#164: Why your students won't do the work (even when it's really doable) | The Differentiation Series: Part 1

When a student pushes a piece of work off their desk, puts their head down, pulls out their phone, or starts cracking jokes, it can feel personal. Like, really personal. Especially when you've poured your heart into that lesson.

But here's the thing: none of that behaviour is random. And it's definitely not about you.

In this episode, I'm giving you a front seat to something I wish I'd known back in my second year of teaching, when I planned what I thought was an epic observation lesson, complete with immersion stations, bells, whistles, the lot… and watched it completely fall apart in real time (yes, a kid literally jumped out the window).

This episode kicks off a three-part series on differentiation, and before you click away because that word makes you want to lie down on the floor,  stick with me. Because this is not the differentiation that has you creating 180 individual lesson plans. This is the real, doable kind.

But first, we need to talk about what's actually going on in your students' brains when they see a piece of work and decide nope. Because once you understand the link between the learning you're designing and the behaviour you're seeing, everything starts to shift.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why "work refusal" behaviours (avoidance, disruption, withdrawal, escalation) are almost always a stress response — not defiance
• What actually happened in my chaotic observation lesson and why it was always going to go that way
• The four ways students' stress responses show up when they feel set up to fail
• Why you cannot separate classroom management from teaching and learning, and why that's actually good news
• Why differentiation has such bad PR (and why that's making things harder for all of us)
• What's coming up in parts 2 and 3 of this series (spoiler: it's practical, it's doable, and it's going to save you time)

RESOURCES AND MORE SUPPORT:

• Shop all resources
• Join The Behaviour Club
• My book! It’s Never Just About the Behaviour: A holistic approach to classroom behaviour management 
• The Low-Level Behaviour Bootcamp
• Free guide: 'Chats that Create Change'

Connect with me:

