The Unteachables Podcast

#158: How to build the most beautiful, positive, connected class community brick by brick (even the toughest, most disengaged of classes)

• Claire English • Season 8 • Episode 158

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0:00 | 27:52

What if the class everyone labels “unteachable”… becomes your favourite group of the year?

In this episode, I’m giving you a front seat to one of the most formative stories of my teaching career—back when I was fresh out of uni, wildly underqualified, and somehow ended up turning the “low class” into the class that changed everything for me.

This episode is a big one. It gets to the heart of how community is actually built in classrooms (and how it’s usually not).

I’m taking you back to my first couple of years in the classroom, when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but somehow stumbled into building a connected, joyful, motivated classroom culture… completely by accident. And then had crushing imposter syndrome because I didn’t know how or why it worked.

We’re unpacking:

  • Why community isn’t built through one-off icebreakers or belonging programs
  • How tiny, everyday moments quietly create belonging
  • And what I was actually doing in that Year 7 class that transformed everything

If you’ve ever thought:

  • “I care so much, but this class just isn’t clicking”
  • “I want calm and connection, but I don’t want to be fake or cringe”
  • “Surely community shouldn’t feel this hard…”

…this episode is for you.

Let’s go back to the Wayback Machine and unpack what really builds classroom community.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

  • Why community isn’t built in one big moment, but in micro-moments
  • The foundation every classroom needs before community can grow
  • How predictable routines create felt safety (even when you’re new)
  • The accidental strategies that changed my toughest class
  • Why in-jokes, rituals, and shared experiences matter more than programs
  • How to build belonging without losing authority
  • What to try this week with a class you’re struggling with

Resources & Things Mentioned:

Your Next Steps:

  • Reflect on what makes you feel like you belong
  • Pick one small thing from this episode to try this week
  • If you’re a Behaviour Club member, head to this month’s resource drop

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

RESOURCES AND MORE SUPPORT:

Connect with me:


