The Unteachables Podcast

#146: Why classroom compliance isn’t the win you might think it is

• Claire English • Season 7 • Episode 146

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Ever found yourself sitting at your desk mid-lesson, staring at the wall while chaos erupts around you… thinking “I cannot teach like this”?

Same.

In this episode, I’m giving you a front seat to one of the most eye-opening classroom experiences I had as a baby teacher—and how it accidentally dropped me straight into something called the pedagogy of poverty.

You’ll hear the story of a student called “Nathan,” how I unintentionally leaned into compliance-based teaching just to survive, and the big, uncomfortable lightbulb moment that changed everything about how I teach now.

This episode isn’t here to guilt you, because I’ve been there. It’s here to show you what’s actually going on when students appear settled but disengaged... and how to shift out of survival-mode strategies without throwing your whole self under the bus.

What you’ll learn:

  • The sneaky signs you’ve slipped into the pedagogy of poverty (and why it feels like it’s “working”)
  • Why busy work, copying off the board, and chalk-and-talk can be so seductive in tricky classrooms
  • How trauma, stress responses, and feelings of failure are shaping your students' behaviour
  • What true differentiation actually looks like (no colour-coded ability groups required)
  • Simple scaffolding tools you can start using this week that support learning AND behaviour

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

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SPEAKER_00:

