The Unteachables Podcast

#135: Is your teaching presence undermining your classroom management?

• Claire English • Season 6 • Episode 135

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Why Your Presence Might Be Undermining Your Classroom Management (And How to Fix It)

Ever felt like you're being too nice... or not taken seriously enough in your classroom?

Like you're walking a tightrope between being warm and relatable and being respected as the leader of the room?

Whew—yeah. Been there. That’s exactly what today’s episode is all about.

We're kicking off the Behaviour Club Kickstart with Day 1: PRESENCE—because how we show up in our classrooms (literally, physically) impacts everything from student engagement to classroom climate. And trust me, the shifts we can make here are subtle but mighty.

In this episode, I’m giving you a front seat to one of the biggest lightbulb moments I ever had about classroom management—when I realised I wasn’t being taken seriously by my “easy” class… and it had everything to do with my nonverbal presence.

Here’s what we’re covering:

  • The two teacher personas you're constantly switching between (and probably don’t even realise it)
  • Why being "approachable" isn't always helping your classroom calm
  • What “credible” non-verbal communication actually looks like (without being cold, robotic, or mean)
  • How I accidentally nailed behaviour management with a “tricky” class… and totally flopped with my high flyers
  • What to tweak immediately to lead with more calm, grounded authority (yes, even if you’re still finding your feet)

If you want the visuals, templates, and reflection prompts that go with this episode, make sure you’re signed up for the Behaviour Club Kickstart. It's just $1 and includes all five sessions + a super practical kickstart booklet to help you embed the work in your day-to-day.

🎟 Join the Kickstart here: https://www.the-unteachables.com/kickstart

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

  • The difference between credible and approachable teacher presence
  • How your body language might be unintentionally inviting misbehaviour
  • Where I went wrong with my year 10 class (and how I fixed it)
  • Practical strategies to switch from “friendly chaos” to “calm credibility”
  • The quickest way to reset your presence mid-lesson

Resources Mentioned:

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

👉 JOIN THE $1 KICKSTART! Click for more info and to jump in!

RESOURCES AND MORE SUPPORT:

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 and 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. Hello, fabulous teacher, welcome back to the Teachables podcast. It is a joy to have you here. This month I am running the Behavior Club Kickstart, and what the kickstart is is five short sessions where you'll learn one quick, simple, powerful strategy for each of your lessons to reduce disruption, to increase predictability, to build calm, confident teaching habits that really shape your incredible compassionate, restorative but actionably so, and trauma, informed but realistically so, and it embeds it into every facet of your practice. So it's all about our presence and entry and transitions and tasks and how we exit the room and what you can do at each of these stages to really nail classroom management, to really mitigate low-level behaviors, to control what you can control, and it really is about those really small shifts done every single lesson for huge impact. So I am so excited for you to listen into these episodes because I'll be going through them in the episodes as well, but also the Behaviour Club. Kickstart is something that you can go and register for and you'll get the accompanying materials and you'll be able to watch the sessions with the slides. So it's going to be so much more valuable if you just press pause on this episode and head to the-unteachablescom forward slash kickstart, because then you'll be able to actually follow along and really implement these things into your practice.

Speaker 1:

I'm really excited for us to get started with this. I was actually originally going to call it the back to school challenge, but then I realized that it was just the stuff that makes classroom management work in the day to day. I also wanted it to be something that could act as a really beautiful introduction into the behavior club and give you an idea on what to work on next. So, behavior clubbers who are listening to this, the reason why I have popped the kickstart inside of the behavior club is not just to give you five really quick wins when you enter the behavior club so you can see what's possible for your practice and go oh my gosh, like I could actually do this, which is such a huge barrier for some teachers, like that feeling of hopelessness and like things can't change or, you know, you feel really stuck. So I wanted to create something for you where you can be like oh my gosh, like this can work, which is a huge barrier and also have something where you can be like if you come in and go, I just don't know what to work on. You'll know because you'll go through the kickstart and each kickstart session has your next steps. If you're like, okay, I really understand now that I need to work on my entry routine a bit more or my exit routine or how I'm tasking students. You'll be able to then be guided to the next step inside of the club. So, yeah, that's it. Here we go.

