The Unteachables Podcast

#108: "Shut up miss, you're a sh!t teacher, your lessons suck!" How to respond when behaviours get really personal.

• Claire English • Season 6 • Episode 108

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WARNING: This episode has a lot of swearing in it!!

Dealing with the challenging behaviours are never easy, especially when they feel personal.

That's why in today's episode, I wanted to talk through one of my own experiences, how I dealt with it, and the lessons we can take away.

SOME KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

  1. Connection First: Even when behaviour feels personal or triggering, prioritise connection as it de-escalates and opens the door to change.
  2. Context Matters: There is no one-size-fits-all response. Tailor your approach to the student and situation.
  3. Do Not Make It About You: Refuse to internalize disrespect. Staying focused on the bigger picture helps you avoid power struggles.

If ever in doubt, you can ask yourself, "Will my response bring us closer together or drive us further apart?" 

And my personal favourite: Connection is NEVER the wrong answer.

Please don't forget to take care of yourselves as a priority, wonderful Unteachables community!

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

Resources and links:

Connect with me:


Speaker 1:

Oh, hi there, teachers, welcome to the Unteachables podcast. I'm your host, claire English, and I am just a fellow teacher, a toddler mama and a big old behavior nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behavior and classroom manage has left us playing crowd control, which is not something I subscribe to, because we're not bouncers, we're teachers. So listen in as I walk you through the game, changing strategies and I mean the things that we can actually do in action in our classrooms that will allow you to lean into your beautiful values as a compassionate educator and feel empowered to run your room with a little more calm and, dare I say it, a lot less chaos. I will see you in the episode.

Speaker 1:

Hello, brilliant teachers, welcome back to my little patch of the podcasting universe, the Unteachables podcast. Is so nice to have you here, especially this episode, because I feel like I speak a lot about strategies and you know what to do in the classroom and all the rest of it, but you're not alongside me in the classroom to see how I deal with like the real nitty-gritty stuff, and I'm not there in the classroom to see how you're responding to the real nitty-gritty stuff and to kind of coach you through that. And that's what makes it a little bit hard for me to support you in the best way that I can on this podcast, and I think that this is why this particular topic that I'm going to speak about got so much traction. When I posted about it a couple of months ago on Instagram, it got a huge amount of feedback. I posted about this specific student Of course, I didn't say names or anything like that, but I posted about like kind of think about it as like a case study really, but I posted about this particular student and their behaviors and when I posted about this, yeah, a lot, a lot, a lot of people were responding with their opinions, their views, their like gratitude for me sharing this particular part of my practice.

Speaker 1:

So I really wanted to bring it here on the podcast and go through it in more detail, because this story right here communicates so much of the reality of what we do and you know, it really just brings home what people mean when they say behavior is communication. It highlights the challenging reality for us as teachers working with vulnerable students who exhibit really challenging behaviours, and it highlights so many things like the power of the smallest moments of connection and how important it is to recognise what success looks like for some students when it comes to their behaviour. You know to have high expectations that are appropriate for the context of that student. And it really highlights how empowering controlling what we can control is in the classroom, because we can't control everything or we can't control another human being. All we can control is can control is ourselves, and it's just a window into how I respond in the moment. These really tough behaviors, you know I have called my business the unteachables, not the sometimes all right but a little bit challenging-ables, you know, and I pride myself on my ability to support teachers to not only transform their practice generally speaking, you know so the low-level behaviours and all of those things that can help them kind of get back to teaching, but I also pride myself on doing so while still controlling what is in the teacher's control to reach and teach the toughest, to reach and teach students. So it's a balance right classroom practice and most teachers won't have to necessarily deal with the behaviors that I've dealt with in my career because I was at a specific behavior school like school, a school that was specific for students with social, emotional and mental health needs and like really complex ones at that. So not all teachers are going to experience these particular behaviors and the quantity and frequency that I did, but I wanted to make sure that I still touched on these things for those of you who really need to support with these really big extreme behaviors.

Speaker 1:

By the way, my podcast is clean, but this episode I have marked as explicit because I didn't want to censor the language in any way, shape or form. I just wanted to come on here and tell my story in the way that I needed to. I also think that's very true of like communicating stories back to parents and carers and all the rest of it. Like we can't sugarcoat it, like it is what it is and it is challenging and it is. Let me just drop my first swear of the, my first swear, my first swear words. I don't even know what I was saying now because I've just lost my own train of thought. Anyway, let me just get into the story.