Why Crowd Control Fails

SPEAKER_00

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 dancers, 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. Hello there, lovely teacher. Welcome back to Thee Chables Podcast. If you haven't been around these parts before on the podcast app, I'm Claire English. I'm your host, and on this podcast, we just talk all things classroom management and behavior and regulation and community building and all of the things that make up like a really beautiful culture in our classroom, a place where students feel safe to learn, a place where you feel happy to be. That's our vibe here, right? If you haven't listened before. If you are an avid listener, then welcome back. It's so nice to have you. So this month inside of the Behavior Club, I'm talking all things community building. And I wanted to come onto the podcast today and tell you the same story that I start with in the training from the Behavior Club this month. And the reason I wanted to share it here was because it is such a great way for me to explain to you how community actually is built in classrooms and how it's not. And also to like kind of reinforce the fact that we don't know what we don't know. Like I'm taking you back to my first year of teaching, and I was so unconsciously unskilled that I didn't even know what choices I was kind of making to build community or to do things well. And it led to me having a heck of a lot of imposter syndrome because I just didn't know what I didn't know. So I just wanted to share it here. If you are one of my behavior clubbers, hello. So nice to have you here as well. Um, please, you can listen along to this as well. But make sure you go into the month's training and you know the current stuff this month because all of the things that I talk about, I provide resources for. And there's like heaps and heaps of really great community resources inside of the club. So still listen along here if you want to, if it's easy, but then still pop into the club if you want to grab the resources. Uh, and if you're not in the behavior club, what are you doing? Come and join us. It'd be so good to have you there if you want to. No pressure. Listen along, join us in the club. All good. However, you want to be supported by me. I am all for it. So let's go into the Wayback Machine. And I'm going to take you to my second year of teaching when I was approached for my first ever promotion in my second year of teaching. And back then there wasn't the teacher shortage that there is now. Like these jobs were really competitive to get. So I'm like, why would somebody want me to go for this role when number one, like, I have no experience and I've got no idea what I would be doing as a year advisor. It was like a head-of-year well-being year advisor position. But I'm like, I just, why would I be in a position of leadership at all in my second year of teaching? I just thought it was ludicrous, right? And I just did not think like the people that were going for these roles were far more experienced in the classroom than me. But I was approached for this role and said, Clay, you really need to apply for it. I wasn't guaranteed it, of course not. But they're like, just throw your hat in the ring. There's no, no harm in trying. And the reason I was approached, mainly, was because of the one year seven class that I taught the year prior to that. This class that I taught, very challenging. They were called the low class. They were the low academic class, which I have all sorts of opinions and feelings on those labels as well, but we're not going to go into that today. They were considered the academically low class, the low literacy class. I'm an English teacher, if you haven't been here before. Um, and I had to teach this class, and they had nothing but historic failure in English, and they just experienced nothing but failure and feeling dumb. And of course, they were then chucked in a class together that was called the low class. Because of that, they were very challenging with their behaviors. They were the unteachable class. Every teacher really struggled with this class, no matter how long they'd been teaching for. But I was there in my first year of teaching, fresh out of university, with absolutely no skills in classroom management. However, by the end of that first year, somehow I had taken that class and turned them into my dream group. I freaking like loved that class. I still speak to some of that class today. They were in year seven back then. Now, like a couple of them had babies at the same time as me. I mean, like I'm much older than them. Um, but yeah, we we had babies at the same time, and like, you know, I've been following their journey and well, it was 15 years ago or so. So yeah, it's just wild. Like, absolutely love, love, loved this class. It didn't start out that way, right? It didn't start out me being like, yep, yep, this class is the best. They're fun, they're great, like love teaching them, they love to be here, they love to learn. But they went from being tough to engage, difficult and rowdy and unmanageable and really complex. They really struggled relationally, they lacked any cohesion. I felt joyless in that class. They challenged everything that I did. But then by the end of the year, like they were the most beautiful, enjoyable, connected class. They were motivated, they were engaged, they were ready to learn. And I'm like, what has happened? Like, how? And then obviously that became something that uh like represented me as a teacher and reflected me, like, you know, my abilities, I guess. And I just didn't know what I was doing. But the principal would walk in and go, oh, wow, like really settled class. I had my leadership team walk past. Oh, what's Claire doing in there? You know, and things started to snowball in that way where they were like, What is Claire doing in this class? Because that class is a different class than they are in different lessons. And by the way, this is not a humble brag episode. Like, I don't want it to sound like, oh, I was such a great teacher because I really wasn't. I had no idea what I was doing. But now I know looking back that I was able to develop community and build community and a really positive culture through these really small things that I was doing day after day. I didn't go in thinking I'm gonna build a community and I'm gonna turn this class into a class that like everyone feels like they belong and blah, blah, blah. It just all happened naturally. But because I didn't know what I was doing, I had huge amounts of imposter syndrome going into this role. I got the role, by the way. I applied, I went through the whole process, I did my expression of interest, I interviewed, I had, I was practicing my interviews, like I was going all in. If I was gonna chuck my hat in the ring for this job, I was going all in. I was gonna put every bit of my heart and soul into trying to get this job because I knew that I wanted to support well-being. Like I definitely knew that that was why I went into teaching. I desperately wanted to support the students like me who needed a teacher to be there and support them. But because I'd done all of this without thinking about it or being aware of it, I didn't know how