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 behaviour nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behaviour 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. Hi, how are we going? Hello, welcome to the Unteachables Podcast. If you can't tell, I am trying to mix up my introductions because I feel like every single one is exactly the same and I'm becoming my own kind of meme. So last week I had the absolute privilege of doing a webinar for Everyday Magazine. I did an article for them actually about, oh gosh, like three years ago, four years ago, and it was about something called the pedagogy of poverty. And I um have spoken about it on the podcast before. It is something that has been so like like understanding the pedagogy of poverty has been such a light bulb for my own career, and it has really helped me to like teach my classes in a way that is quality and understand why students respond to certain things in a certain way. It's just been brilliant, and I had the opportunity to talk, like so. I did the article and I had the opportunity to present on this topic and expand these ideas on the webinar live with some incredible teachers last week. So I wanted to talk through the same kind of stuff that I did on that webinar today with you all because I know it's going to be like really insightful and really helpful, and the teachers on the webinar like really responded well to it. So I thought that I would bring it to all of you lovely folks here on the Unteachables podcast because why the heck not? I already planned for the session, so I might as well just re-say it to you to you all. Uh so I I've probably told you before, but if you're not like familiar with my background and where I'm from and you know what my teaching experience is, I started my career in Western Sydney in a low socioeconomic area of Mount Druid. If you are from Western Sydney, if you teach in Western Sydney, hello, please let me know. Like come and send me an email or pop into my Instagram. But I um I grew up in Western Sydney as well. I'm a St. Mary's girl and I, you know, born, raised, like went to university in Penrith. I like I am a Penrith girl through and through, and I uh worked, my first school was um in Matt Druid. And in Matt Druid, there are a lot of social issues, there's a lot of cyclical poverty, there's a lot of generational welfare dependence, the kinds of things that we see manifesting in the classroom in big behaviors for a whole variety of reasons. By the way, if you are currently a Mat Druid and things have changed, I'm not saying that it is still quite as bad, but uh at the time that I did teach there, it definitely had a lot of issues in Madruit. Anyway, uh, so a lot of the classes I taught were very challenging, and one of those classes was my year seven class. It was a class full of students with incredibly complex needs from learning disabilities to disorganized attachments to serious amounts of trauma, and it was just chaotic. It was so chaotic. And there was one student, let's call him Nathan, and he was plonked in the middle of it, mid-year. So this year seven class, already chaotic. Here's Nathan coming in from a behavior setting. So he was originally at the school, he left the school, went to a behavior setting, and then was plonked back into this class. We had a very quick morning muster to just let everybody know like, hey, this is the new student, Nathan. Here's the laundry list of needs that he has. Pretty much like, good luck, we're putting him in this class that's already unimaginably difficult. Good luck. Now remember, I was a first-year teacher, I had no freaking clue, zero clue on how to handle any of the behaviors already that were happening in this classroom, uh, let alone a student with these complex needs. Um, so I spoke to Nathan. Nathan arrived, first lesson, I had a chat with him, and he said, What are we doing today? And I explained to him that we're going to be reading a poem and then we're going to be talking about what the main message was and the similes, and he said, Ugh, I just want to copy off the board. Like that's what we did back at my other school. And I'm like, Oh, okay. Of course, I kept my lesson plan. I was a first-year teacher, I was trying to hone my skills, I wanted to do a really great job. But then Nathan showed me just what he thought of my great job of teaching with behaviors that brought that class to a whole new level. I couldn't teach over the noise. I felt so out of control. I felt so disempowered in a way, by the way, that I just feel like only teachers would understand. Only teachers who are struggling to teach a class with so much disruption. Like, I just don't think any other profession can quite understand how disempowering and out of control you can feel as a human being in a classroom of 30 students who are, you know, all behaving. Their behaviors are behaving. But I was totally at loss as to what to do. And in the middle of a lesson, I remember going to that place of total disassociation, total shutdown. I sat at my desk and I gave up for the lesson. I'm like, I can't do this. I disassociated. I swear, I was like sitting at my teacher desk looking at the wall. There were students who were running around, they were screaming, they were fighting, they were doing everything but learning. And I just had no freaking idea what to try next. Uh so if you've ever had those feelings of helplessness, of disempowerment, of shutdown in the middle of a lesson in the face of very overwhelming classroom behaviors, which is putting it lightly, please know that you are definitely not alone and there's nothing wrong with you, and there's nothing wrong with your capacity as a teacher. It's just really freaking hard. So I thought on my feet because I could not stand one more moment of trying to teach over the noise. I did not know what to do, but I just went, you know what? Like, let's try something different. And I said, Okay, you seven, I'm gonna, you know, scrap that, copy this poem into your book. And I thought, well, Nathan was asking to do this at the start of the lesson. Maybe I can just give it a good old crack and see what happens. And suddenly, like somebody had flipped a switch, like I had found this like magic potion, it was calm, it was quiet, it was settled, and that calm magic potion was something I used again and again and again and again and again and again and again because I got compliance and I felt like I was in control in a way that I hadn't felt since becoming a teacher. But what I tapped into was something far more damaging than I ever could have imagined at the time. And there was a reason that Nathan's Behavior Unit used this strategy and why he was asking to do this. I had stumbled away from pedagogy where I was trying my darndest to get students thinking and learning and discussing and contributing to