• Follow on Instagram @the.unteachables
• Check out my website

Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:58

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 and welcome back to the Unteachables Podcast. It is wonderful to have you join me here again. And if you are joining me for the first time, then welcome to My Little Patch of the Podcast app. My name's Claire, and here on this podcast, we just talk about all things classroom management, practical, tactical, none of the fluff. And I hope that you stick around. Press that follow button, make sure you're getting all of the new episodes. If you like this one, of course. And speaking of this episode, I am going to be delving into what to do when students don't want to do the work, when it is totally doable. Like maybe you've given a student a piece of work, it is like such a doable thing for them, and they still don't do it. Like they still push it off their desk or say not happening, whether it's with their words or their body language, or just totally flat out refusing to do anything or engage. We are going to be delving into that. To do that, I would like to start with a bit of a story. So I started my career in 2011-ish in Western Sydney. If you're familiar with Sydney, you'll know kind of the area I'm talking about. I worked in a low socioeconomic area of Mount Druid. Um, I'm not saying that it's still, I don't know what it's like now. This was, you know, I left there in like 2017 or so. Um, but you know, in Mount Druid at the time, there were lots of social issues. There's like, especially at the school I was working at, lots of cyclical poverty, lots of generational welfare dependence, the kind of things that we see manifesting in classroom behaviors, like big behaviors in the classroom, for a variety of reasons. And I won't dig too much into that today. But there are lots of challenging behaviors at that school. Not all students, you know, but it was um generally the way that it was at that time. Most of the classes that I taught were full of students with incredibly complex needs from learning disabilities to disorganized attachments, serious amounts of trauma. Like I remember one of my um first mentors said to me, and it like just stayed with me forever. She turned to me and she said, Claire, like what most people don't realize is that most of the students here are walking around with PTSD and like with all these light bulbs going off in my head. I'm like, oh my god, like what? Like what what do you mean? And just like, can we talk about that some more? And it just really shaped kind of how I approached classroom management from that moment. Anyway, so it was just chaotic. All these classes were really chaotic, high behaviors, low engagement, all of the things that, you know, we kind of struggle with in the classroom. And as teachers, it can feel really personal, like just say you've planned this awesome lesson and you look around and there are just kids chatting or saying, Oh, this is dead, I'm not doing it. It's so demoralizing. It can be so hard in these contexts where you're not getting high engagement from students. And I remember in my about my second year of teaching, and I planned this, what I thought was this epic lesson for an observation, as you do when you're being observed. You bring out all the bells and whistles, and that's exactly what I did. I made these immersion stations and like I set all these things up. And remember back in like 2012 when I was doing this, we didn't have the same resources that we have today. So I was like painstakingly doing things on PowerPoint, and you know, it was just really clunky and a lot older when I was doing that back then. So I spent a long time creating all of these amazing immersion stations. And I think I was doing something around like literary devices in one of the texts we're studying. Anyway, so I set all of this up, I spent all that time doing it. Uh, and I came into the classroom and my mentor came in and I was so excited. I really wanted to make a proud. And especially in those early years of teaching, you want to impress, don't you? You want to like show people that I've got these skills and like I'm here and you know, take me seriously. And but man, that lesson was hard. I had a kid jump out of the window and run across the quad, just sticking his fingers up. And, you know, other kids just had their heads down, they weren't getting up to go to the emergence stations. Some of them were running around the lesson because I set up the immersion stations. I was running from pillar to post, and they were just, it was a nightmare. And I just remember sinking into myself. And I remember my mentor at the time saying how like poor the behavior was. And I was, you know, so embarrassed. But looking back now, I totally understand there are so many things that were happening for those young people and things that I was doing in that context that led to those challenging behaviors manifesting in the way that they did. The kind of behaviors that were being like the especially that lesson that I did, that like, you know, great lesson, that immersion station lesson. I was very quick to label those students disengaged, disrespectful, like how dare you! But the more that I did that, the worse things got, and things didn't get any easier for a long time. But I now realize what I did during that lesson that I probably could have tweaked to make things a little bit easier for myself and kind of what went wrong there. Of course, there are things out of our control. There are always going to be things out of our control. We're not worrying about that stuff, we're worrying about the things that is with that are within our control. The important thing about this story is there is a very huge, inextricable link between the learning that we are providing for students and their behavior. Because if a student is in a lesson and they look at a task or a set of instructions and they feel like they can't do that, or it's something that's really like out of the blue, inconsistent, something they've never done before, their brain can register that as a threat, which is when we start to see their stress response behaviors bubbling up. They can show up in four main ways. So avoidance, disruption, withdrawal, and just escalation, like pure escalation. This might look like things such as just refusing to do the work completely. Maybe they're walking out of the lesson, becoming provocative to their peers, doodling, sabotaging the lesson, popping their head down on the desk and just totally disengaging. Maybe they pull out their phone and decide to sit there on their phone because it's easier than admitting that, you know, they can't do something. Maybe they're just joking about. Because the thing is, it's it's so much less scary to get in trouble by your teacher than admit that you can't do something in front of everybody. None of it's random, like none of that stuff that's happening in your lesson is happening for no reason. It's often a response to uncertainty or feeling like they're being set up to fail, or that, you know, they've just had a lot of failure in that subject in the