to replicate it. Like, how can you replicate something you have no idea what you've done? So I started to reflect on things and obviously, like I do know now the kind of things that I was doing back then. But I was thinking, like, okay, what was it? How do families create belonging? Like, how do families bond? How do like friends bond in friendship groups? How do like neighbors start to form connections? And I was just thinking, like, what's happened here? Like, how did I actually get this to a place where I was able to teach this class and they were a beautiful community? So I thought about how families and all of those kinds of groups create bonds and create that belonging. And it's not through this one big event. It's not through an icebreaker at the start of the relationship, it's not through one singular thing that we do. It really is through all of the things that we do. So the rituals, the predictable routines, those shared moments we have, like those repeated touch points over a long period of time in a family. By the way, I don't like using family as like an example because you know how it's a bit cringe, like, oh, we're a family here, and it you can feel a bit culty. So I'm trying not to feel culty here. I'm just trying to talk about how we create belonging in general. So, and I know that all families also don't have that necessarily as well. I know that they're a complex situation, so just caveating that. But families, right? We have morning routines, we have dinner table conversations, we have maybe like a Friday movie night, or like the birthday traditions we have, even little things like the in jokes, or the way that somebody makes a cup of tea, or like, you know, bedtime routines, silly holiday traditions, even those expectations that we hold, every one of those little micro moments is creating a sense of felt safety, belonging, you know, a sense that like we we belong together, we belong here, but we aren't a family. Like we're not we're not family, we're not blood related, we are like we don't see each other as often. There's not as much consistency in that way. As a secondary teacher, I'd see these kids three times a week for 75 minutes. They were long lessons. So, how do we replicate that in a class setting? I'm going to unpack what I was actually doing in my year seven class unintentionally. And these are now the things that I replicate and have helped so many teachers to replicate to create a really strong community. Didn't know it then. It was all kind of happening ad hoc, naturally. Now I'm able to go in and do things really intentionally. The first thing that I did right is create a bit of a foundation, a bit of a base where I had a lot of predictability, I had a lot of differentiation, I had stuff so students felt really safe and supported to learn. All of the things that aren't explicitly community building, but they're so essential for building felt safety, for students coming in and saying, you know what, I do belong here because the work is achievable for me, but there is a really good amount of challenge and the teacher cares about me completing my work. All of those things that say to a student, communicate to a student, I have high expectations of you in this class. I will expect you to learn. I did not get this right all the time. I need to really emphasize that. As I said, I was in my first year of teaching, I was doing things on the fly. I was trying really, really hard to, you know, like cover my basis. I was failing with other classes to do this. Like I was really struggling. I talk about um my year 10 class versus my year this year seven class in another episode where the year 10 class were like really high achieving and they were in the top class. This year seven class was the bottom class. And I struggled with my year 10 class the most by halfway through the year because of the way that I was showing up. I was showing up in a more casual, approachable way. Whereas with the year seven class, I was laying a really strong foundation of credibility, of consistency, of predictability because quite frankly, they terrified me because they were really tough for every other teacher. So I'm like, I need to be really like firm with my boundaries and I need to come in here and I need to make sure things are really predictable. I need to make sure that I've got, I'm so lucky I started at a school, like the school that I did, because I learned so much really early on about predictable routines, about having a starter task. We learnt the BBC, the black ball configuration model by Lorraine Munro, who rolled that out in really like tough, disadvantaged schools all around the US. And she created this model, and then our school adopted that model. And so we had this whole school kind of predictability around like do now's and um starter tasks and all that kind of stuff. And that really gave me a solid foundation to work on. Uh, it didn't, it wasn't overly like successful across the school in terms of like the consistency of it, but I was like running with that and the English department especially. We were like really all over that. So I was really grateful for that. So I did have some really strong foundations in that class, even though I hadn't really honed it or hardwired it yet. So that foundation, that base is what every other thing with community built community building is like built upon. You can't lay those bricks upon that ground if it's not stable and steady. That was the first thing, right? Just having that stable foundation of the stuff that is needed for classroom management. Then one day, one of the boys came in and I did a funny handshake with him. And then that evolved into this really fun whole class handshake. I teach things like class handshakes as a strategy, like really dorky things like that for even the older kids because it does build that sense of belonging. But again, this was all accidental. This was all organic. Just one of the boys came in, we did like a little funny handshake, and that became something that we did every single lesson. Um, not on the way in. I was really strategic about when I did it as well. I'm not gonna get the students to come in and then do a silly handshake with them and get them to be like, you know, a bit more like chatty and like I'm not gonna be in my approachable when they're coming in. When they're coming in, it's like getting them in and getting them sat down and getting them starting their due now. When they were leaving, that's when I'd be like, yeah, like good job. And as they were leaving, as they'd like packed up and done their thing, I was doing the class handshake. And that was something that really helped me start to build the rapport with them. And we just had a little in-joke then. We had a little something. The next thing I did unintentionally that really helped to build community was stuff around growth mindset. One day one of my students was really struggling with their mindset around learning. And I'm like, stuff this. How about we just do like a growth mindset Monday? I was with them every single Monday morning, so I would put a task up on the board. That's actually what kind of started the I did it very scrappy. Everything I'm talking about, by the way, I did very scrappy back