Speaker 1:

I am a secondary English teacher, so if you don't know my background, that is my specialty area and at the time of this story I worked in that specialist setting that I was talking about. So a specialist setting for students who had very complex social, emotional and mental health needs, and all of those were the kind of needs that manifested in very challenging behaviors. So these behaviors weren't particularly unique to that particular student I'm talking about. But there was a student who every single time he came into my English lesson he'd say something like I fucking hate English, I hate you, you're boring, you can't teach, you're the shittest teacher in the world. And that was like every single lesson. He might chuck his book at the wall and walk out, he might just sit there and berate me, but it was really extreme the way that he acted in my lesson.

Speaker 1:

However, I knew, with my thinking hat on that what he hated was not English. You know he didn't hate me. He didn't know me, he didn't know my lessons. Like he might hate you know English lessons on the surface, but you know, I knew that that's not what the problem was. I knew he didn't fucking hate me or hate English. He didn't think I was boring, he didn't think I couldn't teach. He didn't think I was a shit as teacher because he'd never had really any authentic experiences in my class that would make him have evidence to support those things. I knew what the problem was. I've taught enough of these particular students with these needs to know what the problem was. And the problem was that he hated what I represented. He hated what my subject represented because to him my subject represented failure. He hated how he felt. He hated feeling embarrassed, he hated feeling incapable, he hated feeling ashamed. And he came in and the easiest way for him to respond to those feelings was to project it out into me.

Speaker 1:

So I wanted to talk about this specific student and how I responded to these behaviors, because there are two paths that we can take with these particular behaviors. The first path is one that I've taken many times in my own career. So please don't think that I'm sitting on a pedestal telling you how to do something right, saying what you know how to do it wrong. That's not the case at all. If you have reacted in the same way that I'm about to talk about, you are not alone. This is definitely a path that I have taken myself many times in my own career and still do when I'm having a really shitty day. So the first path is take those behaviors on face value and react to them with emotion.

Speaker 1:

So I could say and I have said how dare you swear at me? You know. I could say go see the head teacher, go see Mr or Mrs blah, blah, blah. I could say you can't be in here right now, you need to leave. I could say I don't deserve to be spoken to like this, I am not teaching you, I refuse to teach you until you get your attitude checked. You know like. I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to be spoken to like that. This approach here.

Speaker 1:

If you do take this first door, it might help you in the short term because you're getting that student out of the room and it feels really good when you are being spoken to like crap, that student speaking to me like crap. I know that I'm not, you know, I'm not sugarcoating that. It might help us in the short term because we're getting our feelings out, we're getting them out of the room. Maybe, however, it does nothing to change how that student would feel in that situation. Nothing to change how that student would feel in that situation. So, in this particular context, it was not going to change anything about how this student felt about my subject or or himself or me for the rest of his education. All it would do is only perpetuate and deepen these feelings of failure and resentment. It would disconnect me from him. It would escalate his behaviors for the rest of the time he spent with me in that lesson, which is not what I wanted.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I wanted in the moment to shout and scream because I'm a human being and when you're copying that kind of stuff, like when you're on the receiving end of language like that, it can be very triggering and very, very, very tough. And I'm not saying anyone deserves to be spoken to like that, but it would only make things far worse for the rest of the year if I was to respond in that way, and it has made my life much more difficult in the past because I have responded in that way. So let's talk about what I actually did do. Let's talk about opening that second door and what something different could look like. We talk so much about trauma-informed responses and restorative approaches and I feel like everyone's shouting into a void, saying, but what does that look like? What can I do? What does that mean? This is what my version of that would look like for this situation and remember, this is just a starting point. There is a lot of rigorous work that needed to be done with this student.

Speaker 1:

So, opening up door two, I did what I could to continue to connect with that student and shift these beliefs. So I asked him if we could have a chat. So I said hey, you keen to have a bit of a game of true and false? Are you keen for that? And he told me to fuck off. But then he nodded. So it was after the lesson, obviously not in front of everybody. I said, hey, you keen to play a game of true and false? And he was like, obviously he had his kind of backup about it, he had his mask on, he didn't want to engage with me positively. But then he did accept that and we sat side by side and I said, hey, english is stupid. And he nodded so yep, that was true. I said you don't want to be having this chat with me? And he nodded again that was also true. Then I added in some other questions, english feels hard. And he nodded and I said you don't see the point in trying in English, there's no point. And he nodded again.

Speaker 1:

Honestly, this in itself was a miraculous breakthrough. That student had shown vulnerability, he'd shown trust, he'd shown a willingness to connect with me, the fact that he was able to nod in response to English, feeling hard, and that he doesn't see the point in trying that is something that he likely has never done with an English teacher before. None of the English teachers that I've spoken to had been able to break through with him at all, to even sit in a chair next to them, and it was just a moment of connection. That never, ever ever, would have happened if I opened door one and allowed myself to react rather than respond. So the you know flow and effect from this.