Speaker 1:

The Pavey Club Kickstart, remember. Join the dash on teachablescom forward slash, kickstart and it is $1. And you might think why. What's the point? What's $1? You know, like, why can't you just make it free? The reason I made it $1 is because when you rock up and just enter your email, the amount of things that I have put my name down for and I've just not done it because I don't have the time, you know, I just haven't made the commitment to it. I wanted you to energetically say yes to doing this and to commit to this. I don't want you just to sign up for it and not bother to log into, and also the behavior club's quite a sacred space. So I want people to join because you do get access to the um, the behavior club dashboard. You can't access everything inside of there, of course, but I wanted it to be a hell yes. I didn't want it to be like a oh yeah, maybe I want it to be yes. This sounds amazing. I'm going to do these sessions, I'm going to see this progress, and $1 might be not a lot of this economy, but it is an energetic yes to making that commitment for the next step. So come and join me, make the time, commit to the kickstart. But we will actually be going through the content here on the podcast as well Not in as much depth or not with the resources, but we are kicking into day one of the kickstart today, which is presence. So day one is presence. Then we have entry, we have task, we have rapport and then we have exit. So day one is presence. And this session is going to be particularly beneficial for anybody who relates to the following I find it hard to balance being a kind and relatable and approachable teacher and really embodying the values of being calm and compassionate and all of those things with then holding firm, consistent boundaries and being taken seriously and feeling like you're respected in the lesson and feeling like you're leading the lesson.

Speaker 1:

And that is definitely how I felt when I first started teaching. I felt like I was just kind of trying to constantly strike this balance that I wasn't quite sure how to strike or what I was doing, or you know, it was really tough for me and I do talk about this in my book and I'm sure I've mentioned on the podcast a few times too, because it's such a pivotal moment in my career when this happened. But I did Envoy training, which is Michael Grinder's Envoy. I think it stands for educational non-verbal yardsticks. It's all about non-verbal classroom management that is connecting rather than disconnecting, and it's just so impactful. It's just been such a foundation for my own practice, anyway.

Speaker 1:

So I did this training and it's like the penny dropped and all of a sudden I could see what was going on in my lessons and why. You know, I was the problem. I was I. A lot of the issues that I was experiencing are because of the things that I was doing myself in these classes, without even being aware of. I wasn't aware that there are these two kind of nonverbal modes that we can swap between, and once I understood this, what I'm going to be teaching you today and, of course, like the training itself, was much longer, but there's this one concept in there that just pinged all of the light bulbs off in my mind, and this is the concept of the two kind of nonverbal profiles that we can have, which is the approachable and the credible. Non-verbal, like the teaching presences that we can step into, and I have spoken about this on the podcast before. If you've listened to other episodes about low-level behaviors, I speak about this a lot when I talk about mitigating low-level behaviors. So it's the approachable and the credible.

Speaker 1:

Before I did this training, I was really confused as to what was going on because I got my class lists for that year and I had, like you know, six classes. One of the classes was what you would call the lower year eight class and of course that's problematic, you know, grouping them and saying that they're the low class, and I'm not going to go into that right now. But then I had. So I had the lower year eight class that had a lot of behavioral concerns. They had a lot of complexities in their behavior profiles, a lot of complex needs in that class that I, as an early career teacher, had no bloody idea how to deal with. And then, on the flip side, I was given the top year 10 class, you know the year 10s that were going to be super studious and engage, and I was so excited as an English teacher, I'm going to get in there, I'm going to teach them Shakespeare, I'm going to, you know, engage them and my English brain.

Speaker 1:

We get into, I think, high school teachers, we go and study our subjects and want to teach our subjects because we bloody love it Like we love our subjects. We are passionate about our subjects and I was so passionate about English. I was so passionate about the way that we can experience other worlds through texts and like it was such an escape for me when I was at university and I realized there was so much more to the world and it just opens us up, right. So I was so passionate about literature and about English and I was so excited to teach my students about English. Now I realize that we don't teach our subjects, we teach our students and there's a big difference between those two. But anyway, at the time, early career teacher, so excited to teach them literature as an English teacher.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, it was not that easy because what happened? So things started out the way that I would, you know, have assumed they would have started out. The year eight class was very challenging. A lot of behavioral issues. I was, like you know, a bit of an uphill battle every lesson. But I was going into every lesson like so damn determined to like have a lesson that was calm and have a lesson that was productive. So I was very intentional in what I lesson that was productive. So I was very intentional in what I was doing in that lesson.

