Teaching learning relationships is key to pupil success and teacher well-being

Fifteen years ago, I was thrown out of teaching for disclosing what I judged to be the unhappy and desperate measures teachers resorted to in order to establish order in the classroom. 

I was late to the teaching profession, having had a career in the media industry and as a freelance writer.  It was perhaps this experience that meant that I found the day to day adversarial relationship between teacher and student hard to suffer.   My own birth as a teacher was a painful one but what I witnessed on a daily basis; grown men towering over diminutive 12 years-olds and booming full-throated threats at them; teachers screaming blue murder or tearing their hair out and fleeing tear-soaked from ‘triumphant’ classes; classes where children would crawl around the floor while being pursued by a teacher beyond wits end.  

It would be easy to blame individuals; teachers, pupils who just weren’t cut out to cope with the behaviour but even at that stage it felt to me that the problem wasn’t individual but systemic. The challenge was not that teachers lack compassion or conviction or that the children were ‘beyond help’. It was more that teachers had no resources to deal with the draining emotional challenges they encountered on a daily basis and that children were often using poor behaviour as a cry for help. Like my own training; most teachers had been given one afternoon’s role play workshop on managing behaviour before being ‘thrown’ into classroom and the door closed behind them.  Whether you could ‘cope’ was merely a matter of the sum of your resilient parts.   I would like to say that things had changed and maybe they have a little.  But, latterly, I have spent many hours observing and training teachers and the stories they tell, compounded by the data detailing the problems of retaining and recruiting teachers, lead me to believe that whatever change there has been is insignificant. 

In April of my first year of teaching, I was asked to write a short article for a London newspaper about what it was like to train as a teacher at my age – I was in my early 40’s – in London.   I wrote what I thought would be a small column in the back of the paper – asking the editor cut my 1500 words down to fit the format.

The following day I got a call from a friend asking whether I’d seen the latest copy of the Standard. I said I hadn’t. Before I could get to the news stand to buy my own copy, I received another call from the commissioner of the article, asking if I was “happy” with it.  When I finally opened up the newspaper, looking for my single column inches, I was greeted by the centre pages of a double page spread with a full-length photo of me, arms folded, looking like a teacher-warrior! That night I got a call from Sky News; did I want to go on TV to talk about the article?  I didn’t. I wanted to be a teacher. 

I wrote the article because I wanted teachers to be helped.  The following Monday I went back to school. I was thinking that I would get a few nods of approval from other teachers and a few kids excited to see their teacher in the paper!  That didn’t happen. As I walked into school I was greeted by two of my colleagues who said that the Headteacher wanted to see me. Twenty minutes later, I was escorted off the premises.  It took me another year to get back into the profession.

That was nearly twenty years ago.

With the help and support of some great colleagues, I have since had a successful career as a teacher and school leader. As importantly, I have dedicated that time to discovering, through necessity, practice, observation and years of psychological study, what it really takes to lead a classroom. The subsequent unique training that emerged—and my forthcoming book—is the result of that journey.

A Mind to Teach is Continuing Professional Development that helps teachers form purposeful relationships with students so that effective learning can take place. The training outlines some simple social psychology that lays out how and why students want to form learning relationships with teachers and outlines the ideal environment in which they thrive. The training helps teachers understand the roots of children’s innate curiosity and helps teachers overcome the defences students employ to mitigate the challenge of new and difficult ideas. 

This human approachhelps teachers prepare themselves to teach rather than simply ‘plan a lesson’. It brings in the importance of self-knowledge and offers opportunities for learning through self-reflection.  The emphasis is on the reciprocal relationship between teacher and learner and the shared experience of being together in a learning environment. Outlining the parallels between taking care of students and taking charge of a classroom the training helps teachers step more naturally into being an authority figure in the room. By analysing the subtle interpersonal dynamics that ebb and flow in any lesson, teachers can begin to confidently plan and teach lessons that deliver much more than subject content.

This approach also helpslighten workload because it helps teachers understand the exhausting emotional baggage that caring for others imposes on them.  By uncoupling this burden from the important task of managing learning, the training improves student/teacher communication as well as teacher self-confidence and well-being. Lessons become more productive and more fun which in turn has a positive impact on teachers’ enthusiasm for their important work.

The social psychological model is drawn from the work of The Tavistock Clinic and from child development psychologists like Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby, as well as more contemporary authorities such as Biddy Youell and Margot Waddell.

It's a “need-to-know” rather than a “know-it-all” approach. 

This approach saved my teaching life, improved my well-being and helped pupils in my room and in departments I led achieve some extraordinary results. It allowed me to see what teaching really entails, which is getting out of the way and letting students do what they want to really do in school: learn!