then. I didn't have the beautiful resources I do now. Like I've got time and, you know, stuff to invest in that now. It's my job. But back then I was doing it scrappy. Like I was just popping some questions up on the board. I was thinking about things the night before, and that's it. Really simple things like a quote. You know, those quotes from like Michael Jordan, like I've missed X amount of shots, or you know, I just do really like basic things like that. I didn't get them to talk about the quote, or I do some flipping our thinking from like yet, like, you know, adding yet onto things that we're struggling with. Really basic growth mindset stuff. And it would take literally like five minutes. I would just use that at like do now time to do a bit of growth mindset. I didn't do it the whole year, but when I noticed that we're struggling, I did like take pause and I did that with them. Uh, the next thing that I did without realizing how important it was back then was creating certain experiences that the class would share together. So we're doing a book study around Once by Morris Gleetsman. And I'm not sure if you've read that book, if you've studied that book with your class, but it is based on um, it's it's the story of a young Jewish boy in World War II during the Holocaust, and his parents leave him at a Catholic um boarding school, I believe. And it's just going through the story of him kind of working out what's happening around him, and it's just such a beautifully written book. There's three in the series, but I was studying once with my year seven class, and for them to get into a book was huge because again, they were always labeled the low class, the low literacy class, you can't read well, like all of those kind of things that people had instilled in them, and then they would perpetuate, like, you know, they believed they internalized that, but they were so into this book, and I would just read it to them every, you know, every lesson, we'd spend time reading this book. When the chapter was coming up with the bunker, so if you haven't read it, there's this part where they have to go into like hiding in a little bunker. I created this experience where I said to students to bring in like a sheet from home, a towel from home, anything that they could make into a fort. And for that lesson where we were going through that particular chapter, I had all the students come in. We created this humongous class fort, and we sat in there with torches and we read the um the bunker chapter. Again, that was something that came really naturally. It was something that I did kind of on the fly. I'm like, you know what? I think we need to have an experience around this because I leant into it. They were getting so into it, and I'm like, how can I extend like their the feeling of like engagement and joy they have when they're reading? Um, so it was it was so nice to be able to do that. I probably wouldn't have done it with that class if they were really challenging with their behaviors still, but because we'd gotten to a place where we were, I do book studies in the in the last term of the year. So this was right at the end of the year, and we had established such a beautiful rapport, and it was such a nice way to then have like a shared experience together. And that's something that those students still remember today and talk about, which is just so nice. And it's definitely like one of the most beautiful experiences in my career as well. Just seeing them all sitting in there and taking turns reading and being vulnerable with their reading. Uh, it's just beautiful. Um, anyway, the next thing I would do is focus on birthdays again, really organic. Every time it was one of the students' birthdays, I would loudly and embarrassingly sing them happy birthday. Like I'd make it my mission to be heard by the class next door, and then going, oh my god, you're so cringe. But it started by at the start of the year, one of the students is like, Oh, Miss, it's his birthday. And then I started to sing, and then it turned into like a really fun tradition where students would out their friend whose birthday it was. They'd be like, Oh, shut up, man. Like, don't tell her. But it would become this really fun and funny thing that we would do as a class. The next thing I did in that class that really helped me build community, by the way, these are in no particular order. I'm just like kind of riffing off what we were doing in that class that was really great for building that felt safety was a class playlist icebreaker. I did the first one of those all those years ago. I talk about that as a really great icebreaker still today because it is so awesome and it's great for all ages. Like it's just such a great one for any classes that you teach. But again, it was like really organic. Like I was like, I need to lean into this because kids are wanting to listen to their music. They really value this, they value the way that it reflects parts of their life. And I went, you know what? Like everybody just like they were just, I think one of them was listening to a song on their phone at the start of the year. And I got really frustrated. I'm like, actually, like, let's see a way that we can lean into this. So I said, okay, everybody stop. I want everybody to, I handed out a post-it note and I said, Everybody, I want you to write one song on here that you would love to listen to in class, you know, for everyone to hear. Like, what's your favorite song? What's something that's that really resonates with you? And each of them wrote a song on a post-it note. They popped it up the front to me. And that was that. I created a little um class playlist. It wasn't as easy back then as it is today to create like multiple playlists, but like I'd be YouTubing them and doing all that kind of stuff. But I do recommend that icebreaker. It's just such a great one because all the students can get involved. Obviously, vet their choices. Like, you're not gonna just put them on without listening to the lyrics first, but it is such a nice way to build some community because then I'd play them during, you know, like a task that we were doing or packing up time, transition times. I'd be using those songs. And then it was just so fun because they'd try to guess whose song it was. Some of them were really funny and dorky, some of them like chucked in a joke one. Like it was just such a great way to develop that community in that particular class where they haven't really had a lot of experiences that were positive in English before. So it was just so nice. Another brick that I was able to put on top of that really nice foundation to create that community and felt safety was when I noticed that my students were being like quite petty and nasty to one another. And I mean, they were in year seven, so like of course that's gonna happen. It's just part and parcel. But I did a very impromptu lesson on the invisible backpack, the emotional backpack. It was totally ad hoc. There were no resources, I didn't have anything. I had a whiteboard marker and a whiteboard, and that was it. I just taught them the concept. I was very sensitive in how I did this. Even back then, I was like, oh, I just want to be quite, you know, aware and sensitive. Uh, I