Speaker 1:

I was very prepared, I was very careful about the way that I was presenting myself. I was, you know that whole don't smile till Christmas or don't smile till Easter, depending on where you are in the world. I wasn't embodying that necessarily, but I was trying to embody the idea that I shouldn't be as bubbly and out there. And you know the personality that I came to kind of adopt with that year 10 class. So I was a little bit more still with my movements, I was a little bit quieter. I was, you know, slower I was. I was just, without even realizing it right, I was intuitively trying to regulate with the class, intuitively, without even realizing what I was doing. I was unconsciously incompetent, like I had no idea what I was doing, but I was doing things intuitively as a human being that was working with the year. So I was doing all that. I was prepared. I had things up on the, on the board when they got in. I had a sitting plan. I was just a different teacher with them because I knew how important it was to keep those boundaries, without really understanding now what I understand about doing all of those things. And things started to get better right.

Speaker 1:

But in the year 10 class I took a different approach because they were the top class, they were the ones that were supposed to be excited about English and excited about learning. So you could just imagine me as a really excited young English teacher. I was barely older than them. They were in year 10. I was fresh out of university, so I was probably like five years older than them. So I was like trying to riff off how exciting English was and try to engage them. But what I was doing, without realizing it, is every single second of that lesson I was falling into a credible teaching persona, I mean, sorry, an approachable teaching persona.

Speaker 1:

And with the year eight class I was falling into a credible teaching persona. So I was embodying the teaching personas that I thought was appropriate for those particular lessons. But I was doing it all wrong. And in that year 10 class that really showed because after about a term I had All of a sudden I realized that going into that year eight class I felt calm, I felt okay. It was still tough because I didn't have the skills that I have now and I didn't have the knowledge that I have now. Of course it was still tough and I was working my butt off in that class to try to get them to learn and to engage in all of those things. But it was happening. It was naturally happening.

Speaker 1:

I was getting there, but then the year 10 class were going backwards and I found myself walking out of that year 10 class every lesson with a huge headache. I was constantly battling chattiness, I was starting to resent them and feeling like they were getting really arrogant about their abilities. And you know, things just really changed for me with those two classes. And then I caught myself. I'm like, oh my gosh, what is happening here? Like this, year 10 class has become the class that I really struggle with and I just don't like teaching. And the year eight class by the end of the lesson I was like walking out with them and I'd give them little high fives. We had a class handshake. It was beautiful.

Speaker 1:

That year eight class, I felt like I had transformed that class but, again, unconscious about it, I had no idea what I was doing. When I walked out of that Envoy training, however, that Michael Grinder training, all of those light bulbs went off and I realized what was going on. I realized where I was going wrong. I realized what was working, what wasn't working. Of course, not all the puzzle pieces, but when it came to my nonverbal teacher presence, it was so clear. So there are two nonverbal personas that we can embody in the classroom and all of the nonverbal language that we use can be grouped into these two styles. Both are so important and I think that that year eight story reflects that, because I was able to also embody the, the approachable at the end of the lesson, once that lesson was over, I was able to kind of let those parts of myself out.

Speaker 1:

But a strong teaching persona is so reliant on us using these at the right time and they really can be make or break for our classroom management. But if you're struggling with this right now, it can be as easy as a flick of a switch. It is a little bit hard to get comfortable being more in your credible body, but credible and boundaries. It's not the opposite of compassion. Please understand that. It's not the opposite of us being compassionate and kind and building rapport with our students. It is one and the same. It's just us and our nonverbal language right?

Speaker 1:

So the approachable when we are more in our approachable body, we are relaxed. We might be slouching, we might have weight on one foot, we might have more of a bubbly persona speaking with an upwards inflection, maybe a louder volume or tone, quicker pace. We're more gestural and I have observed so many lessons in my career and mentored so many teachers and supported so many teachers and I'm telling you now one of the things that I have helped them switch that like flick that, switch on is just them tweaking one element of their nonverbal language. So, for example, they might be up there up the front and they're trying to give instructions to the class, but I've noticed in their body language they're you know, they're talking seriously and they're trying to get students to listen, but their weight's on one foot and they're slouching and their body language is not in the credible. Just that little tweak can be make or break. So that is the approachable. We're more relaxed, we're slouching, bubbly, persona, where you know, not all of these at the same time, necessarily, but you know we're kind of using this, these messages, we're sending these messages out.

Speaker 1:

When we do use this, of course it's important for us to use our approachable body language, sometimes our approachable non-verbals. We might use it when we're one-to-one with small group instruction. We're definitely using it like outside of a classroom context, maybe when we're doing a story time, like I would always sit on the table up the front when I'm telling them a story or trying to engage them through narrative, and they'd be like oh, story time with Miss English. And they know that I'm in my approachable body language. I'm more open to having a chat. You know, during more informal class discussions, building relationships, maybe when they're doing something practical in the lesson and I'm kind of walking around having a chat to them, the message that the approachable sends is that right now I'm down for a chat, right now we're having a discussion. It's more collaborative. I'm happy for you to call some answers out. We're having a bit of a laugh, we're all good here.