past, or, you know, like something is going on in their brains in response to that work in front of them that is, you know, creating that escalation. Not all the behaviors, by the way. Obviously, something might have happened before, something else might be going on, but I'm talking about the link between the learning and their behavior. This is why we absolutely cannot separate the discussion on classroom management and teaching and learning. We can't. We can't separate it. I'm not sitting here telling you this, by the way, to put any blame on you or say that you just need to spend hours longer planning or just make your lessons more engaging or recreate your lesson in three different levels or drop your expectations. Not at all. Like that is definitely not my vibe when it comes to teaching classroom management. It's not about us shaming anybody or blaming anybody. It's about creating the conditions in our classroom that will help to mitigate the behaviors that we are seeing in the room. For example, let's go back to that observation lesson. What I know now that I didn't know then was the fact that I had created this lesson that's on paper, like seemed really great. I was really excited for it. But the class that I ran this with were a class that already felt a lot of like unsafety. They were a class that were already quite complex in their needs. They were a class that struggled with their literacy. Uh, they were a class that struggled with change. I had to be very boundaried and I had to be very consistent. The routines had to be dialed in. So, what happened when I then went from trying to hold the class and be boundaried and have those things going on and have that predictability and that consistency. By the way, I didn't know then that those were the things that were helping me like kind of day by day hold things together, but now I obviously can reflect on those retrospectively. But what I did was I then set up a lesson where I didn't provide scaffolding. It required a lot of independent work without me modeling that for them. It required those students to um take initiative with like moving from station to station without me setting up those transitions really, really clearly. So those transitions weren't set up in a way that was going to help me in any way, shape, or form execute those transitions smoothly. There was so much about that lesson. So even getting them into the lesson, I didn't have my usual starter. I didn't do the usual things that would allow me to have more, like, I don't want to say control because it's not about control. It like kind of let my leadership go. It let my credibility slip. Um, and of course, the students were then going to respond differently to me and differently to the lesson. And they also saw my mentor in the room and they're probably like, oh, like someone else is in here. So when you put a bunch of students who have a challenging, you know, have got, you know, a context that is more challenging, where they do exhibit more challenging behaviors, where they need a lot of safety, they need a lot, they need that felt safety, they need that consistency, that predictability, they need that modeling, they need the scaffolding. You put students like that in a class together, and then you give them a task that you think is really exciting, but it requires skills that I'm assuming they have, or uh knowledge that I was assuming that they had, or, you know, the ability to move through that task in a way that I had in my head, but hadn't put on paper or on a slide, or, you know, in any way to help with that transition, of course it was going to be challenging. There is just such a huge link between how we set up that learning environment and the behaviors that we see. But there are huge problems with differentiation. And there are huge, like I think that it gets a really bad, it's got really bad PR differentiation. I think it's very misunderstood. Uh, and I think because of that, we're really struggling to really differentiate in a way that works not just for our students, but works for us as teachers. Works for us in the way that, like, how the hell do we have time to do this? And how do we know our like so as a secondary teacher, I've got 180 students a year. Like, how do we possibly differentiate for 180 students who all have, like, you know, in a school like the one I was talking about, all have some kind of additional need or background that we have to consider, or you know, maybe they've got a behavior plan, a learning plan, like you might call it things in different countries, like IEPs. We like we look at that scenario as teachers and we go, how the hell? Like, how can possibly can we do this realistically with the time that we have? Next episode, I will be talking about these problems. I'll be talking about those misconceptions that we have with differentiation, and most importantly, I'm going to be talking about how you can differentiate and design the learning in such a way that you're supporting every student whilst also cutting down the time it takes to be able to do that. It's going to be a really, really so this is just think of this as like part one of my differentiation focus. And there's going to be three parts to this. This is the first part, thinking about that behavior learning link, what's actually happening in the brain of students when they see a piece of work that they can't do. Next episode is going to be about kind of busting that misconception and talking about how we can actually differentiate. And then in this, the third part of this series, I'm going to be digging into one specific part of my differentiation toolbox that you are going to be able to take away into any lesson and be able to mitigate, reduce the stress response behaviors like the work refusal, walking out, the provocation of peers, the doodling, the sabotaging the lesson, all of those things, putting their head down, zoning out, distracting others, joking around, all of those things that really are just a response to uncertainty, feeling like they can't do the work, feeling that sense of failure, feeling embarrassed, feeling sh ashamed. And their amygdala is saying, not today. When we feel out of control, when we feel stupid, when we feel embarrassed, our brains are going to register that as a threat. So we're going to be talking about how to minimize that threat. I like to think about it as making best friends for the students' amygdalas, really making that like so because it's all about clarity, predictability, consistency, and we're going to be doing that through the differentiation, like real true differentiation. Not the differentiation that makes you think like, how the hell can I do that? But this is real and doable. So I am really excited for the next couple of episodes on differentiation. I feel like I say it so weird when I say it too many times and it loses all meaning that word. But definitely, if you have not done so yet, make sure you're following this show along so you don't miss those episodes. And I cannot wait to see you there. Until next time, lovely teacher, keep spreading that classroom management magic all over the place. Bye for now.