no avail, right? Like I wasn't uh an experienced teacher, I didn't have the skills and the strategies that I have now, but I was really trying so hard to get them doing higher level learning. And what I did was I fell forward into something that I now know is called the pedagogy of poverty. So, what is the pedagogy of poverty? It is a term coined by Martin Haberman. He is a professor of curriculum and instruction, and he went to a bunch of schools all over the US and noticed some really stark and concerning trends. He visited a lot of schools in quite disadvantaged areas with lots of issues like low attainment levels and high dropout rates and youth incarceration and behavior problems. The kind of schools where on paper you think, my gosh, these kids need so much support. Like these schools need a lot of funding. They need something more. Like if the needs are this complex, like these social issues are kind of coming into the classroom, we need, we need more. But what Martin Haberman noticed was they had huge similarities in the way that students were being taught. Because instead of being taught in a way that helped them think critically and stay engaged in their learning, these students were across the board being given busy work to keep them quiet, compliant, and under control. Just like me, getting Nathan and the rest of the class to copy the poem off the board instead of reading and interacting with the poem itself and getting them to pull out the similes and talk about the main messages and think about how, you know, like, you know, what was the poet trying to say? Like all of those things. Instead of actually interacting with something, I was just getting them to write off the board. The kinds of pedagogies that he saw being used to increase compliance and the things that I also fell back onto using in my early career were things like this teacher-centered chalk and talk, where students would just sit there and there would be it'd be very teacher-centered classroom with just chalk and talk, you know, copying down things. Um, rote learning and memorize, memorize. I always fumble over the word memorization, uh, death by worksheets, just handing out worksheets, worksheet, worksheet, worksheet, do it, do it, do it. No stretch. By the way, when you like worksheets that are done strategically, fine, no problem at all. What I'm talking about is just printing a whole bunch of stuff, not actually wanting, because what happens when you're trying to actually teach a lesson and they're talking over you? It is really hard. So when you give them a worksheet and say work through it at your own pace, some will look at the walls, some will scribble some things down, but there's no kind of expectation there in the same way that if you're trying to actually teach them something. Um, no stretch or challenge, there's very little student output. So I'm I remember some of the kids in my classes, they like I'm being very, very open and honest with you here. If I were to look at some of the pay, like some of the books for some of my students, they would be almost empty. And I was doing nothing about it because I was so entrenched in this pedagogy of poverty. All of the things that they were seen to be doing were more low-order thinking skills. Uh, he noticed that there was very low or no expectation for progress. So all of these things were very um like consistent across the board in these schools that had a lot of challenges with behavior. When we use these pedagogies, what we're doing is increasing compliance. We are reducing behavioral issues. The kids who struggle the most at school have likely experienced feelings of chronic failure across the board with so much of what they do. So just say a student looks at a task and they feel like they can't do it, their brain registers that as a threat. That's when you'll see the stress response spike and an increase in the behaviors that are the stress response in action. So avoidance and disruption and withdrawal and refusal and students walking in and out of the lesson and becoming loud and provocative and doodling and joking and you know, putting their heads on the desk. If you take away that challenge, if you give them something that is safe, that is easy, the reduction in those behaviors is huge. It is huge. The students are rewarding you for the ease of their tasks. And if you increase the challenge, if you try to then change the game in these classes instead of getting them to copy off the board, just like Nathan was not used to, he was used to copying off the board. And I tried to give him something that was, you know, higher order thinking. He pushed back and he pushed back hard and he asked for what he wanted. So this is why the pedagogy is used in classrooms where there are higher proportions of students who have social, emotional, and mental health needs. These needs that manifest in challenging behaviors because it works, it keeps them quiet, it keeps them settled. But that's not me saying to do it, obviously. Of course, my bag here is classroom management. And of course, my goal for you would be to have a classroom that is calmer and quieter, and you know, one that you feel like you can be in. But compliance is not the goal because what the pedagogy of poverty is is insidious and problematic because it takes away the most vulnerable students' opportunities for success and it perpetuates and feeds cyclical poverty, welfare dependence, failure in education, um, you know, the way that students see education as useless, as superfluous, it feeds into all of that. The fact of the matter is when we have low expectations for our students, our students will perform poorly and they know that we have low expectations of them. Just like the Pygmalion effect study, where teachers were told that there was a select group of students who were high achievers based on a test that actually wasn't done. But the high achievers that were were identified and told to the teachers that they were high achievers, they actually did achieve far more than the rest of their cohort. And the only thing that was different was the belief that their teacher had in them. So if we believe that students are capable of so much more, they are going to achieve more. But if students are behaving in certain ways and we have poor expectations of a student's achievement because of that, we, whether consciously or not, we actually behave in ways that communicate those poor expectations and feed into those poor expectations. And then the student behaves in a way that reinforces those beliefs about their behavior and achievement. So there is a clear link between learning and behavior. Hence the name of my book is never just about the behavior. And one thing that is absolutely crucial to be able to break the pedagogy of poverty is yes, having those high expectations of them, but doing