Speaker 1:

So if you are in your approachable body language but you don't want to send those messages, you need to shift it to the credible. Right Now let's talk about the credible. The credible is what I was trying to embody with year eight, without even realizing it. So the credible looks like a quieter tone, you know, less high energy, more serious. We're speaking with a downwards inflection. We're standing straight. Our movements are calm, they're slow. They're considered credible. You know, like how would you imagine credible to be? Our weight is evenly distributed onto both feet. We're planting our feet down into the ground.

Speaker 1:

When we use this, you know, whenever we want to model to our students, that it is the time to be a little bit more serious or it is the time to listen and to be engaging in that way. So like whole group instruction or transitions, when you require attention and engagement, more formal discussions where you need to lead and maintain a calm and controlled climate, entering the class calmly and quietly, supervising exams and assemblies, like if you're supervising an exam, you might naturally embody the credible because you understand intuitively that you need to be modeling what you want back from the students. I've seen teachers in exams that are like talking loudly to a student they're trying to support, or like trying to yell an instruction over the hall or up the front, with teachers like visibly having a really funny chit chat. I mean, I have been the teacher in exams that has like little races down the lines with other teachers or I've done all that right. I'm not saying that you can't have a bit of a laugh or you can't try to kill those two hours or three hours in the best way possible. That's not soul sucking. But I'm saying like you know, modeling what you want back from the students when they can see you, it's really important. Otherwise they see you at the front having a chat. They're like okay, maybe I can like have a bit of a whisper to the person next to me what messages these non-verbals send.

Speaker 1:

So this is a time for work and attention. I am leading this room and this discussion. I am holding boundaries and expectations around what we are doing right now in this space. This is the time we need to be a bit more serious with our work and you need the approachable to develop that connection, trust and rapport. But you need time in the credible so you can lead the room and get down to the business end of the lessons and get down to work. You just need to do it in the right time and in the right way, especially when you want to mitigate those low level behaviors or the chattiness.

Speaker 1:

Always opt for the credible when you are wanting them to listen, when you're wanting them to be doing quite independent work. Anytime you want your students to be you know, cracking on with what they need to do your students to be you know, cracking on with what they need to do. Opt for the credible and don't make the mistakes that I have made, and I hope that this session has just helped you. Maybe you've gotten the same light bulb moments that I had when I walked out of my Envoy training and I was like, oh my gosh, I have just been doing it all wrong with my year 10s. No wonder things are absolutely chaotic in there, because I myself am always in the approachable and even when I'm trying to be serious with them, I'm still like flipping from place to place and I'm still frantic and I'm still rushing and I'm still calling things out or trying to talk over them and feeling really frantic. So no wonder the class was the way that it was. And if you're ever in doubt, just ask yourself what I want to see right now for my students and how can I model that, how can I be what I want to see with my students right now.

Speaker 1:

If you want to watch that session, please come and join the kickstart, because with that session as well, obviously you get to see visuals, like you know, representations of what credible and approachable look like. I show you kind of some examples of that. I give you a like a template that you can take away. It's a checklist, a credible checklist, so you can go through that and kind of self-assess where you are at with your credible and approachable body languages. You also get the kickstart booklet and you get like a little reflection page at the end of each session where you do a quick win challenge. So I've got a challenge there for you when it comes to your credible and approachable body language.

Speaker 1:

So it is so worth going and joining the kickstart, even if you understood this session, and obviously if you want to get all of the sessions to come. All of them are just as actionable, um, just as powerful as this one really quick shifts that you can make in your practice. So the dash on teachablescom forward slash kickstart. I will drop that in the show notes as well. But for today, just think is my body language predominantly in the credible or is it predominantly in the approachable, and when am I using those styles? Go and reflect on that. I hope it's really enlightening and I look forward to seeing you inside of the kickstart.

Speaker 1:

If you do join the kickstart and you're from the podcast, if you come from the podcast, say hello to say hey, I listened to the podcast episode and I am doing the kickstart. I would love to hear from you. Just just reply to that welcome email and let me know what you're all about, what your goals are, what you teach, where you are in the world all of those things I love to connect with all of you, wonderful teachers. Okay, that's it. Have a wonderful day, week, commute to work, walk, whatever you're doing right now as you're listening to this podcast episode, and I will see you in the next one. Bye for now.

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Claire English

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