It is pure survival. I had no clue, I had no support and it was pure survival. So, even with my strong which is exactly why I do the work I do today because if I had this, why, if I'd experienced those things in my education, if I'd gone through schooling with that experience and that trauma and still gone back into the classroom explicitly wanting to support the students that were like me and I still failed because I didn't have the skills or support to be able to do that, then most teachers are going to struggle with that. So that's why I do what I do. And if you are sitting there right now and nodding along and feeling like this, please just know you're not alone. I've been right there alongside you.

Speaker 1:

There are days where I remember getting to school and not wanting to get out of my car, days where I used to drive home crying, classes that made me feel sick thinking about going into, and one of those classes I talk with my teacher bestie about back in episode three, and we talk about it through a really humorous lens and it's all funny and it's really fun looking back on reflection about how we manage that. But it's really important to note that at the time going into that class was it felt so out of control, it felt so difficult. But go and listen to that episode. So what did I do to get myself out of this, this mess, this funk, this challenge, this difficulty? Well, I consider myself incredibly lucky when it comes to my teaching experience, my everything that happened to me throughout my career. I am incredibly lucky because I had some of the most incredible mentors I could possibly ask for. I got blessed, I really, really did, and it should not be luck that we get into a classroom setting like a school setting where we do have that support. It shouldn't be luck.

Speaker 1:

But one of them one day said to me like she observed one of my lessons and she said to me Clay, you're making this so much harder on yourself. Look what you're doing. You're expecting all of these students to become it was a chaotic year, eight lesson. You're expecting them to become and quiet and listen to you and you're demanding that. But just pay attention the next time you go into this lesson. Pay attention to how you are acting in the classroom. Just give it a go, just tune in and see what you're doing.

Speaker 1:

Oh my gosh, I walked into that classroom the next lesson and I paid attention to what my body was doing, to how I was speaking, to how I was acting, and again, I wasn't able to really put the two and two together. But I was loud, I was just regulated, I was like my shoulders were tied. It was franticism, it really was, and I was frazzled and I was disorganized and I didn't like the kids in front of me because of everything that was happening. And it was really really hard for me to in that moment, like settle into that class. But the penny had just dropped and the penny was.

Speaker 1:

I just had no clue about classroom management. I had no idea what I could actually control in my classroom. I had no idea where to go next. But my mentor just saying that. My mentor just saying you're making this so much harder on yourself, like you're expecting all these things, but you're doing the opposite. So I went to her and I said please, like help me. Like, what do I do here? I know that I don't know. I am out here kind of like floating, thinking crap. What do I do next? And I hear that from a lot of you like, what do I try next? What do I do next? Because it's so hard, you just don't know what you don't know.

Speaker 1:

But I had my strong why and that was the foundation, remember, of that house that I built and I became a total nerd for classroom management. I absolutely threw myself into it. I wanted to learn as much as possible about behavior and you know what is happening in the brains of my students, what was happening in my brain. So I kind of went back and I remember doing choice theory training and that was incredibly confronting for me and I had a lot of moments of being in tears because I had to face what was actually happening for me at that time in my own life. But I was just so enthralled by the whole idea of classroom management and little by little over the years, I was able to develop a tapestry of practice. I was able to weave all of these threads together of practice that actually worked, and it didn't just work, but it showed the same compassion for my students that I once needed and that is exactly why I got into the profession and, oh my gosh, it's something that I've been able to then replicate over and over again with different classes in different schools, whether it's in Australia, in London, in central London, with some of the most vulnerable students that you could possibly teach Students who you know are gang affiliated students who have incredibly disorganised attachments and are volatile and violent in their behaviours because of that.

Speaker 1:

But what is so important in this whole story and in the whole classroom management approach that I take is that everything, what I had to kind of come to terms with and realise is that everything changes in our classroom. Everything truly changes in our classroom and for us and every single student that we teach, and we focus on things that we can control in our practice, and we can control so much. We can't control the behaviours of the young people that we teach, of course we can't. They're not our puppets, some strings that we're able to manipulate but we can control so much in our practice, in ourselves, and I'm so passionate about this because not only do you deserve quality support, but the way you are able to reach and teach your students depends on it and, unfortunately, the way that people have been teaching classroom management for as long as I can remember is that. Okay, here's the behaviour? What are we going to do about the behaviour when it is not the case? It is everything that we do, all of the micro moments around that, what we're doing in our classroom beforehand, what we're doing in preparation, what we're doing in the moment, how we're doing everything builds this big puzzle of classroom management.

Speaker 1:

And I know that sounds really big and really scary, sometimes saying, well, it's not just one thing, it's literally every single little thing we do in our practice. It does sound really overwhelming and really scary, but it is not, and that is why I do this work. I've broken it down, I've made it really simple, I've made it into a roadmap that you can follow. And in the next episode of the podcast I'm going to be digging into what a holistic approach to classroom management is. And this is the backbone of my teaching practice, it's the backbone of my leadership, it's the backbone of what I do here at the Unteachables Academy. And, as well as going through this next episode in a little bit of detail, I'm going to be kind of giving you an insight into what is made up of my approach. But I also am running a free training session on this exact thing. It's more visual, it's more in depth. A podcast episode can only do so much, so I wanted to sit down and do an hour long session going through the exact roadmap I take, going into each of the little parts in detail.

Speaker 1:

So if you would like to attend this free training webinar like I strongly suggest you do, come along. If you're listening to this podcast and you've gotten to this point in the podcast episode, obviously you're engaged in it. Come along, it's free. You can watch the replay for seven days as well, because I know that some of you listen from other sides of the world, and if you want to register in that free training, you can just and this is for people who are listening in real time. By the way, if you're listening in four weeks time, this might not be the case anymore. So just double check the website, but it is the-unteachablescom forward slash free training or I'm putting the link in the episode description show notes. So please go there and click that.

Speaker 1:

I already have, at this point, about a thousand of you coming, which is it blows my mind to think that there are that many of you coming to be able to Like I can support that many of you. It just makes me so incredibly happy and listening to my story, I think that some of you have a better understanding now of why I'm so passionate about this. What you do in the classroom should not be reliant upon how much support that you are blessed with. Like, it should just be a given that when you walk into a school for the and I'm not talking about just an early career teaching, by the way, I'm talking about your entire career I still need support. Everybody still needs support. Classroom management is something that is something we continually have to hone, so I am so glad that I'm able to be that support for some of you.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I'm going to stop rambling now. That was 23 minutes and yeah, that was very vulnerable and be kind, and if you did resonate with that episode at all, please send me a message, say hello, because, as I said, it's like speaking into a void until I hear little snippets of people knowing my life and I'm like, oh, wow, okay, there are actually ears that are on the receiving end of that. You know one set of conversation I had in bed with my coffee. Okay, everybody, I will see you next week for the episode about my classroom management approach. Until then, have a fantastic week.

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Claire English

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