so in a way that provides them with the right supports because you will experience pushback. If you are trying to get them to think, get them to do the work and they feel like they're a failure and they can't do it, and they look at any, no matter how accessible you've made it, if you get if they look at something and they already have that preconceived idea they can't do it, it's going to cause that spike in the uh stress response and it's going to escalate their behaviours. So, how do we do it? How do we break the cycle of the pedagogy of poverty? We do it through differentiation. And I know that when I said that word, I probably like had a collective shudder from everybody who's listening, but I don't mean it in the way that you've probably been taught about differentiation. When students are able to do the work when it's pitched properly, when they have the right supports in place, it keeps students inside of their window of tolerance and it reduces the chances of those behaviors flaring up in the first place. But in the real world of a classroom, differentiation does feel like a pipe dream, especially the way that differentiation has been kind of packaged up for us by people who aren't really in the classroom or don't really understand differentiation, or you know, like it's just not taught to us in a way that is realistic because it's not about giving students different work or, you know, creating the lesson in different levels. You have a full curriculum to deliver, you've got 30 unique learners in front of you, and never any to do list. So individualizing the learning for all of the needs of your students feels impossible because it is, but you don't have to do it all. You just need a few simple strategic tools that you can use consistently that help every student access the learning and stay regulated and feel successful. And this will help shift us out of the pedagogy of poverty. Because when we're also differentiating in the way that I'm going to explain, what's happening is we are sending nonverbal messages to our students that I expect you to be doing this. I know you can do this, I have higher expectations of you than you might have been held to a high expectation of in the past. I have more belief in you than you have in yourself, and that will start to shift things little by little. It is like a long road, and I have been down that road many times in many classes, but it is so doable, not only for like, you know, shifting students out of the pedagogy of poverty, but and when I say shifting students out of, you know what I mean. I mean like they are so used to the pedagogies that are perpetuating that. But the like true differentiation is actually so easy for you as a teacher, and it just takes the pressure off. It helps you just have a few consistent tools that you can use on repeat, like and they're just so easy to embed into your everyday planning and routines. They just take the guesswork out of it, and more importantly, they just meet students where they're at so they can actually access the learning. This is what true differentiation looks like. So the kind of things in the differentiation toolbox that I teach are things like scaffolding, which includes things like physical scaffolds, like writing scaffolds. It includes things like joint constructions and modeling, all of those things that kind of fall under that scaffolding bracket. Um, success criteria, learning maps, things like starter activities, concept-based teaching, task cards, timers, all of these things are differentiation tools that work for every single student in the room at the same time. You're not needing to give them three different things because you have got the scaffolds working, the success criteria working, the visible task cards working. Everything is working together in order for us to have high expectations of work completion, work quality, um, and just being able to actually access the learning for all of our students. And that's how we start to break free of the pedagogy of poverty if we're caught in that cycle, but do so in a way that is not going to lead us on a path where you're feeling exactly the same as I was feeling in that lesson when I decided to use the pedagogy of poverty, which is disempowered, sitting there, disassociating, thinking I can't teach anymore, I'm not a good teacher, I can't do this anymore. Maybe I should just quit in my first year of teaching. I can't teach these kids, they're too tough. Uh, I'm just gonna write some stuff on the board for them to copy down. When we use true differentiation, we are shifting out of that mode, and we're not doing so in a way that's going to increase the behaviors because everything by nature is going to increase felt safety, and my gosh, it will completely transform your classroom culture, but also the way that you plan and teach. Because oh my gosh, when I started to use this toolbox, it was like night and day with how easy my planning came to me because these tools are rinse, repeat, let's go. It made it so much easier. Um, of course, I can't go through all of those tools. It's like a whole module in my classroom management lab training course, but I will drop in some little bits and pieces throughout the next few weeks for you, just so uh you've got a couple of takeaways. I'll talk about some starter activities, success criteria, and actually I've got some I've got some episodes around task cards because they're just like bread and butter. Like I love dorking out over task cards because they're one such like they're such a simple tool, but they are just classroom management magic, which is all of these things. So I will drop the link to the episode about task cards for you so you can go back and listen to that. That way you can start to put this into practice yourself. Uh, but I hope this was an insightful session. It was just a small snippet from the everyday session that I did run where I did go into a few of those differentiation tools. If you were there, it was so lovely to see you there. And that is all for this episode. If you're enjoying the Unteachables Podcast, by the way, it would be absolutely magnificent if you were to head over and leave me a review, a five-star review, preferably, um, with uh just a little tiny bit of written feedback around what your what like kind of takeaways you've gotten or why you love the podcast, because teachers need more support, you need greater access to this kind of information. So the more of you that are able to um leave me a review, that is all I ask of you, and it will help me to reach more teachers, and that would be just so magnificent, as I said before. Um, okay, that is everything for today, and have a lovely week. I will see you next time. Bye bye.

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Claire English

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