Speaker 1:

The next lesson he came in. What was I expecting? I wasn't expecting anything. I didn't place any expectations on the situation. I didn't put pressure on this to change anything, because what we know about behavior is that it cannot be shifted overnight. It is more complex than that, it is more nuanced than that and likely this student, the road that he had to go down to get to the point where he's sitting in a secondary classroom telling me to fuck off every lesson that road is not one that I can backtrack and fix in one single discussion. That is not going to happen.

Speaker 1:

But he did come in the next lesson and he said English sucks. He said this is boring. He didn't say fuck off. He didn't say your shit, english sucks, this is boring. And I'm like, okay, this is interesting.

Speaker 1:

And then he sat down and I responded by giving him not by saying how dare you say English sucks? I didn't respond by saying you haven't even tried the lesson. How do you know that it's boring? You can't say that unless you've tried it. You don't even know what the work is. And no, I just gave him a fresh English book and I asked him to write his name on the front of it. That was it. That was my only request of him. Here's your book write your name on the front. A fresh English book. His old English book looked like a piece of crap. It was scribbled all in, it was ripped. It had no work in it other than like, maybe a couple of like you know titles or dates or something that he'd started and never, ever did anything with.

Speaker 1:

So I gave him a fresh English book and I asked him to write his name on the front and he did. And then he did all the work, that lesson, and everything was all good. No, he didn't. He didn't do any lesson. No, I'm sorry, any work in the lesson. He did nothing.

Speaker 1:

However, he picked up a pen and he wrote his name on the front, and he wrote his name on the front in a way that was very neat and legible, and I could see that he really tried to write his name nicely on the front, because we are not miracle workers and I am not using this story as a way to say look at me, I am brilliant. That is not the case at all. I am a very imperfect human being that is just working through the mess of this together with you, but what we need to realize is, when we choose micro moments of connection and understanding, things do begin to change. That was a massive change for this person, and these decisions that we make have the potential to create incredible change, and even if that change seems as small to begin with, as a student picking up a pen, if you are ever in doubt when you're facing some really, really challenging behaviors like the ones that I just explained, always just ask yourself if I respond right now in the way that I want to respond, is it going to bring us closer together or drive us further apart?

Speaker 1:

Is it something that is going to make things more difficult for us in the long run or is it going to make things easier? Is it going to connect or disconnect us? That one simple question. Connection is never the wrong answer. If you lead with connection, it's always going to lead somewhere better. Even if it leads nowhere, it's better than taking 10 steps back, which is what happens when we open door one and say how dare you speak to me like that If you have a good relationship with the student and they come in one day and they're like, fuck, you miss. I'd be like, excuse me, you come here, you speak to me about that. Like I will respond differently. But in this particular situation, in this context with that student, that was not the appropriate response to that.

Speaker 1:

So just a few more things that I want to say on this subject. The first is that I know it can feel very, very hard to know what to say in the moment, especially when the behavior is very triggering and feels very personal, and that's because it can be very hard for us, when we're faced with that stuff, to stay in our thinking brain, because very often it's a threat If someone is saying something that's nasty to us, if someone's saying something that is abusive or, you know, whatever else it might be in the classroom, our brain, the very normal biological response to that for our brains is to go into fight, flight or freeze, is to go into that stress mode because we are going into self-protection mode, self-preservation mode, because we're human beings and we don't, you know, being spoken to like that is a threat. So it can be very hard to stay in our thinking brains and know what to say in the moment. Remember, when you hear this story, that I have had thousands, of thousands of hours of classroom experience in very challenging settings with students who specifically have these needs that manifest in very big, dysregulated, challenging behaviors. So the way that I respond now comes pretty naturally and the my ability to kind of remain regulated has gotten better over time, mainly because things have been a little bit normalized in my brain. But I just wanted you to know that it is a massive road to go down as a teacher as well, to be able to respond in this way and to kind of get our own regulation sorted. So if you're ever stumped, as I said before, just remind yourself that connection's never the wrong answer because it is going to disarm and deescalate. So even if you don't know how to sit down in the moment and have this kind of chat with a student, or even if in the moment you feel really dysregulated and it's really tough and you just want to run out of the room, just remember connection's never the wrong answer and disarm and deescalate the situation because it's going to give you a much better chance later down the line to connect with that student. And remember that success looks different for every student.