think because I was very young, I probably was quite naive to like the lives that some of these kids had. So I probably like I have created this month inside of the behavior club, I have created a whole SEL lesson, like fully resourced with a teaching plan and everything for the Invisible Backpack. Um, because I probably didn't do it well back then. I just like popped it up on the board. I was chatting to the students, but it is such a good concept to teach them because it really, it naturally will build their empathy. It'll get them to think about their peers in a different way. And yeah, it's just a really beautiful way to discuss bullying and like nasty behaviors, all of those things in a way that will resonate with them and they'll get a lot more buy into rather than just going like, hey, let's have a lesson on bullying, which also is important. Like it's important to call it what it is and to actually have like explicit lessons on it. But this will build empathy way more than any lesson on bullying can. Another brick that I added on top of that were things like challenges for starter activities, like beat the clock challenges. Sometimes I did like scatteries, uh just little things like that, like um word hunter. So all of these actually have become really like foundational resources inside of the behavior club. But they started as me just putting things up on the board for my students because I knew that it was going to be a bit of fun. Because the students that I was teaching, they were chronically late. Like they were always late to class in the beginning. Like they didn't want to come, they were struggling. They'd then like try to escape by going to the toilet. Once I started to do challenges as starter activities, once I started to like create some in-jokes about students who came late, that's where the fast track for heater concept came from as well. And the um the tardy taco, because I would do little things like that as well with students in like handout little cards or like crown them a certain thing if they came late or if they were, you know, taking their time between transitions. I would give them the tardy taco card. So that's where that came from as well. Like everything's kind of fed into the behavior club from like little sparks of ideas that took hold all those years ago that I didn't actually like resource out because it was just something that I was doing in my practice. But without realizing it, these kinds of things were creating in-jokes, they were creating belonging, they were creating community. All of those little things, it's not just one thing. It was like all of those micro moments combined, created a class where students walked in and they felt like they belonged. They walked in, they felt like they could succeed, like they were a part of something. And that was what I was doing without realizing it. And once I was able to reflect and become really metacognitive of it, I was able to replicate it time and time and time again. And it became so pivotal in the work that I did in my role as the year advisor when I became, because obviously I did get that job and I was able to then kind of like talk it out with people and become more metacognitive of it. It shaped the work that I did in that role, in my first leadership role. It shaped the roles that I did beyond that in leadership, and it shaped the way that I support all of you as well. It really has become so, you know, like foundational in the work that I do. So if you just get one takeaway from this episode, it is that community in a classroom is not built in explicit programs that we have to do, that we're forced to do, or it's not built in like first-day icebreakers. It really is built in those everyday moments. It's built into like the way that we approach every single student and send those messages that you belong here, I care about you. The way that we set those foundations of our routines, the way that we build upon that with the bricks that I spoke about, where we're dripping that community building in. But again, like it's not just one thing. It's just like classroom management, community building, having that positive vibe in our class. It really is an amalgamation of everything that we show up and do. And that can be quite daunting, but when we start to just do little things like this, just little things over time, makes such a huge difference to the class that we're teaching. And it brings us so much more joy. Like I remember slogging it out with the other class that I had that year, my year 10 class. And I'd walk out of there feeling so defeated and deflated. Actually, this year seven class was the only class I was successful with that year, which is why I had such bad imposter syndrome going into this new role. Because I'm like, yeah, I was great with that class, but what about the other five that walked over me and I and made me sit there and want to cry every day? And so, like, please don't think that I walked in going like this is all I know that you know that if you've been listening to this podcast for longer than this one episode, but if this is the first episode you listen to, you might go, uh, what a loser. Like, why is she talking about this? Um, it all came so easy to her. It definitely did not. It definitely did not. And I took a very long time to start to put the pieces together. But that is that's it for this episode, I guess. Uh, a great reflection for you would just be to sit there and think now, like, what are the things that make you feel happy and like you belong, whether it be in your family or friendship group, and then how can you replicate those things in your classroom? What kind of things can you use from what you've heard today in this podcast episode? Um, and bring that into your classroom this week. Just try one little thing and like be really intentional with that and see if you can start to bring more joy. Try it with a class you're struggling with because if you can have more joy in that class, that is powerful. That is so infectious as well. Your students would be like, oh my God, they actually want to be here with me. Like, they don't think that I'm the low class, they don't think I'm the useless class, the bad class, the intolerable class. Like we are a class that they enjoy being with. And my gosh, that could be game-changing for you in your classroom. Okay, I'm gonna leave it there for today. If you are in the behavior club, please go into the current month's resource drop because there are some beautiful resources there that you can take into your classroom and make your community strong and positive and joyful. And if you are not in the behavior club, you can grab, I'll pop the links to some of that stuff anyway. Um, but come and join us in the behavior club. It'd be wonderful to be able to support you. I am closing the doors to new members today, actually, at the time of this record, like the date of this release. Um, but just keep your eyes peeled because there'll be a wait list and you can join later on during the year. Okay, my beautiful teachers out there, have a wonderful week, and I will speak to you next time in the same place at the same time. Bye for now.

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Claire English

Host