Speaker 1:

So if I were to expect this student the next lesson to sit down and write an essay that day, it would be an unrealistic leap. Can he get there one day, heck? Yes, I believe that every single student has the capabilities of doing brilliant things with the right support and the right belief in themselves and the right people who believe in them. But today, no, he's not going to write an essay for me, he's not going to do all the work, and that's a really unrealistic expectation for me to have when that student has gone from telling me to fuck off and saying English is shit to coming in the room and writing his name on the book. Him showing a willingness to pick up a pen and write his name is a victory that I was not going to let slide. So please don't forget to celebrate the successes when they pop up. And this really helps us to catch the positive with students as well, because it allows us to see things in a bit of a different way and get our mindset straight around it.

Speaker 1:

I have very high expectations of my students. If other students were to do no work that day, I would be on their case, but this student, again, it's all contextual, it's all nuanced, it's all dependent upon the circumstances around it. That leads me to the next thing, which is there is no one thing to say, no one right thing to do, because us we're just meatbags. We're all different and the relationships we have are different and our personalities are different. So what you say and how you respond, personalities are different. So what you say and how you respond, it's always going to be different. You know it's not going to be a one size fits all ever.

Speaker 1:

And the final thing that I want to talk about before I finish up this episode is there are a couple of people that were concerned that this story meant that I was allowing myself to be treated like crap or spoken to like shit. This is not about me letting that behavior slide or the swearing slide. It's not me accepting to be spoken to like shit or treated like crap. It was not me being disrespected. I gave no power to that. If I was to make it about me, I would have stayed stuck on the well you swore at me and I feel disrespected. And if I did that, I am throwing any opportunity I have had in the bin to making progress with that student, because that student would not have the buy-in to listen to me talking to them about swearing. Look, it doesn't feel nice. It doesn't feel nice being confronted with these behaviors from our students, and in no way, shape or form am I advocating for that or saying that that is okay, but it's about looking deeper and thinking about ways that we can actually start to shift the behavior.

Speaker 1:

This particular student that I'm talking about guess what happened weeks down the line. I was able to sit with him and I was able to say do you remember when you came in every lesson and said you know you're shit and you fucking hate me and I'm the worst teacher ever and all the rest of it? Do you remember saying those things? And he went oh yeah, that's right. Oh, sorry about that and like I'm not expecting an apology I would never enforce an apology but the fact that weeks down the line he was able to reflect on those things and I was able to discuss those things with him in a way that actually would make him take accountability in a really self-directed and authentic way. Like there was no apologize to her. Don't say that blah, blah, blah, it was him going, oh crap. Like yeah, that wasn't okay. And I want you to also remember that door too, that door that I'm speaking about.

Speaker 1:

It takes no extra time. I think the argument as well with this approach is that it it takes no extra time. I think the argument as well with this approach is that it takes a bunch of time. I saved so much time with this student down the line and I saved myself a lot of, a lot of headaches because things in class got better. I was spending the same amount of time talking to him after class rather than just keeping him for attention, and it just made my life so much easier in a couple of months when we had a better relationship and things started to shift a little bit and I didn't have to constantly redirect him in class and you know, he was actually getting a little bit engaged and you know we built a rapport there so he wasn't displaying as extreme disruptive behaviors, which was such a massive, massive change for him after you know, a very long road in his education of doing nothing but those behaviors you know of pushing everybody away, of putting that mask on, of not engaging in lessons and being completely disengaged in school in general.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I'm going to stop rambling on about that now. I would like to, you know, keep these as short, sharp and sweet as possible. I know you're really busy, but I'm sure that if we were sitting over a coffee we would be nattering on about this for a very long time. So just remember that door number one gets us stuck and in a vicious cycle, and door number two actually does have the power to create change. That's all you really need to take away.

Speaker 1:

So I hope you got something from this story.

Speaker 1:

I know I say this all the time, but please feel free to reach out, send me a message, say hi, let me know if anything resonated.

Speaker 1:

But it was really wonderful to kind of bring you along into my classroom and be able to talk about some of the rationale I have behind things and some of the ways that I would approach different things. This is just one of many, many, many, many things that I could share that might help when it comes to responding to challenging behaviors in the classroom. So if you've got a particular behavior challenge that you want me to talk through on the podcast, you can also drop that in a message on Instagram and I can see what I can do there and and you know explain what I would do in that situation. But, yeah, like, I just want this to be a resource that helps you as much as possible feel more confident and capable dealing with these things, because my gosh, it can be tough, it can be disempowering, it can be all of the things. Okay, wonderful teachers, until next time, have a lovely week and I will see you there. Bye, for now.

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Claire English

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